Chapter Thirty-Six
Finlay could not say when Katrin disappeared from his side.
He’d been determined that above all else he would keep hold of her, stick to her the way a thistle sticks to a man’s plaid.
That he would get her and her da out of the battle.
But they now thundered downhill in a huge, screaming, caterwauling, unstoppable mass. One moment she was there, the next not.
Horror washed over him in a drench colder than the rain.
This battle had drawn upon the roots of his soul.
He’d been a warrior once, more than once, and being here in the midst of it all did not seem so very strange.
Even though his harp banged upon his back in its wrappings, his sword did not feel unfamiliar in his hand.
But Katrin! He’d spent his whole life searching for her. How could she be gone from him?
An arrow skimmed past his cheek, so close the point laid open the flesh. Had he not been turning his head to look for Katrin, it would have taken him in the eye. Around him, other men fell.
The Gallowglass company, just ahead, were fully engaged. Another few steps and so would he be, and those around him. Gregor. Where was Gregor? He too had gone.
Ahead and to the left lay the broken stone wall, a portion of it fallen or never completed. Who could tell, obscured as it was by the dead and dying? Indeed, a great groan seemed to arise from the very ground, a terrible susurration of sound.
The Scots’ charge was further hampered by a depression in the ground, a kind of pit filled with yellowing bracken around which they had to divert.
A number of the attacking Scots had fallen into this hollow, where the English archers, pressing forward now from the other side, fired upon them. Volley after volley after volley—
They would lose this fight. The ancient warrior within Finlay knew it.
He and those of Murtray blood had caught up with the band of Gallowglass who stood strong. They faced off against the English knights who charged at them, their steeds terribly wounded yet coming on. Reagan O’Hanlon fought with a snarl on his face that made him near unrecognizable.
The rain had slackened and Finlay caught a flash of steel—a pike coming at him—and turned. His sword came up instinctively and then he was engaged. Fighting to stay alive.
The seething mass of the Scots army pushed. Pushed and gained a few paces of ground. A moment or two of respite.
O’Hanlon looked around and saw Finlay. His eyes registered astonishment.
“Where is the chief, Harper?”
“I do no’ ken.”
“And Katrin?”
Pain stabbed Finlay to the heart. He shook his head.
“Go. Find them.”
Find her.
Finlay heard those words thunder in his mind.
Then the battle surged back at them. Howling faces and steel on every side.
He had a last glimpse of O’Hanlon’s face, streaming sweat and blood, as the man turned.
The great claymore with which Reagan fought flashed and intercepted a blade that most surely would have taken Finlay’s head.
A great nudge from the Gallowglass sent Finlay sprawling into the soaking turf.
He landed on his back and felt Brada break beneath his weight. Sword still in his hand, he saw rather than heard Reagan shout at him, “Go.”
Saw an enemy blade take the Gallowglass in the shoulder so he fell.
Fell.
A mortal wound? Who could tell? It had looked so.
Finlay wanted to get up and fight on. Every fiber in him longed to avenge the man who had just saved his life, quite possibly at the cost of his own.
But O’Hanlon’s men had gathered around him, and anyway Reagan’s concern was all for the chief he served. For Katrin.
Did Reagan love her? He worried for her, that was certain.
Finlay struggled to his feet, the gouge to his left cheek streaming blood, and looked around. Tried to look around, for it proved impossible. The last of Murtray’s men plodded past and he laid hold of them, one after another.
“The chief? The chief’s daughter?”
At last one answered, “I saw our men carrying him fro’ the field.”
“His daughter?” Finlay repeated on the ragged edge of desperation.
“She were wi’ them.”
It felt cowardly to leave. The warrior, that ancient warrior deep inside him, insisted it was. To move off and hie away while still others thundered into that morass of death.
Yet if Murtray’s men carried him from the field, he must be injured, perhaps mortally so. And Finlay possessed one last bit of the story that Anders MacMurtray needed to know before he left this world.
That knowledge, as much as his longing for Katrin, spurred Finlay from the field. Others moved in the same direction as he, not many. The turf lay littered with dead and dying. A vast massacre, the arrows had wrought.
Others made their way on foot, limping and creeping, some helping their fellows.
He could not see Katrin or the chief anywhere.
The battle moved away from him. Up here on the moor, he could still hear it, the bellowing, the terrible screams of horses and of men. But it echoed like a memory down through time.
For a blessed moment he closed his eyes. Pictured a young woman with yellow hair standing in the sun outside a roundhouse. A graceful lass with a gray deerhound at her side. The woman he loved, gazing into his eyes.
Here.
He turned and made off toward a kind of ridge covered in dying bracken. Men took refuge here, a few lying, their fellows trying to stanch the flow of blood from hideous wounds.
He found them behind a screen of bracken, the old man lying stretched on the ground and the three others gathered around him.
His relief at finding them, at seeing Katrin, went beyond expression.
The chief looked dead. He had an arrow through his thigh, and his face had gone the color of daubed wattle.
By all that was holy, had he reached them too late?
He stumbled forward. Katrin looked up and their eyes met. She shot to her feet.
He wanted little more than to embrace her. For she was here, alive and whole, from what he could see. But the two clansmen looked up also, watching with what appeared to be astonishment.
Somehow, he kept from clasping her tight. The emotions flashing between them and what he saw blazing in her eyes would have to be enough.
“Ye be hurt.” She lifted a hand to his cheek.
“’Tis naught.” Reagan saved my life. He could not tell her that now. Mayhap later. “The chief—”
“He’s alive. The arrow head passed through, but I think it nicked bone.” She blinked at him. “’Tis bad, a grave wound. We canna find a physician.”
“Are there any to be had?” They had not thought of that, had they, while rushing headlong into battle.
“If there are, they will be busy elsewhere. The king was struck. Did ye see?”
Finlay nodded.
“I do no’ ken if he lives.”
“He leads yet the center company,” Finlay told her. He had seen that much during their own charge. “But I think we will lose this battle.”
“Och, aye. Curse all that sent us to it. Come, we maun do what we can for Da. Do ye ha’ any skill in those hands besides for harping?”
“Nay.” But she did. He remembered her treating his wounds when he returned from battle long, long ago. In the small roundhouse this was, the place where they dwelt. Her touch gentle and comforting. Healing in its love.
He did not say that either. He did not know if she was ready to hear all they had been to one another.
“Let us see wha’ may be done.”
Anders was not unconscious after all. He opened his eyes when Finlay hunkered down next to him and said weakly, “Harper.”
“Chief.”
“I am that glad to see ye alive.”
“And I, ye.”
After some discussion, they decided the best course was to break the shaft off the arrow, a process that proved painful to Anders in the extreme.
What followed proved even less pleasant, so much so that, at length, the chief did pass out, a relief to all involved.
Katrin scavenged from her clothing to bandage him. Not until that task was accomplished did she turn to Finlay.
“Your face—”
“Skinned by an arrow.”
“Let me see what I can do for it.”
They had discovered a muddy rivulet of water, one no doubt formed by the rain.
She wetted a scrap of clothing and washed the blood from his face and beard, and aye, it was so like those days long past that he had to close his eyes again, absorbing the feel of it.
Of her. If he opened his eyes, whom would he see?
His Irish lass bent over him with her golden hair all hanging down or Katrin in her filthy armor, love and concern brimming in her eyes?
It scarce mattered. The love was the same.
Just the same.
“I canna bandage that,” she said. “I canna do much at all for ye, but ’tis clean as I can make it.”
He opened his eyes and found himself back on the muddy, broken plain. He took her hands in his.
She leaned forward and lightly dropped a kiss upon the wound. “Ye will ha’ a scar there.”
“Alas.”
“Nay matter, I do no’ mind. Ye may be ugly as a boar’s backside and I would no’ mind. No’ that ye are.” The smile in her eyes failed. “How do we get my da away out o’ this?”
Finlay did not know.
“Wha’ frightens me, Finlay, is that I ha’ already had my miracle. When I saw ye walking out o’ that battle to me—”
“Aye.” It must have been akin to what he felt seeing her there kneeling on the ground.
“I do no’ ken if I will get another miracle. If I deserve one.”
Finlay hesitated to tell her. “I saw O’Hanlon go down. Before he did, he saved my life.”
Her eyes filled with a rush of tears. “Dead?”
“I could no’ tell.” Finlay glanced over his shoulder toward the great, seething battle. How could it be otherwise?
“Och, God, och, God,” she wept. “A great man. I cared much for him.”
Finlay could not find it in him to mind. If she loved the Gallowglass, well, O’Hanlon was a man worthy of her admiration. Of her respect. And his own heart hurt with seeing him fall.
For an instant, there on the edge of the soaking battleground, the world wavered around him, life and life and life overlapping in loss and pain.
In love.
Softly he touched Katrin’s hand. “Let us see to your da.” All that they could do, for the time being.