The guards looked at me skeptically, and I could read their thoughts. Wasn’t this the lass they’d been ordered to protect? The one who’d been nearly abducted, and was the very reason the walls had been fortified and doubly manned?
“I am no longer under the laird’s protection,” I continued. “Trust me when I say he would like nothing better than to see me outside these walls, and as soon as possible.”
They surveyed my outfit and my weapons. Then the head guard barked, “Open the gates.”
And there I was, back outside the Mackenzie keep, alone under a star-studded sky. The clanging clash of the gates as they shut me out echoed in my ears even after the sound had long ceased.
I headed back to my cave.
CHAPTER SIXTEEN
THEHIKEUPTHEMOUNTAINtook much of the night. My legs seemed less agile than usual, and my weight heavier. I made my ascent through woods scented with dirt and freshly dug earth, as though death and decay was rising. Abstractly, I noticed the hue of the light was changing. Night into day.
It was then I found my cave. I entered it, and the sight of the bloodied blanket, left there upon Wilkie’s rescue, speared me anew.
I wrapped myself in the dirty cloth. It was all I had left of him.
I searched the cave for my knife, finally locating it in a dim corner. I walked down to the pool and paused to appreciate the pink-stained sunrise, falsely promising a perfect day.
Dropping the blanket to the ground, I unfastened my sword, laying it down. I removed all of my clothing from the waist down, but I kept the long tunic on. And I unbound my hair, letting it hang loose, as he once said he liked it best.
Clutching my knife in one hand, I lowered myself into the cool waters of the pool.
The water, as I remembered it, was inviting and divine. Cool but not cold, as though warmed by the earth, or from a secret underground hot spring.
I didn’t hurry. I felt trepidation, naturally. But not fear. This quiet end was far less frightening to me than a lifetime of endless separation and vast emptiness. Of knowing he was forever lost to me.
My heart simply couldn’t bear it.
Spying a glint of sunlit reflection at the edge of the pool, I saw my mother’s glass-jeweled pin, sitting on the nearby rock, exactly where I’d placed it several weeks ago. But it was of no consequence now. I had no need of possessions.
I ran the knife’s blade lightly across my inner wrist, getting a feel for it, studying the existential power of its touch and its promise. Did I want to die? Nay. I wanted tolive. I’d only just tasted what truly beingaliveactually felt like. Did I want to live the life that was my fate: of Ogilvie’s wrath or Macduff’s pity? Nay. I would rather die, now that I understood the extent of the difference between surviving and living. The only life I wanted to lead was that of a Mackenzie, and more: asWilkie’sMackenzie. But that path was lost to me. Even living as a Mackenzie meant nothing to me if I couldn’t have Wilkie as my own.
But I wasn’t ready. And I wept at my choices. I wished there were others.
The rising day was unusually warm, and the heated sunlight on my face and my shoulders provided a small relief in the midst of my sorrow; it felt so comforting that I closed my eyes and laid my head back on the grass bank of the pool.
I thought of Wilkie. Of his hands and his mouth. His black hair and his dark, beautiful presence tightly around me and in me. I may have dozed off for a time, lost in my only reverie.
I couldn’t tell how long I had slept, but I awoke with a start to the crashing, thundering sound of horses’ hoofbeats just over the lip of the hill, so close that before I could react they were there in the clearing, huge and looming and armed, pulling to a dramatic and sweat-flicked stop.
Was I still dreaming? Was it him, coming to find me and claim me as his own?
Nay. This was neither heaven, nor was I waking to a heavenly new reality. I could recognize that I was fully, starkly awake. I was so immersed in the depths of my longing for Wilkie,willingit to be him with all my heart, that for a moment I thought it was him.
His broad shoulders, his wild hair.
He’s come for me.
But the hair was not black enough.
The movements were not as graceful.
The man that approached me—one of six, I could see that now—was most definitelynotWilkie.
He was an Ogilvie warrior. I recognized the face, if not the name.
“Aye,” he was saying to the other men. “’Tis her. Surround her. Make sure she has no escape. This time we bring her home.”
