Chapter Twenty-Two #2
While his men kept watch, Jamie crouched, brushing away the cobwebs and ivy that covered the keyhole. Taking his sword in both hands, he drove it into the ground and then carefully removed a cap from the tip of the hilt. Inside lay a tiny key.
Sending up thanks to his father for ensuring he took such precautions, Jamie pried out the key and pushed it in the lock.
For a moment, it refused to turn and Jamie wondered whether they’d have to break down the door after all, but finally, the lock opened with a tiny snick that sounded unnaturally loud in the stillness.
Stealing through the postern gate in silence, Jamie and his men found themselves in the kitchen garden behind the storage barns. Pausing only long enough to check nobody was in sight, they stole across the garden and entered through a little-used door that gave access to the ancillary kitchens.
It felt strange entering his home like this, like some thief with no right to be there.
“Oi! They aren’t for ye!”
The voice froze Jamie and his men in their tracks.
Creeping to the door, Jamie peered through a crack.
Beyond lay a proving room for the main kitchens, where bread and pastry were left to rise.
A rack of freshly baked loaves stood cooling on a rack and a man dressed in the king’s livery stood with his back to Jamie, chomping on one of the loaves.
Tabitha, Dun Arach’s formidable cook, was facing the man with a murderous scowl on her face. “Get yer filthy paws away from my loaves, ye damned rat!”
Jamie had been terrified of Tabitha when he was a boy and had felt the wrath of her rolling pin on more than one occasion when he’d been caught stealing from the kitchen.
Yet the cook’s wrath had no effect on the king’s guardsman. His hand went to the hilt of his sword. “I’ll take what I like, woman,” he snarled. “And ye will keep a civil tongue in yer head lest I cut it out for ye.”
Tabitha opened her mouth for an angry tirade, but her eyes widened as Jamie stepped through the door, pressed his finger to his lips, crept up behind the guardsman, and then whacked him over the head with the pommel of his sword. The man’s eyes rolled back in his head and he slid to the floor.
“Jamie!” Tabitha roared, throwing her arms around him and crushing him into a hug that almost cracked his ribs. “I canna believe it! Thank the Lord ye’ve returned!”
Jamie extricated himself from the cook’s stifling embrace and laid a hand on her shoulder. He was shocked to see tears of relief in her eyes.
“Listen to me,” he said. “I dinna have time to explain. I need ye to do exactly as I say. Gather as many of the kitchen and household staff as ye can without alerting anyone that I’m here.
Barricade yerselves in the kitchens and dinna come out until it’s safe.
There is likely to be fighting, and I canna guarantee yer safety otherwise. ”
“I’ll fight with ye!” Tabitha cried. “Just give me a roasting spit and I’ll teach these scum to rue the day they thought to take our home from us!”
“I’ve no doubt ye would,” Jamie replied, squeezing her shoulder. “But I need ye to help keep our people safe.”
The stout woman took a deep breath and nodded, her eyes flicking to the men gathered behind Jamie. “Just ye be careful, lad. I dinna know what’s going on but something’s got this place riled up like ye wouldnae believe.”
“I will. Dinna worry.”
He led his men out through the doors and into the castle proper.
They moved silently and swiftly, keeping to the smaller, quieter passages as much as possible.
Three times they came across guardsmen patrolling, but each time they were able to surprise them and take them out before they were able to raise the alarm.
They reached the door that led down into the storerooms where Phillip was holding Albie and the rest of Jamie’s loyal men. As expected, it was heavily guarded, with at least seven men holding positions along the corridor, blocking access to the heavy door.
At his gesture, his men pressed themselves against the wall around the corner. Jamie pulled his cloak pin from his plaid and tossed it down the corridor. It made a tinkling noise as it landed on the hard flagstones and the guards’ heads turned towards the unexpected noise.
In the instant they were distracted, Jamie struck. With a roar, he and his men burst from their hiding, weapons raised.
If he’d hoped to take them by surprise, he was sorely disappointed. These were no mere mercenaries or untrained rabble, but king’s guards: highly trained and highly disciplined.
At a word from their commander, they formed into a fighting formation to meet Jamie’s onslaught. The corridor suddenly exploded into steel and violence.
With a roar of released emotion, Jamie stepped to meet the first man. He ducked under a vicious downward swing, kicked the man hard in the knee and then slammed the pommel of his sword into his nose. Bone crunched. The man collapsed to the floor, clutching his face.
Jamie stepped over him, already swinging at the next guard.
These men were good—damnably good. They fought as a tightly controlled unit, covering each other, retreating in step, trying to lure Jamie and his men farther down the corridor and away from the door they were guarding.
But Jamie wasn’t about to fall for that.
As a guard lunged for him, he twisted away, stepped inside the man’s reach, and grabbed his arm. Yanking him forward, he drove his knee into his stomach with all his strength, doubling the man over and breaking the guards’ formation.
“Now!” he bellowed.
His men pushed forward, driving into the guards with renewed frenzy. The guards struggled to reform their lines, but Jamie’s men were relentless as blades swung and fists connected with flesh. The king’s guards fell one by one.
Finally, there was only one man left standing before the door. To his credit, he didn’t try to run, didn’t throw down his weapon and surrender. His lips curled in a sneer and he began spitting curses. “Come on then, ye rabid dogs! What are ye waiting—”
Jamie’s thrown dagger plunged into the meat of the man’s upper arm and he screamed in pain. Jamie swept the man’s legs out from under him and snatched the sword from his hands. Disarmed and injured, it took his men only a second to subdue him.
Jamie wiped his blade on his sleeve and looked around. Two of his men were down—alive, he saw at a glance, though one clutched his arm and was wincing in pain. The rest stood blood splattered and fierce eyed, chests heaving.
“Tie the guards up,” he ordered.
He stepped up to the door and kicked it in with enough force to splinter the wood. As he stepped through, the stench of damp and sweat hit him, along with the yeasty smell of dried grain. Dun Arach’s storerooms stretched ahead, barrels and crates stacked high.
“Come for more have ye?” a familiar voice bellowed from a room at the end. “Come on then! Ye’ll not take us without bloodshed, ye stinking bastard sons of—”
“Albie?”
There was silence.
Then, tentatively, “Jamie?”
He hurried into the gloom. Torchlight flared across familiar faces as he reached the farthest rooms—his men looking grim, hollow eyed, bruised but unbroken. Albie stood at the front, gripping the bars of the tiny window in the storeroom door, his beard wild.
“Ye took yer bloody time, boy!”
Jamie shrugged, giving a rueful smile. “Apologies. I was busy.”
Albie’s bluff features broke into a grin. “Aye, we heard. When all the racket started up, I thought it was the king’s dogs come to take us out for a hanging. I’m mighty glad to be proven wrong.”
Jamie turned sharply. “Keys.”
One of his men produced them, already stripped from a fallen guard. The lock clanked open, the door swinging wide.
Albie stepped out, straightening to his full impressive height, and clapped Jamie on the shoulder hard enough to make him stagger.
“Ah, that’s better! We were starting to think we’d rot down here.”
“Not today,” Jamie replied.
The rest of the storerooms were thrown open, and Jamie’s men emerged—some limping, some swearing, some silent, but all with fury burning behind their eyes. They wasted no time grabbing weapons from the bound guards, looking eager for retribution.
Albie eyed the men who’d come with Jamie. “Barra lads unless I miss my guess?”
At Jamie’s nod, he waded among them, clapping them all on the shoulder. “No better fighters in all the Isles. Except for those of Islay, of course. I’ll personally buy ye all a drink when this is over.”
“Bloody hell,” another of Jamie’s men muttered. “This is a day for miracles.”
There was a round of low chuckling and Jamie felt some of his tension ease. But only some. He’d accomplished his first goal, but they still had a long way to go.
“Listen up!” he snapped. “The king and his puppet, Phillip MacClelland, hold Dun Arach, but, by God, we are going to take it back. Barra and Skye have managed to draw away most of the king’s men and his fleet. But we have to act swiftly. If we are to retake Islay, this is our moment.”
Albie’s grin turned savage. “Then we’d best not waste it, aye?”
Jamie nodded. “We move quietly, we move swiftly,” he ordered. “Our priorities are taking the gates and the battlements. If we meet resistance, we deal with it, but we dinna get pulled into a protracted fight. Clear?”
His men nodded grimly. Throwing the unconscious king’s men into the storerooms and locking the doors, Jamie led his men swiftly up the service stairs and back towards the kitchens.
As Jamie stepped through the door, he was almost brained by a rolling pin that came swinging for his head.
Tabitha pressed a hand to her breast. “Lord, dinna do that to me!” she cried. “I nearly ruined my best rolling pin!”
“Aye, and my head to boot,” Jamie replied. Looking around the kitchen, he saw at least twenty of the household staff taking shelter in the large room. They looked frightened, aye, but determined too, most clutching a weapon: a knife, a poker, a meat cleaver.
“Stay here,” he told them. “Dun Arach isnae ours yet and this might get bloody before the end.”
He slipped out the back door with his men. Ahead lay Dun Arach’s bailey, weak sunlight glinting off the wet stone. Shouts suddenly echoed from the far side and Jamie stifled a curse. Somebody had raised the alarm.
He nodded to his men and they fanned out, weapons drawn. “Ye know what ye have to do.”
They nodded and in smaller groups, scattered in all directions.
Jamie was left with ten of his hand-picked men. “We take the gates,” he told them. “Or die trying.”
They sprinted across the courtyard as a group of king’s men poured from the gate house with blades drawn.
Jamie didn’t slow. He crashed into them, sword flashing, a kick slamming into a guard’s chest hard enough to drive the breath from his lungs.
He twisted aside as a blade whistled past his throat and drove his sword into the man’s gut, shoving him back into another king’s man.
All the outrage, the shock, the anger at having his home stolen from him, came boiling to the surface.
A strange sound filled the air, and it took a moment before Jamie realized it was coming from himself, a bellow of unleashed rage as he swung and blocked, punched and kicked, teeth bared in a feral snarl.
His men moved with him as they fought. The king’s guards were good—but they were outnumbered now, pressed from all sides, and they were facing men of the Isles who were fighting for their home.
One by one they fell or surrendered until suddenly there were no more king’s men in front of him, only the gates, and a ground strewn with fallen, groaning men.
He turned and saw that his men had retaken the battlements, the king’s guards kneeling in a line with blades pressed to their throats.
In the courtyard, he saw that Tabitha and the household staff had followed him from the kitchens.
Armed with cleavers, pans, pokers, and sheer fury, they had dragged down a group of king’s men.
Tabitha stood over them, chest heaving, rolling pin clenched in her hand. She met Jamie’s gaze. “That will teach them to take liberties in my kitchen.”
A laugh tore free from Jamie’s chest—short, incredulous, fierce.
It was done. Dun Arach was theirs.
“Find Phillip MacClelland,” he ordered his men. “Alive if ye can.”
He didn’t wait to hear the acknowledgment, instead sprinting into the keep. He bounded up the steps to the guest quarters, heart pounding for reasons that had nothing to do with the fighting.
He reached a door and didn’t bother knocking. He threw it open hard enough to slam it into the wall and burst through.
“Elise!”
He stuttered to a halt, looking around, but the room was empty. The bed was untouched. The coverlet neatly folded back as if nobody had slept in it. The room felt cold and desolate, and he knew with dread certainty that she hadn’t just stepped out momentarily. She was gone.
Heart thumping, he turned, already running again. He thundered down the stairs and into the great hall where the people of the keep were gathering after news of its recapture filtered out. The cavernous space was filled with noise and chatter. Jamie cut through it all like a blade.
“Elise!” he demanded. “Has anyone seen Elise?”
People glanced uneasily at each other.
“No, my lord.”
“And Phillip?” he snapped. “Or the envoy?”
A pause. Then, more grim shaking of heads.
“Jamie!”
The door opened and Albie entered, supporting Andrea who leaned heavily on him as she limped towards Jamie. His housekeeper was pale, her dark hair loose and tangled, her gown torn at the sleeve. There was blood on her cuff—he didn’t know if it was hers.
He was across the hall in seconds. “What happened?” he demanded, taking her other arm and helping her to stand. “Are ye all right?”
Andrea swallowed, her eyes shining with unshed tears. “I’m fine. But Elise… Phillip took her.”
The words slammed into Jamie’s chest like a hammer blow. “Took her where?”
“To the ships,” Andrea said hoarsely. “The king’s fleet sailed before ye got here. Phillip went with them. He said…he said the Ulster fleet was approaching and he made Elise go with him to meet them.”
“Dear God,” Jamie whispered.
“She tried to fight him, Jamie,” Andrea said. “She tried, but Phillip threatened to hurt people if she didn’t do what he wanted. And he—he knows how her magic works now.”
Jamie closed his eyes. Elise was on one of the king’s ships. She was surrounded by enemies, by people who wanted to use her. And they would force her to unleash her power against Ulster.
Except it wasn’t Ulster at all.
He turned to Albie and the rest of his men, both Barra and Islay warriors alike. “Sound the call to muster. Ready every ship that can sail. We are going after them.”
Phillip had taken Elise. But Jamie would tear the world apart to get her back.