Chapter 22
CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO
“Why did ye let me win?”
Colin’s mouth tightened, and she could see a stillness in his eyes. The laird was withdrawing behind the wall before the husband could betray himself.
“I didnae.”
She gave him a look. “Please dinnae insult me immediately after flattering me. It confuses the household order.”
His mouth almost moved. “Ye threw well.”
“I did. And ye threw worse than ye are able.”
“Perhaps ye overestimate me.”
“I have seen ye throw a dagger from horseback at a moving man.”
“That was different.”
“Yes. The man was trying tae kill ye, and yet ye seemed less troubled than ye were by a painted board.”
He glanced toward the target, then back at her. “Ye won. Take the victory.”
“I am taking it. I am merely inspecting it first for tampering.”
His gaze held hers for a long moment. Around them the feast continued in uneven bursts of sound.
A fiddle was scraping into a lively tune, men were laughing near the ale casks, and children were shrieking as they pursued one another through the grass.
Smoke moved low from the cooking fires, fragrant with meat and rosemary.
Somewhere, honey had spilled upon a table and drawn bees to circle drunkenly in the sun.
It should have been a happy scene. It was happy. Yet Colin’s attention had gone beyond her, to the edge of the meadow where his councilmen stood stiff and pale.
Elspeth followed his gaze. “What did they say?”
His eyes returned to her too quickly. “Naething ye need hear.”
“That is a very lordly way of saying they said something I absolutely need tae hear.”
“Elspeth.”
The warning in her name might have frightened a more obedient woman. She stepped closer instead.
“Tell me.”
His jaw worked once. “Nay.”
“Husband,” she said sweetly, and saw the word strike him as she had intended, “I won the right tae ask anything.”
“Aye. And I answered.”
“Poorly,” she supplied.
For a moment, something warm flickered between them. It was not ease, exactly, for they were not made for ease. But, it was something like recognition of his darkness, her defiance, and the strange thread that had begun to draw between them no matter how sharply each tried to cut it.
Then Colin sighed in a small surrender disguised as impatience.
“They spoke of ye poorly.”
The warmth vanished.
Elspeth felt herself go very still. “How poorly?”
“Poorly enough.”
The meadow seemed to tilt by a fraction. She looked again toward the men, but they had turned away, their shoulders rigid.
It had been foolish to think one thrown dagger could make her belong.
She was foolish to be moved by cheers, by children calling her name, by old women pressing food into her hands.
She was still the bought bride, still the Fraser girl brought to them through bargain, still an intrusion dressed in fine cloth and expected to learn gratitude for her cage.
Elspeth swallowed. “I didnae need ye tae protect me from words.”
“Aye,” he agreed quietly. “Ye didnae. But I needed them tae understand I would.”
The air between them changed. It was absurd that such words should affect her more dangerously than his hands had done. His hands made her body tremble. This… this reached some unguarded place in her.
She looked away first, because gratitude felt far too near tenderness, and tenderness toward Colin MacKenzie was a cliff one did not approach without worry.
“Then I shall ask me true question,” she continued.
His expression shuttered again, but not before she saw the slight quickening of interest.
“Ye have already asked one.”
“I won against a man who cheated himself. I believe I am owed a correction.”
“Convenient.” The faintest smile touched his mouth. “Ask, then.”
Elspeth’s courage wavered. It was one thing to challenge him before the clan with blades in hand. It was another to stand beneath the rowan trees, with music and sunlight around them, and lay bare the small hurt she had carried since morning like a stone beneath the tongue.
She glanced toward the dancers, toward Skye laughing with two young women near the tables and toward the children arguing over whether her throw had been luck or divine intervention.
Then, her eyes returned to Colin. “Why have ye been distant with me?”
The question left her more softly than she intended. Colin went still. He looked like a man struck somewhere he did not permit others to touch.
Elspeth regretted it at once and did not regret it at all.
His gaze moved over her face with such quiet intensity that the sounds of the feast seemed to retreat. For one suspended moment, there was only the scent of grass and smoke, the warmth of sun upon her cheek, and Colin looking at her as if the answer might cost him more than a wound.
He opened his mouth, but at that very moment, something hissed through the air. Colin moved before Elspeth understood the sound.
One instant, he stood facing her. The next, he seized her and turned, driving her behind his body with such force that breath left her lungs. She heard the wet, hard impact before she saw the arrow.
Colin jerked. His hand closed on her arm, his whole body changed, the force of him catching around pain. The arrow stood from his shoulder.
For one heartbeat, Elspeth could not understand what she was seeing. The shaft quivered near the dark leather of his doublet, fletching bright in the sun. A red stain began to spread around it, slow and then terribly fast.
“Colin,” she whispered.
His face was pale beneath its iron composure. “Down.”
Then the meadow broke. A scream tore from somewhere near the tables. Another arrow struck a trestle and sent a bowl of berries bursting across the cloth like spilled jewels. Horses thundered beyond the trees. Men shouted from three directions at once.
“Munro!”
The name cracked across the feast like lightning.
Robert’s soldiers came out of the edges of the world.
They were not many at first, dark figures spilling from the rowan line, from the low ridge near the heather, from behind the stone wall where the path bent toward the village.
But surprise made a few look like an army.
Women screamed and children froze. Cups fell, while the fiddler’s music broke into one last tortured note and stopped.
Colin shoved Elspeth behind a cart as an arrow snapped past the place her head had been.
“Stay down.”
“Ye are hit!”
His eyes cut to her. “Stay. Down.”
It was not a request. It was command sharpened by terror and fury together. Then he drew his sword with his uninjured arm and turned toward the first man rushing them.
Elspeth had seen Colin fight before. She had seen steel in a cathedral and blood upon stone. But never like this, never with an arrow buried in his shoulder and his face emptied of everything except purpose.
The attacker lunged. Colin killed him. There was no flourish in it, no grand story for songs, only a brutal economy of movement that made Elspeth’s stomach twist and her heart seize. Another man came from the side, with his blade raised, aiming not for Colin but for the space behind him.
For her.
Colin saw it. He stepped into the blow, took it on his sword, and drove the man back with such force that the attacker stumbled over a fallen bench. Colin followed, wounded shoulder useless but rage making a weapon of the rest of him.
“Elspeth!” Skye’s voice cut through the chaos.
Elspeth turned. Skye stood near the tables with a child in her arms and two more clinging to her skirts. Her face was white, but her eyes were steady.
“The women!” Skye shouted. “The children!”
For a moment, Elspeth’s whole body rebelled against leaving Colin. He was bleeding. He was fighting because of her. Every instinct in her screamed to reach him, to press her hands against the wound, to demand that the world stop until he could be tended to.
Then an arrow struck the ground a foot from the sleeping child who had earlier rested against her skirts. Elspeth moved. She gathered the little girl up so swiftly the child began crying only after she was already in Elspeth’s arms.
“Tae the lower wall!” Elspeth shouted, though she did not know when she had decided she had the right to command anyone. “Behind the carts! Move!”
Some heard her. Some were too frightened. An older woman stood frozen beside a fallen bench, staring at the fighting as if her mind had left her body to escape before the flesh could follow.
Elspeth seized her hand. “Now.”
The woman blinked.
“Move, or I shall drag ye, and neither of us will enjoy it.”
That worked. Around them, the meadow became a confusion of smoke, steel, and trampled grass.
Breac was everywhere at once, with his sword flashing, and his voice carrying above the panic as he drove men toward the ridge.
Murdoch fought near the tables with a hard, grim focus, using a broken trestle as much as his blade to keep attackers from the women.
Colin’s soldiers rallied quickly, pouring from the meadow’s lower edge, shields up, forming a rough line between the villagers and the men who had come to slaughter them.
The attackers expected panic to do half their work.
They were not expecting villagers to seize knives from feast tables.
They were not expecting old men to swing staffs with the fury of insulted kings.
They were not expecting women to throw hot stew into the faces of men trying to pass them.
They were not expecting Colin MacKenzie’s people to become, in one breath, a wall.
Elspeth pushed children behind the carts. Skye passed one infant to a grandmother and reached for another child crying beneath a table. Smoke stung Elspeth’s eyes. Someone’s blood darkened the grass near her foot. A boy no older than ten stood with a bread knife in his hand, trembling.
Elspeth took it from him. “Behind me.”
“But—”
“Behind me.”
He obeyed. Then, a man burst between two overturned benches, his face half-covered, and his blade drawn. His gaze found Elspeth, and something in it sharpened with recognition.
They were looking for her.
Her breath stopped. The man lunged. Elspeth swung the bread knife with more terror than skill. He caught her wrist, twisted, and pain shot up her arm. The blade fell. His other hand struck her side, then suddenly, cold fire opened along her ribs.
She gasped. Before the man could strike again, Skye came at him from the side with a stool in both hands and brought it down against his head with a crack that would have impressed a warrior and horrified a carpenter. The man dropped.
Skye stared at him, panting. “I have always disliked that stool.”
Elspeth almost laughed. Then the pain beneath her ribs bloomed hot and wet. She pressed a hand to her side. Her fingers came away red.
Nae too much, she told herself at once. Nae deep.
There was no space for fear, not while a child sobbed into her skirts, not while Colin bled somewhere behind the line of men and not while Robert Munro’s soldiers still came through the smoke.
“Are ye hurt?” Skye demanded.
“Nay.”
“Elspeth—”
“Nay.” Elspeth caught her friend’s wrist, leaving blood upon her skin. “Later.”
Skye’s eyes filled with furious terror, but she nodded.
They kept moving. More villagers reached the safety of the lower wall.
Men dragged carts into a barrier. The first wild panic began to change into organized resistance.
The attackers, pressed from the front by Colin’s soldiers and harried from the sides by villagers armed with whatever the feast had provided, lost their advantage with every passing breath.
Elspeth saw Colin again through a break in the smoke. He was still on his feet. Relief struck so hard her knees nearly failed.
Blood ran down his arm. The arrow remained in his shoulder. His face was set in a terrible calm, but his eyes searched the meadow even while he fought. They found her.
For one impossible second, battle vanished. He saw the blood at her side. The change in him was frightening.
“Elspeth!”
His voice tore across the meadow, not in command of a laird to clan, but something that made her heart answer despite the pain.
A soldier came at him from the left while he was looking at her.
“Colin!” she cried.
He turned in time. The blow glanced off his blade. Breac appeared behind the attacker and ended the danger with a savage stroke. Murdoch shouted an order. Colin’s men surged forward. The villagers roared with anger, grief, and the desperate refusal to be butchered on their own grass.
The attackers began to fall back one by one at first, then in a rush. They retreated toward the trees, dragging wounded men, loosing two final arrows that struck shield and earth. Colin’s soldiers pursued only far enough to drive them beyond the meadow’s edge. No one followed into the woods.
The feast lay ruined. Tables were overturned. Food was trampled. Music was silenced. Smoke was drifting where sunlight had been golden only moments before.
Elspeth stood among the women and children, with one hand pressed tight against her ribs, and the other still gripping a little girl’s shoulder.
Her breath came shallowly because deeper breaths hurt.
The world had grown strangely sharp at its edges with the copper smell of blood, the crushed sweetness of berries beneath her shoe, and the rough wool of Skye’s sleeve against her arm.
Colin was coming toward her. He moved too quickly for a man with an arrow in his shoulder and too grimly for anyone sensible to stand in his path. His face was pale, his eyes fixed only on her.
“Elspeth.”
There was too much in the way he said it. She meant to be brave. She meant to tell him she was not badly hurt, to demand he sit before he collapsed, to scold him for being struck by arrows as if the matter were merely poor manners.
Instead, when he reached her, the strength she borrowed from terror began to leave. She looked down at her red hand, then back at him.
“I think,” she said, with as much dignity as a woman bleeding at a ruined feast could command, “that Robert Munro is a very poor guest.”
Colin caught her just as her knees gave way.