Page 34 of So Close To Heaven
Her eyes had softened with recollection, her mouth curved in a wistful smile. Alaric found himself listening more intently than he meant to, his hand loose on the reins, his destrier plodding easily beside hers.
“I remember when I was about six or seven,” she continued, her voice warm yet, “Gramps let me help bottle-feed a calf once. My arms were barely strong enough to hold him, and it seemed I had to wrestle with him to get him to drink. I was giving him something he needed—wanted—and I didn’t understand why he fussed so much. He ended up knocking me flat—milk everywhere, and me dumped in the mud and muck of the barn. Gramps laughed until his pipe slipped from his teeth. I was mad and embarrassed and covered in mud, and Gramps told me it was a baptism—‘nobody gets out of raising cattle without being covered head to toe in something,’ he said.”
The men around them rode silent, but Alaric could see some were listening too, ears tilted back. Her voice carried easy on the air, not boastful, not showy, but full of color.
She shook her head faintly, her smile dimming. “Those were the good weekends. The best, really. But then my mom found husband number four, and that was the end of it. No more weekends at the farm. She wanted me at home, part of her new family. Which—” a shrug, careless on the surface, but her tone thinned with something harder beneath “—wasn’t really a family at all. Just another man she tried on, like a pair of shoes. Junior—that was his name. Fitting, since he was a small man in every way that mattered.”
Alaric studied her carefully. She spoke quickly now, as if hurrying over the jagged places, smoothing them with dark humor. But he heard the change in her voice, the way the warmth drained when she spoke of her mother, and he understood the contrast without her needing to say it outright.
Again, he wasn’t sure he comprehended all the particulars of which she spoke, but he forged out an idea that she’d been a lass dropped between two worlds—one solid, rooted in earth and routine, the other shifting and uncertain, where the only constant was disappointment, mayhap outright unhappiness.
Her grandparents gone, and her mother and father naught but shadows in her life. Alaric’s mouth tightened. Whether her tale of coming through time were truth or madness, it mattered little—there would be none searching after her, none to mourn her absence.
As though reaching for the brighter side again, she turned to another memory from her grandparents’ farm, recalling an instance of what seemed a fantastic storm, and her fright, but how her grandmother had made it all a game, she said.
He shifted in the saddle, his gaze lingering on her face as she spoke. She liked conversation, that much was plain. Perhaps she always had, but ten days in near silence and suspicion had corked it tight inside her. Now it spilled out in a steady stream, and against all reason, he found himself wanting her to go on.
She carried on, with little instigation, speaking of people and places he could not fathom, names and customs that meant nothing to him, and yet the joy in her voice needed no translation. He found himself listening, not for the strangeness of her tale, but for the music of it. He’d told himself he did not believe her, and yet for these moments, he almost forgot to doubt.
And then, for a stretch they rode in silence, but it was not an awkward one. The road unwound before them, the men’s voices drifting in front and behind them.
By the time the sun hung high overhead, Alaric realized their talk had drifted far across many subjects. He could not recall the last time he had listened so long, so willingly, to another’s voice. With Ivy, it seemed, he found no weariness in it. Her words came like a stream, and he let them wash over him, surprised by the ease of it. At times, he nearly forgot the men marching around them, the war ahead, the weight that ever pressed on his shoulders.
Chapter Ten
The company pressed on the next morning, the ground soft beneath their mounts, mist rising in slow curls from the damp earth. Alaric rode at the front, eyes ever sweeping the ridgelines and the road ahead.
The thunder of hooves announced the return of his scouts. Struan came first, mud spattered to his thighs, his mount lathered with sweat. He pulled up sharply, directly in front of Alaric.
“Riders ahead, my lord—two miles, maybe less,” he informed him. “Royal guard, forty strong. They’ve a messenger with them, held tight at the center.”
Alaric’s jaw set. “Which way?”
“East, toward Inversnald.”
Alaric’s gaze swept the road, his thoughts swift, calculating. A messenger under guard meant intelligence, coin, or orders from Edward himself. None of those could be allowed to pass unchallenged. A ripple of sound went through the men—their interest piqued.
He gave a single nod. “Aye, we’ll have them. Form up.”
The men straightened as one, steel rasping from scabbards, horses snorting as reins were gathered tight.
Forty armed and armored Englishmen were no challenge and didn’t need any particular strategy. The MacKinlays had ambushed parties of this size a dozen times at least, possibly more in the last year. Without either Alaric or Mathar having to call out commands, officers gave orders and men began to break off with their units, understanding what would be expected of them, where and how they should position themselves.
Alaric wheeled his mount down the line until he found her.
Ivy rode pale-faced among an army shifting into different formations, Kendrick, Ewan, and Blair having abandoned her to reach their units. Wearing a wee frantic expression, she met his eyes when he drew up before her.
His voice came low but necessarily firm. “We aim to take on a small band of English,” he explained, certain no one else would have enlightened her about what was about to happen.. “Ye’ll stay close to me until I tell ye otherwise. When we strike, I’ll put ye in the trees. Ye’ll nae move until I come for ye. Do ye ken me?”
She gave a stiff nod, knuckles white on her reins.
Alaric’s jaw clenched. For a heartbeat he let his eyes linger. The wind had torn strands of her russet-gold hair loose from the plait she’d made, her mouth parted as if she meant to speak. And in that instant he saw her not as his charge but as prey, as any Englishman would see her—soft skin, unguarded beauty, something to be taken. His stomach turned hot at the thought of their hands on her, the ruin they’d make of her if she fell into their keeping.
“Come.” He tore his gaze away and drove his horse to the fore, appreciative of Ivy’s skill with a horse as she kept close to his flank.
The company surged, hooves hammering the earth as they raced east. The ground dipped ahead, the track funneling into a glen, though Alaric kept his army in the trees, on the crag above.
When he spied dust rising ahead, when the flash of banners and polished helms were visible through the trees, Alaric raised his hand, and riders peeled off to the slopes, archers with bows in hand. They were compelled to wait, of course, to allow the sprinting infantry to catch up.
