Chapter 37
CHAPTER THIRTY-SEVEN
Ewen thought he had won. Isobel saw it plainly, though the blade at her throat allowed her little else. He saw her as prize.
Ruaridh’s hand tightened upon the hilt. Even from where she stood, Isobel saw the force it cost him not to move.
Ewen’s grip also tightened. “What I want are Duart’s pledges before the Crown, land rights in the south and a public admission that ye stole what was mine.”
“Done,” Ruaridh said at once.
Isobel went cold.
“Ruaridh.”
He did not look away from Ewen. “Done,” he repeated. “Give her tae me.”
Ewen’s expression shifted from triumph into delight. He had expected resistance. He had hoped for rage. He hadn’t expected surrender so complete it made resistance unnecessary.
“Ye would shame yerself so easily?”
“Fer her?” His gaze moved to Isobel then. “Aye.”
The single word entered her like a blade and a blessing both.
It broke something open in her chest, something that had been bruised too long by being unwanted, exchanged, judged, and claimed by men who spoke of women as if they were land.
Ruaridh was not claiming her now. He was yielding everything because she was his beloved.
And because she was his beloved, she could not allow him to be destroyed for it.
Ewen’s attention remained fixed upon Ruaridh. His body shifted slightly, his confidence loosening the very care that had first made him dangerous. He held her still, but not as tightly. His blade remained near her throat, but his wrist moved enough to speak and savor humiliation.
Isobel forced herself to breathe. The world returned in fragments of mud, smoke and the pain throbbing in her cheek.
And there, half beneath the body of one of Ewen’s guards, lay a bow.
Beside it, several arrows spilled into the mud, their fletching dark with wet earth but intact.
The bowstring caught a dull glint of firelight.
Ewen laughed again, saying something to Ruaridh about payment and witnesses, but Isobel no longer heard the words clearly. She watched the hand that held the blade.
He shifted, only a little, but it was enough.
Isobel dropped her full weight without warning.
Ewen cursed as her body dragged against his hold.
The blade nicked the skin sharply at her throat, but his arm slipped.
She twisted toward the side where his grip had weakened, wrenching her shoulder with such force that pain flashed white behind her eyes.
His fingers caught in her hair. She cried out, more from fury than hurt, and drove her elbow back with all the strength she possessed.
It struck him hard in the ribs. For one precious instant, he loosened his grip and fell backwards. She tore free.
“Isobel!” Ruaridh roared.
She fell to her knees in the mud, with one hand slamming down near the fallen man. Ewen got up to lunge after her. She seized the bow. The feel of it in her hand steadied her faster than prayer. She rolled, snatched an arrow, and came up on one knee.
Ewen was close. She could have tried to shoot him. She wanted to. She wanted to put an end to every hand that had dragged her, every threat, every dead white feather, every word that had tried to turn her into property.
But rage was a poor archer, and Ruaridh was still exposed. Two men nearest him had seen him lower his blade. One moved toward his flank, another toward Torin, both quick enough to take advantage before Ruaridh could recover from the shock of her movement.
Isobel nocked, drew and loosed. The arrow struck the first man high in the shoulder, spinning him aside before his blade could reach Ruaridh. She didn’t wait to see him fall.
Another arrow followed. The bow answered her hand, rougher than her own but willing. She drew again and found the man closing on Torin. She aimed low. The arrow drove into his thigh. He collapsed with a cry that vanished beneath the renewed roar of fighting.
“Move!” Brodie bellowed.
Isobel reached for another arrow, with fingers slick with mud and fear. Ewen still coming at her, rage twisting his face, but Ruaridh was moving, too. A third man lifted a knife behind Brodie. Isobel fired. The arrow struck his wrist. The knife flew from his hand, skidding across the ground.
The path to Ewen opened. Ruaridh took it.
There was no hesitation in him now. He crossed the space between them with such speed that Ewen barely had time to bring his sword up.
Their blades met with a violent crash that seemed to shake the whole camp.
Ewen staggered, recovered, struck back with a vicious slash toward Ruaridh’s side.
Ruaridh turned it aside. He was no longer the man who had lowered his sword for her. He was the man who had risen from that surrender with something beyond wrath inside him. Every restraint that had held him before had fallen away.
Ewen struck again. Ruaridh answered. Isobel could barely follow the movement. Ewen fought like a man accustomed to getting near enough to make others fear him. Ruaridh fought like a man who had already decided the outcome.
Ewen retreated a step, but his boot slipped in the mud. He caught himself and lunged low, aiming not for glory, but injury. Ruaridh turned his body, took the force along his blade, and drove his shoulder into Ewen hard enough to knock him sideways.
Ewen reached for the smaller knife at his belt. Isobel saw it.
“Ruaridh!”
He saw it, too. The final exchange came almost too quickly to understand. Ewen’s knife flashed upward. Ruaridh caught his wrist, twisted, and drove him back. Ewen snarled something Isobel couldn’t hear. Ruaridh’s blade rose, then fell. Ewen collapsed into the mud and did not move again.
For several seconds, the world seemed to continue without sound.
Moments later, Brodie barked an order, and a MacLean man answered hoarsely.
Torin stood over two fallen men, with his chest heaving and his gaze already searching for threats that no longer rose.
The camp had broken. The men who remained threw down weapons or were forced to the ground.
Isobel still held the bow. She could not seem to release it. Her arms trembled with the effort of keeping herself upright. Her cheek throbbed where Ewen had struck her, and her throat burned where the knife had kissed skin.
She blinked just once, and Ruaridh was before her. She had not seen him cross the space. One moment, he was standing near Ewen’s body, the next he was kneeling in the mud at her side.
“Isobel.”
His gentle hands came to her face first. It was almost impossible to reconcile those hands with the violence she had just seen, and yet they were the same hands. He was the same man. His thumbs brushed along her jaw, then paused at the red mark across her cheek. His expression fractured.
“He struck ye.”
“I struck him first,” she whispered.
Something like pain and pride moved together through his eyes. “Aye. Of course, ye did.”
His fingers lowered to her throat. When he saw the small cut there, the color left his face.
“It isnae deep.”
His hands moved over her arms, her shoulders, her wrists. He checked each place as if his touch could gather proof against the terror still living inside him. When he came to the wrist wrenched during her escape, she winced before she could hide it.
His eyes sharpened. “Here?”
“Sore only.”
He pulled her into his arms with a force that drove the breath from her, but she welcomed it, clung to it, folded herself into the hard warmth of him as if she might vanish otherwise.
She pressed her face into his shoulder. “I kent ye would come.”
His hand tightened. “I was late.”
“Nay.”
“I was.”
“Ruaridh.” She drew back only far enough to look at him. “Ye came.”
His eyes moved over her face as if he could not bear to stop looking. Then he bent and pressed his forehead to hers, heedless of blood, mud, smoke, or watching men.
Torin approached quietly and stopped a few paces away. His face softened when he looked at them, though the sword in his hand remained ready.
“We need tae move,” he told them.
Ruaridh nodded once, but did not look away from Isobel. “Can ye stand?”
“I think so.”
He helped her rise. She swayed as soon as her feet took her weight, and his arm came around her at once. She might have protested on another night, but not this one.
Brodie came near, his face grim and splattered with mud. He looked briefly at Isobel, then away, as though granting privacy by force of will.
“Ewen’s men are secured or dead. Two ran. Our men are tracking.”
“Let them run only if they run toward someone who should hear what happened here,” Ruaridh urged.
Brodie’s mouth tightened in approval. “Aye.”
Isobel looked once toward where Ewen lay. She expected to feel triumph. She did not. What came instead was a weary, hollow certainty. He was dead. The threat that had followed her from Inveraray, through Duart’s gates, into her sleep, into the dark kitchen, was gone.
Ruaridh followed her gaze.
“Dinnae look,” he told her softly.
“I saw enough.”
“Aye,” he nodded. “So did I.”
He took off his cloak and wrapped it around her shoulders, fastening it with hands that still trembled only when they touched her.
Then he kept her hand in his as they left the camp.
MacLean men moved through the trees around them, gathering the wounded and binding those who had yielded.
Torin walked close at their back. Brodie ranged ahead, making the path safe.
Their horses waited beyond the trees, restless and blowing white breath into the cold.
Ruaridh mounted first, then reached for her.
She let him lift her before him without pride or argument.
Once she was seated, his arms came around her to take the reins, enclosing her so fully that she felt, for the first time since waking from the nightmare, that the dark could not reach her.
They rode back to Duart as the night thinned. Isobel rested back against Ruaridh and felt the steady strength of him with every step of the horse beneath them. His arms tightened slightly.
“I thought I would lose ye,” he murmured.
She covered his hand where it rested at her waist.
“Ruaridh.”
“Aye?”
She turned enough to see him. In the growing light, his face looked drawn, marked by blood and exhaustion and something tender beyond concealment.
“I love ye.”
The words left her quietly. They came with the dawn, plain and certain, after the dark had done its worst and failed to take them from one another. Ruaridh went utterly still behind her. Then his eyes closed for one brief moment, as if he had been struck by mercy and did not know how to bear it.
“Say it again,” he whispered.
Her throat tightened, but she smiled. “I love ye.”
His arms came around her more fully. She felt his mouth press there through the cloak, felt the shudder move through him.
“I love ye,” he replied against her. “God forgive me fer every moment I made ye doubt it. I love ye, Isobel.”
She turned in his arms, careless of the awkwardness, and lifted one hand to his face. “I didnae doubt it when ye lowered yer sword, nor when ye were ready tae give him everything.”
Pain crossed his expression. “I would have.”
“I ken.”
“I would have given him Duart stone by stone if it kept ye breathing.”
“I ken,” she answered, and leaned her forehead against his. “But I wouldnae have let ye.”
For the first time since the camp, something like a broken laugh escaped him.
“Nay,” he replied. “I understood that.”
“Only now?”
His mouth curved faintly, though his eyes remained too bright. “I am a slow learner when terrified.”
She kissed him then. His hand rose to her cheek, careful of the bruise there.
The gentleness of it made her heart ache.
When she drew back, Duart was nearer. The castle stood on its height, dark against the brightening sky, its walls no longer the prison she had once feared, nor merely the fortress that had failed to keep danger out.
It was imperfect, wounded, watchful, but it was theirs and together, they rode toward it.