Page 43 of Rebellion's Fire

“Oh Lady, save us!” wailed Grizel, Mairead’s woman. “Brigands!”

“Nonsense,” Mairead said crossly, “And even if they were, we have men-at-arms. More likely we’ve lost a wheel.”

Leaning forward, she opened the carriage door and found herself gazing into the grinning face of a strange man armed to the teeth. Several strange men, some on foot, all armed to the teeth. They surrounded her carriage and were in the process of disarming her own men, who seemed to have given up without much of a struggle. It seemed her woman was right.

The first man had Mairead by the elbow while he peered inside. The light from the lamp clamped to the carriage’s side played over Grizel’s terrified face and the brigand’s ferociously amused one.

“You’ll be the Lady of Kingowan?” the first one said, distracting Mairead from the safety of her woman.

Mairead chose to step down gracefully rather than be dragged from the carriage. Then she shook herself free. “I am, and you will pay for robbing me so close to my husband and my soldiers!”

Perhaps it wasn’t so clever to threaten them in the circumstances, but it didn’t have any of the effects she might have expected.

“It’s her!” the man called, and someone else loped out of the darkness through the ring of men surrounding the carriage. The dim light from inside the carriage fell across a tall figure with wild black hair and eyes that had once made her bones melt just by giving her their full attention.

He smiled at her. “I’ve come to steal your jewels.”

“Bastard,” Mairead said, most improperly, and lifted her face to his. After all, her own servants were well bribed to loyalty, or at least to discretion.

Before his grinning men, Adam MacHeth kissed her with enthusiasm if excusable distraction.

“Is the king at Kingowan?” he asked, releasing her more quickly than she might have liked, even though she was no longer utterly besotted with him. For a while now, he had lain in her memory like a shadow, an echo of his father, although up close once more, there was nothing shadowy or remotely insubstantial about Adam MacHeth. There were new lines around his eyes, a rigid set to his mouth that she didn’t remember seeing before.

“I’m not sure,” she answered. “He’s expected. I’m only just arriving. But, Adam, you can’t take the house—especially not the king—with ten men!”

“I have more,” Adam said. “I just have to wait for them to catch up. Besides, I only want to talk to him. Stuff whatever knickknacks you love somewhere in your clothing. I’m afraid we do have to steal the rest to keep your cover. Rush into the castle and bewail your robbery as you normally would.”

Anxiety warred with the old surge of excitement she always seemed to feel around him. She didn’t know whether to laugh or shoo him back to sea. “Adam, this is madness! We have archers who’ll shoot you!”

“Arrows are like lightning. They don’t strike twice.”

“Rubbish. Are you hurt already?” It would explain that odd rigidity around his mouth and eyes.

He shrugged. “No. Only an old wound. They’ve got your chest, I’m afraid.”

“Of course they have,” Mairead said resignedly. “If I didn’t love you, Adam mac Malcolm, I’d kill you.”

Adam grinned—it wasn’t the first time she’d said this—and handed her back into the carriage, where Grizel was almost fainting from fear. “Bless you, Mairead,” he said and reached for the bridle of the gray horse, which had appeared through the darkness to stand at his shoulder.

Judging by the speed with which Mairead’s horses leapt forward, someone had hit them on their rumps.

*

Fergus of Gallowayalways had mixed feelings when he visited the court of the King of Scots. On the one hand, he had to pretend he didn’t mind that the king—a mere child—regarded him as one of his nobles and never accorded him his title of King of Galloway. On the other hand, there was nowhere better to collect interesting news and make sure Galloway was always represented by the important men he regarded as his allies.

Whoever owned the land around it, Galloway was always regarded as a border region. Since King David had acquired Cumbria and Northumbria during the support of his niece Matilda in her wars with the English King Stephen, Galloway was becoming squeezed, and Fergus was aware he had to push back. Without, of course, waging any wars he couldn’t win.

Having made a stately progress through the country called Alba in his native tongue, Fergus finally caught up with the King of Scots between Dundee and Aberdeen, where the Lord of Kingowan was ruining himself by entertaining his royal visitor and his court of followers, advisers, and hangers-on.

The young king and his host both received him graciously, and Fergus enjoyed a most satisfying meal. Here, he learned the latest news, that the MacHeths, no doubt while their cousins and allies in Moray conveniently looked the other way, had attacked the king’s lands and burghs there.

“By all accounts, the ships appeared out of nowhere!” the king exclaimed. Which Fergus translated, as the man whose duty it was to notice such things hadn’t been paying attention and had explained the matter away to the young king as something more akin to magic. The MacHeth reputation helped here. Fergus rather admired that. “They plundered Banff and beyond, driving off cattle indiscriminately, and when the local militias streamed out to give battle, another lot attacked from the sea farther south! Fortunately, the galleymen ran off with their loot back to sea, and the militia were free to chase the others back into Ross.”

“Fortunately indeed,” Fergus said, gazing intently at the king. “So…we were successful against the MacHeths in the end?”

“In the end,” King Malcolm said. At least he had the sense to look glum about it. “But we lost much land to fire, and many animals. To say nothing of the men and the revenues.”

“What will you do, my lord?” Fergus asked. “Send the royal army against them at last?”

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