Page 137 of Outlaw Ever After

“Cease this!” Peigi begged, as folk gasped and Jossy gripped her other arm and Aileana and Lady Elizabeth begged Seamus to intervene.

MacGregor raised his sword. Peigi cried out as the metal came down and Caleb buckled to the floor on a roar, the sword missing by inches as MacGregor lost his grip and it clattered away. Yet Kendrew withdrew a dagger.

The hall roared disapproval. “Poor sportsmanship!”

“Only one weapon of choice!”

Seamus launched himself over the dais. “Disqualified!”

But MacGregor was backing Caleb into a corner! Caleb inched back, heaving for air through the pain, a little farther, when—

MacGregor’s toe caught.

He tripped. The uneven paver by the hearth… MacGregor collapsed atop him!

Thumped the hearth. Went still. Had Kendrew’s blade cut Caleb?

Peigi couldn’t bear to think it or worse, worry that Kendrew had finished him.

She ran around the dais, bunching up her skirts when…Caleb grunted. He shoved at MacGregor’s bulky weight as Niall and Tormund hauled the man aside, flipping him over.

The dirk clattered aside, as did Caleb’s scythe. Blood trickled from Kendrew’s forehead where he’d knocked it on the hearth, splitting the skin.

“First blood!” Naill and MacLeod bellowed into the silence.

Caleb had lured him across the hall, unable to outmuscle him, and so he’d outwitted him!

Bale, furious, snatched free his sgian dubh, lifted it high as a roar of protests erupted—

“Enough!” boomed Seamus, flicking his fingers at his guards. “Lock Bale away!”

Cheers echoed to the ceiling as folk flooded away from the edges to gather around, and Peigi looked down into her warrior’s face and knelt.

“Christ,” he wheezed. “Did I win? Or die?”

She laughed as she wrapped her arms around him and kissed him. “Ye won.”

A smirk tilted up his lips. “Will no man give me uh”—he winced as he swallowed and curled a hand around his side—“a worthy competition?”

“Ye’re insufferable ,” she lamented, brushing back his hair and resting her ear to the drumbeat in his chest as he convulsed on a husky, pained laugh.

His hand rested on her cheek. “I’m just getting started, songbird.” His other hand found her stomach, palming her. “We’re just getting started.”

Epilogue

Beginning of Twelfthtide. Twenty-fifth of December. 1553.

Scrch…scrch…scrch…

Caleb wiped the sweat off his brow with his sleeve as he pushed the sanding block. Recovered. Reset it and pushed it again.

Scrch…

“Will the babe like it, Da?”

Caleb smoothed a hand over the cradle he and wee Alexander were putting finishing touches on and dusted away the sawdust—a smoothed finish ready to be rubbed with oil. Alexander, his lad of five years, conceived at Lughnasadh six years before, who’d come into the world with screaming lungs during the spring Beltane fires, leaned against his side. He laid down the jar of crushed pumice they’d sprinkled onto the cradle flanks for the final sanding.

His arm came around his oldest son and squeezed him in return. “Considering its big brother helped make it, the babe is certain to love it. Here.” He handed his chestnut-haired lad—the spitting image of his woman—the sharp engraver and turned the bottom over. “A craftsman always carves his name into his work with pride.”