Chapter 38
CHAPTER THIRTY-EIGHT
The attack, once engaged, was over with a speed Duncan did not trust.
From the first clash in the outer yard to the last cry in the passage below the western wall, the threat was met and crushed with a swiftness that ought to have brought him relief.
His men had held their ground, just as they were supposed to.
The intruders, few in number and poorly coordinated, were cut down or captured before they could reach the heart of the castle.
Even the smoke that had first caused alarm proved slight, more confusion than destruction.
Duncan lowered his sword only when the last of them had fallen back. Around him, guards hurried to secure the gates and drag the wounded aside, while their voices were rising and falling in short, urgent bursts. Yet beneath all of it, one thought pressed upon him with increasing force.
This was too easy.
He stood very still in the midst of the chaos, feeling every instinct within him tightening.
MacKenzie was not a man who spent lives carelessly without purpose.
He did not strike merely to be repelled.
He did not make noise unless he had an aim and that could mean concealing something else beneath it.
At once Duncan thought of Elaina. A chill, cold and absolute, went through him.
“Iain!” he shouted, turning sharply.
Iain was already crossing the yard toward him, holding his darkened blade. “It is done, me laird.”
“Nay,” Duncan said, with a certainty that made the word feel like a blow. “Nae done. It was too easy.”
Iain’s face changed at once. He needed no fuller explanation.
“Catriona,” Duncan said, already moving. “Go tae her.”
He did not wait to see whether Iain obeyed. He knew he would.
Duncan himself was already running. He crossed the courtyard at such speed that the men nearest the doors drew back to let him pass.
His boots struck the stone with punishing force, because each step was driven by a dread that rose higher with every moment.
The corridors beyond seemed endless, with the torches guttering as he passed, their light wavering madly against the walls.
He could hear his own breathing, which was harsh and unsteady. He could hear the hammering of blood in his ears, yet none of it drowned the thought repeating itself with merciless clarity.
Too easy.
He reached the corridor of their chambers and saw at once Elaina was not there. Duncan stopped so abruptly he nearly stumbled.
For one terrible instant he did not move. He simply stared, his whole body seized by a horror so complete it left him breathless. Then he crossed the distance in a stride and pushed the door open.
The room was empty.
No candle burned. No voice answered. The bed-curtains stirred faintly in the draught from the window, and the room bore all the signs of her previous haste: garments half-packed, linen cast aside.
“Elaina.” He said her name as though he could still summon her back by speaking it. But only silence met him.
Duncan turned sharply, searching the room with a desperation he could not master. He crossed to the window, then back again, his gaze taking in every disordered surface, every abandoned article, every useless detail. He knew, even as he looked, that she was gone.
His chest tightened so violently that for a moment he could scarcely draw breath. Then footsteps sounded behind him, and Iain appeared in the doorway.
“Catriona is safe,” he informed him at once. “She was coming tae look fer us when I found her, tae tell us that Elaina was taken. By two unknown men with nay recognizable colors.”
“Elaina is gone?” Duncan whispered.
It was not the voice of a laird giving report. It was the voice of a man dragged to the edge of a black and fathomless abyss.
“MacKenzie’s got her.”
Duncan’s hand tightened around the hilt of his sword until the leather bit into his palm. “A diversion,” he realized, and each word was cut from fury. “He meant tae draw us away from her. He never meant tae take the castle. He meant tae take her.”
The truth of it blazed now with awful clarity. Every moment spent in the yard, every order given, every second he had believed her safe upstairs was useless. It was as if Duncan himself had delivered her into MacKenzie’s grasp.
A savage self-reproach rose in him. He had sent her away. He had commanded her to her chamber. He had believed stone walls and locked doors could protect what MacKenzie desired most.
He had been wrong.
Duncan drew a hard breath, forcing the fury into purpose.
“Prepare the men,” he gave the order.
Iain did not move at once. “Duncan—”
“Prepare them,” he repeated, and now there was such deadly calm in his voice that no man who knew him would mistake it.
“Every rider who can sit a horse. Torches. Hounds, if they can be roused quickly enough. I want the grounds searched, the walls checked, the river watched, and every track beyond the gate examined before the moon rises higher.”
Iain gave a single sharp nod. “Aye, me laird. We will find her.”
Duncan stepped once more into the center of the room, his gaze falling briefly upon the things she had left behind. It was evidence of how near she had been to fleeing him, only to be stolen away before he could make all right between them. The sight only drove the blade deeper.
When he spoke again, his voice was low, but no less terrible for it.
“Aye, we are going tae find Elaina,” he echoed. “And Lachlan MacKenzie will at last receive what he deserves.”
There was no heat in the words now and no wildness. All Duncan had was a resolve so absolute it seemed beyond anger.
Iain held his gaze and understood, then he turned and went to gather the men. Duncan remained one moment longer in the empty chamber, surrounded by the silence her absence had made unbearable. He inhaled deeply, then left the chamber at once. There was no more time for grief.
Only the hunt.
Duncan began where she had last been seen, in the corridor outside her chamber, and worked outward from there with the patience of a man who understood that haste, if not governed by reason, might cost him the very life he sought to save.
The castle was in uproar still, though the worst of the attack had been contained. Near the outer wall, not far from a stretch of shadow too deep to have invited casual notice, he stopped.
There.
At first glance the ground appeared no different from any other patch of trampled soil, but Duncan crouched, studying it with the concentration of a hunter who had learned young that the land, if properly read, always spoke. There were faint and hurried marks, badly disguised.
Boot prints, several of them, were impressed into the softer earth and then obscured in a clumsy fashion, as though their makers had trusted darkness to finish what carelessness had begun.
Duncan touched the ground with his fingers. The soil was still loose.
Recent, he thought to himself.
He followed the line of the prints for several yards, finding where they curved away from the wall rather than toward the gate. Whoever had taken her, would not dare to take the main road.
He straightened sharply and turned to the men behind him.
“This way,” he ordered. “And keep yer eyes open. They were rushed, which means they feared pursuit. That is our advantage.”
The trail led away from the castle grounds and toward the edge of the woods, not in a straight course, but in a broken one, cutting through rougher country and skirting the more obvious paths. Duncan followed the line of broken branches.
The thought of Elaina in their grip did not leave him for a single instant. It moved with him. It sharpened him and kept every sense painfully alive.
At the tree line he knelt again, studying where the earth gave way to roots and fallen leaves.
Here the signs grew more difficult, yet not beyond him.
A branch had recently broken. Moss was crushed under the careless edge of a heel.
There was a faint drag of movement where none should have been.
He saw enough to know they had entered the woods at speed, and not without difficulty.
“Iain,” he called without looking up.
His friend came at once. “Aye?”
“Take two men and hold this line. Let nay sign be lost.” Duncan rose, his gaze moving over the dark mass of trees ahead. “The rest with me.”
They went on beneath the cover of the forest, where moonlight filtered only in fragments and the air grew colder with every step.
The deeper they moved, the more the ground changed beneath them.
Yet, the trail did not disappear entirely.
It reappeared in hurried fragments, enough to guide a man who knew how to read what others overlooked.
Before long, the land began to slope toward the river. Duncan recognized the low, ceaseless sound of water moving over stone, distant but distinct in the night silence. The trail bent that way, then turned again into thicker woodland, where the trees stood close and the undergrowth grew wild.
It was there that he found the first true proof, in a place where branches had been cut back too cleanly, where ash had been half-buried beneath damp leaves.
He found the remains of a fire, not old enough to have been washed by dew.
Also, a discarded strip of leather, and farther in, where the ground opened just enough to admit a clearing, there were the unmistakable signs of a temporary camp.
Duncan halted.
No one spoke. Even the men nearest him seemed to understand, from the change in his bearing alone, that they had come upon what they sought.
He moved slowly through the edge of the clearing, reading it as he would a battlefield.
Tents had stood there recently, perhaps still stood not far beyond.
Horses had been tethered nearby. Men had come and gone in numbers, but not in such quantity as to form a proper encampment.
It was concealed, provisional, and chosen with care, close enough to strike at the castle, hidden enough to evade casual discovery.
MacKenzie was using the woods and riverbank as cover. He had kept himself out of sight while remaining near enough to move quickly when opportunity offered. Duncan felt, with a force so fierce it was almost physical, how narrow the distance now was between pursuit and reckoning.
He looked once toward the deeper stretch of forest beyond the clearing and knew, without needing another sign, that Elaina was somewhere ahead, in danger and terrified.
He turned back at once.
“Hold this place,” he ordered. “Nay noise, nay fire and nay movement beyond what is necessary. If they stir, I want word before a leaf falls.”
The men nodded. Duncan did not linger. All he had to do now was follow the signs they left for him, without even knowing. By the time he reached the point where the rest of his force waited, his course was decided in full.
MacKenzie would be found. There would be no delay now.
He gathered his men in the shelter of the wood. They stood ready, armed and silent, waiting upon his word with that grim steadiness which belonged to men who knew both their laird and the justice of the cause before them.
“MacKenzie is out there,” Duncan addressed them in a voice that carried through the night with unmistakable authority. “Hidden by the river, in the deeper wood. He took her under cover of this evening’s attack, and he has nae yet gone far enough tae place himself beyond our reach.”
A hard murmur passed through the men. Duncan let it die at once.
“We find them and we strike before dawn,” he continued. “Quietly, from all sides. Nay man breaks rank without order. Nay shot is loosed unless it must be. We close the perimeter first, cut off retreat second, and then we drive inward.”
He pointed as he spoke, assigning positions with the precision of long habit.
Two parties were to circle east and west. One was to hold the line at the riverbank.
Another was to cut off any movement toward the old path through the pines.
Iain would take the men most accustomed to fighting in close quarters.
Duncan himself would lead the central advance.
No one interrupted and no one questioned. His commands were received and obeyed with the speed that came only when men believed entirely in the man who gave them.
When all was ready, they moved. The woods received them in silence.
They advanced beneath the branches in disciplined lines, with each man knowing his place.
The smell of damp earth and pine lay heavy in the air.
Somewhere in the distance, an owl called once and was still.
The river moved unseen through the darkness, in a constant murmur beyond the trees.
At last, they reached the ground overlooking the camp.
Duncan raised a hand, and at once the men halted. Below them, partly concealed by trees and the fold of the land, lay MacKenzie’s refuge. Faint light flickered between the trunks. Shadows moved now and then along the edge of the clearing. It was enough to confirm what Duncan had already known.
He turned his head slightly, meeting Iain’s eye across the dark.
Everything was in place. The perimeter closed quietly around the camp, with each party reaching its station unseen.
Steel glinted dully where moonlight found it, then vanished again.
Men crouched among brush and shadow, poised and waiting.
Duncan looked toward the center of the camp and felt every beat of his heart sharpen into purpose. They were close, closer than they had ever been.
And somewhere within that ring of darkness, Elaina waited.