Wedding for a Knight (MacLean #3)

Prologue

AT SUNRISE ON A HOT SUMMER’S DAY, on the banks of the River Earn near Perth, Scotland’s new Guardian, Donald, Earl of Mar, and a large army of the realm’s finest men engaged in a fierce and bloody battle that would last but a few short hours.

By noon, the whistling cloth-yards of the English enemy had decimated the proud Scottish schiltrons. . . . the bristling spear rings proving no match for the expert aim of English archers and their constant rain of deadly arrows.

The Guardian, two Scottish earls, a handful of nobles, sixty knights, and several thousand brave spearmen lay dead upon the field. The English aggressors and the Scottish turn-coats fighting with them, and known as the Disinheriteds, lost but thirty men.

Those few Scots who were wounded, or simply pinned beneath the towering pile of their fallen countrymen, wished they, too, had died.

Of a certainty, they did not consider themselves fortunate.

And along with the endless rivers of blood soaking the ground that ill-fated day, each and every Scotsman to walk away from Dupplin Moor left his heart behind as well.

Magnus MacKinnon was amongst the survivors.

But he left more behind than most.

For along with his heart, he lost the fortune he’d worked three long years to amass. Monies he’d won in tourneys and hoped to use to restore his clan’s destroyed fleet of galleys.

And mayhap a bit of his family’s pride.

But even losing such riches wasn’t the worst to befall him.

Nay, the most bitter blow of all was the crushing of his soul.