Chapter 28
Chapter Twenty-Eight
Fergus came back to the keep in less than an hour, smoke ingrained in the fibers of his heavy wool clothes, and a profound exhaustion weighed heavily on him.
The fire still burned beyond the hills, a distant, angry orange line against the sky, but the wind had shifted enough. Just enough to slow the flames' advance and allow his men to hold the western firebreak before sparks crossed into the vital barley fields.
It was a temporary containment, nothing more, but the immediate danger to the valley had passed.
He rode through the massive iron gates, his eyes scanning the dark yard, already calculating what still needed to be done before dawn. More watchmen on the northern ridge. A continuous water line from the river. Strict watch rotations during the remaining hours of the night.
Then, his eyes caught the dark silhouette of a heavy carriage parked near the keep steps.
His horse slowed instinctively beneath him, its hooves clattering lazily against the gravel. Something inside his chest tightened, a sudden, inexplicable spasm of alarm.
The courtyard felt entirely wrong.
Alasdair must have sensed the shift too. He dismounted quickly beside Fergus, his black stallion tossing its head, and gazed toward the carriage being loaded with travel trunks near the keep steps.
"Why is that carriage prepared at this hour?" Alasdair asked, his voice sharp with suspicion.
No one answered him. The servants near the steps deliberately kept their heads down, refusing to meet their Laird's eyes.
Then Fergus saw Isobel.
She stepped out from the shadow of the great hall doors, standing at the very top of the stone steps. She was wrapped in a dark traveling cloak, and Lilly was cradled securely in her arms.
And Fergus knew.
He crossed the gravel yard immediately, tossing his reins to a boy without looking. He walked fast, his heavy boots slamming against the ground, his stride so predatory and intense that the servants scrambled out of his path without being told twice.
"Where is she?" His voice came out much sharper, much rougher than he had intended, a raw growl that cut through the quiet yard.
Isobel looked down at him from the top of the steps, her gaze perfectly steady, unblinking. There was no surprise in her pale face when she looked at his soot-stained tunic. Only a cold, profound disappointment.
Alasdair reached the steps a moment later, his hand resting instinctively on the hilt of his sword. "What in God's name is goin' on here, Isobel?" he demanded.
Isobel adjusted Lilly higher against her shoulder, her movements calm. The child blinked sleepily at the sharp noise, her tiny thumb hovering near her mouth.
"I promised Margaret I would help her," Isobel said quietly, her voice level. "And I intend to keep me word."
Fergus felt a sudden, icy cold wash through his veins, freezing the sweat on his back. "What does that mean, Isobel? Where is me wife?"
"She asked me to trust her to do this on her own," Isobel replied, her dark eyes cutting into him. "She has left, Fergus."
Nay.
The word slammed through his mind instantly, a chaotic, violent rejection of the reality before him.
Nay. She wouldnae.
"Where is she?" he roared, taking a step up the stone stairs.
Isobel did not answer him with words. Instead, she reached into the fold of her cloak and held out a piece of carefully folded white parchment.
Fergus stared at the paper for a fraction of a second. Then, he snatched it from her fingers. His hands, usually so rock-steady under the pressure of battle, suddenly felt strangely, terrifyingly unsteady. He unfolded the parchment with rough, clumsy movements.
The elegant, slanted handwriting blurred once before his eyes before snapping into sharp, brutal focus under the glare of the torchlight.
Ye daenae want a bride. Ye daenae want a bairn. Then ye willnae have either. We are nae going to be a burden for ye anymore. Ye are free.
Free.
Fergus read the short line a second time. Then a third. Each word felt like a physical strike against his ribs, twisting violently deep inside his chest until he could barely draw breath.
Free.
He had spent most of his life fighting for that very word: freedom from the lies of his past, freedom from a stolen identity, and freedom to become his own man, answerable only to himself.
Now, standing in the middle of his own hard-fought courtyard with the smoke of his burning land still darkening the stars, he had never felt less free in his entire miserable life.
Because the realization hit instantly, bypassing all his carefully built walls. It wasn't a feeling of relief. It wasn't the clear, simple distance he had tried to create between them. It was a vast, terrifying void.
Margaret gone from the keep. Margaret gone from the high hall. Margaret gone from the quiet of his bedchamber. Gone from supper. Gone from Lilly. Gone entirely from him.
The sheer possibility of it hit him with the force of an incoming tide, a wild, unmanageable panic rising in his throat. He had driven her away. He had taken his fear and his guilt, and he had used them like a blade against the only person who had offered to help him carry the weight of his life.
"Where is she goin', Isobel?" he demanded, his voice cracking with a raw intensity that made Alasdair glance at him in surprise. Already, his soldier's mind was calculating routes. Distance. Terrain. Speed. How many minutes had he wasted fighting the fire while she rode away?
Isobel held his frantic gaze, her expression unyielding. "To Lady Alba MacLaren. Her cousin."
MacLaren lands. South.
Fergus's mind snapped instantly toward the topography of the land beyond the southern ridge, and his blood turned entirely to ice.
"She left alone?" he asked, his heart hammering against his ribs like a trapped bird.
"Fergus, she was determined."
"When, Isobel? When did she clear the gate?"
"Less than half an hour ago."
Fergus spun around sharply, his eyes locking onto the dark, jagged outline of the southern hills. Gray smoke was beginning to drift over those ridges now, too. It wasn't a thick, roaring wall of fire yet—not like the west—but it was enough to see. The wind had shifted.
God.
"The dragon's tail," Fergus muttered, his face turning pale beneath the soot.
Alasdair frowned immediately, stepping closer. "What? Fergus, what are ye sayin'?"
But Fergus was already moving, his boots pounding across the gravel as he sprinted back toward his bay stallion. Every instinct inside him had condensed into a single, brutal, terrifying certainty.
Find her. Find her now, before the fire gets to her.
"The lower southern pass," Fergus called back hoarsely over his shoulder as he threw himself back into the leather saddle.
His thoughts raced at a frantic pace. "The narrow stretch of dirt between the rocky ridges.
The wind funnels hard through there from the west, Alasdair.
It's full of dry brush and gorse. If the sparks cross the ridge, the fire will run through that canyon fast. Faster than a horse can gallop. "
Isobel stared at him from the steps, her face draining of color as she clutched Lilly tighter against her chest. "What are ye talkin' about? Fergus!"
But Fergus didn't waste another second explaining.
He hauled on the reins, turning his stallion sharply toward the dark south gate.
Every piece of armor he had spent twenty years building had completely vanished, leaving him entirely exposed to the dark.
He had driven her out into the path of the flames with his own brutal tongue.
"I'll bring her back," he said, his dark eyes locking onto Isobel for one final, desperate second.
Then, he drove his steel heels hard into the horse's sides. The stallion reared slightly before plunging forward into a dead run, carrying Fergus out through the gates and straight into the smoke-choked night.
* * *
Fergus rode as though the devil himself chased him through the craggy Highland hills.
Gorse and birch branches whipped across his face hard enough to cut the skin and draw blood, but he felt none of it. Stones scattered like hail beneath his stallion's iron hooves as they tore down the rugged southern path at a reckless, suicidal speed.
The smoke thickened with each passing moment, rolling low across the heather in dark, choking waves that completely obscured the cold stars overhead.
Too slow. He was still too damn slow.
His horse strained beneath him, its muscles bunching and stretching fiercely, thick foam gathering along its neck as its lungs labored from the brutal climb and steep descent across uneven ground.
Fergus pushed the beast harder anyway, leaning low over its neck, his fingers white where they gripped the leather.
The dragon's tail lay just ahead. And Margaret was somewhere inside it.
The terrifying thought pounded through his skull with every rhythmic thunder of the hooves against the dirt.
Find her. Find her.
The wind shifted sharply across the rocky ridge, howling like a wounded animal. Fergus snapped his head up.
And saw it. Fire.
The flames moved through the dry, summer-parched brush with a terrifying, predatory speed, racing along the narrow pass between the sheer cliff walls like a living, breathing beast. Billowing black smoke climbed upward in thick columns while red sparks scattered violently through the air, carried hundreds of yards ahead of the roaring fire front.
The dragon's tail. A narrow, rocky death trap once the wind turned the canyon into a chimney.
Fergus swore fiercely under his breath, a raw Gaelic curse, and urged his horse faster into the darkness.
Every instinct in his soul had sharpened into a single, brutal clarity.
Nothing else mattered on God's earth but reaching her before the wall of flames cut off the way completely.
Not the Mackenzie land. Not the structural safety of his keep. Not the survival of his crops.
Only Margaret.