“I wish I could tell ye. I dinna ken. But whoever leads them is crafty. And careful.”
“Ye have some ye suspect.”
“Aye. Watch yer back, laird. Fortunes have changed with the slash of a dirk.”
****
Coira breathed a sigh of relief that Elizabeth seemed focused on the late-season bounty they’d discovered, rather than on the fact that she and Logen had been alone for quite some time. As fast as Elizabeth talked, it was clear what they had found excited her.
Logen and the healer were deep in conversation, but she couldn’t hear them over her chatty companion.
“Let’s try this way,” Elizabeth said at the end of a long, breathless sentence.
Coira realized she intended to head off into the woods again. Why not? They were out here for that reason. Coira let her take the lead, but as Elizabeth moved away, something else started to invade Coira’s senses.
Hatred. Not heated fury. Cold, calculating hatred that she recognized. Coira froze in her tracks. Where? One of their guards? Why had she not sensed this before? The person who’d pitched Logen overboard into shallow water was here. She spun in time to see Elizabeth’s guard draw his sword and rush at Logen and the healer.
Coira screamed a warning, but Logen was already pulling his claymore and moving away from the healer, drawing his attacker with him. Coira ran to the healer and pulled her back so that several trees provided a barrier between them and the combatants. Elizabeth had run up at Coira’s scream and now stood at her side. “Where’s the other guard?”
Ach nay! Was he in league with the attacker and trying to get behind Logen? Coira searched the surrounding area with her eyes and her empathy. There! Thank goodness, he was making his way toward them while keeping one eye on the two men fighting. Intent on his duty to protect them? She couldn’t tell yet. Elizabeth’s fear and excitement were too close, too loud. Coira reached for the healer, hoping to find calm, but a deep sense of foreboding swirled like a whirlpool in open ocean, treacherous, ready to pull her into its depths. Nay! The healer had given up on Logen, but Coira would not.
She stepped away from the other two women. The healer’s guard, intent on the combatants, radiated concern—but for whom? At least he wasn’t trying to interfere, so Coira turned her attention back to Logen. He fought with cool precision, blocking each attempt to injure him or take his life. The guard was neither as skilled nor as lucky. In moments, Logen backed his attacker against a tree, his dirk’s edge against the man’s throat while his sword braced against the man’s sword arm, preventing him from using the weapon.
“Who do ye fight for, Andrew?” Logen’s tone brooked no refusal, no hesitation, but the man held his silence.
Anger, cold and deadly as a winter storm, rolled off of him. Coira glanced at Ross, the guard who’d stayed with the women. He scanned the woods around them. Had he heard something she’d missed? She moved closer. He was tense, but not expectant. Doing his job, then, being vigilant while Logen dealt with the traitor.
“Who?” Logen’s sharp demand rang through the forest and echoed harshly back to them.
“Gareth. And Alasdair. Others.”
The man swallowed and Coira wondered how he’d avoided getting cut. Despite his anger, Logen must have lifted his blade just enough to grant the man the ease to speak. And swallow.
“There’s more of us than ye ken.”
Coira flinched at that, but Logen’s determination to find out what the guard knew remained a steady, inevitable, force, like the incoming tide.
“Who’s in charge? Who is willing to kill again and again to control the clan?”
“Ye’ll never see him coming,” the prisoner scoffed. “The others didna. But yer return to the clan disrupted his plan. He’ll remove ye in his own good time.”
“Ye’ll tell me who he is.”
Andrew pursed his lips, considering, Coira supposed, whether he had a choice.
“I dinna think I shall.” With that, he jerked forward against Logen’s hold, causing the dirk’s sharp edge to bite deep into his throat. Blood sprayed around the blade as Logen jerked it back, too late.
Andrew dropped his sword and sank to his knees as blood pumped from the slice in his throat.
Logen cursed and tried to put pressure on the wound. There was too much blood. His hand kept slipping off.
Coira rushed forward to help, but the man was already dead.
Logen waved her back, finally allowing the body to topple to the side. He wiped his hands and dirk on the dead man’s clothes and stood, staring at the body. “What just happened?”
His words were spoken so softly Coira doubted anyone but she heard them. “Logen.” She uttered his name just as softly, shocked at the turn of events, saddened by the grief quickly washing away the vestiges of surprise and anger in him. She’d been wrong to deny him her help. If his life was at risk from men who would throw themselves on his blade to protect their leader and their conspiracy, then she had no choice. No matter what it cost her, she must help him.
He turned to face her and the others, his expression grim. “He chose to die rather than give up the name of the person behind all the deaths, all the misery, in the clan since Flodden. Who among us commands that kind of loyalty, of sacrifice?”
