Chapter Two
Logan Cameron, eldest son of Constantine and Ismay, adjusted his heavy belt around his waist and stepped outside his stone house at the foot of Ben Nevis.
Several dirks clinked together from the belt.
A claymore swaying over one hip and a short sword dangling from the other gave away nothing about his condition.
His condition that had ended his fighting career.
Would that he had died. What good was his life, helpless to fight for king and country?
He squinted up at the sun and unfastened the laces at his collar.
Another hot day. Good. He liked practicing under the sun.
He liked it under the moon, as well. If he was swinging his blade, he was happy—even if he could only swing with one arm.
His left arm was slowly improving. He could feel sensations in his hand, and he was able to lift it almost to his waist. But to be honest, the recovery was incredibly slow.
Six years felt as if fifteen years had passed.
There were days, much like this one, when he didn’t think he was needed any longer. He could barely swat a gnat out of his way, let alone a sword.
So, he practiced fighting with his right hand every day until he grew more proficient with it. One day, he would step onto the battlefield again. He would be ready, with or without the use of his left arm.
He heard laughter echoing beyond the glen and recognized the sounds of two of his cousins.
He drew his claymore with his right hand and walked into the glen. After three swings, Jamie Cameron, son of Lachlan and Joan called out.
“Ye mean ye cooked and ate breakfast withoot us?”
Logan smiled and shrugged his shoulders. “When I say sunup, that is what I mean.”
“But ye know ye cook better than Clarence the cook at Tor,” Jamie whined. The golden-haired highlander possessed the charm of his father and the resilience and staunch loyalty of his mother.
“Leave him be, Jamie, ye bastard,” Steafan MacDonald, son of Geoffry and Stel MacDonald warned and strode to Logan. When he stood only inches away, he unsheathed his sword. “I’ll fight ye.”
Logan’s smile widened. He loved these fools. They had saved his life, not to be cruel but because they considered him their leader. For that, and for who they were to him—his kin—he would do anything.
“I saved some food fer ye, Jamie,” he called out, then laughed briefly when his cousin hurried up toward the house.
“Has Ewen no’ returned from his journey to Dunley?” he asked Steafan, readying his sword.
“Are ye so vain that ye ask trivial questions when ye should be devising yer strategy against me?” his MacDonald kin asked.
“’Tis no’ vanity, Cousin. If I sound convinced that I can trounce yer arse from here back to the castle, ’tis because I can.”
He feigned a blow to Steafan’s side, to which Steafan answered too quickly with a jab to where Logan’s most vulnerable spot should have been. Instead, he felt the blunt of Logan’s hilt to the back of his head.
Logan stepped over him and waited for him to get back to his feet.
“What do ye think aboot me givin’ Dunley Keep to Ewen?
” He blocked a strike of Steafan’s sword to his neck and swung hard enough, though he only used one hand, to knock Steafan’s blade out of his hand.
“’Tis certainly in poor condition,” Logan continued as Steafan’s sword flew over his shoulder, “but he found me there.”
Steafan nodded, “As long as ye give me Inverlochy Castle when King James grants it to ye.”
“’Tis yers,” Logan promised. He didn’t care about castles, since Tor would likely become his.
“I’ll tell Ewen when he returns. Dunley Keep is his.”
His cousin raised his blade over his head after retrieving it and brought the iron down on Logan’s sword. Lights burst into existence between his face and Steafan’s. Logan held fast when their blades slid down to the hilts.
Holding Steafan off with his right arm, Logan hooked his ankle around Steafan’s and brought the beefy Highlander to his arse.
Reaching down, Logan helped his fallen cousin to his feet and swiped dust from Steafan’s tunic.
Steafan slapped his hands away. “Dinna pity me, Logan. I dinna lose to anyone but ye. And I dinna even know how ye do it…and with one arm!”
“I dinna consider what I canna do. I think aboot ye and Jamie and Ewen, and I think aboot what I can do.”
Steafan grinned at him. “Ye do it well, ye bastard.”
“My thanks fer sayin’ so,” Logan told him with a pat on the back as they left the glen. “Though all my toil at regainin’ my strength and skill does me nae good if I canna fight fer Scotland.”
They walked up the short hill at the base of the mountain and entered Logan’s smaller, thatched roof house parallel to his father’s two-story stone house, both built low against the wind.
They found Jamie in the Main Hall standing over a thick wooden table near the great hearth and shoving a hardboiled egg into his mouth. When he saw Logan, he grinned happily.
Logan wished Ewen was here. Ewen was more like his brother than his cousin.
All his cousins had been raised together.
He spent the most time with Jamie under the watchful eyes of their mothers.
But it was Ewen with whom Logan felt the closest. They had gotten into trouble the most—mostly trouble Logan had led them into.
The oldest of the cousins, despite being only two months older, Logan and Ewen were allowed to explore as far as Torlundy at the age of ten summers old.
But battle burned fiercely in Logan’s blood, and by the time he was twelve, he’d convinced his parents to let him go serve King Charles.
They had finally agreed, and from there Logan trained to be in the King’s Royal Army. By the time he was ten and five, he was granted his wish by being put in the king’s sixth regiment. Once he started fighting, he was more convinced than ever that he was born to battle.
He never lost to anyone, but one man. Lord William Woodburn, leader of a group of Protestants in his region.
Logan knew Woodburn would come to be prominent and powerful in the Protestant movement.
He and others of like mind believed the king should succumb to the power of the kirk.
They believed God held the utmost authority over everything.
Logan’s kin believed the same thing—and who gave the king all his authority? God.
But as wide as the bridge to friendship between them was, it wasn’t their religious or political views that drove Woodburn to attack Logan and take him prisoner in his keep in Dunley.
Logan had first seen Woodburn’s daughter when he’d separated from his cousins’ camp in the woods beside the river Teith to look for breakfast.
He had spotted a fairy instead. She was bending to a rabbit in a sunlit clearing, her delicate profile lit by a healthy glow.
Two butterflies fluttered around her halo of pale yellow waves swaying softly in the summer breeze.
He’d tried to stay away. But on the second day, when he should have been concerned with the enemy Covenanter, he found himself back at the clearing, watching from behind the trees for her return.
She never saw him, either the first morning or the next.
But her father had. Woodburn’s men had surrounded him and fought with him.
Sixteen to one. Finally, after he’d felled most of them, Woodburn stabbed him in, or near his heart.
He hadn’t known at the time. But he still could remember the sensation of fading away.
They beat him when he was dying and helpless and took him to Dunley Keep and to the baron’s dungeon.
He’d woken up twice while he was chained up there. Once, to realize that, sadly, he was not dead. And then once more when he dreamed that, at last, he had died and woken up with an angel.
He didn’t remember much after that—not until he’d woken up in Tor Castle with his kin around his bed.
From how they told it, his cousins had found him in Woodburn’s dungeon after discovering the baron’s men he’d fought in the clearing. They had arrived at the Covenanter’s holding, found Logan, and burned down the keep.
He knew he had much to be thankful for, but he was not always filled with gratitude. The lass he had almost died over was now dead herself. The enemy’s sword hadn’t pierced his heart but did more damage to his left arm and shoulder.
It left him unable to fight again.
“My sister, Scout, wants to wed an Irishman,” Jamie said when Logan entered the Main Hall.
“Why are ye tellin’ me and no’ my father?” Logan asked him, pouring a cup of water for Steafan and himself. “Marryin’ an Irishman isna as bad as weddin’ a Covenanter. I doubt the lochiel will refuse to allow it.”
Jamie’s smile brightened. “That is what I was hopin’ ye would say. Scout seems mightily taken with him. She would be heartbroken if the union was denied.”
“Is he a soldier?”
“Aye,” Jamie told him, popping another egg into his mouth.
“Then she will have enough heartache.”
Steafan agreed, and then, after another moment, Jamie agreed, as well.
All their mothers paid the price for having husbands who were soldiers.
Logan remembered the nights his mother sat around the great hearth at Tor Castle waiting for her husband to return from fighting for the king.
Thankfully, none of the Camerons or MacDonalds perished in the battles of those days.