Chapter Twenty-Six #2
The doors burst open before she reached them, and a boy of perhaps ten or so came running into the hall, breathing hard.
“Boats coming!” he gasped. “Men coming ashore below the cliff.”
The news moved through the crowded hall in a wave, voices rising on every side as people turned toward one another, and Anna felt the blood drain from her face.
“How many?” Mairead asked.
“Dinna ken. Four boats, mayhap. The laird’s gone to the sea wall.”
Anna's stomach tightened at the mention of Bram, but Mairead merely nodded, accepting this latest threat with the same remarkable steadiness with which she had met every other crisis that morning.
“Then he kens of it. Get back to Harsain and ask what he needs from us.”
The boy hurried away, and Anna stared after him, struck by Mairead’s absolute confidence.
Then he knows of it. To his mother, Bram’s awareness was its own defense.
Anna saw that same faith reflected in the faces around her.
They hadn’t just run to a fortress; they had run to their laird.
They believed in Bram, that Bram was on the wall, and that Bram would see them through it.
Anna wished desperately that she possessed the same certainty.
“He’ll be all right,” Etta said beside her.
“Yes,” Anna said softly, swallowing thickly.
Anna went back to work. There was nothing she could do for Bram from inside the hall and nothing she could do for him upon the walls, and so she did the only useful thing left to her, helping the men who were brought through those doors and trying not to imagine the one face she feared seeing among them.
The change came gradually enough that Anna did not recognize it at first. The great eruptions of shouting beyond the walls grew less frequent, the terrible blows against the gate ceased altogether, and the intervals between wounded men being carried into the hall lengthened until nearly a quarter hour had passed without the doors opening at all.
Around her, others had begun to notice as well, conversations lifting cautiously from frightened whispers while Mairead repeatedly cautioned everyone to remain where they were until they knew what was happening.
The doors finally opened, admitting the same young messenger who had brought word of the boats earlier. This time he was flushed and breathless but grinning.
“They’re away,” he announced. “Raghnall’s men have broken and are retreating.”
Relief swept through the hall in a great collective exhalation, followed almost immediately by excited voices and questions from every direction. Etta caught Anna’s hand and squeezed it.
“Where’s Bram?” Anna asked the boy.
“Gone after them. The laird took mounted men through the gates nae five minutes ago.”
Anna stared at him, aghast. She had spent hours bracing for the worst, and the moment she had finally let herself unclench, he had decided to abandon the safety of the wall and had ridden out away from it.
Her feet moved before she had consciously decided to go.
“Anastasia!” Mairead called when Anna pushed through the crowd toward the doors. “Stay within until we ken ’tis safe!”
Anna ignored her.
She ran into the bailey and across it toward the wall, scarcely noticing the exhausted men and discarded weapons around her.
Someone else called after her as she climbed the steps, but she kept going until she reached the parapet and looked beyond it, searching first toward the village and then the road beyond.
Bram was nowhere to be seen.
The ground beneath the walls was strewn with the wreckage of the assault—shields split or simply dropped, arrows so thick in places they bristled from the earth like dark grass, a ladder snapped at its middle with dead men still tangled in its rungs.
Bodies lay where they had fallen, some close enough to the wall that they might have touched it, others presumably had dragged themselves back almost to the cottages before they’d stopped moving.
Anna knew Bram could not be among them, knew he had ridden after Raghnall Hay, yet still her gaze moved helplessly from one motionless figure to the next.
She hurried to the seaward wall next, passing Harsain who frowned and stuttered at her presence, needing only to assure herself that the attack there had ended as well.
The boats were gone, leaving the narrow beach below strewn with more bodies, several lying among the rocks while others had been caught by the tide.
One rolled sluggishly in the shallows as the water drew back and then came forward again.
Anna recoiled from the sight—and then went very still as a strange sensation brushed across her skin.
For several seconds she remained perfectly still, uncertain what had caught her attention. The morning was cool, the sea breeze damp against her face, and nothing she could see had changed. Yet something had.
The air felt different.
Her fingers tightened slowly upon the stone.
“No.”
She knew that feeling. The recognition was not rational and did not require thought.
Her body remembered before her mind could begin arguing against it: the peculiar pressure in the air, the sensation of something gathering around her that did not belong to wind or weather, the same feeling she had carried out of York like a splinter still working its way deeper — the moment before the world she knew disappeared.
Anna pushed away from the parapet so abruptly that she nearly collided with a man passing behind her.
“No, no, no.”
***
Bram drove his horse through the gates with three dozen men at his back, the thunder of hooves drowning the last shouts from the walls.
Ahead, Raghnall's retreating force had dissolved into a ragged column of men mostly on foot, their horses spent or abandoned, their armor heavy after the failed assault.
Bram could see the gray horse now, could see the banner that still followed it, and something hot and vicious uncoiled in his chest. Months in an English prison.
The men dead at Berwick. The betrayal that had made it all possible.
He was close enough to smell them-sweat and fear and the particular stink of men who had fought and lost. Close enough to see individual faces turning, to watch the panic spread as the pursuit they may not have expected came nipping at their heels.
“Laird!” Domnall's voice, somewhere behind him. “Bram!”
He didn’t answer, there were no orders to give. They knew what he was after. No words were needed until Raghnall was dead at his feet, when the man who had sold Scottish warriors to English torture had paid for every life lost to that bargain.
The gray horse stumbled on the uneven ground, and Bram saw his opening.
A quarter mile, perhaps less. The wind pressed harder against his face, and his destrier tossed his head and snorted.
He hauled on the reins, cursing, and felt it then-not just wind, not just weather, but something that made the hair rise on his arms and the back of his neck.
The same wrongness he had felt in York, when Anastasia had appeared before him for the first time.
The same pressure in the air, the sense of something gathering that did not belong to the world he knew, just as when he told he’d to go, that she didn’t belong here.
Bram felt a pressure behind his eyes, subtle as the ache before a storm, but wrong somehow-wrong in a way that made his horse shy again, nearly unseating him.
He tightened his grip on the reins and pressed his knees harder against the animal's ribs, urging it faster along the rutted track that passed for a road.
Bram pulled the horse up so sharply that it half-reared, dancing sideways on the track. Behind him, he heard Domnall and the others drawing up, heard the confusion in their voices, but he could not look at them. He was staring east, toward Craig na Coille, toward the sea.
Anastasia.
She was leaving.
Not by choice, perhaps, mayhap not willingly. But the thing that had brought her to him had come to take her away, and if he was not there—
If he was not there, she would simply be gone. As suddenly as she had appeared, as completely, and he would spend the rest of his life wondering if she reached for him in those final moments, if she called his name, wanting to remain after all.
Raghnall was two hundred yards ahead, close enough that Bram could see the hunch of his shoulders, the desperate way he rode his horse.
“Laird?” Domnall again, closer now. “What is it? Why do we stop?”
Bram looked from the fleeing traitor to the eastern sky, where the clouds gathered in a pattern that made no sense, where the wind blew from too many directions at once.
He thought of Anastasia standing in his hall, her chin lifted in defiance, her eyes bright with tears she would not shed.
He thought of her in his bed, warm and real and his.
He thought of her vanishing like morning mist, and the world narrowing to the space she had occupied, empty and absolute.
“Bram—”
“Pursue him if ye will—Hay and nae other,” he said, letting the choice be theirs.
He wheeled the horse. The animal fought him for a moment, still unsettled by the wrongness in the air, but Bram remained determined, pointing it back toward Craig na Coille. Toward the keep. Toward her.
“Laird!” Domnall's voice, shocked and angry. “He's getting away!”
Let him.
He didn’t say it aloud. He had no breath for words, only for driving his heels into the horse’s ribs, for bending low over its neck as the wind—no longer fighting him but shoving—pressed hard at his back.
He would leave the reckoning on the road.
Not forever—no. He was still Bram MacCailin, and if there was breath in his body when the world stopped coming apart, he would hunt the traitor down.
But not now. Not when the sky was boiling with colors that did not belong to this world, not when he might lose Anastasia.
He had to get to her. Every part of him knew it, from the marrow out.