Chapter 12
No blade fell.
“Damn you, be done with it?” came a deep, husky query.
The voice stunned her. She wasn’t about to die—she didn’t think.
She inhaled on a deep breath, shaking. She hadn’t known how dearly she wanted to live.
“Laird … Lion?” she whispered. She still couldn’t see in the darkness, but she was growing very familiar with the sound of his voice, his touch … even his scent.
“Ah,” he murmured dryly, and the suspicion he bore her was heavy on the air. “You didn’t know?”
“Nay, you fool,” she charged him, shaking. He was angry, yes, contemptuous of her, but she was going to live. “I didn’t know it was you, and you should have said something, told me, warned me—”
“Ah.” Now there was the slightest touch of amusement in his voice. “And you would have greeted me differently, knowing it was I? Pardon my confusion, but didn’t you run here to escape me?”
“I thought that you were—that Viking.”
“Which Viking? There are Vikings everywhere. I’ve even been told that I do have Viking in my blood as well, m’lady. And then, of course, we all know that you are Viking.”
“And Scottish.”
“A Viking’s daughter,” he acknowledged.
“Damn you, I thought you were the man who—”
“Abducted you. You didn’t go willingly?”
The sound of his voice was humiliating. “Please,” she murmured, coolly, politely, “if you’re not going to kill me, will you let me up?”
“Soon. You’ve not actually answered my question. If you’d known it was I, would the greeting have been different?”
She didn’t know how to tell him that yes, there would have been a tremendous difference. She wanted to live her own life, but she knew that he was a powerful, compelling man, the king’s man, and he wouldn’t hurt her unless forced to do so, while with the other man …
She had felt something that was mean, frightening. Evil.
“Aye, it would have been different,” she said wearily. “I never tried to kill you.”
“No? Not even when you struck me with the oar?”
“I’ve been fighting for my own life. I don’t wish death on anyone.”
“Really. What an enlightening thing to learn about you. But when you left Stirling with Daro, didn’t you imagine the two of us engaged in mortal combat, swords clashing, cries of vengeance on our lips?”
“Nay, I did not!” she swore.
His sniff in the darkness was insulting, but she had no chance to tell him so because she heard movement from behind him.
“Waryk …” she warned in a whisper.
He was instantly up. He didn’t seek to help her to rise because he had moved forward to use his body as a shield for hers.
She leapt to her own feet, not knowing who came now, but aware that there had been enough of the enemy for her to want to take care for her own life.
Inching backwards toward the wall, she found her sword.
Just as her fingers closed around it, the first man burst into the cave, a deadly battle-ax swinging.
She was amazed to see Waryk’s deftness as he ducked the swinging death, swinging his sword around to catch the man in his midsection while his own impetus with the ax brought him inexorably upon the deadly sword, where he was impaled.
Two men followed the first, and as Waryk withdrew his heavy weapon from the dead man, she surged forward, meeting a sword thrust meant for Waryk’s throat.
“Get out of here!” Waryk bellowed to her.
“‘Thank you, m’lady,’ might have been appropriate!” she cried in return, but the man she fought was lifting his broadsword and striding toward her, forcing her backwards. She would soon be pinned to the wall …
A blow to the fellow’s back turned him, and Waryk was fighting both men, his sword clanging again and again as he met every thrust of steel.
The enemy were not fools; they braced to strike together, and despite his strength, Waryk’s sword was tossed into the air by the strength of the blows.
Mellyora stepped quickly forward crying out to him, “Here, Waryk, my blade …”
He caught her sword midair and turned, taking the unwary attacker on his left midsection and ripping him to his throat. He spun again, and his second attacker was split through the center. Both men had fallen.
“By God, damn you!” he swore, unreasoningly, Mellyora thought, to the dead men. She was shaking; the carnage was horrible. But she hadn’t wanted to die herself. She had done nothing to them, and they had meant to torture and kill her.
“Why—” she began, but she suddenly heard her uncle’s voice from beyond the cavern’s entrance.
“Waryk?”
He was silent for a moment. She couldn’t see his eyes, but she felt him staring at her, as if he could see her.
“Here, Daro, I’ve found her!”
“Alone?”
“Aye, she’s alone now!” He reached out to Mellyora. She was shaking so badly that she couldn’t have taken his hand if she’d been able to see it. He caught her hand, and drew her to him, and she was still trembling so wildly that she had to lean against him.
Impatient, he swept her up into his arms, striding the distance to the cavern entrance.
“You’re shaking now—when you stepped by me to attack those men?”
“Aye, well, at the time, it seemed expedient to do so!”
Moonlight touched the entrance, and she saw that her uncle and Waryk were both covered in blood.
“Daro!” she gasped, afraid that he might have suffered some mortal wound. Waryk let her down, and she rushed to her uncle. He set his arms around her.
“You’re injured!” she said.
“A few scratches,” Daro assured her.
“A few scratches, nothing more. Yet there are many dead men down by the loch,” Waryk said.
She felt dizzy, uncertain, afraid. She didn’t know who the men were. She was truly relieved that Daro and Waryk weren’t killing one another, and she didn’t want her answers to cause an argument to break out.
“Dead men,” she whispered.
“Aye, who are they? Who brought you here?” Waryk demanded. “How did they get you here? Willingly?”
Her lips were trembling. “The man—the man I thought to be coming after me again—said that he came for me at my uncle’s command. He and his men were to slip me away while the two of you engaged in negotiations. But when I didn’t see a guard, I knew something was wrong. He said—”
“He—one man spoke to you all the time?” Waryk demanded sharply.
She nodded her head, looking at her uncle. “Aye, one man. I’d not seen him before, and I—I wouldn’t know him now. He wore a helmet. I’d know his voice—or his eyes.”
“Traitors amongst my men!” Daro swore. “Living among my people.”
Waryk was watching him, and Mellyora wondered if the king’s man believed her uncle, or if he thought that this had been a trick played on him by the Vikings.
She inhaled on a sudden gasp, staring at Waryk.
“He—wanted vengeance against you,” she said.
She felt a strange, hot tremor snake down her spine as she looked at him in the moonlight.
Towering in height, spattered with the blood of his opponent, his eyes hard and bright upon hers, he seemed as indomitable as the rock around them.
She tore her eyes from his and looked at her uncle.
“I fought with him. And I cut him, and he said that Laird Lion wouldn’t have his prize, that he would …
that he would torment me until nothing was left of me.
He wanted the two of you to go to battle and cut one another down. ”
“After you fought …?” Waryk asked.
She looked at the blood covering them both. “I eluded him. I thought that he’d found me again … You fought men by the loch—”
“Aye, but we’ve more horses left than men dead,” Daro said.
“Some have escaped, on foot. Someone knows the truth of what has happened here,” Waryk said.
“In these rocks, we could search forever,” Daro said.
“Let’s get down the cliffs, back to Daro’s camp,” Waryk suggested.
She felt cold, and still afraid in a way that she hadn’t before. “What of the other men?” she whispered.
“They are gone by now, Mellyora. We’d have found them, between the two of us and Angus if they were not,” Waryk said.
She was still unnerved. “So they are free somewhere. But who were they? They had to have known your camp well—”
“Aye,” Daro interrupted angrily, “bands of warriors sometimes come and go from loose alliances such as the Vikings who fight with me, but I’ve never known of such a treachery.
I don’t know any of the men we killed, though they certainly may have been at the camp.
I’ll send men to retrieve the bodies. Perhaps someone will know more about them. ”
Mellyora was still shaking. She was afraid to look at Waryk, though she felt his eyes, watching her, studying her, probing her soul. Determining that she and Daro were both liars?
She realized then that she’d been rescued by the man she’d been trying to escape.
She’d also tried to stab him, and must surely have come close to his jugular.
She had tried to beat him away with an oar, and she’d drawn his own claymore against him.
Not that much else she’d done since they’d met could be construed as nonviolent.
He’d formed a friendship with her uncle, and she was glad that they hadn’t gone to battle, that they hadn’t killed one another, or that her uncle hadn’t died for her honor.
But she was very afraid that Daro had agreed to trade her for some boon from the king. He wouldn’t do so! she told herself passionately.
But her uncle and Waryk had ridden together after her.
“Fine, let’s go down,” she said nervously. She turned away from the men and started to descend, hurrying with greater speed as the downward trail brought her closer and closer to the level ground below.
She was fast, but Waryk moved with equal speed. He didn’t speak, and she didn’t intend to, but finally, as they neared the ground and the loch, she could bear it no longer. “Have you traded Anne for me?” she queried bitterly.
“Hardly an even trade,” he murmured.
“She hasn’t vast lands.”
“She hasn’t a knife for a tongue,” he returned sharply.
“Did you make a trade?”
“No.”
“Then where is Anne?” she demanded.
“At your uncle’s camp.”
“Then you’re lying, you did trade—”
“Nay, lady, I did not. Anne and Daro have nothing to do with you.”