God’s blood, how long has she been in that hellhole? Four days? Five? She’d been close to death—wasstillclose to death. Without food and water for so long…
He grimaced. It would be bad enough for a grown man, let alone a young girl with little meat on her bones to spare. Her shredded fingers from trying to climb out of the well were evidence of the torture she’d endured and how desperate she’d been to escape.
He’d thought he’d seen just about every injustice and barbarous cruelty the English could mete out. But who could do something like this to a child? It seemed calculated and almost personal.
Gregor didn’t have much experience with young lasses, but he did have two younger brothers, and she couldn’t be more than eleven or twelve. Still more young girl than young woman. One side of his mouth curved up, recalling the breeches he’d been surprised to discover under her skirts when he’d carried her over his shoulder to climb out of the well.
She weighed next to nothing. Practically skin and bone. Fragile, but with a surprising strength to her skinny limbs. Aye, the lass was a fighter. With what she’d survived, she had to be.
It was MacLean who finally asked the question they all were thinking. “What are we going to do with her? We can’t take her back to camp. It’s too dangerous.”
That was an understatement. They’d been back in Scotland for less than a month after being on the run in the Western Isles for the past six. Bruce’s army had won one minor victory against the English at Turnberry, but they were one lost battle away from being forced to flee again. After the disaster at Loch Ryan, where over two-thirds of Bruce’s force had been killed, they’d been left with fewer than four hundred men in the entire army.
A lost cause it might seem to some, but they didn’t know Robert the Bruce. Gregor would fight by his side for as long as it took, even if they were the last two men standing.
“Was she able to tell you anything that might help?” MacLeod asked.
Gregor shook his head. “Nothing more than what we’d already guessed. It was Hereford’s men.” Though Lochmaben was part of the Bruce ancestral lands of the Lordship of Annandale, its castle was again in English hands after being retaken by Bruce last year. King Edward had given it to Sir Humphrey de Bohun, Earl of Hereford, and the earl and countess (one of King Edward’s daughters) had arrived not long ago to occupy it. “She is still in shock. She couldn’t even tell me her name. She just kept crying over and over that he killed her mother, and now she was alone.”
Lamont winced. “She witnessed her mother’s death.”
Gregor turned to him grimly. “Aye, it sounds like it.”
“Poor lass,” MacLean said. “She’s too young to have seen something like that.”
An odd look crossed MacLeod’s face. It took Gregor a moment to realize it was compassion. “I was ten, probably only a couple of years younger than her, when I witnessed my mother raped and murdered. I still remember every damned moment of it.”
The men were silent. Apparently Gregor wasn’t the only one to be strangely affected by the lass’s suffering; it had penetrated the stony shell of one of the most feared swordsmen in Scotland—hell, probably in Christendom. Until MacLeod’s marriage last year to Christina Fraser, Gregor didn’t think the Chief of the Highland Guard was capable of smiling.
“Perhaps she has relatives nearby?” Lamont asked.
“No!” The lass’s voice rang out, and the next moment she’d launched herself into Gregor’s arms. Her raw and bloodied fingers were digging into his arms again, clutching tighter if it were possible. “Please, you can’t leave me here. They’ll find me and kill me.”
“Shhh,” he soothed, stroking her head. “No one is going to leave you here. But isn’t there someplace we can take you? An aunt? An uncle?”
She shook her head furiously. “There is no one. My mother is my only family.”
He didn’t correct her tense. “What about your father?”
A hard look crossed her face. “Dead.” From her tone, he gathered her memories were not fond ones. “At Methven.”
One of the many disasters that had felled Bruce’s and his men last year. “What’s your name, lass?”
She hesitated. “Caitrina.”
“And your father’s name?”
Another pause. “Kirkpatrick.”
A common enough clan name around these parts. “You have no brothers or sisters, Caitrina?” Gregor realized it was the wrong question to ask when her face collapsed in grief.
“My mother was eight months pregnant. He was hurting her. I had to try to make him stop.”
Gregor felt rage flare inside him, suspecting the kind of “hurting.” Sick bastards! He squeezed her tighter, though he knew there was no comfort he could give her that would take the pain away.
“I hit him with the hoe, but I missed, and then he…” Tears glimmered in the big brown eyes that dominated her small face. She was a cute little thing (even beneath the dirt) with a wide mouth, slightly upturned nose, softly pointed chin, and dark hair and brows to match her eyes. “He killed her. It was my fault. He killed her because of me.”
Gregor’s voice turned hard as he shook her by the shoulders and forced her to heed him. “It was not your fault,” he said in a voice that brooked no argument—much like MacLeod had spoken to MacLean and Lamont earlier. “You fought back and gave her a chance no one else in this village had.”
