Chapter 15
The fog had not lifted.
It clung low to the hills, thick as wool and cold as a warning, softening the shape of stone and heather and tree until the whole world seemed made of shadows.
Isabel rode slightly ahead of Lachlan, her horse picking its way over damp earth, but she no longer had the uneasy comfort of believing they were merely traveling.
That illusion had vanished somewhere between dawn and the first time one of Lachlan’s men disappeared into the trees without a word.
They were not merely escaping to the Isle of Skye but were being hunted along the way.
After tracking the men’s movements through the days of travel, Isabel believed she finally had the routine down.
Before she was unsure if it was a linear formation, or more of randomly chosen protected dance.
Lachlan’s men didn’t move in a simple line, as her uncle’s household guards had.
Two riders slipped ahead, usually James and Angus, vanishing down a curve in the path ahead before returning with curt nods.
Another lingered behind, Padraig mostly, turning often in the saddle to study the misted path they’d already taken.
At intervals, Hamish and Duncan drifted away from the trail entirely, guiding their horses over craggy rock and the thick foliage of trees.
Isabel was nearly enamored with how very calculated and practiced their moves were. It was clear why Lachlan was respected as a leader. Of course she would never tell him that, but she was impressed. A rare feat for a man to make.
The Lachlan MacLeod of the road seemed a different man from the one who had teased her through his fever, argued with her over poultices, and looked at her with that unsettling combination of irritation and heat.
There was no teasing today. He had always watched the road before, but now his assumptions of danger had been cemented, and it was like he had become someone else, something else.
A hero of old, a protector of legend. His eyes were like a wolf following the ridge above them.
The bare-limbed trees. The dark openings of narrow gullies.
Any place a man might crouch with a bow or leap out with a sword. Every place betrayal might wait.
Isabel had been moved like a piece on a board by men who believed her blood mattered more than her mind.
She had been followed, watched, had enemies lie in wait to snatch her for some purpose.
But for what? And were these the same pieces of rubbish who had tried to use Falkirk as an open wound?
Whispers of betrayal and dissent sent to flood the Scottish highland.
Left to fester, left to infect. But Lachlan’s protection felt different.
She wasn’t an object to be used for bargaining in his eyes.
He was not watching her because she was the Bruce’s niece or because some order had been placed upon his shoulders.
There was a softness when he looked at her, in frank opposition when he looked anywhere else. He watched the hills as though the hills themselves had threatened her very existence. And her existence…was something he would move those hills for, even if he had to break every bone in his body trying.
Angus burst from the trees ahead, riding hard enough that his horse’s hooves struck sparks from hidden stone. Every MacLeod warrior shifted at once. Hands went to sword hilts. Horses tightened beneath their riders. Even the air seemed to draw itself thin when Isabel sucked in a startled breath.
“My laird,” Angus said, reining in before Lachlan.
Lachlan straightened sharply in the saddle, and Isabel saw the cost of it. His jaw hardened, one hand pressed briefly to his injured thigh before he dropped it again. “What is it?”
“English riders on the southern road. No’ close enough to see us, but no’ far either.”
The words moved through the group like a blade being drawn.
“How many?”
“At least a dozen.”
Bloody hell. Of course, he and his men would be able to easily overtake a dozen Sassenachs, but it would put more of a wrench into their schedule than if it had been the same four or five of earlier.
Lachlan’s gaze cut to the ridge, then the fogged road ahead, then to Isabel. That last glance lasted no more than a heartbeat, but she felt it all the same. The calculation. The risk. The fact that if the English found them, she would not simply be another traveler caught in dangerous country.
She would be the prize.
“We leave the road,” Lachlan said.
No one questioned him. He turned his horse toward a narrow trail that wound upward through a break in the craggy hillside, where the earth climbed sharply into thicker forest. The path was scarcely a path at all, more a scar between rock and root, slick from morning dew and hemmed in by bracken.
As she drew nearer, she saw Lachlan had paused just outside the entrance of the trail and then came into the line behind her.
Within moments neither the warriors, nor Isabel and Elsa, could ride side by side. Branches scraped Isabel’s skirts. Wet leaves brushed her cheek. Somewhere above them, a raven gave a harsh cry and vanished into the mist.
The climb grew steeper. Where before she could still see the road traveling parallel below them, now there was nothing but foliage.
Behind her, she heard Lachlan’s horse stumble once, then recover.
She turned despite herself. He sat tall, but his face had gone pale beneath the weathered bronze of his skin.
His injured leg was braced awkwardly, the muscle too damaged to absorb the jarring rise of the trail.
He would sooner bite through his own tongue than admit pain, she suspected, which made the evidence of it all the more alarming.
After another stretch of climbing, he called, “My lady.”
The formality of it made her wary. She turned in the saddle. “Aye?”
“Ye must ride with me.”
Her brows rose. “That sounds less like a request than an order.”
“’Tis both.”
“That is no’ how a request works.”
His mouth twitched, but the humor did not reach his eyes. “The trail narrows ahead. If your horse slips, I canna reach ye quickly enough. If mine stumbles, I canna manage the reins as well as I should.”
The admission cost him. She saw that, too. He extended his hand. Isabel looked at it. Large. Callused. Steady.
She should not have trusted that hand as readily as she did.
Still, he halted his horse, while she guided hers close.
James took her reins, and Lachlan leaned down, jaw tight with pain as he helped draw her onto his horse.
She sat before him awkwardly at first, but then his arm came around her waist, firm and sure, and her back met the hard warmth of his chest. Her bottom crushed to his lap.
The closeness struck her with such force that for one foolish instant she forgot the English.
She felt him everywhere. The strength of his arm.
The rise and fall of his breathing. The heat of him through his plaid and her gown.
His injured leg pressed along the outside of hers, held with brutal control.
He was not as invincible as men whispered.
Not now. Not with fever barely behind him and pain riding every mile beside him.
And yet he held her as though he could still put himself between her and the world. That should not have moved her, and yet it did. There was something about witnessing his vulnerability that drew her closer.
“Are ye settled?” he asked, his voice low behind her.
“Nay,” she said honestly.
He handed her the reins, and she couldn’t help but be slightly surprised at how much he trusted her to guide Dionysus.
A breath passed against the back of her neck. “Nor am I.”
The answer was too quiet for anyone else to hear, and perhaps that was why it rattled her so much.
The trail climbed beneath them, the horse careful under Lachlan’s hand.
Isabel fixed her gaze on the path ahead, on the slick lichen-covered stones and twisting roots, but every sense had turned traitor.
She was aware of his fingers near her waist. His breath near her ear. The hard line of his body behind hers.
And because she was aware of him, she thought of the croft. Of the fever. Of his hand closing weakly around her wrist. Stay. Of his mouth on hers.
She had told herself it did not matter. A dying man’s delirium was not a confession of the heart. Fever made ghosts of warriors. It made saints into sinners and warriors into lads crying for their mothers. Surely it could make Lachlan MacLeod kiss a woman he did not mean to kiss.
Except he had looked at her differently afterward.
And she had remembered everything.
The trail narrowed until branches closed above them, catching the mist in silver drops.
The company moved slower now, each horse picking its way along the ridge.
Below, somewhere beyond the trees, the southern road lay hidden.
Isabel tried to listen past the creak of leather and the soft chuff of horses, but the forest held too many sounds.
Water dripping from leaves. Wind worrying through pine.
A distant crack that might have been a branch or might have been a man’s boot on deadwood.
“How do you keep going,” she asked quietly, “when ye dinna know who betrayed ye?”
For a moment, she thought he would not answer, but then he said, “Ye fight the enemy in front of ye, while keep an eye on your back for another. Often times, they are the same.”
“And the traitor?”
His arm tightened around her, and she couldn’t tell if it was out of protectiveness, or that he was holding on. “The truth finds its way out eventually.”
“Ye sound very certain.”
“I have seen enough war to know secrets rarely stay buried.”
“Bodies do,” she said before she could stop herself.
His silence chilled her more than the fog. Then he said, “Aye. Bodies do.”
She swallowed. “If the English are this close, someone told them where to look. I think Kerr—do ye know him?”
“Aye.” The single word landed hard, an affirmative without hesitation.