Chapter 3
CHAPTER THREE
Cormac stumbled backward. His heel struck a loose stone, sending it skittering over the edge, but he recovered before the cliff could punish him for what Roy’s sword had not yet done. Hatred stripped the last measure of caution from his face. It burned there plainly now, made uglier by humiliation.
Roy kept his blade level with the man’s chest. MacIver had been granted many opportunities in his life to kill men.
Some required thought, others required only sufficient speed.
Cormac Gunn, standing within reach with rain upon his face and murder in his eyes, offered a temptation of the simpler sort.
But Donaldina’s wrist remained within Roy’s grasp, cold and trembling despite the proud stillness she attempted to impose upon herself.
The cliff was no more than two paces behind them.
The wind came hard around the rocks, catching her skirts and pulling them toward the sea.
Roy would not risk her life for the satisfaction of ending Cormac’s.
Cormac’s gaze moved from Roy’s sword to the hand holding Donaldina behind him. Something twisted in his expression. It was not merely anger at defeat. It was the fury of a man who lost possession of something he already counted as his own.
Roy knew that look. It had been seen worn by men over land, over titles, and over armies sent to die because of another man's inability to tolerate denial. He never admired it. He disliked it even more when it was aimed at the woman behind him.
Cormac straightened slowly, his hand moving toward the sword at his hip. The MacNicol guards shifted upon the path, their blades whispering partway out of their scabbards. They found courage at last, now that courage required only following the man already standing between them and danger.
Roy did not spare them a glance.
“Dinnae,” he warned.
Cormac drew the sword. Donaldina’s fingers closed involuntarily around the leather at Roy’s wrist before she seemed to realize what she had done. She released him at once, and Roy felt the loss of that touch with an irritation he had no leisure to examine.
Cormac lifted his blade, though he did not advance. “This is far from finished.”
“Then ye should conserve yer breath.”
Cormac’s mouth curled. “Ye think because ye carry the King’s paper, the MacNicols will kneel and call ye chief?”
“I require nae kneeling.”
“Nae?” Cormac shouted, turning his voice toward the men gathered below. “He comes tae take Lachlan’s place, Dun Ard and the woman who bears its blood, and ye stand idle while he does it!”
A murmur moved among the guards. Not agreement, perhaps, but Roy had spent too long among soldiers not to know how swiftly uncertainty could become mutiny when a man gave it the right words.
Cormac knew it, too. That made him dangerous.
“The King may command a marriage,” he continued, his voice carrying above the sea, “but he cannae force Clan MacNicol tae accept a stranger as its chief.”
“Lady Donaldina is standing here. Ye might attempt addressing her before ye appoint yerself the voice of her clan,” Roy exclaimed.
Cormac’s eyes snapped toward the narrow space beyond Roy’s shoulder.
“She doesnae understand what is required.”
Roy’s eyes flared up. “She understood well enough when she refused ye.”
The blow landed. Roy saw it in the tightening of Cormac’s jaw. Obvious truths were often the ones men found most insulting.
Cormac stepped back again, toward the bend in the path.
Shapes moved within the thickening mist beyond him.
Three men emerged near the waiting horses, armed and watchful.
They wore MacNicol colors, but their attention remained fixed upon Cormac.
That meant the betrayal went beyond one councilman with an ambition too large for his station.
Cormac saw Roy count them. A grim satisfaction entered his face.
“Ye havenae won, MacIver.”
Roy adjusted his grip on the sword. “I wasnae aware we were playing.”
For a moment, he thought Cormac might rush him.
The man’s weight shifted forward and his sword rose.
Roy was ready. He could easily turn the first stroke, drive the point beneath the ribs and finish the matter before Cormac’s men crossed half the distance between them.
He knew precisely how much force it would require.
He knew where the blade would enter and how long the man would remain standing after it did.
Then Donaldina swayed. It was hardly a movement. Had Roy not been holding her wrist, he might have missed it. Her knees softened before she forced them straight again, as though even her own body must not be permitted to witness weakness.
Roy’s attention altered. Cormac saw it.
Cowardice was often mistaken for cleverness by the man practicing it. He gave a sharp whistle and retreated toward his men.
“Fall back!” he ordered them. “Tae the horses.”
Roy advanced one pace. Donaldina’s wrist moved with him; that slight resistance was enough. He stopped. Cormac smiled with all the pleasure of a man who believed restraint proved fear.
“This isnae ended,” he called as his men closed around him. “The King hasnae won. Ye havenae won. Dun Ard will never be yers.”
“Me concern at present,” Roy replied, “is that ye cease speaking.”
Cormac’s smile vanished. He mounted with an awkward haste that did little to restore his dignity. The others followed. Hooves struck the wet ground, throwing mud and fragments of stone across the path as they turned toward the ridge.
Cormac looked back once. The mist gathered around horse and rider, blurring his shape without softening the malice in his face.
“She will never belong tae ye!”
Roy’s hand tightened on his sword.
Donaldina spoke from behind him, her voice hoarse but perfectly distinct. “I belong tae myself!”
Cormac heard her. That, more than Roy’s threat, drove him into the mist. The riders disappeared beyond the bend, the sound of their flight fading beneath the crash of the sea. Roy remained still until even his soldier’s ear could no longer separate the hoofbeats from the storm.
Every instinct trained into him urged pursuit.
A fleeing enemy was at his weakest. Cormac’s men were few, their retreat disordered, and the mist concealed Roy as readily as it concealed them.
Five minutes might have ended the danger before it acquired more followers, stronger walls or a more convincing lie.
Then he felt the tremor passing through Donaldina’s arm, and he lowered his sword. There would be another opportunity to deal with Cormac Gunn.
There would not be another Donaldina MacNicol if he allowed pride to carry him away while she stood bleeding beside a cliff.
He turned. She released his wrist at once and stepped back from him, nearly putting her heel upon the slick outer stone.
Roy caught her elbow. “Careful.”
“I am perfectly capable of standing.”
“So I observed.”
Her eyes narrowed. Even pale with cold and shock, she possessed enough spirit to resent assistance. Roy found this reassuring. A woman truly overcome would not have looked at him as though deciding which portion of his character required correction first.
He guided her toward the inner wall of rock before releasing her. She lifted her chin, rain loosened dark strands from her hair, clinging to her temples and throat. A faint red mark lay beneath her jaw where Cormac’s blade had touched her. Roy looked at it too long.
Something cold settled beneath his ribs. “Are ye hurt?”
“No.”
He looked down at her torn sleeve.
“No,” she repeated, more firmly.
“Then ye have taken tae bleeding for ornament.”
Her gaze followed his. A shallow cut ran along the inside of her forearm. Delicate red lines, thinned by the rain, traced a path to her wrist, disappearing into the glove marks and Cormac's bruises.
For the first time, uncertainty crossed her face. “It is scarcely a wound.”
“That is fortunate. It means ye may survive having it tended.”
“I require no tending.”
Roy sheathed his sword. The sound of steel sliding home seemed to ease something in the men behind them. He ignored their cautious approach and took the flask from his belt.
“Give me yer arm.”
Donaldina stared at him. He had discovered long ago that silence defeated most arguments more efficiently than eloquence. It did not really defeat hers, it merely caused her to recognize that she would be obliged to continue the argument alone.
With an expression of great displeasure, she held out her arm. The gesture was so regal that Roy might have thought she offered him a royal document rather than an injury she had denied possessing.
He pushed the torn sleeve carefully above the cut, but she flinched.
“Did I hurt ye?” Roy asked, his hands stopping.
“Nae.”
It was not a convincing answer. Her breath caught before he touched the wound.
Pouring water over the cut, Donaldina drew in sharply through her teeth but did not pull away.
The water ran pink over her skin and fell in bright drops upon the black stone.
Roy cleaned away the remaining blood with his thumb, using less pressure than he would have believed his hands remembered how to employ.
They were not gentle hands. The knuckles bore scars from sword hilts, winter marches and battles whose names men in Edinburgh would never learn.
He used those hands to drag wounded soldiers from mud, to close the eyes of the dead, to hold his own body together until a surgeon could make a poorer attempt of it.
Donaldina’s wrist seemed impossibly slender within them. He was conscious of the beat of her pulse beneath his fingers. It was fast and frantic, his own was no better.
Roy released her long enough to open the fastening at his collar. He pulled a strip from the linen shirt beneath his soaked tunic, tearing the fabric with a short, sharp sound.
Donaldina looked down at the linen. “Ye need not ruin yer clothing.”
“I have other shirts.”
“That is reassuring.”
“I thought it might comfort ye.”
To his surprise, the corner of her mouth moved. It was not a smile; she was far too sensible to offer one under the circumstances. However, the potential for it had been present, and Roy sensed it as a dangerous shift in the atmosphere.
He wrapped the linen around her forearm. When he passed the strip beneath her wrist, his fingers brushed the sensitive skin there. She flinched again, though this time he had not touched the cut.
Their eyes met.
The waves crashed against the cliffs, and the mist veiled everything, making it feel as though only the small space between them existed.
Roy became aware that he still held her hand. She became aware of it in the same instant. Neither moved.
Her eyes were not soft. There was suspicion in them, pride, grief and the lingering shadow of fear. Yet there was something else now, something uncertain that had not been present when he entered her brother’s hall. He had no right to seek its meaning.
Roy tied the bandage and withdrew his hands. Donaldina lowered her arm slowly. Behind them, one of the MacNicol men cleared his throat, then appeared to regret having done so when Roy looked in his direction.
The funeral procession remained gathered near the lower gate. Lachlan’s bier stood unmoving beneath the gray sky while Father Maol waited beside it, his dark robes snapping in the wind.
Roy’s chest tightened. Lachlan had once asked him, during a rain-soaked night beside a miserable campaign fire, what manner of woman Roy expected to find waiting at Dun Ard.
Roy had answered that he expected no woman to wait eight years for a stranger, to which he had laughed and told him Donaldina had never waited obediently for anything in her life.
Roy had understood the words as a brother’s fond exaggeration. He understood them better now.
“Can ye walk?” he asked.
Donaldina looked toward her brother’s bier. Her face was momentarily filled with such raw grief that Roy felt embarrassed to have seen it.
“Aye,” she said, her spine straightening.
Roy offered his arm. She regarded it with the same caution another woman might have reserved for a drawn blade. At last, she placed her hand upon his sleeve; the contact was light and formal, yet Roy felt it through wool, leather and every discipline he brought home from the war.
Together, they turned toward Dun Ard. The MacNicol men fell in behind them.
No one spoke. The mist curled along the path, closing over the place where Cormac had vanished, while the sea continued its assault upon the rocks below as if treachery, rescue and the near loss of a life were all too small to interrupt it.
Roy kept Donaldina on the inner side of the path. He told himself it was merely sensible. He did not examine why, even after the cliff widened and the danger passed, he did not ask her to release his arm.