When a Laird Takes a Lady: A Claimed by the Highlander Novel Page 22

  “I disagree. He travels the roads alone and carries a sharp sickle at his belt.”

  “He could be a cad, or a thief,” he said. “We know nothing of him.”

  “The same could have been said about you,” Isabail pointed out. “Sometimes we must base our choices on the options presented to us, rather than on what we truly desire.” She rounded the campfire and joined the other two. “Ana? Might I have a word?”

  The two women stepped away, Ana limping stiffly. To Magnus’s relief, Isabail did not appear to coerce Ana into making a decision. She simply asked the healer a question and listened at length to the answer. Ana ended the conversation with a pat to her staghorn-handled dirk, and they returned to the fire.

  “If it is not too much to ask, Bhaltair,” Ana said to the old man, “I wonder if you might remain with me for a few days while I regain my strength? My companions have a pressing need to reach Tayteath forthwith, and I’m afraid my horsemanship is not up to the task.”

  Bhaltair nodded graciously. “Of course. In truth, it would be greatly to my benefit to spend a few days with such a learned herbalist.”

  Isabail smiled and returned to Magnus. “So, are you game to continue?”

  “Aye.” He helped her mount her horse. “This lad you’re so determined to save must be a very worthy sort to inspire such devotion.”

  She waited for him to vault into the saddle. “That he is, Magnus. That he is.”

  * * *

  By the time Niall returned with the news that Daniel de Lourdes had been identified by several of the villagers and that he had arrived at the keep with a young lad in tow, Aiden had reached a decision on how to breach the keep. Drawing a map in the snow, he shared his plan.

  “Our best option is to start here.” He pointed to the base of the cliffs. “At the evening low tide, we walk out to the base of the cliffs. From there, we scale the rocks until we reach the castle, and then we enter through a window.”

  “Climb the cliffs in the dark?” Niall asked.

  “It will be difficult,” acknowledged Aiden. “But the rear of the castle will be unprotected. We have a far greater chance of success with the cliffs than with a frontal attack.”

  Several of the men nodded, seeing the wisdom of his plan, but most remained silent. They would do whatever Aiden asked of them, but he wanted more than blind obedience. Pointing at the keep through the trees, he lowered his voice to a firm intensity. “Inside those walls lies the crown of our great ancestor, Kenneth MacAlpin. The last true king of the Picts. Do I want to retrieve it? Aye, I do. I’m sworn to protect it. But more important than any piece of treasure is kin. One of our own is held within that keep, perhaps in pain or suffering. Jamie is not only one of us; he’s the son of one of our finest warriors. He’s paid the greatest of sacrifices, losing his maither and his wee brother to a murdering thief. I, for one, am willing to pay the same price to see young Jamie freed. Are you with me?”

  This time the response was enthusiastic. “Aye!”

  Even Niall, who was a cautious fellow by nature, brought his fist to his chest with a resounding thump and joined the chorus.

  “Pack lightly and pack quick. We leave for the cliffs at nightfall.”

  * * *

  Isabail and her hired warrior arrived at Tayteath just as dusk was falling. Noting an air of quiet around the castle, she wondered what had become of the MacCurran. If not laying siege to the castle, where was he? Surely, he would have arrived well ahead of her.

  She voiced her thoughts to Magnus.

  “Were I him,” he said, “I’d be camped in that wood.” He pointed to a thick forest a half league to the west. “No sense alerting your enemy to your presence until you’ve gathered all the information you’ll need to breach his walls.”

  “Do you think you could you find him?”

  Magnus smiled. “Of course.”

  He spurred his horse into a canter and headed for the trees. Isabail did the same, even though she’d long since reached the limit of her endurance. Exhaustion tugged at her shoulders, and holding up her head had become a monumental chore. A short distance into the woods, Magnus reined in his mount and swung to the ground. “We walk from here.”

  “Why?”

  “The horses make too much noise. They’ll hear us long before they see us.”

  Isabail frowned. “Don’t we want them to find us?”

  “Find you? Aye. Find me? Nay.”

  “Do you have a grievance with the MacCurrans?”

  “Possibly,” he said, leading her through the brush and showing her where to step. At the short trill of a bird, he halted. “This is as far as I go. Head straight toward that half-fallen birch. If they’ve got their wits about them, as I suspect they do, they’ll find you within a pace or two beyond that.”

  She frowned. “And where will you go?”

  “I won’t be far,” he said. “If you run afoul of the MacCurrans, just yell. I’ll find you.”

  Isabail lifted the hem of her dress and ripped open the seam. She removed the silver deniers sewn there and pressed them into Magnus’s hand. “Thank you. I could never have made this journey without you.”

  He shoved the coins away. “Thank me after the lad is safe. Before that, there’s nothing to be rewarded for.”

  He gave her a gentle push in the direction of the fallen birch, then melted into the shadows and was gone.

  * * *

  Niall marched across the camp to Aiden’s side. “You’ll never believe whom we found in the woods.”

  Aiden glanced about. “Who?”

  He followed Niall’s pointed finger and found the disheveled yet still amazingly lovely face of Isabail Macintosh. “Bloody hell.”

  As she stepped out of the woods accompanied by two of his men, Aiden shook his head. “How is this possible?” he asked her. “How did you get here?”

  “Never mind how,” she said. “I’m just glad I arrived before you laid siege to the keep. I will go to the castle and demand entry. They are my men, so they’ll raise the portcullis, and we can enter without bloodshed.”

  He sighed heavily. “That won’t work.”

  “Of course it will.” She shot him an exasperated look. “Why is it men always want to solve problems with their swords?”

  He grabbed her elbow and led her out of the earshot of Niall and the others. He was tempted to kiss her, but thought better of it. She might get the idea that he approved of her reckless race across the countryside. “It won’t work because de Lourdes has replaced all your loyal soldiers with mercenaries from France.”

  “What?” She blinked at him.

  “Mercenaries,” he repeated. “The villagers confirmed it.”

  “Oh.”

  She looked so absolutely shattered by his news that he tugged her to his chest. “I know you were attempting to aid Jamie, and your efforts are appreciated,” he said softly into her hair. “Even though I should paddle your arse for coming all this way on your own.”

  “My bottom is quite sore enough,” she said, her voice muffled against his lèine. She sagged against him. “I truly believed I could help.”

  “I know.” He tipped her head up and planted a firm kiss on her lips. “Now, I must ask you to stay here and wait patiently for my return.”

  “Where do you go?”

  “We enter the keep tonight.”

  She frowned. “How?”

  “Promise me you’ll make no attempt to follow.” When she nodded, he explained. “Up the cliffs.”

  Her hands gripped the front of his lèine. “You’re mad. That’s a sure way to meet the Maker.”

  “For lads born in the Highlands, ‘tis a simple feat,” he assured her, even though it was no such thing. “And these Lowlanders will never expect it.”

  “I’ll be praying for your safety.”

 
“Will you?”

  She looked at him, her eyes dark and serious. “Do what you must, but come back alive.”

  “I’ll do my best.” He kissed her again, then let her go. “Stay out of trouble, lass.”

  “What trouble can I get into here in the wood?”

  He snorted. “You’ve a knack for finding it wherever you might be.” He turned to leave, but she caught his sleeve.

  “I love you,” she said quietly, as if haste would somehow minimize the importance of her words.

  His heart thumped heavily in his chest. He took her chin and peered into her face. It was a moment that begged for heartfelt words and promises of devotion, but saving Jamie would not wait. “I’m going to hold you to those words. When I come back, we’ll have the discussion we ought to have had some time ago.”

  And then he kissed her again. Hard. “Godspeed, lass.”

  * * *

  When the men had departed, Isabail lit a small fire. When she was certain the wood had caught, she sat on a stump with her hands toward the flames and finally let weariness curl her shoulders. She’d raced all this way—and forced Ana to race with her—for naught.

  Daniel was not at all the man she’d thought him to be. His betrayal of her was not some spontaneous thing, some madness. He’d been plotting against her for months. How else could he have replaced her soldiers? It was even possible, though it made her heart ache to contemplate it, that his love for John had been a sham, that John’s death hadn’t been the accident he insisted it had been.

  She tossed another branch on the fire and watched a plume of sparks leap into the night air. What a fool she was. Now Aiden was risking his life scaling the cliffs to her castle and she was unable to do anything but wait and pray.

  “I take it your plan to spare lives was not well received?”

  Isabail looked up. Magnus stood just inside the circle of light cast by the fire, the black outline of trees at his back.

  “It was a naive plan,” she responded dismally. Like all of her plans.

  He advanced. “It was born of a genuine desire to help the lad. Who could find a fault with that?”

  “Niall MacCurran for one,” she said bitterly. “I didn’t have the heart to tell him I dragged Ana along on my foolhardy quest and then left her in the woods with an old peddler.” She released a humorless laugh. “He’d have been completely distracted as he set off to scale a cliff to the castle, and I’d have another person’s blood on my hands.”

  “Ah,” he said, lowering himself to the log beside her. “Indulging in a wee bout of ‘pity me,’ are we?”

  She glared at him. All of it was true. Couldn’t Magnus see that?

  “You’ve never struck me as a lass given to weeping,” he said. “We are safe, Ana is safe, the MacCurran lads are about to surprise the castle guards, and your wee lad is about to be rescued. What’s there to weep about?”

  “All of this could have been avoided!” she cried, leaping to her feet. “If only I’d told MacCurran from the start that Daniel was after the necklace.”

  He stared at her. “Why didn’t you?”

  “In the beginning, I believed MacCurran might be guilty. Later . . . I don’t know. I suppose telling MacCurran felt like I would be betraying Daniel.” She shook her head. “In the end, he betrayed me.”

  “Well, ‘tis all water under the bridge now. Daniel will not escape his just dues.”

  Isabail frowned. Escape. That tugged at a memory—an old memory from when she was a child. She and John had played in the empty dungeons of Tayteath, a simple game of hide-and-chase. He’d leapt out of a hidden door and sent her screaming down the corridor.

  “Wait,” she said, grabbing Magnus’s sleeve. “There’s a door in the dungeons that leads to outside. If John told Daniel, Daniel can indeed escape.”

  Her hired warrior surged to his feet.

  “Show me where the door leads.”

  * * *

  Scaling the cliffs was a slow, arduous task. Footholds were scarce and narrow and sometimes crumbly. There were few outcroppings big enough to hold a man, so rest was infrequent. By the time Aiden was halfway up, his thighs were aching and his fingers were raw. But quitting wasn’t an option, so he pushed on.

  He glanced down only once, when he was a fair distance above the beach. The tide had started to come back in, and the sand had vanished. Waves beat slow and steady against the rocks, and his head swam with a dizziness that made him cling to the rock face.

  Since down was not a direction he wanted to experience, he focused on up. One toehold and push at a time.

  The men who followed him were equally silent and focused. Aiden heard the occasional scrape of a sword or a knife against rocks, but nothing more.

  When the gray stones of the castle came into view, Aiden found renewed strength. Their goal was in reach. He felt for a grip among the rocks over his head, found purchase for his right boot, and heaved his body another three feet up the cliff.

  A wide ledge was his next target—the ground on which the castle was built. Eager to plant his feet on solid ground again, he gripped the ledge with both hands and hauled himself over the lip. He lay there for a moment, catching his breath and offering a short prayer to the gods; then he leaned over and offered his hand to Niall.

  One by one the MacCurran men reached the top. Aiden could tell by the euphoric expressions on their faces that several of them had not believed they would make it.

  They paused on the ledge for a short while, allowing their shaking legs to recover.

  When Aiden was confident they were ready to move on, he waved Cormac forward.

  The bowman swung the crossbow from his shoulder. “Any one of you could do this,” he muttered. “Don’t need a skilled man to shoot a bloody bolt thirty feet into the air.”

  Aiden patted the man’s shoulder. “I need you to bury it in the stone next to the window”—he pointed above them—“deep enough to hold the weight of a man. At this angle, that requires a man with skill.”

  Cormac shrugged, aimed, and fired. The bolt, with rope attached, drove into the stone with a loud thunk. Aiden and the others flattened themselves against the castle wall and waited for someone to peer out the window. But none came.

  Aiden yanked on the rope, testing its solidity. It held firm. Then he wrapped his hands and feet around the rope and began to climb. By comparison to the cliffs, scaling the castle wall and entering through the window was easy. The room he slipped into was dark and small—an antechamber intended to house guards on watch. But it was empty.

  As the other men dropped into the room, Aiden quietly pulled on the door and peered into the larger room beyond. A bedchamber. Fortunately, the curtains on the bed were open and he was able to quickly ascertain this room was also empty.

  Widening the door, he stepped inside.

  The room was well appointed. Velvet draperies on the bed, an elaborate brocade coverlet, a ladies’ table replete with combs and mirrors. Just for an instant, Aiden’s thoughts went to Isabail. It was easy to imagine her here, attired in her finery, with a maid brushing her hair. Living in a ruined broch with no furniture did not suit her beauty. But this elegant castle did.

  He shook the mental cobwebs away, unsheathed his sword, and peeked past the outer door to the corridor. There were four guards stationed in the corridor, and as soon as his men joined him at the door, he swung it open and leapt to the attack. With the element of surprise in his favor, he made short work of this first opponent, then moved to the next.

  The clang of metal on metal soon drew other soldiers, and the battle thickened. Had they been fighting regular household guards, the fight would have ended swiftly. But these were seasoned warriors, not easily unnerved. They fought aggressively and with skill.

  It took Aiden longer to dispatch his second and third opponents than he had hoped. By the time he was free to
search the other rooms for Daniel and Jamie, they were empty. The door at the end of the corridor opened into a large chamber that clearly belonged to the lord of the keep.

  The bed sheets were rumpled, and Aiden noted the presence of a pallet on the floor at the foot of the bed. A manacle lay on the mattress. Anger surged through him. After all the lad had been through, he hardly deserved to be chained like a dog.

  “Search the chests,” he ordered. “Find the crown.”

  Then he dove for the stairwell. They couldn’t have gone far. If he was fleet of foot, he could end this now. Leaping several stairs at a time, he reached the great hall in a heartbeat. But Daniel and the boy were nowhere to be seen, Only a frightened group of gillies huddled by the fireplace.

  “Where?” he demanded.

  They pointed to the stairs leading to the dungeon, and he raced for the bottom.

  Chapter 15

  Moss had overgrown the secret exit door to the castle, and Isabail almost missed it.

  “Here,” she said, pointing to the dark brown wooden door. Rot had blackened the door in several spots, and it blended into the rock with great effectiveness.

  “No one has come through,” Magnus said. “I can enter, but I prefer you wait in the woods for me, not here on the cliffs.”

  Isabail had no argument about that. She was uncomfortable on the ledge, especially in the dark, with the wind tugging at her skirts. She inched her way back toward the trees, with Magnus following immediately behind her. When they reached the end of the sloping path, he lifted her up the remaining two feet to the plateau. As she paused to regain her balance, the door burst open and three soldiers stepped out onto the ledge, swords aloft.

  “Run,” Magnus urged her, as he drew his weapon and joined her on the plateau. Added height and a sturdy footing were clear advantages.

  Isabail ran into the trees, but did not go far. Outrunning an armed soldier wasn’t a future she could foresee, and leaving Magnus behind seemed not only unfair, but unwise. She hid behind the broad trunk of a Scots pine and with one hand to her madly thumping heart, watched her hired warrior battle for his—and quite possibly her—life.