Chapter 31
Frederick had never known waiting to feel like this.
He had stood through battles. Through negotiations that turned on a pause too long or a breath too short.
Through nights when he had known men would ride at dawn, and blood would follow before noon.
None of it had felt like this. None of it had hollowed him out from the inside while leaving every nerve sharpened to the point of pain.
They had followed Iona exactly as planned.
At a distance. Silent. Archer, in the lead once they reached the eastern grounds, because he knew the approach to the old hunting lodge better than any of them.
Lennox at Frederick’s left. Four men behind.
Enough to move swiftly if needed. Not enough to be seen too soon.
It had felt wrong from the first step.
Every time Iona’s dark shape had slipped ahead through the mist, every time she had rounded a turn and vanished from sight for the span of a breath, something in him had tightened further.
He had told himself it was strategy. Timing.
That if they moved too early, Noor would bury herself deeper and drag the women with her.
That if they held steady, they would end it all at once.
The words had done nothing.
When they reached the rise above the lodge, Archer raised one hand, and they all stopped. Light spilled faintly through the warped shutters. One lantern burned at the door. Another glowed through a crack in the side wall.
Archer bent low, listening.
Then came Noor’s voice, indistinct through timber and distance. Then Iona’s, clearer, steadier than Frederick had expected and stronger than it had any right to be after all she had carried into this place.
I am not the same helpless lass ye once knew. Frederick’s heart slammed once, hard enough to make him dizzy.
Archer turned his head slightly. “Now,” he said.
The men moved as one.
Frederick reached the door first. One of Archer’s guards had barely lifted the latch before Frederick struck it with his shoulder and drove it inward so hard the hinges screamed. The room beyond exploded into motion.
He saw too much and not enough at once. Women against the wall.
Children bound close. Men turning with weapons already half-drawn.
Noor by the hearth, surprise flashing across her face before it twisted into something vicious.
And Iona, standing too near the center of it all, too near danger, too near everything he had been trying not to imagine.
Noor moved first. Not backward, but toward Iona. “Kill her,” she snapped.
That was all Frederick heard.
The first man reached him with a knife in hand and died before his second step fully landed.
Frederick’s sword went through him low and savage, then tore free wet and hot.
He did not stop to watch the body fall. Another came from the right.
Lennox met that one with a short blade under the ribs.
Archer’s men crashed into the far side of the room, dragging one guard away from the women before he could put steel to a throat.
Frederick pushed forward.
A heavyset man with an axe came between him and Iona.
Frederick turned the first swing with his blade, felt the jolt travel all the way to his shoulder, then drove his elbow into the man’s face and cut upward under his arm when he staggered.
Blood sprayed the wall. Someone shouted. A child began to cry.
He kept moving.
Noor had taken a knife from one of the fallen men. Her face was no longer composed. It was wild now, bright with the sort of fury that had long ago burned away whatever dignity rank had once lent her.
Iona met her.
For one impossible second, Frederick saw it too clearly.
Iona seizing a broken candlestick from the side table, Noor lunging, the two of them colliding in a shower of overturned wood and spilled oil.
Noor slashed. Iona twisted, not quickly enough.
The blade caught along her arm, slicing cloth and skin.
Frederick saw red.
He did not remember crossing the distance.
Only that a man tried to block him, and Frederick killed him so brutally that by the time the body hit the floor, Archer was swearing at his shoulder to watch the women, watch the women, but there was no room left in Frederick for anything except Iona and the blood on her sleeve.
Noor came at her again.
Iona did not retreat. She drove the candlestick hard into Noor’s face with both hands. Bone cracked. Noor cried out and reeled back, one hand flying to her cheek where blood had already begun to pour between her fingers.
That should have relieved him, but instead it made everything worse. Because if Iona could still strike, then Noor could still strike back. But if she was wounded enough to bleed, she was near enough to be lost. The thought arrived suddenly and whole, and impossible to deny any longer.
I love her.
The truth went through him with the same violence as the fight. Love, full and terrible and too late to soften itself into anything easier.
Noor raised the knife again, and Frederick reached them before she could bring it down.
He caught Iona by the waist and dragged her behind him with such force she stumbled into his back. Then his left hand shot out and tangled in Noor’s hair, wrenching her forward so sharply that the knife dropped from her fingers with a clatter against the floorboards.
She laughed, and even then, blood down her face, one eye already swelling, the room around her collapsing into shouts and groans and dying men, she laughed.
“Ye fool,” she hissed at him. “Ye cannae kill me. Nae if ye wish to avoid war.”
Frederick’s grip tightened until her neck strained with it.
Behind him, Iona’s breath was ragged. He could feel it. Feel the slight trembling where she stood pressed too close to his back, whether from pain or shock, he could not yet tell.
Archer came up on his right, sword wet to the hilt, chest rising hard with the exertion of battle.
He took in the room in one sweep. Two of his men were already cutting bonds from the women.
Lennox had pinned another attacker through the throat and was kicking the body clear of a child’s feet.
The fight, for all practical purposes, was over.
“We can put her below,” Archer said, breathing hard. “A dungeon will hold her until morning.”
Frederick looked at Iona then. Only a glance, but it was enough.
She stood pale and bleeding from the arm, the broken candlestick still in her hand, her eyes fixed on Noor with such exhausted hatred that Archer saw it too.
Frederick knew the instant he understood.
Knew the instant he abandoned any pretense that this would end cleanly if Noor continued drawing breath.
Noor saw the change and tried to pull away. “Archer?”
He did not answer her.
Frederick did not think. He only acted.
The blade went in clean.
Noor’s laughter stopped all at once. Her body jerked once against his grip, her eyes widening not with pain at first, but with astonishment.
As though death itself had broken some private rule she had always believed would protect her.
Blood spilled hot over Frederick’s hand. Her mouth parted. Closed. Parted again.
Then the light went out of her eyes.
He let her fall.
For one moment, no one spoke.
Then Archer looked down at the body of his mother-in-law and said, with a composure that would have seemed absurd anywhere else, “Well. That is one way to handle a family difficulty.”
Frederick barely heard him.
He turned at once.
Iona was no longer looking at Noor. She had already dropped the candlestick and moved toward the women, kneeling beside the nearest one as Archer’s men cut the last of the bindings from her wrists.
The woman was shaking too hard to rise. One of the children had begun sobbing in earnest now, the sound small and broken after so much forced silence.
“Ye are safe now,” Iona was saying, though her own voice shook with strain. “It is done. Do ye hear me? It is done.”
The red-haired woman from years ago stared at her and began to cry. “I kent ye,” she whispered. “I kent ye would come.”
Another woman, the one missing from Frederick’s own lands, clutched her child so tightly the bairn whimpered. “Thank ye,” she said hoarsely to no one and everyone at once. “God, thank ye.”
Frederick crossed the room in three strides and dropped to one knee beside Iona.
Her sleeve was soaked through.
He touched her arm first, then her shoulder, then her face, checking without grace and without apology. “Where else?”
She looked at him as though from very far away. “I am all right.”
“That is nae an answer.”
She tried to smile. It made his stomach drop. “I hurt her.”
“Aye,” he said. “Ye did.”
Her eyes fluttered once, the effort of keeping them focused suddenly visible. “I feel… lightheaded.”
The words had barely left her when her body tipped toward him. Frederick caught her before she struck the floor. “Iona.”
Lennox was suddenly there at his side, breathing hard, one sleeve bloodied to the elbow though not, Frederick thought, from any wound of his own. “She is breathing.”
“I ken she is breathing.”
“Aye, and she has also just walked herself into a trap, fought for her life, and watched a woman die. Give her a moment, for the love of God.”
Frederick ignored him except for the small fraction of reason in the words that forced his hands to steady.
Archer bent, gripped Noor’s body beneath the arms, and dragged it clear of the center of the room as though clearing away one more piece of wreckage.
“We return at once,” he said. “I will take her back to the castle and let the morning sort the politics of it. Ye take your wife home, Laird McIntosh.”
Home.
The word struck with sudden urgency.
Lennox nodded toward the woman from Frederick’s lands. “I will stay behind with her and one of Archer’s men until she can be moved properly.”