Chapter 11
Eilidh nudged Grian’s nose to the side just before they reached the big puddle in the path, the one that never dried and would splash everything with sticky, stinking mud if you rode through it.
She didn’t think twice about the gesture, but when Ciaran, a few paces behind her, swore as he guided Shadowbane through the hard-to-see spot, she grinned.
“Apologies,” she said, shooting a grin over her shoulder at him. “I should have warned ye about that.”
He frowned at her, but even with the serious expression, she could tell that riding had taken some of the burden off his shoulders. She was grateful for it; she hadn’t liked seeing him so clearly lost in painful thoughts.
She also couldn’t help a little frisson of pleasure at the fact that they both turned to the same activity when they needed to clear their heads.
“Ye seem to ken these trails too well,” he said, his eyes narrowed, even as a grin threatened. “I’d wager that ye have sneaked out to ride more times than ye ought.”
She tossed her braid over her shoulder as the path widened enough that Ciaran could come up to ride next to her, making conversation easier.
“Perhaps I have,” she said airily. “And then again, perhaps not.”
Out of the corner of her eye, she saw him shake his head.
“Come on, now,” he chided. “I told ye my tales. Now it’s yer turn.”
She was faintly surprised that he mentioned his stories from earlier; she would have suspected that he wished to speak about anything but the memories that so clearly weighed upon him. But she could not deny that he made a fair point, so she relented.
“Och, very well,” she said. “I will admit that maybe I have climbed out the battlement that overlooks my bedchamber and snuck down to the stables. And maybe I ken when the stable lads switch shifts for the evening, so I can slip in and out undetected.”
He shook his head again, but she could hear him chuckling. It felt unbelievably good to make him laugh, she discovered. Far better than she could have imagined.
“Ye are a tricksy wee sprite,” he told her. “How is it that ye haven’t been caught?”
“I have been nearly caught so very many times,” she admitted. “Vaila knows that I am up to something, she just hasnae yet caught me out. But och, there have been so many close calls.”
“People likely underestimate ye,” he observed. “Ye look like an angel, but there’s a minx underneath, is there no’?”
Eilidh hoped that the moonlight didn’t cast enough light to show how fiercely she blushed when he said that.
The smile on his face was lighthearted and easy, but she wouldn’t have said that he looked like an angel, not even with the lighter strands in his hair gleaming in the cool light.
No, he looked more like the way the classic painters depicted Lucifer—so beautiful that even the most virtuous would be tempted to follow him into damnation.
Not that Eilidh considered herself especially virtuous. She’d always been a minx, just as he’d said.
She forced herself to turn to another topic before she could spend too long staring at him.
“The trails here are good for riding,” she said, casting her gaze ahead of them. “But nothing rivals riding along the shore at Castle Dubh-Gheal in my opinion.”
“It’s been ages since I’ve been there,” he said. “But I do remember how it perches on the cliff.”
“Aye,” she agreed. She could almost see it in her mind’s eye now.
“There was this one point on the castle walls where you could stand and look out over the water—for miles and miles. For years, when I was a wee lass, I thought only my father and I knew about it, and whenever there was a storm gathering at night off the shore, we’d go up and watch it start to roll in.
Then, one night, the clouds were taking their dear time about coming close to shore, and my mother marched right up to our secret spot and lectured us for venturing from our beds at such hours.
” Eilidh laughed, the sound wistful. “As it happened, she’d always known about the spot.
She had just let my father and me enjoy it together. ”
“Ye miss them,” Ciaran said gently.
Eilidh waited until she could trust her voice before she spoke again.
“I do. But I also just miss my life the way it was before we came here. Not only my parents being alive and there not being a war—although those things too, of course. But I miss… knowing my path,” she finally said, realizing the rightness of that phrasing as she said it.
“My sisters, they all know where they are headed in their lives now. For goodness’ sake, Ailsa is a mother. ”
She shook her head in astonishment. The idea still seemed so bizarre that she could scarcely believe it.
“But me?” she went on. “I am still adrift. And it makes me miss home.”
“Ye do realize,” Ciaran said dryly, “that half the guards at Buchanan Keep would be honored to give ye a path right here, to offer ye a new life in this place.”
Privately, Eilidh smiled to herself that he had noticed. Surely he couldn’t have no interest in her if he had noticed that, could he? Aloud, she just scoffed.
“I’m a Northerner,” she said. “I am fond of Buchanan lands, sure enough, but I cannae imagine living out my days here.”
He hummed thoughtfully. “Aye, I agree with ye on that,” he said. “Though it has been some time since I have been back to my home. It’s beautiful there, though. No matter how long I am gone, I never forget how lovely it is.”
He sounded so wistful. The longing in his voice echoed the way she felt in her heart when she thought about her home. Maybe it was the similarity, or maybe it was the moonlight, but something made her bold.
“Perhaps one day… we could visit there together?” she ventured.
He didn’t immediately answer, though there was some quality in his silence that stopped Eilidh from feeling insecure about it.
When she looked over at him, she found him already gazing in her direction.
Their eyes locked, and in that moment she knew that at least part of that vision of their future that she’d imagined he could see it too.
Grian’s scream ripped Eilidh from her reverie; he reared, both furious and frightened, his hooves pawing the air. Ciaran cried out in alarm, but Eilidh had been riding Grian for years. She controlled her mount swiftly, her grip unerring on her reins, no matter how startled she might have been.
When Grian’s hooves were safely back on the ground, however, she saw that it wasn’t merely the horse’s sudden rearing that had caused Ciaran to react.
No, it was the men, armed to the teeth and grinning maliciously as they stepped out from the trees and surrounded Eilidh.
“Well, well, well,” one of them purred, tossing a knife from hand to hand in a foolish, flashy move that would have made him vulnerable to being disarmed if not for the fact that they were outnumbered ten to two—and that the two were unarmed.
Eilidh hadn’t taken a weapon with her, after all she hadn’t planned the ride. Ewan hadn’t ever given Ciaran weapons, not when he was a newcomer to the keep.
This was very, very bad.
“What a delightful morsel that has fallen right into our laps, lads,” he went on, grinning in a way that showed that one of his canine teeth had rotted.
“She’s prettier than anyone said; our master will be pleased.
At least with a face like that, it willnae be such a hardship to fill her up with his heirs.
And then, finally, the Donaghey Clan will be the Gordon Clan—as they ought always have been. ”
Eilidh swallowed hard against her rising gorge as the men, apparently finding this hilarious, all laughed uproariously at their leader.
She didn’t quite dare to take her eyes off the mercenaries, who were edging closer and closer to her mount, but she tried to glimpse Ciaran in the corner of her vision. He was sitting very still on his horse, something strange and uncertain in his expression.
No sooner had Eilidh started to wonder about that look in his eye, though, than he sprang into action.
No, she thought feverishly as she spun Grian, urging him to kick out at one of the men who tried to approach.
“Sprang” wasn’t even a good enough word for it.
He was like a hurricane, with all the swift ferocity of one of those offshore storms she and her father had watched together in years gone by.
He produced a knife, seemingly from nowhere, and before she could do much more than blink, he’d driven the blade through the throat of one of their attackers and stolen his sword, which he used to run through a second man.
Grian lunged again, snapping his teeth furiously at another man, and Eilidh turned with her mount’s movement, trusting the horse to execute his training.
By the time she got Ciaran back in her line of sight, he had felled two more men.
Each of his strikes was like poetry; with each flash of a blade that wasn’t even his, men dropped before they could blink.
This was why he was a legend, Eilidh realized with a breathless sort of awe. This was why everyone’s eyes had gone wide with wonder when they’d learned that Ciaran Gunn was among them.
The remaining mercenaries gathered themselves, clearly recovering from the surprise of Ciaran’s attack.
Steel clashed against steel, and perhaps Ciaran might still have been overcome, but he dodged a blow in such a way that one of the mercenaries struck at his companion, then sidestepped to deliver another deadly slash.
Six of them were dead, Eilidh counted frantically. Grian had left one more clutching his broken ribs and gasping for air; he wouldn’t last long. The tide was turning.
She had no doubt that Ciaran would have finished them all without so much as a scratch if not for the hiss that streaked through the air, followed by a sickening, wet thump as the arrow buried itself in his shoulder.
“Ciaran!”
His name was torn from her lips in a scream as she watched him fall to his knees, then catch himself with his sword hand before he collapsed all the way to the ground.
She had dismounted in an instant, moving before she could consider the lack of wisdom in such a thing, and by the time she reached his side, Ciaran had regained his feet.
He scanned the shadows for signs that another attack was coming, but the three mercenaries that yet lived—the archer, the leader, and one other—had wisely taken the opportunity to flee.
“We should follow them,” he said through gritted teeth, taking a stumbling step forward as if he intended to plunge directly into the thicket, even with the long shaft of the arrow still protruding from his shoulder. “They will report to Gordon. They need to be stopped—“
Eilidh caught his uninjured arm, but even that made his words stop around a hiss of pain.
“Stop,” she said. “You are hurt, and there’s nothing they can tell Gordon that he doesn't already know.”
Ciaran looked as though he wanted to argue with this, so she pressed ahead.
“We need to go back,” she insisted. “Ye are injured.”
Her heart was racing in her chest, and she could feel tears beginning to drip from her eyes.
She had been scared aplenty in her life; this past year of war had brought naught but terror after terror.
But she didn’t think she’d ever been quite as frightened as she’d been when she’d seen the arrow pierce his skin.
But she could not yet fall apart. He was not yet safe. They were not yet safe.
Ciaran frowned at her tears and put down the sword so that he could wipe her cheeks with the backs of his fingers. His hands were spattered with the blood of the men he’d killed, but she was glad that he didn’t stay his touch.
She needed to feel the warmth of his skin on hers, no matter how briefly, to remind herself that he was still alive. That arrow had not taken him from her.
“Dinnae waste your tears on me, lass,” he told her. “All that matters is—” A hitched breath of pain—“that ye are safe.”
His gaze was so earnest on hers as he said this, his eyes burning bright in the darkness. Eilidh felt her heart shatter, and from the pieces, she scooped up all the courage she possessed.
She seized his face in both her hands and kissed him.
If their first kiss had been frantic and unexpected, this one was even more so.
The embrace in the armory had been heated and full of trembling desire; this kiss held that as well as the fear that she’d felt watching him in the deadly dance of blades and the knowledge, deep in her center, that she would never be the same if she lost him.
They were at war, and there were no guarantees that any of them would live through the mess to come, so she poured everything into the kiss. All her terror and joy and relief and dread and, yes, love—the love she knew she would begin to feel for him if she let herself.
The love that, perhaps, had started to take root the very first moment she’d seen him.
The coppery tang of blood reminded her that they could not linger here, in this copse of corpses. She released him and he stumbled back, knocked off balance both by the kiss and by the blood that continued to drip down his arm.
“Eilidh,” he said, the word full of wonder and warning.
But Eilidh had made up her mind. She was not going to lose him—not to death and not because he pushed her away. She was going to keep him, and, for now, that meant keeping him alive.
“Later,” she told him firmly. “For now, let’s get home.”