Chapter 5
Lachlan drifted in and out of consciousness. One moment he was fighting off a horde of twelve Sassenachs, steel clashing and blood slick beneath his boots—and the next, the battlefield at Falkirk vanished.
He was sixteen again.
Peat smoke filled the air, and an early frost shone on blades of grass.
The Highlands stretched wide and endless before him.
His grip tightened around the hilt of his sword, not from fear, but from the sheer, roaring anticipation that had filled his chest. His first real battle.
No mere skirmish of training. This was where lads were either broken or remade.
The weight of the MacLeod colors on his back made him stand taller. Red like blood, black like death. The older warriors glanced at him, some with blank expressions, others with doubt. Lachlan had grinned, welcoming the chance to prove them wrong.
The ambush came fast. The thunder of hooves. The battle cries of men. The only kind of madness that could swallow hesitation whole. Lachlan, untested, had not faltered. He plunged straight into it.
Steel met steel. He’d taken a blow to the ribs that stole his breath.
Split a man’s shoulder with a strike that jarred him from palm to spine.
When the battle was won, the enemy broken, and the field falling into silence, Lachlan still stood.
Bloodied. Bruised. Bursting with life. No longer was he a lad, but a man.
Standing covered in blood that was not his own was their chieftain, his father.
When their eyes met, the MacLeod nodded at Lachlan, and his chest swelled with pride.
The best day of his life. And one of the worst. That nod was the one thing standing between him and the nightmare of truth.
That he had taken lives, even if they were his enemies, he was the reason a child would grow up without a father. He was the cause of a widow’s tears.
The memory fractured, slipping from his grasp, and the Falkirk battlefield surged back in its place. Screams tore through the air. Hooves thundered against the ground. Then, the unrelenting agony of his speared leg that stole the breath from his lungs.
More than the pain was the shame of being beaten. That burned hotter than any wound. The Wolf of Skye had been brought low in the mud like any other fallen warrior.
And the cavalry, mo chreach, the cavalry had not come...
His mind clawed for a reason, even as darkness pressed in at the edges of his unconscious mind.
He pictured them on the road, ambushed and cut down before they could reach the field.
Horses frantic. Men slaughtered. For there had to be a reason they had abandoned their own, and he couldn’t imagine it was that they’d switched sides, eschewing their tartans for English armor.
What if they weren’t meant to come at all? What if someone had ensured their absence?
The idea coiled through him, cold and suffocating. His mind drifted to something darker, more sinister. Someone had betrayed them from within.
The noise of the battle warped, stretched, and then it was gone.
He stood in a field of heather, the wind soft against his face.
His fingers brushed over the tops of tall grasses and wildflowers, the quiet so complete it rang in his ears.
The day his father had died. Was that a sign?
To think of his father’s death now? A hollow thought nudged at the edges of his brain.
There was a good chance that Lachlan was dead already. And perhaps that field of heather was his Heaven. But if that were true, why then did the battle keep dragging him back to painful life? Was this eternal judgment?
Mayhap, this was a test.
Lachlan’s brow tightened, even in his haze. Nay. He had done what was required of him. What any warrior sworn to his clan must do. Steel for steel. Life for land. A battle for freedom was not murder, but a necessary brutality.
His ruminations slipped, unraveling as a voice broke through the darkness. Soft. Female. Close. The sound drifted, just out of reach. An apparition or maybe an angel. Perhaps this was Heaven after all.
Concentrating, Lacklan forced his eyes open.
A face hovered over him, blurred at first, then sharpening into something far more real than any vision.
Delicate, aye, but not fragile. There was strength in the line of her jaw, in the steady set of her mouth.
And her eyes… Blue like the loch that surrounded his home.
Behind them, a spirit that was just as cutting as the rocks hidden underneath that dark water.
They held him there, pinned more surely than any blade.
She was not an angel, but he had the absurd desire to know her, except keeping his eyes open was proving a feat he wasn’t certain he could manage.
“Wake up, ye.” Her command cut through the haze.
Once more, Lachlan forced his eyes open, her beautiful, yet stern face coming into focus as she put two fingers to his eyelids and lifted them open.
“Can ye hear me? I want ye to bite down on this,” she said, holding a strip of leather near his mouth. “Unless ye fancy biting off your tongue.”
Well that settled it, he was not in Heaven. Not quite yet. And whatever came next would be far closer to Hell.
Memory slammed back into him, the fall, the white-hot agony, and his gaze dropped just enough to see the spear still lodged deep in his thigh. A blood-soaked bandage had been wrapped tightly above it, cutting him off from feeling the pain fully. For now. A curse rumbled low in his chest.
“Angel,” he muttered, voice rough as gravel. He dragged his gaze from his wound to her face. “I’m awake. Do what ye must.”
“Open,” she said, and thrust a leather strap between his teeth, the strapping pressing his tongue down. The taste of it was dry and bitter, and he forced himself not to gag. “Bite.”
He obeyed without question, sweat beading on his brow. While he might have admonished a lesser man for telling him what to do, she did not seem the sort to take any argument from anyone.
“Good,” she said, already moving her hands toward his leg. “Now, dinna move.”
As if he could. As if he would. Even now, half-broken and bleeding out his life’s force, Lachlan found himself watching her, mesmerized. No one failed to fear him. And yet… she didn’t. That alone was enough to keep him still.
Pressure clamped down around his thigh. Through the blur, he caught sight of her hands, quick and precise, as she bound more tight strips of cloth above the wound, around the ones his men had applied on the battlefield, pulling hard enough on the knots to make his vision spark.
He groaned around the strap of leather in his mouth, glad for the strip to bite down on.
“Hold him.” The words were barely spoken before Ewan and Callum moved in. He knew their weight before it hit him, one bracing his shoulders, where the arrow had been removed, the other pinning his legs by his calves, their grips unyielded. Brothers in battle, and now his jailers.
Lachlan tensed, every instinct in him rising up in warning.
“Dinna—” he started to say, the sound muffled by the leather, and—
Too late.
The first pull tore through him. White-hot. Blinding.
Lachlan’s back arched off the table, the leather strap forgotten as a raw and savage bellow ripped from his throat. The kind of roar that came from bone and blood and fury.
More hands now, as the woman issued brisk orders. Grips tightened, forcing him down as the spear shifted, wood grinding bone. A sickened crack. A wet, sucking sound as it came free. The world fractured.
For a heartbeat, there was nothing but pain. No thought. No breath. No soul left in him at all. Then it crashed back. Air tore into his lungs, the scent of blood heavy, and rage followed close behind.
If Lachlan hadn’t already killed the man who had done this, he would get up off this table, march back to the battlefield, and murder the bastard all over again. But he would make it a slow, excruciating death. Just as soon as he…
“Ye will no’ die,” Robert the Bruce commanded as Lachlan lay on the table, throat raw, body savaged.
Lachlan’s head rolled to the side, just enough to see the Bruce where he stood, his presence solid as the ground beneath them.
Lachlan opened his mouth to answer, something defiant, but the effort slipped away with the leather strap onto the floor before the words could take shape, and darkness pulled him under.
Something cool pressed against his skin. A cloth. Soft movement followed, light, deliberate touches that skimmed over him, careful where before all was torment.
Lachlan groaned. The crushing weight of men holding him down was gone. No hands gripped his limbs. No bodies braced him to the table. Only the lingering ache remained, a deep throbbing, but somehow distant as if he were not inside his own body.
The hard table still pressed to his back and there was a candlelit chandelier above his head. He had the oddest thought that hot wax might very well drop on him, and that soon he’d be glued to the spot.
Turning his head from side to side, he noted that nearly everything had changed from when he’d woken sometime before.
How long ago, he couldn’t say. He’d been drifting in and out of consciousness for hours, maybe days.
The light had dimmed to a wavering glow.
The clamor of the room had quieted. No longer did he hear the injured being tended, their cries sorrowful and pain filled, but instead scattered murmurs and the occasional groan.
Some of the men lay still. Others slept, their wounds bandaged like his.
Lachlan drew in a breath and tried to sit up. Pain flared, sharp and immediate, and a hand pressed firmly on his chest, until his back hit the wood once more.
“Ye will no’ be getting off this table, sir. Have ye lost your wits?”
The same woman who’d tended him stood over him now, with a glare that could have felled a lesser man.
There was a crease between her brows, and wisps of blonde came loose of her plait to frame her face.
Her lush pink lips were pursed at him as if she’d only just realized something distasteful.
He had the distinct impression that she found him to be the biggest oaf she’d ever met in her life.
“Ye’re on the brink of death, sir,” she went on, pressing him back when he tried to rise a second time. “So lie still, or I’ll send ye there myself.”
A slow, pained smile tugged at his mouth. He liked her fire. “If death looks like ye, lass, I’ll no’ complain.”
Her eyes narrowed more, the fringe of thick lashes practically kissing her cheeks. “Ha. Keep talking like that and I may yet help it along.”
Lachlan huffed a laugh, then sucked in a ragged, pain-filled breath. Everything hurt. “A fine way to go,” he murmured. “At the hands of a bonnie tyrant.”
She let out a groan and rolled her eyes. “Imbecile,” she muttered, though there was the faintest shift in her expression, the hardness softening.
An aching chill sweat through him then, the tell-tale sign of a coming fever.
The lass started to walk away. Without thinking, without sense, he reached for her.
His hand closed weakly around her wrist. Though she could have easily shaken him off, she stilled and glanced over her shoulder at him.
And was that a… Lachlan blinked his vision into focus.
Aye, there was a ferret popping its head out of what he’d thought was her ample bosom. He smirked.
“Stay,” he murmured, the word more breath than voice.
“Say again?” she asked, leaning closer to hear him.
For the briefest of moments, neither of them moved.
The lass stepped closer to the table, his grasp still on his wrist. She looked ready to say something.
Likely to rebuke him for touching her. Then, driven by what could only be madness, for he would not have done it if he’d been in his right mind, he shifted, dragging himself up just enough, and then pressed his mouth to hers.
It was clumsy. Fleeting. More instinct than intention. More teeth than lips. And over almost as soon as it began. There was a sharp nip on his chin from her ferret, and the lady jerked back, pulling free of his grip.
“Ye’re impossible, sir.” She dabbed a linen against his chin. “Freckles does no’ tolerate me being manhandled.”
Lachlan sank back against the table, the mad effort of kissing her costing him. “Ye’re beautiful,” he whispered, eyes already slipping shut. “And I like your ferret.”
There was an irritated grumble from the lass. “Fool.”
He barely registered her leaving or returning.
“Drink. Ye’ll need it for the pain, and the fever that’s coming whether ye like it or no.”
Lachlan tilted his head as she poured a bitter draft between his lips. It burned all the way down his throat, the pungent and unpleasant scent and taste of feverfew, and he coughed weakly.
“Swallow,” she said gently, steadying him with a firm hand.
Lachlan managed it enough to satisfy her. Through his haze, he felt her thumb brush the corner of his mouth, wiping away the dribbles of what he’d missed, tender and efficient.
“Will ye stay with me while I sleep?” he questioned.
“I’ve been here the whole time, sir.” And as if to punctuate that statement, he felt movement at his arm and noted her ferret had curled up there.
That pulled the faintest grin from him. “Then I shall have happy dreams.”
“Ye are bold for a man laid out on a table,” she remarked, her tone filled with mirth.
“Aye,” he blinked, trying to focus. “But near death, a man may say whatever he likes.”
He could have sworn her mouth twitched, though barely.
“Or perhaps,” she said, “he loses what little sense he had to begin with.”
Lachlan laughed, though slowly, as if he couldn’t quite remember the reflex. “Then stay and keep me from getting worse.”
“Ye are trouble,” she said, but she did not move away.