It was thefourth time that morning that Cam had been whacked on the side of the head with the broad side of a shield.
They’d been learning swordplay for the better part of a month, using a dull wooden sword called agladius, and that had been after an entire month of physical conditioning that had nothing to do with fighting. Cam still wasn’t very good with weapons and shields. He was clumsy and did better when it was just his fists.
Wendell was coming at him again as he lay on the ground and fury sparked in his belly. He didn’t like being smacked around, especially in front of other men who were just as new to this as he was, so he struggled to shake off the ringing in his ears as he rolled away from Wendell and got up on his feet. He no longer had his shield, but he had the wooden sword.
As Wendell came at him, he dodged away from Wendell’s momentum. Now behind Wendell, he put the wooden blade across the man’s neck. Wendell froze and laughed, low in his throat.
“Excellent,” he said. “You are learning, smithy. Drop your blade now.”
Cam did, but that was his mistake. The moment he relaxed, Wendell swung around and clipped him on the side of the head. As Cam stumbled back, Wendell watched him with a smile on his lips.
“Another lesson,” he told him. “Do not trust a man when you have him under submission. He will say whatever he must to gain the upper hand.”
Cam was becoming increasingly enraged and it was difficult to control himself. He’d been at this for over a month and, so far, he felt as if everything Wendell did was meant to humiliate him. Sometimes, Axel would come to the field and work withthem, but Axel didn’t try to injure anyone. He would knock men around, but he wouldn’t make them bleed like Wendell did.
It was difficult for Cam to remember his vow to Clegg, promising to obey Wendell’s orders. There were times when Cam wanted to flatten the man.
The training continued on into the morning. There were eleven new men whom Cam had come to know by name, but nothing more. He wasn’t there to make friends. The recruits had begun to form cliques, but Cam wasn’t part of any of that, and as the morning progressed and they broke off into pairs to practice a thrust-and-parry method that Wendell had been showing them, Cam was forced to pair off with Wendell himself, which he dreaded.
Angry, with bloodied knuckles and bruises all up his arms from where Wendell had struck him, he threw hisgladiuson top of the shield he’d dropped and walked away. He could hear Wendell yelling after him.
“Where are you going?” he called. “We are not finished, smithy.”
Cam simply shook his head and kept walking, heading to the edges of the field to get clear of Wendell and calm his temper. He was tired of being thrashed. As he heard Wendell laughing behind him and telling the other men that they could take a rest because the “poor smithy” was, he reached the shadow of the arena, leaning over the half-wall that surrounded the dirt field.
He was tired, but more than that, he was humiliated. A man’s pride could only take so much. Shaking out his sore right hand, he heard a woman’s voice.
“Cam?” came the tremulous words. “Sweet Jesus…Cam?”
He knew that voice; God help him, he knew it and he whirled around to the source. Looking up, Cam could see the outline of a woman standing a few rows above him and as he held up a handto shield his eyes from the sun coming over the top of the arena, he could see her face. He thought he was dreaming.
Isadora was here.
One moment, he was standing in the arena and in the next, he was in the stands, throwing his arms around her. He could feel her in his grasp, shaking and weeping, clinging to him so hard that she was becoming a part of him. Her body was melding with his. He couldn’t have described that moment if he lived to be a thousand years old.
So much panic…
So much pain…
“Isadora?” he breathed. “Lass, where did ye come from?”
Her face was against his neck. “I thought ye were dead,” she wept, finally loosening her grip enough to pull back and look him in the face. “When Netherton burned, I thought ye were killed! But ye’rehere?”
He nodded, his big hands on her face as if he were trying to convince himself that she was real. “I’m here,” he said, his voice quivering. “I came here. But before I left, I went tae find ye in the vale, hoping ye might come. But ye never did, so I left ye a message.”
Isadora was struggling to calm down, looking at a vision she never thought she’d see again. She still could hardly believe it.
“I never saw a message,” she said, wiping at her face. “What message? Where did ye leave it?”
Cam could see how shaken she was. Truth be told, he was fairly shaken himself. “On the mud of the brook bank,” he said. “I wrote the only words I have for ye—thu fhèin.Only ye, lass. Always, only ye.”
She smiled at him, tremulously, as she instinctively clutched the copper bracelet still on her arm. “I’ve never taken this off,” she whispered.
He reached into his sweaty tunic, pulling out a matted bundle of red hair. “And I’ve never let this go.”
The expression on her face was full of delight as well as confusion. “But I have so many questions,” she said. “I dunna understand how ye came here. Why are ye—?”
A shout from the arena floor interrupted their delirious reunion and Cam turned to see Wendell waving him over.
