Page 1

1

West of Highgate End, Scotland, 1273

Graeme de Sowlis and his brother, Aidan, heard the scream at the same time. They exchanged a look, and he took off running.

“Graeme, no!” his brother shouted.

He skirted the wounded and hurtled toward the burning cottage. Unlike the other buildings, its thatched roof had not been unattached before the raid. Bright orange flames rose high into the night sky. Not realizing they were now secure from their enemy, the villagers ran in every direction, including away from the very structure Graeme now entered.

Smoke gushed out toward him when he opened the door, but he charged inside, ignoring the loud pop announcing the roof was near collapse. Smoke confronted him at every turn, rendering everyday objects—a bed, a stool—into invisible obstacles.

“Goddamn it, Graeme, get out of there,” Aidan roared from the doorway.

He didn’t need the warning to know he wouldn’t last long in here. Graeme knelt and tried to ignore the smoke around him and the flames above him. He saw her boot first. Reaching for it, Graeme pulled the child toward him. She didn’t appear to be breathing.

Scooping her up, he stood and staggered toward the door. The acrid air would kill them both if he didn’t hurry, but his brother’s cries led them both to salvation. Once outside, he gasped for clean air, sucking greedily as the girl in his arms lay motionless. A crowd had gathered, and as he began to breathe normally again, unease welled inside him. Would the girl live?

No sooner had he laid her on the ground than an elderly woman shoved him aside and lifted the girl’s head into her lap. His mind felt like it was stuffed with straw, but the murmured word “healer” finally penetrated. It seemed God had not forsaken them completely. When the peasant girl, no more than ten and two, began to cough, another woman fell on top of her sobbing. Graeme was about to tell the woman to back away to let her breathe when the healer did it for him. Pushed to the side, the woman then ran to him, threw her arms around him, and began to sob.

“Thank you,” she murmured over and over again. “My daughter . . . thank you.”

“Mistress, I must speak with this man.”

At the sound of her chief’s voice, the woman disengaged herself, bowed to them both, and ran to her daughter’s side.

Graeme followed Ferguson MacDuff away from the crowd. As they walked, Aidan fell in beside them.

“By all that’s holy, Graeme, you could have been killed,” Aidan said. Though he was Graeme’s junior by three years, his protective impulses were more akin to an older brother’s. A situation, Aidan often said, born from his brother’s predilection for danger.

They came to a stop a small distance from the gathering, somewhere they would not be overheard. “Chastise your brother all you’d like later, Aidan.” MacDuff extended his arm. “I’m too grateful to him to join in.”

Graeme wrapped his hand around it, a gesture of solidarity.

“All is secure?”

“Thanks to you and your brother, aye.”

Graeme released the man’s arm. “Bloody reivers,” he said.

Earlier that evening, just as the three men had sat down in MacDuff’s solar to discuss the problem of increased raids along the border, one of MacDuff’s men had come running into his hall to report the attack. The laird had ordered Graeme and Aidan to remain behind, as if either would have done so.

“This is not your fight,” he had said.

Perhaps not, but MacDuff was an ally to Clan Scott.

Brought back from his thoughts, Graeme turned to MacDuff. “The men were English?” he asked.

“Aye.”

The three men watched as MacDuff’s people began the task of regrouping after the second attack in a week.

“There’s something different about this latest rash of raids,” Graeme said, reiterating the words he’d spoken just before they’d received news of the attack. These raids were intended to rile the clans. “Will your men catch them?”

MacDuff shrugged, but he didn’t look hopeful.

Graeme looked from his host’s soot-streaked face to his brother’s frown before turning back toward the still-burning remains of the destroyed home. The raiders had stolen enough livestock to devastate more than one family and nearly taken the life of a girl too young to understand the dangers of the border along which she lived.

“If we are to stop this escalation, we’ll need their help.”