Chapter 15
“Applecross, Dingwall, Suddy, Cromarty, Plockton, Garve, Kyle, Avoch, Knockbain, and Wester,” Glenna recited.
Places to avoid. She led Skye not in the southern direction she believed Montrose had been taking her, but due east from Beauly, where at first she had gone through the woods in a southerly direction, then guided Skye along a stream and doubled back, twice and in two different directions, covering her tracks, and leaving false ones.
He would never know she was headed for Inverness.
For half the day she had crossed through the long, wooded grounds of the Great Glen, riding through streams of water and away from, or skirting around, villages and hamlets she and her brothers had plundered.
Her brothers’ sweet faces came flooding into her mind and she wondered what they were doing this day, and did they miss her as sorely as she missed them, as if she had left part of herself with them, an arm, a leg, a piece of her heart.
She lost herself in thought for a few memories, ones that stole some of the life from her.
The silence stretched onward, until she heard nothing but the crush of Skye’s hooves on the leaves and pine needles beneath her, and then her heart beating loudly in her ears.
The realization hit her that she was more alone than she was comfortable.
On the island, the quiet had always felt peaceful, soft, and not empty like it did now.
She had sought out time by herself. She was quickly becoming a stranger, she thought, and rode onward.
At the place where the stream turned to falls, tumbling down to a river below, she stopped to refill her flask and remounted.
As she moved on, the song of a lark made her look up through the trees, but it stopped singing when a devilish black rook shrieked loudly and flapped its wings, diving like a spear and scaring the lilt and bird music before it flew away.
Overhead, a patch of blue sky stared back at her as if it had eyes.
The clear blue of his eyes.
A hare suddenly scampered out from beneath a fern and her heart caught in her throat.
Overhead a hawk circled, only to light in the high branches of one of the tallest trees and she could hear the sound of an animal thrashing through the brush, eerie and strange and a little frightening.
It was as if there was no other living human soul in the world. Urging Skye forward, she held her breath, and then finally exhaled as she rode out from under a dark stand of larch and pine and reined in, sagging slightly in the saddle, her heartbeat slowing and her hands relaxed.
Before her spread a vast and open river plain and the air was dry and warm as a fur-lined cloak, and tasted of summer, unlike the fecund and verdant dampness of the woods—a metal taste reminiscent of blood on the tongue.
The high sun had cooked away the last of the night’s dew on the grass, and to her left, a marten scurried through a crackling nest of needles and larch leaves to disappear into a hole.
Skye shied slightly and she controlled her with slight pressure from her knees, which were fairly numb from her dog’s weight.
Fergus lay limply in front of her, slung like a grain sack across the saddle, unmoving.
But once she shifted, one of his eyes popped open and he was staring dully up at her.
“You are awake. Poor dog.” She stroked his neck, feeling like the worse kind of monster.
“Beer is not for hounds, you foolish thing.” A couple of breaths and his sad eyes drifted closed again.
“And spiked beer is for big, brawny barons who….” Her words trailed off.
She couldn’t muster up anything horrible enough to squelch her feelings of guilt.
Had he awakened by now and discovered her deceit? He would be angry enough to spit daggers, that she knew. His expression of anger was burned into her memory, so different from how he looked at her the day before.
The image of him in the stable at Beauly came flooding into her mind, Montrose laughing, his eyes the exact color of a perfect sky, crinkled at the corners and changing his whole face and demeanor, the flash of white, even teeth, his ample height and impressive breadth, looking ludicrous in the way his clothes and face were dripping water as he stood threatening to soak her to the bone.
Her mind’s eye switched to the tender, odd look in his eyes when she was singing—a look she had never seen on a man—and then the stiff tension in his muscles and the sense of panic emanating from him as he ran down the narrow abbey hallways with her shaking in his arms…
the warmth of his body when she was ill, both there and on the ship’s crossing… his mouth on hers.
Such thoughts. She was twisted up inside them, these games inside her head, trapped, and tangled in even sillier dreams she dared not allow herself to think about. Montrose, Al and El, her father dying…her father lying…not her father after all. Her father, the king.
Oh, God…would the king ever let her be? If she could stay hidden for a long time would he forget about her? Would she ever be free?
Men, she thought with disgust. May St. Columba take them all! If she were violent, she would want to hit something. “Yesterday does not matter,” she said aloud stubbornly, as if by doing so she could believe it as truth.
The past was merely that: past.
She used her hand to shade her eyes against the startling bright sun, as her squinted gaze followed the bare leg of road cutting through viridian grass and a lazy scattering of chalky rock; it led through the last span of land between her and the port burgh of Inverness, which was large enough to keep her safe, with cross streets and its trade market.
Cast in the blue haze of distance and perched on a distant crag was the castle; she could make out the notched teeth of its crenelled walls.
Below it, a wide silver ribbon of water, the River Ness, which curled off into Moray Firth and was trimmed in lines of the town’s staggered buildings a good league away.
From here, they looked like nothing more than a game board of merels.
A startling shout, the snap of a whip and a curse to the “slowest beasts this side of Cromarty” pierced her lonely silence, and soon the slow, creaking sound of a wain came from a nearby bend in the road.
Oxen, huge and horned and knotted, pulled a lumbering wagon which slowed as it grew closer.
Stacked up the sides of the cart bed, burgeoning bundles of plump corn threatened to burst from their tethers.
“Good day to you, lad!” The driver wrapped the thick leather reins securely around his fist and pushed back his hood of brown wool worn above a saffron tunic of trade's linen.
His face was kindly, eyes bright and cheeks red as island deer, but the right side of his face was misshapen and twice the size of his other.
He rested his reins on his knees and uncovered his head to reveal hair the color of iron, blackish flecked with gray. The oxen must have stopped, although considering how slow they had been moving, Glenna wasn’t certain. “Good day,” she said.
“What have you there?” The man sounded as if he had a mouthful of stones and she stared without thought at his swollen face. He was looking at Fergus--a large furry lump in front of her.
“My hound.”
“Is it dead?”
“Nay. Dead drunk,” she fabricated, figuring it was a half-truth. “He lapped up more ale than a brewer earlier.”
The man gave a bark of laughter then grabbed his cheek and groaned.
“This blasted tooth! “ He pulled a small pot from his cloak, dipped in his fingers and rubbed them on the back of his mouth.
“Wintergreen oil,” he explained and tucked the pot away.
“Barely a league of road left ahead of me and I can seek out the clever hands of the town barber. Won’t be too soon enough, I say.
With this fat load I should be wanting to head straight to the mill, but—“ He put his hand on his fat cheek. “I will stay in town for I cannot take another eternal night of this. You’re headed for town, laddie?”
“Aye.”
“I’d welcome the company. Will take me mind off the Devil’s own throbbing pain.” He cast a quick nod toward the wagon and winced slightly. “The hound can rest in the back of the wain.”
She looked down at Fergus, knowing he would be most comfortable in the wagon, sleeping off his stupor on a bed of corn husks rather than ribs rattling as she and Skye rode on.
” And his weight was causing her limbs to go uncomfortably senseless.
She eyed the man’s wain and its precarious load and wondered where Fergus could sleep safely and not fall off.
“Do not fash yourself. We’ve plenty of room for him. See? There is dip in the midsection.” He stood. “Come. Hand him up to me, laddie, and rest your animals for a while.”
So with Skye tied to the back of the wain and Fergus asleep in the middle of the load, Glenna took to posing as the lad Gordon of Suddy, the best she could invent in the spur of the moment, and she rode companionably into the town of Inverness on a sunny afternoon settled on a wain bench next to the loquacious Heckie of Drumashie.
He told her tales of his past and his family, his wife who was the daughter of a sea merchant and, he, with hectares of fertile land given him as reward for saving the son of his overlord, a story he chewed her ears over with flourish and as much drama as an Angevin bard.
Heckie of Drumashie was a man of many words and even more gestures.
Soon black-faced sheep could be seen grazing contentedly on the low rises, and dairy cattle munched on fathoms of clover speckled with yellow flowers.
Scattered along the outskirts of town were perimeters of low stone fences and crofts covered in thick thatch, built of solid wattle and daub that sparkled in the sunlight with newly lime-washed walls, surrounded by freshly mown fields, one with a lumbering spotted sow and gaggles of children laughing, chasing.