Chapter Two
The moors of Brahan Castle
Mist lay thick over the moor, shrouding the world in ghostly silence. It clung to armour and horsehair, softening sound and shape until everything seemed suspended between dream and reality. For a fleeting moment, Cameron Munro found comfort in that. The mist hid the faces of his enemy, hid fear.
Then came the rumble of carts, the jangle of bridles, and the slow, grinding rhythm of hundreds of boots, and the spell was broken. The army advanced towards Brahan Castle and the Mackenzies’ clan, towards the reckoning that had been promised since the Munros’ defeat a month ago.
Cameron rode beside his father, Robert Munro of Foulis, the clan’s laird and its iron heart.
The Earl of Sutherland flanked them on the opposite side.
They rode under the banner of the king as they had many times before in battle, but Cameron knew better.
It was not loyalty that drove these two men forward; it was vengeance.
His father would never forgive the Mackenzies for the humiliation they had dealt the Munros at the Skirmish of Alness, and the laird would spill blood freely to wash the disgrace away.
Around them, men rode in tight formation.
Cameron’s brothers, Gavan and Kenzie, were close by, followed by fifty mounted warriors in red and black, and muted blue and green tartan, then the archers, the swordsmen, and behind them all, the lumbering cannons that groaned with every rut in the earth.
The army was a beast of muscle and fury, caged only by the mist. And even as they marched towards war, Cameron wished it were otherwise.
Clan Munro had sworn loyalty to George I not as a hollow formality, but as a mantle of responsibility.
The king sought peace among the clans as earnestly as Cameron did, believing, as Cameron believed, that allegiance to the Hanoverian crown offered a path away from endless feuds and retaliations.
It was a vow meant to still old hatreds, not stir them anew.
Cameron only wished his father honoured that promise as faithfully as he demanded it of others.
War with the Mackenzies, no matter how justified it was claimed to be, fractured the very peace they had sworn to uphold.
The memories Cameron carried weighed heavier than any argument shouted across a council table.
He remembered neighbours lost to old vendettas, blackened barns standing like gravestones against the hills, and widows who’d learned too young how grief hollowed the chest.
Peace would benefit all the clans, not just Munro.
Stability, predictable justice, and restraint were the only shields strong enough to protect the next generation.
If the king’s rule could offer the children of Foulis Castle a future unmarred by the constant spectre of bloodshed, then Cameron would stand with that king, even when his heart longed for fields ready for harvest rather than men striding towards war.
But today such wishes would never be his.
Today, his father wanted war in the king’s name, and Cameron and his brothers would give the laird of the Munros exactly that.
When the first towers of Brahan Castle loomed from the mist, the enemy revealed themselves as blue and green-tartaned shadows rising from the haze.
Cameron’s pulse thudded. He could not see the Mackenzie clan’s full numbers, but instinct told him the two armies were evenly matched. This would be no easy victory.
His father drew his sword high, his war cry slicing through the muffled dawn. The line broke forward. The cavalry thundered across the moor, a tide of steel and plaid. The earth itself seemed to quake beneath the charge.
Cameron spurred his horse after them, his heartbeat syncing with the pounding of hooves. Arrows rained down from the grey sky. A scream, a crash, the sharp ring of blades, then chaos. The world dissolved into movement and noise, the acrid scent of powder and the copper tang of blood.
A rider in Mackenzie blue and green bore down on him.
Cameron met him head-on, their blades striking in a flurry of sparks.
The man’s face twisted in rage; his shout lost in the storm of sound.
Cameron ducked low, slashed upward, and the man toppled, his blood dark against the mist. Another attacker came, and another.
Cameron’s world narrowed to a rhythm of parry, strike, breathe, until there was nothing but the blur of bodies and the clang of swords.
Then, through the chaos, he saw his father.
Laird Robert Munro was fighting three men at once, his sword flashing like lightning.
Cameron’s stomach clenched. One of the Mackenzies struck his father’s horse, sending it rearing.
Robert hit the ground hard. Another man wheeled his horse and drove its hooves towards him.
“Da!” The cry tore from Cameron’s throat.
He beckoned his horse forward, scattering soldiers in his path. Gavan and Kenzie followed, sensing the same dread. But they were too late. Robert dodged the horse’s crushing hooves only to meet a waiting blade. The sword plunged deep into his side, then another into his chest.
Cameron leapt from his horse, catching his father as he fell. Blood soaked through his plaid, hot and slick. “Nay, Da!” Cameron choked, pressing a strip of torn tartan against the wound. “Stay with me.”
Robert coughed, crimson flecking his beard. His eyes, once fierce, flickered with something close to regret. “My son, my heir,” he rasped. “Carry on. Avenge me. Make me proud.”
Cameron’s vision blurred, but he pressed harder against the wound, desperate to save his father. “Do not speak. You will live.”
His father’s hand found his, cold and shaking. “Dying . . . Cameron . . . marry. It is arranged.”
Cameron froze. “What?”
Robert’s lips trembled, blood bubbling between his teeth. “Destiny Gunn . . . betrothed to you. Better for our clan. Where war failed me . . . diplomacy might aid you.”
The words struck harder than any sword. Destiny Gunn. A name his father had never spoken, a face Cameron could not conjure, and yet she was now part of his father’s dying wish, the last command of a man he had both loved and feared.
“Why? What can the Gunns bring to us through this marriage?”
“Gunn has ties . . . to the Mackenzies. It might help . . . bring peace. Also need their land . . . secure our position . . . with the other Highland clans.”
“Da, please . . .”
But Robert was already slipping away. His gaze darted towards Gavan and Kenzie, who stood guard beside them, blades still drawn.
To Gavan he said, “Help your brother lead . . . serve the government . . . that is our future . . . Scotland’s future .
. .” His breath came shorter. He turned to Kenzie. “Avenge me. Execute our enemies.”
With his final words of vengeance, Robert’s body shuddered once, then went still.
Cameron’s breath hitched. Around him, their clansmen protected them, fighting off those who would intrude on this moment. The battlefield noise fell away until all he could hear was the wind keening over the moor. He stared down at the man who had ruled his life and now lay broken at his knees.
Robert Munro, the Butcher of Caithness, was gone. And in his place, the clan’s burden shifted onto Cameron’s shoulders. Cameron had come to accept his father’s ruthlessness. He and his brothers had borne their father’s brutality their whole lives.
He wished the moniker of butcher would have died with his father, but he knew it would not.
Cameron was known as a butcher as well. The butcher’s son, he had been called on countless occasions.
Now, with the death of his father, the name would continue, and he, Cameron, would be known as the Butcher.
Cameron looked at his brothers, one on his left and one on his right.
They were warriors, like their father, and had taken their own share of lives, and now they would share in their father’s sins.
Returning his gaze to his father, Cameron pressed his hand to his father’s face, closing his eyes.
He wiped his father’s blood from his fingers with his tartan, though it clung like a brand. You are the heir now.
Grief hollowed him, but something harder took root beneath it. A resolve forged in pain. He would not be his father’s shadow. He would lead differently if he had the chance. And as for the girl, Destiny Gunn, he would honour his father’s final wish. But he would deal with her in his own time.
Cameron looked towards the horizon, where the mist was burning away and the field lay strewn with the fallen. “We will keep the clan standing,” he murmured. “But we will do it our way, my brothers.”
The battle still raged as Cameron set his father’s head against the ground and stood.
He released the tail of his tartan and drew his dagger, slicing through the woven fabric, creating a length that he then draped over his father’s body.
“We will return for him when this battle is done,” Cameron said, then trading his dagger for his sword, he stepped back into the fray.
The Munros would win this day or die trying.
*
The journey back to Foulis was a dirge etched in the rhythm of footsteps.
Cameron walked on one side of the simple cart, his brother Kenzie on the other as the horse pulled it forward.
Seventy of their bravest warriors walked behind them as the cart rolled forward over the slick, wet soil, each rotation of the wheels a mournful reminder of the Battle at Brahan and the great man they had lost, despite winning the conflict.