Prologue
As he fled the castle chapel with the heavy gold candlestick, the priest’s bellows still ringing in his ears, fear lent Lachie MacAdam strength and agility. He leapt up and landed heavily in the saddle of the horse.
He urged the animal into a gallop, and they flew out of the castle grounds as though the hounds of hell were chasing them. He could feel his heart racing and his blood drumming in his ears; he had to get away—it was a matter of life and death. He dared not look behind him, for he knew that he would see the castle guard being mobilized to pursue him.
Presently he heard a cacophony of trumpets sounding the alarm from the castle walls and half a dozen armed horsemen issued from the gates. Lachie could ride but he was not an experienced horseman, and the mare was more used to carrying a rider than fleeing from soldiers. He had stolen her only ten minutes earlier in the village of Ardbrae, but he had not been able to look her over carefully.
She was not very fast or even very young, but she was the best he could lay his hands on in haste, so the guards’ faster, smaller horses were soon gaining on him. He tried to make the mare go faster, but she was already at full stretch.
God help me, please,he prayed desperately.I will dae onything ye ask o’ me but I must get hame.
Now Lachie was in bowshot range, but he did not know until he felt a blow to the back of his shoulder that was so powerful it almost pushed him off his mount. He cursed but kept on going. He had to.
It was a second later when he realized that an arrow was buried deep in his flesh, and he was bleeding copiously from the wound. He could feel the blood trickling down his back and his arm all the way to his hands, but it was a few seconds before the pain came, wave after agonizing wave of it. He stopped himself from screaming with a heroic effort of willpower, for he needed all his failing strength to escape.
Lachie looked over his shoulder. The pursuing horsemen were still a few hundred yards behind him, but there was a dense stand of trees to his left, and he plunged into it, quickly becoming invisible in the thick vegetation growing between the trunks. The riders had not seen him making his escape since the trees were concealed behind a little rise in the land with a fairly steep slope on the other side, and he was out of their sight for a moment.
He heard shouts of anger and frustration behind him as the soldiers realized that they had lost him, and he felt a huge surge of relief, but he knew that it was no time to let his guard down. They could find him at any moment.
He dismounted and dug a hole with his hands in the soil by a large fir tree with a distinctive scratch on it, then covered it with leaf mulch and fir cones so that it was invisible. It was not a particularly good hiding place, but it was the best he could do for the moment. He squatted on the ground to rest for a moment, his breath coming in great gasps, and his shoulder throbbing in agony.
He reached backwards to feel the arrow in his back, but realized that pulling it out would be a death sentence, even if he could manage it. He was no longer afraid for his own life but terrified that he would not be able to give the candlestick to Maisie, his wife.
The money they would get from its sale was all that stood between his family and starvation, since the crops on his croft had surrendered to a freezing winter and spring, and an unkind summer. This was the reason he was trying to ignore the excruciating pain from his wound, so he mounted again and rode out of the other side of the copse. He looked behind him once and was relieved to see that he was not being followed.
All that was keeping him going now was dogged determination; his strength was ebbing away, but he said the names of his family to remind himself why he was on this terrifying mission. “Maisie, Donald, Andy, Katie.” His voice was becoming slurred and he could hardly keep his eyes open, but necessity and his own stubbornness would not allow him to give in. To add to his woes, he had an almost unbearable thirst, but he had never surrendered to weakness and he would not do so now.
He felt nausea sweep over him, but he had nothing in his stomach and so could not vomit. All of a sudden everything in front of his eyes began to blur and waver, and he fell forward in the saddle as a wave of dizziness swept over him.
Gradually, despite desperately trying to hang on to the saddle pommel, he was losing the strength to keep himself upright. Then his fingers, slick with blood, began little by little to lose their grip.
Eventually, his slippery hands lost purchase on the saddle, and the last thing he remembered was a jarring thump and a bolt of agony as his head hit the ground, before blackness overwhelmed him.
1
Leana stood up and swept a damp hand through her long red hair, tilted her lovely face up to the sun, then let out a slow breath through her lips. She was sweaty and her hair was straggling down her face in “rats’ tails” as her father put it, and her back ached from stretching and bending, even though she was not a stranger to hard labor.
It was a damp, humid day in September, and unseasonably warm for that time of year, which was strange, because she had hardly seen sunshine at all that summer. It was definitely not the kind of weather for cutting hay, but cut it she must, because she needed to provide fodder for her animals during the winter.
The grass this year was sparser than usual, and she hoped there would be enough hay to tide her sheep over until spring came again. Not only did she have herself and her workers to feed but her father, who had become weak due to the fever he had suffered the year before after coming home from driving the English away from their land. The remnants of the sickness had never really gone away, and he was unable to do any farm work at all, but Leana was happy to do his share; after all, he had given almost everything he had for the sake of her wellbeing.
Her mother had been dead for many years, a victim of smallpox when Leana was only two years old. Fortunately she had not been infected, but her father had not remarried, and it was one of Leana’s lasting sorrows that she would never have a brother or sister.
She was about to lift her scythe again when she heard hoofbeats drumming across the land just outside the fence at a furious rate, and as she looked around, she saw a huge horse galloping towards her at breakneck speed. She almost screamed as she realized that it was on a collision course with the fence, and she instinctively ran in the other direction.
The rider was swaying in the saddle, obviously unable to keep his balance. She saw him falling to the ground and rolling for a few yards before lying still. His horse reared in panic and galloped for a long way before being caught and pacified by one of Leana’s laborers.
Leana was a strong, wiry woman, and made short work of the timber fence, scrambling over it with more haste than grace. She ran to the prone figure lying on the rough earth.
By the time she reached him he was unconscious, but his arrow wound was still pouring blood, which was staining the dry pale ground around him dark red. She immediately took off her kerchief and packed it around the shaft of the arrow, putting the pressure of her own weight on it to try to stem the bleeding.
The man had not stirred; she could not discern any sign of movement at all, and this was a bad sign, since his face was pressed into the ground, stopping him from breathing. However, when she turned his head to the side to free his nose and mouth, he took a great gulp of air and mumbled a few words, none of which she could make out.
Two of her farm workers, who had been helping with the hay cutting, came to her assistance and helped lift him into a sitting position. They had never had a problem working for a woman like Leana because she was knowledgeable and intelligent, and if her bodily strength was not quite equal to theirs, she was willing to admit it and ask for help.
Leana put her fingers to the man’s neck to check for a pulse and found that there was a very weak one. Always calm in a crisis, she took action at once.
“We need tae get him back tae ma hoose,” she said firmly. “Geordie, get the hay cart. It isnae fu’ yet. Hamish, help him.”
