Page 55 of So Close To Heaven
But she forced herself to hold onto something else—hope. To imagine a future, however uncertain. Maybe she hadn’t come here by accident. Maybe there was a reason she’d been thrown into this century, into this man’s path. Maybe Alaric MacKinlay was meant to be part of her story... and she part of his.
She wouldn’t waste that chance, if so.
No—she would not be the woman who merely hoped. If Alaric came back—whenhe came back!—she would tell him. Not with hesitant looks, not with half-swallowed words, but with something plain and sure. She didn’t yet know how, or what words could possibly carry all that pressed inside her chest.
She’d have to think of something that was much less embarrassingly sophomoric than,Do you want to be my boyfriend?, which was all that she could presently imagine, and which sounded ridiculous in a stone castle in fourteenth-century Scotland, but which did manage briefly to make her smile.
Chapter Fifteen
From the ridge where Alaric sat his horse, the English column stretched like a dull serpent along the lochside track—chain mail and spearpoints, creaking axles, the bawl of driven oxen. Three thousand men, and a tail of wagons so long a man might grow old counting them.
The reek of smoke and iron rode the damp air of the Great Glen. Ciaran edged his destrier upslope until their stirrups brushed. Mist filmed his hair and cloak.
“We canna break that head,” he said, frustration evident after three days trailing the enemy. “But a beast that long—aye, it bleeds easy at the tail.”
Alaric’s gaze never left the road. “Aye, we bleed it, but when? Where?”
A scout scrambled up through the bracken as if on cue, peat and muck as high as his knees. “Laird! There’s a choke a half-mile north. The track pinches hard to the water with an old birch stand on the slope and bog to the west. The wagons’ll have to slow for a burn crossing—rotten planks and slick stone.”
“Guid,” Alaric said, drawing Ciaran’s gaze. “We make our cut there.”
Ciaran nodded and raised his hand, giving a sharp whistle which drew the MacKinlay and Kerr officers close. Mathar, broad-shouldered and steady, bareheaded in the mist, drove his steed up the slope. Mungan, the Kerr captain, lean as a fox and twice as hungry, came in Mathar’s wake. Two more Alaric trusted with steel and his life, if need be—Neacal, all scars and scowl, and Petrus, young but quick with a bow—gathered as well.
Alaric spoke low and clean, no words wasted. “'Tis time to move. Mathar, we’ll take a unit up among the birches and keep to the roots; the ground will swallow us if we dinna watch.Arrows first, then steel when we spring. We’ll break their back at the crossing. Ye want the wagons?” He asked Ciaran, knowing that the first of the fight would happen there.
Ciaran nodded. “Aye, we’ll cut the traces, drive the oxen uphill into that gulley; they’ll take the carts with them and bog the lot. Nae heroics. Ruadh can hold the far flank and cut down any who try to form a line.”
Alaric turned to Neacal and Petrus. “Circle with a dozen, Torches when my horn sounds. Make them ken the shadows have teeth.”
“Ye take the rearguard,” Ciaran said to Mungan.
They checked girths and leather. Faces were smeared with peat, and steel was wrapped to keep from clinking. Alaric drew his sword a thumb’s breadth and settled it again, the familiar weight right in his hand. Below them the English moved with the tired arrogance of men who believed themselves too large and strong, safe from the hill and its wolves.
A flicker of hazel eyes came unbidden to him. Ivy in that chamber at Caeravorn nearly a week ago, her eyes shining and startled after he’d kissed her.Be safe, she’d said, small and fierce. He shut it away with a breath and put his heels to his horse.
Dusk sloped down the glen as they took their places. Mist rose off the loch in the distance. The tail of the English column hit the pinch-point—the road squeezing to a slick spine of rock with the burn foaming white over black stone. Wagons squealed and balked. The cattle slowed, hooves slipping. The rearguard formed a lumpish hedge of spears to cover the crossing.
Ciaran raised his arm, fisted his hand, giving the silent signal.
The Kerrs and MacKinlays moved into position.
From the birch stand above, a hiss and a thrum, as Mathar’s first volley of missiles fell swift and hard. Men shouted; onetumbled backward into the water. Stones came next, the size of a man’s skull, loosed from ropes and levered roots, bounding and crashing down. An ox bellowed, struck, staggered sideways; the wagon behind it skidded across the track and jamming the way.
Ciaran and his men erupted from the brush with swords and axes. Two slashes and a heave, and a yoke of oxen bolted, hauling a cart sideways into the bog. Mud sucked, wood groaned, and the cart tipped, spilling sacks of oats like dry sand.
“Now!” Alaric called out and put spurs to his destrier.
They went down the slope at a controlled slide, iron-shod hooves biting. The English shouted and tried to form ranks, but the burn, the jammed cart, the sudden rain of arrows had made a tangle of them. Alaric hit the first man like a hammer, his blade finding the narrow gap where helm met mail at the throat; the man folded as if the bone had gone out of him. The second swung a scythe; Alaric shoved the weapon off course and drove his blade up beneath it.
The thrum of Mathar’s second volley reached him, arrows biting into the enemy’s side. A horse screamed—another’s mount, not his—and then was quiet.
Torches flared in the trees to the north, Neacal and Petrus and their unit ghosting through the dark, fireflies become wolves. A ripple of panic ran the length of the wagons. A call in English went up to form on the standard, but the flag was already in flight, its bearer bolting to save the silk, not the men.
“Dinna waste good steel on unarmored rabble!” Alaric heard Ciaran call out.
Alaric kept his horse moving, never standing to be surrounded, always carving diagonals through soft spots. A lad with a face too smooth for hair beneath the helm tried to hold him, but Alaric’s blade checked the lad’s heartbeat. The boy’s eyes widened. A thrust came for his knee. He cut it aside andfelled the boy who held it, then forced his horse through the break in the line.
A horn sounded—three short blasts. The withdrawal. Alaric turned his head, checked the edges. Mathar was already falling back, archers breaking into pairs under the birches. Blair was limping, blood black on his hose but still planting men in the mud as he stepped backward. Someone had set one cart too many alight; flame flared high and hungry, and an iron band snapped off a wheel, coursing through the air, meeting with one of the Kerr men.
