Parris Afton Bonds (27 page)

The deep-set eyes beneath the grizzled brows looked troubled. “
I thought we would be using the sloop for escape."

He shrugged. “
If ’tis convenient, we shall. I’ll worry about that after we get there."

“
Relying on travel-weary mounts for escape could be hazardous," Ian said.

“
Could be. So could a lot of things." As if dismissing any further consideration of the possibility, he nudged his mount into a trot and called over his shoulder, "We leave the road at Glen Corries.”

At Glen Corries wilderness enveloped the party abruptly. Grouse exploded from the snow-crusted heather, startling Enya. Enormous red deer streaked between the white-shrouded pines and firs. A rising wind whistled through
the branches. She felt a growing sense of oppression, a surfeit of desolation, a savage monotony. She huddled deeper in the folds of her cloak and blessed the heat rising off her plodding pony.

On and on the group traveled. Enya could never remember being
so weary. When only eerie light floated amid the trees Ranald called for camp that night. The mounts were staked. A warming fire was built. Its orange tongues spit and crackled and drove back the demons of the dark.

Hunks of bread, cheese, and cold mutton
were distributed to Enya and the other silent travelers. Each knew the rigor that awaited on the morrow, when the more arduous part of the climb over the top would begin.

For her part, her toes and fingers and nose felt frostbitten. She wondered if she wo
uld ever know the sunlight of the Lowlands again.

Ranald moved among his men. An exchange here, a nod there.

Enya was reluctant to leave the reassurance of the fire and her mother, Duncan, and the other Lowlanders who found this land as hostile as she.

Duncan
’s lovelorn gaze was riveted on Mhorag. Apparently, she was determined to distance herself from him and had elected to sit among the reivers.

Too soon, Ranald returned to the circle of firelight. His hand touched her shoulder. "We turn in now." That
one gesture told everyone she was still his property.

Arch made a movement, as if preparing to defend her, but he sank back down at her mother
’s touch at his forearm, calming yet restraining.

Enya wanted to respond that she wasn
’t ready, but, in truth, she welcomed the warmth of his massive body. Only a man built as he was could offer the kind of nurturing protection her own tall, solid body sought. She would sorely miss the security the big man’s embrace and those powerful arms offered.

She stood up beside
him. Enfolding her in the sheltering folds of his great cape, he drew her apart from the others to a bed of leaves and dirt he must have mounded himself when he was making his rounds.

Sinking into the bower, she tried to make light of her melancholy. "Did
one of your trowies build our bed, my laird?"

He lay down alongside her and gathered her against his length, spoon fashion. His lips against her ear, he said, “
Dinna jest about the wee folk. Like the monster of Loch Ness, they teach us to believe in something we canna see. You understand me?”

The wind howled. It tore at the travelers’ clothing. Enya pulled her tartan scarf up over her nose and mouth. Worried for her mother, she glanced back. Kathryn was riding pillion with Arch, who was taking the brunt of the blizzard.

When the wind abated it left in its wake an intense cold that felt to Enya as if it were freezing her flesh to her bones. The very rocks seemed to groan. Limbs snapped. Bare branches scraped icy fingers against these intruders o
f Buachaille Etive’s jagged summit. Then even the trees seemed to give up their precarious hold on the granite, brooding massif.

Now only the huge hump of rock, white-coated, opposed the travelers
’ descent to the other side. Her horse’s hooves slipped and slid on the murderous rock. She noticed that the other mounts were blowing wind puffs up and down their forelegs.

Again the wind arose to hound the travelers. The blizzard drove sand and sleet and snow with stinging force. Despite Enya
’s gloves, her fingers would temporarily freeze in their clutched positions on the reins, and she would have to flex her hands to restore the circulation. She couldn’t feel any sensation at all in her feet.

Ranald stood up in the stirrups and had to shout a halt to make himsel
f understood above the wind’s roar. When they paused in the lee of a rock wall she half fell into his arms. Her own, and her legs, were stiff and cramped from the agonizing cold. He peeled away the icy-wet tartan that covered her nose and mouth. “’Tis doing more harm than good now.”

He held her against him and chafed her arms and back and shoulders. For all too brief a moment it was a heavenly respite. Then he restored her to her saddle and called out for the march to resume. After that he called halts at o
ne-hour intervals, with five-minute rests.

Seventeen hours passed in this way, with a little less than twenty kilometers transversed. Night came, yet the caravan continued its trek.

Toward dawn, Enya’s pony was dying of exhaustion. She turned her back while Ranald disposed of the animal. Mercifully, the wind’s shriek was loud enough that she just barely heard his pistol’s retort.

Now, she, too, rode pillion, her arms wrapped around the steely strength of his body. By the time a gray dawn filtered through th
e denuded limbs of wind-twisted trees, the storm had blown past. Still, the air was bitter cold. Her lips were actually bleeding, and her face and hands were chapped and raw.

When Ranald called the first halt in the light of day she saw that the rest of th
e party had fared no better. It was a scraggly, weather-beaten bunch that had not the slightest semblance to the legendary Ranald’s Reivers.

A serene loch, reedy around the edges, its surface frosted with mist, was the first indication to Enya that the wor
st of the weather was behind them. The horses cropped at the thin grass poking through soggy dunes, as she and the other riders, dazed, nibbled on the stores of food in their saddles and talked quietly among themselves, as if in awe that they had survived.

Duncan and Arch appeared to be tending the weary mount that had transported both the priest and her mother. Enya went to see about her mother and Elspeth, the frailest of the travelers. Both women looked like mummies but had proven themselves hardy. “
Take more ’n a blizzard to do me in," Elspeth said.

Kathryn was comforting Annie, who trembled uncontrollably. "The journey will soon be over, lass."

"Give her whiskey," Mhorag suggested. “If it doesn’t kill her, then the kirk’s punishment will.”

Enya almost s
miled, but the movement of her cracked lips hurt too much. She sagged down atop a marshy knoll. She tried to remove one riding boot, but her hands wouldn’t cooperate.

"Here, let me,”
Ranald said, coming to kneel before her and brush away her fumbling fingers. First one boot, then the other, then he peeled away her wet merino stockings. He cradled her foot in his large, callused hands and briskly massaged her blue-tinged flesh. "Knox should be showing sail sometime today."

She stared down at the indomitable, unyielding, and taciturn countenance. Could she believe in something she could not see?

Then, when she raised her gaze, what she did see shot horror through her heart.

Chapter Seventeen

T
he regiment commander astride the white stallion, Simon Murdock, knew the fifty-odd riders in Ranald’s Reivers’ party did not stand a chance against the surprise attack by the British patrol. Although only thirty-two strong, his own red-coated force crested the low-lying hills and rode down upon the dismounted, weather-whipped party.

At the burst of musket fire dozens of the frightened Highlanders plunged into the water. Those stragglers at the back of the group bounded onto their horses and fled back up the trail.

Their escape went hardly noticed. For one, the wind was so strong, Murdock’s Lobster- backs were blinded by their own gunsmoke. For another, his British patrol was drawn from dregs of society and cared not a whit for military tactics.

Then, too, he, himself, had his
sights on only one man in particular. The tall, brawny man could be no other than the legendary Ranald. The red-haired wench with him had to be the Lady Enya.

Just as Ian Cameron
’s message had warned— the reivers were headed for Loch Leven. Only earlier than spring thaw, as the message had indicated.

With just such a precaution in mind, Simon Murdock had forsaken the warmth of his office to ride patrol in the Loch Leven area. He dug his spurs into the flanks of his prized horse, gouging flesh. He wanted to
be the first to reach the pair, to take Lady Enya from the reiver before he killed him.

Only then would he turn his attention to the Lowland lass, his tainted bride.

Ranald shoved Enya behind the nearest dune, a bracken-crested hill that afforde
d little concealment. He thrust a flintlock pistol into her hands. "Load it!”

Without pausing to think, she did as she was told. She was helping her sworn enemy
—the love and passion of her life.

While he rammed grapeshot into his musket barrel and then fir
ed, she jammed ammunition into his flintlock pistol. He exchanged the empty musket for the loaded flintlock and raised the sight to his eye to fire again. A red coated rider somersaulted from his saddle.

Alternately, she continued to load the pistol and th
e musket. At the same time she darted anxious glances around, trying to locate her loved ones.

At another sand dune, Arch caught a pistol and ammunition pouch tossed by Patric. Kathryn and Elspeth crouched behind Arch and the young reiver. Concealed by ano
ther sand dune were Ian and Jamie, who had taken Annie under his wing.

Duncan? Her heart lurched.

Her gaze sped across the dunescape, past the sight of white sails, and encountered Mhorag. Ranald’s sister stood upright to fire upon a Lobsterback riding full tilt toward her.

The musket misfired. The red coated rider flung himself atop the breeches-clad woman. The pair tumbled, wrestled, grappled for supremacy. Sand spewed, making difficult the distinction between the two.

Then Enya spotted Duncan. He sprinted toward Mhorag and her assailant. He wrested the man from her and began pummeling him with his fists. As if dazed or blinded by the sand, Mhorag stumbled backwards.

Enya saw another mounted soldier charge toward Mhorag.
Saber drawn, the rider hurtled toward the woman who had made Enya’s life such a misery at Lochaber Castle. Ranald’s sister despised Enya and would have killed her had she had the courage. Now, within the space of seconds, Mhorag would join her parents and her infant son.

At that same moment, from the corner of her eye, Enya sighted a British officer galloping on a white stallion toward herself. "Lady Enya!" he called.

Ranald appeared distracted by a burst of musket fire off to his left. Escape was hers! Not an instant was left to spare.

Yet, instead of fleeing to the safety of the officer
’s outstretched arm, she raised the pistol she had just loaded and fired at Mhorag’s attacker. With an ear-deafening retort the saber-wielding Redcoat was hurled backward.

In the next moment Enya whirled back to see Ian limp from the cover of the dune. He waved his arms to get the officer
’s attention. "Murdock! Tis Cameron. Ian Cameron."

The officer did not swerve his steed from the path of the Highlander. In horror, Enya wa
tched the great animal trample Ian. The man bounced and rolled like a rag doll. With a soul-piercing shout, Jamie dashed toward his father and gathered the broken body in his arms.

The officer
’s frothing white horse stumbled and broke stride. The man lost his balance and was pitched from his saddle, his highly polished Hessian boot catching in the stirrup. The frightened horse regained its footing and shot forward. It dragged the officer, as it would a plow, across the bracken and sand and rock.

At that, th
e remainder of the patrol reined in on their mounts and turned tail. Musket in hand, Ranald sprinted toward the loch's shoreline, where the white stallion had come to a panting halt. Its reins dangled in the foaming water.

She ran behind Ranald, caught up
with him just as he knelt over Simon Murdock. His face was unrecognizable—a mass of torn flesh where lips and nose and eyes had once been. She felt like gagging.

Ranald reached into the vest pocket and withdrew a leather pouch. He balanced it in his palm,
as if weighing it value.

"What is it? Is it important?”

His fingers closed over the pouch. A muscle in his jaw twitched. "I watched him take a knife to my brother’s testicles and, holding aloft the skin, claim what a grand tobacco pouch it would make.”

She
shuddered, put her hand to her mouth. “No. No one can be that—"

"At that moment," he continued dispassionately, "I knew I would find a way to kill Murdock. One day, some way, I would slay the monster."

“You didn’t have to,” she murmured. "His stallion did it for you.”