Chapter 29 #2
“We should head back, me lady,” Ewan said from behind her. “Before the jarl notices ye’re gone.”
“Aye. Just a moment.”
Isolda watched the last of the crates being moved down the gangplank. Two deckhands hauled a heavy box between them, their movements practiced but their eyes too alert, too aware of the guards’ positions, scanning the dock the way men scan terrain before a fight.
The captain’s hand dropped to his side. A small gesture—fingers closing into a fist, then opening.
Then, the deckhands moved, but not toward the crates. The first blade appeared from beneath a coat. Then another. Then four more, and suddenly the dock erupted into violence so fast that Isolda’s mind couldn’t process it as a single event—only fragments.
Leif’s ledger hitting the ground. A spray of blood, dark against the grey stone of the pier. Ewan drawing his sword and the wet, heavy sound of steel meeting flesh before he’d finished the motion. Torben shouting something she couldn’t hear over the ringing in her ears.
Run!
She spun toward the road, toward the castle, toward Ragnar—but hands seized her from behind. Arms like iron bands locked around her waist, wrenching her backward off her feet.
They were waitin’ fer me.
“Get her on the ship!” someone barked. “Now!”
The sound that tore from her throat was raw and as they dragged her backward toward the gangplank.
The dock had erupted into chaos. Two of Ragnar’s guards lay dead on the ground. Leif was fighting with blood streaming from a gash above his eye, his sword carving through one attacker before another drove him sideways.
“RAGNAR!” His name ripped out of her like a prayer she already knew wouldn’t be answered.
Rough hands shoved her over the rail. She hit the deck hard, her abdomen striking wood, the impact driving the breath from her lungs. Before she could rise, rope bit into her wrists.
The gangplank was already being hauled in, the ropes slithering free of the dock with a sound like snakes through grass.
The sails unfurled, catching a breeze that seemed to have been waiting for exactly that moment.
Through the chaos, she caught one last glimpse of the harbor—Leif on his knees, bleeding but alive, shouting orders to a man already sprinting toward the castle road.
The ship lurched beneath her as it caught the tide, pulling away from Uist with the terrible, unstoppable certainty of something that had been planned down to the last detail.
The island grew smaller. The castle on the headland—their castle, their bed, their library full of books and broken quills and the ghost of a kiss that still burned on her lips—shrank to a dark shape against the grey sky.
He’ll come fer me.
The captain stood at the helm, his face the color of ash, his hands steady on the tiller despite the tremor running through the rest of him.
He wouldn’t meet her eyes.
He kens this’ll cost him everythin’. He kens what Ragnar will dae tae him—tae all of them.
The wind shifted, carrying them south through waters Ragnar didn’t control, toward a man who had spent six patient weeks orchestrating this moment.
And somewhere behind her, growing fainter with every heartbeat, the alarm bells of Uist Castle finally began to ring.
“Well, we cannae just—”
The sound cut through the solar’s thick walls—the frantic, overlapping clang of the alarm bell from the harbor, and right after, the horns blowing.
His chair hit the stone floor behind him.
“Freyr!” He was already moving, every nerve firing, his body responding to the crisis. “Where is she?”
Freyr was a step behind him in the corridor. “I’ll check the chamber..”
Something was wrong.
She’s gone.
He knew it before Freyr came tearing down the corridor from the eastern wing. Knew it the way a man knows the ground is about to give way beneath him—from the sudden, terrible absence of something that had been holding him upright.
“She’s nae in the keep.” Freyr’s face was white. “Ewan says she left fer the harbor a little over a half hour ago. Wi’ the document they’d forgotten.”
Ragnar didn’t wait for a horse. Didn’t wait for his men.
He ran down the path from the castle to the harbor with a speed born of pure, uncut terror, and when he crested the rise above the docks and saw the ship—already past the headland, her sails fat with wind, pulling south through the strait toward open water—he stopped dead.
He stood on the ridge with his chest heaving, his hands hanging useless at his sides, and watched the vessel carrying his wife shrink against the grey line of the horizon.
Around him, the dock was smeared with blood.
Leif sat propped against a mooring post, a rag pressed to his head, barking at the men who surrounded him. Two bodies lay covered with cloaks.
Freyr reached him a moment later, breathing hard. Neither of them spokes as the ship disappeared behind the headland.
I failed ye, Isolda.
His hands curled into fists at his sides. His breathing steadied and his face settled into the flat, controlled mask that Freyr hadn’t seen since the night Ragnar had walked out of that storehouse with bloody knuckles and a confession.
“Orders?” Freyr asked.
“Get Bjorn. Tell him tae prepare the war room.” The words emerged quiet, measured, and cold as ice. “I want every patrol route, every shippin’ lane, every approach tae the mainland laid out before the hour’s out.”
“Aye, me jarl.”
Ragnar stood at the docks a moment longer, staring out at the empty water. The wind off the strait carried brine and the distant call of gulls, and nothing else—no voice, no sharp tongue, no grey-green eyes looking at him like he was worthy.
I’m comin’ fer ye. And every man who touched ye will wish they’d never been born.
He turned his back on the sea and walked back to the castle.
A message arrived at dusk, carried by a fisherman who’d clearly been paid well enough to risk the crossing, but not enough to hide his terror. The parchment bore no seal, but the handwriting was precise, unhurried.
Jarl Ketilsson,
Yer wife is alive and will remain so, provided ye comply with me terms.
Ye will surrender the territory south of the Uist straight tae me authority. Ye will publicly denounce the Laird’s Pact.
Ye have five days.
Refuse, and I will demonstrate tae the King, and the whole of Scotland exactly what becomes when our women are given tae Viking Jarls who cannot protect them.
Ye ken where tae find me.
Douglas Graham
Ragnar read it twice before setting it on the desk, the fury threatening to consume him. But he forced it down and reached for a fresh sheet of parchment. He tore it into four strips, and wrote four messages—short, identical and stripped of everything except what mattered.
Douglas has taken Isolda. Bring yer axes. Come now.
R.
He rolled them up, dripped hot wax onto the join, and pressed his signet into each one.
He would not negotiate. He would not kneel.
Douglas Graham wanted the Stag brought down by love.
Wanted proof that attachment was weakness, that a man who let a woman past his defences deserved what followed.
And Ragnar intended to show him exactly what happened when you took something from a man who had already lost everything once and survived it.
Ye wanted me attention, Graham. Now ye have it.
Beyond the walls, riders galloped into the night carrying sealed parchment toward Skye, Barra, Mull and Lewis.
One thing Ragnar knew for certain—Douglas Graham would soon discover the difference between catching a stag and killing one.