Chapter 24
Chapter
Twenty-Four
F our days they'd been on the move, at a pace that spared neither horse nor rider. They kept to the forest and thick stands of pine, and elm even as they lost their leaves scattered on a cold and brutal wind. And all along they watched for Blackwood and some sign they he and his men had passed this way.
A faint hope burned like the last ember of a fire that he had perhaps thought better of riding so far into Fraser land, or had turned back to rejoin Marshal and then return to London.
It was there as they passed farm after farm, a remote bothy, and herds of sheep and cattle once returned to Fraser lands. It was there as they finally approached the edge of the village of Lechlede, cottages, the ale house, and the smithy all intact, but with a strangeness in the air that hung over the all, a young woman darting out to grab a child who had wandered off, with a fearful expression until she recognized one of his men, fear giving way to another expression he could not name.
Happiness that her kinsmen had returned, and soon her man? That was not the emotion he glimpsed as they rode past. He saw wariness, fear.
Then they saw the gates at the entrance to the high wall at Lechlede as they fanned out and slowly rode toward Fraser keep. And hope died.
Massive timbers were charred and sagged at the gate, some still smoldering. The door at the gate house was gone, the stones at the opening scarred. Smoke hung over all under a thick blanket of clouds in the cold afternoon. A large cart with oak barrels had been pulled across the opening just inside the yard. No wild baying of the hounds announced their arrival, as a solitary figure appeared at the top of the wall.
All drew their weapons as they rode closer, Ruari spurring the stallion ahead, fear unlike anything he had ever know like a fist at the gut as he thought of those within--Brynna, the children, Gabhran and their kinsmen... Alix!
He reined in the stallion and approached the blocked opening, shouting up at that solitary figure a dozen questions racing through his thoughts.
Where was Gabhran? Who was the man at the wall? What had happened here? The village was unscathed, but not the keep. He gave orders to his kinsmen, spread out in an arc, with others turned toward the village and beyond where they could watch for any who approached as he and DeBrus slowly rode through the charged opening.
What would they find?
The answer lay inside the walls as the cart was slowly rolled back and they entered the great yard of Lechlede--burned out cottages, the long house that had once served as armory, reduced to charred ruins, the stark expressions of those within mostly from the village--McGinley, the smithy, and his son Eben, and the gaping entrance to the main hall even as an icy rain began to fall.
A slender figure appeared at the entrance of the main all, dark brown hair worn in a single braid at her shoulder, her gown stained, with a sword clasped in both hands, and a nine-year old lad with the expression of a warrior, determined to protect her--Brynna Fraser and beside her, James' oldest son.
She ran down the stone steps, taking the sword with her. Tears spilled her cheeks.
"Ruari!" She hugged him fiercely. "Praise God!"
He gently set her from him. She looked past him to the men who had ridden with Them.
"James?" she asked, the unspoken there at her voice and in her eyes.
"Soon here, with the rest of our kinsmen."
"He is not injured?"
He heard the fear in her voice. "He is well."
"Why is he not with you?"
He glanced around the yard. Already his men searched the buildings, cottages, and the ruins of the long house, then set about securing the entrance. An argument had broken out, Eben McGinley challenging one of his men.
"Where were ye when the English came?" Eben demanded, getting in the face of a kinsman. Ruari was already across the yard and waved his man off. Eben turned on him.
"Where were ye?" He came at him. "Three score they were, and see what they've done!"
The lad was furious and reckless to the point of losing all reason.
"Ye should have been here to protect her!"
Ruari grabbed him by the front of his tunic, fear like a stone in his gut.
"What are you saying?"
"I'm saying that ye should have been here... ! Ye should have protected her... "
A slender hand at his other arm belayed the blow when he would have struck the boy.
"Do not," Brynna implored him. "All have suffered enough."
"What did he mean?" he demanded, fearing the words he would hear.
"There is much ye must know."
His men had secured the hall. The front entrance had been repaired as well as it could be until more permanent repairs were made, while those who had lived through the attack went about the sad work of tending their dead. DeBrus and the handful of his men who had ridden with them worked to secure the keep in spite of the icy rain.
Inside the great hall the devastation was as great as beyond the walls.
"They were upon us before we knew it," Brynna explained. "Our kinsmen did what they could to protect us... " she spoke haltingly, in that way of someone who has lived with the horror of death and wants only to forget it, but forced herself to tell of it.
Ruari held her hand as they sat across from one another. "You and the bairns?"
"All safe, as well as the other women and children... " she hesitated then, sensing the question that mattered most.
"She is alive," she told him.
But how to tell him the whole of it, Brynna thought, with those twin emotions she'd lived with the past days--guilt and a pain so deep for one she cared for as one of her own.
Ruari rose from the chair before the hearth, half expecting one of the hounds underfoot as they always were, but they were gone with only a young pup that had survived the attack, sitting at the entrance as though expecting the others to appear.
"Where is she?"
"No," Brynna replied, then too rose, softening her words. "Not now... ! She is tending the wounded... "
"Gabhran?"
She nodded. "He was badly wounded... It is not known if he will live, and there are others... " Including Alix, her thoughts filled with the memory of those first hours after the silence had settled over the great hall, and the English were gone.
Rather than fleeing deeper into the woods with weather fast upon them, she had made the decision to return to Fraser hall. What they found when they returned had broken some of the women, including Morna. Others remained strong for their bairns as she tried to shield her children from the horror they had found. But Connor, so much like his father, had gone with her from chamber to chamber, fallen kinsman to the next man, as his father would have.
" They are Fraser ," he had said, fighting back his own emotions as he recognized those who had fallen. And then his expression was fierce.
" I am Fraser. I am not afraid ."
But in the long hours of the night since, she knew he was troubled by dreams from what he had seen those first days. She had tried to comfort him as best she could. The child he had been was gone, replaced by a solemn young boy with serious eyes that had seen too much for one so young. He took on the protection of his brother and sister, the new bairn, and the other children. A slender metal blade had replaced the wood one. And her heart broke at the innocence lost.
There was more. Ruari sensed, in the way she folded her hands before her to stop them shaking--something she struggled with.
"Oh, Ruari. We are only safe because of what she did... "
That foreboding that he'd carried from Stirling since learning Blackwood had left the English encampment, was tight at his throat.
"Tell me."
Tears filled her eyes. Even though she knew that she must be the one to tell him, the words were painful as if torn from somewhere deep inside.
"Tell me!" he insisted.
She did tell him then, in painful words amidst tears--of their escape through the passage under the orchard, that Alix had gone back for the old woman and found her dead.
"There were too many of them... she wasn't able to escape. Young Dougal tried to protect her... They killed him." Brynna wiped the tears from her cheeks with the edge of her gown, the same gown she had worn that day.
There had been no opportunity to wash it or search for another, there were too many to bury, too many children who had lost their fathers, and too many women, both young and old who looked to her for strength and comfort.
She still had not told him all of it. There was more.
"Tell me... " he said, hands braced at the edge of the long table.
"I know of the vows ye spoke with one another... Oh, Ruari, he hurt her, the one called Blackwood. Then left her, bruised and bleeding. The only thing she said in the past days--that he was sending James Fraser a message. " She wiped the tears as if she could wipe the memory away, but could not. The guilt was too strong.
"He thought she was Lady Fraser , and she wouldna say different, to protect the rest of us." Her voice broke then.
The words cut deep, in the way no blade ever had, not even when Blackwood had taken his arm. It was a wounding of the heart and soul for another, for someone who meant more to him than his own life.
He swore, a painful wounded sound as he swept a clay bowl from the table. It shattered at the stone floor, his fisted hand shaking with helpless rage.
Brynna went to him as she would comfort one of her boys, this man as dear to her as a brother. His pain was her pain.
"Oh, Ruari, it was supposed to be me! Do ye ken? He told her that he would have all of Fraser lands. It was meant to be a message for James. What does it mean?"
He knew, but would not burden her with it now. There would be a time for that later, when James returned.
They held each other, in shared pain and grief. He thought of James and things past that these two people who were his family had endured, what Brynna Fraser had endured before she was wed to James.
And now? The guilt that it should have been her?
"It should never have been either one," he told her.
And as he spoke the words, pain deep inside, he silently vowed that Blackwood was already a dead man.
"I would see her."
Brynna looked up at him. "What has happened is a terrible thing, there are some who never... "
They both new of women among their clan who had suffered such a thing and were never the same afterward, a dreadful thing to bear, like a wounding so deep that never healed.
She had suffered at the hands of a brutal man, her first husband Hugh Fraser for whom such brutality was a common enough thing. It mattered not that it was within the bounds of marriage.
"I must speak with her," Ruari said.
"She is tending the wounded. She has been there these past days, taking little food and no sleep. Ruari?" She laid a hand at his arm as he turned to leave, the struggle over his own emotions at his face.
"Dinna let her see the anger. There will be time for that later." For she knew him well, and there was no way to stop what was to come.
"Tis yer true heart she needs now. I know well enough."
The roof of the long house, where the weapons were stored, had been set afire in the attack, but the building had survived unlike smaller cottages and the horse barn. The roof had been patched over and the wounded taken there after the attack.
A dozen or more kinsmen, including Gabhran, lay on thick pallets against the long wall. Shutters held back the weather that had set in and a brazier burned in one corner, a stack of half burnt timbers stacked along side. Through the shadows from candles that had been set in bronze bowls, a handful of women moved among the wounded warriors, taking them water, tending a wound, with muffled conversations with a gentle word, or no conversation at all among those who slept or were more seriously wounded.
Gabhran lay nearest the entrance, a long sword beside his pallet, as his chest rose and fell in rapid, shallow breaths, and the sight of the old warrior, near death yet still guarding those within was an image he would carry with him until his own life was gone.
He looked for Alix among the women, then saw her bending over a young boy who had been injured. She placed a cloth at his forehead, then in that way of hers that he'd come to know so well as she tended his own wounds those months past, her slender fingers stroked the boy's cheek.
"Ye will live, Michael. Do ye hear me?" she told the skinny lad of twelve who had been cut down by the English when he stubbornly stood at the gate and defiantly ordered them to halt.
"There is much for ye to do, a life to live, aye?"
She slipped an arm beneath his shoulders so that she might get him to take some of the herbal remedy against the fever that ravaged his body. Another stronger than hers, lifted the boy's shoulders. She looked up, her gaze meeting intense blue.
There were bruises, outward marks left by Blackwood's brutality, at her neck, collarbone, and vivid across her cheek. Emotions Ruari had never experienced engulfed him. He had faced Blackwood's brutality and knew it well. That she had suffered at the bastard's hands tore at him.
She had heard the horses, the shouts from the top of the wall, then glimpsed the riders as they entered the yard.
Now, without a word between them, she tipped the flagon so that some of the herbal tea slipped past the boy's lips. Without waking, lost somewhere in pain, he would have choked. She stroked his throat, and he unconsciously took the tea and the silent prayer that he would live past morn.
That dark blue gaze that he knew so well--from laughter across a chess board, from some prank she played on him as a child, from the fever that had ravaged his body after Calais, the same eyes that had looked back at him as they came together that last night in the old place and pledged themselves to each other--angled away from his.
"Alix... "
He saw the pain at her eyes, and in the way she pulled back, gathering the things that were so much a part of her--a copper basin, a clay jar of her healing powders, linen for bandages--and held them against her like a protective shield.
She was so beautiful, in spite of the bruises, in spite of what he now knew, in spite of the sadness at her eyes.
He should have been there. As long as he lived, he would live with that pain and regret, that he should have been there to protect her.
She rose, holding the basin and jar so tight she might have broken the jar as she fled the long house.
Alix let the tunic fall to her feet as steam rose at the large stone basin in the room next to the kitchen, then reached for the ties of her gown, her hands shaking.
She had bathed, after... frantically washing in the cold water of the horse trough at what was left of the stables, scrubbing away all traces of Blackwood.
But he was still there, in the purple and blue marks at her shoulder as the gown joined her tunic at the stone floor, and at her breasts and thighs. Like brands burned into her skin. His marks that no amount of soapwort or herbal salves could wash away, or heal.
The tears came then.
She had brushed them away when Lady Brynna found her, refusing to give in to the horror and pain, refused still as she did what Maisel had taught her in tending their wounded, refused again as she had dressed the old woman in a clean gown, then walked with the others as they carried her to the funeral pyre where so many had been taken.
Now she wept, her heart breaking for what was lost.
"Ruari."