Sound of the Heart
Read Sound of the Heart Online
Authors: Genevieve Graham
PRAISE FOR
Under the Same Sky
“A beautifully written, riveting novel that had me hooked from the opening sentence. Genevieve Graham is a remarkable talent.”
—Madeline Hunter,
New York Times
bestselling author of
Dangerous in Diamonds
“
Under the Same Sky
weaves together the lives of its two protagonists with such skill and poetry it’s like entering a dream, one that will leave you both marveling and richly sated.”
—Shana Abé,
New York Times
bestselling author of
The Time Weaver
Berkley Sensation titles by Genevieve Graham
UNDER THE SAME SKY
SOUND OF THE HEART
Sound of the Heart
G
ENEVIEVE
G
RAHAM
THE BERKLEY PUBLISHING GROUP
Published by the Penguin Group
Penguin Group (USA) Inc.
375 Hudson Street, New York, New York 10014, USA
Penguin Group (Canada), 90 Eglinton Avenue East, Suite 700, Toronto, Ontario M4P 2Y3, Canada (a division of Pearson Penguin Canada Inc.) • Penguin Books Ltd., 80 Strand, London WC2R 0RL, England • Penguin Group Ireland, 25 St. Stephen’s Green, Dublin 2, Ireland (a division of Penguin Books Ltd.) • Penguin Group (Australia), 250 Camberwell Road, Camberwell, Victoria 3124, Australia (a division of Pearson Australia Group Pty. Ltd.) • Penguin Books India Pvt. Ltd., 11 Community Centre, Panchsheel Park, New Delhi—110 017, India • Penguin Group (NZ), 67 Apollo Drive, Rosedale, Auckland 0632, New Zealand (a division of Pearson New Zealand Ltd.) • Penguin Books (South Africa) (Pty.) Ltd., 24 Sturdee Avenue, Rosebank, Johannesburg 2196, South Africa
Penguin Books Ltd., Registered Offices: 80 Strand, London WC2R 0RL, England
This book is an original publication of The Berkley Publishing Group.
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, business establishments, events, or locales is entirely coincidental. The publisher does not have any control over and does not assume any responsibility for author or third-party websites or their content.
Copyright © 2012 by Genevieve Sawchyn.
Excerpt from
Under the Same Sky
by Genevieve Graham copyright © 2012 by Genevieve Sawchyn.
All rights reserved.
No part of this book may be reproduced, scanned, or distributed in any printed or electronic form without permission. Please do not participate in or encourage piracy of copyrighted materials in violation of the author’s rights. Purchase only authorized editions.
BERKLEY SENSATION
®
is a registered trademark of Penguin Group (USA) Inc.
The “B” design is a trademark of Penguin Group (USA) Inc.
PUBLISHING HISTORY
Berkley Sensation trade paperback edition / May 2012
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Graham, Genevieve.
Sound of the heart / Genevieve Graham.—Berkley Sensation trade paperback ed.
p. cm
ISBN 978-1-101-56907-8
1. Soldiers—Scotland—Fiction. 2. Scotland—History—18th century—Fiction. I. Title.
PR9199.4.G723S68 2012
813'.6—dc23
2011051706
For Dwayne, my real life hero.
Contents
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
I must start with thanking my brilliant editor, Wendy McCurdy. Without her insistence that I write the companion to
Under the Same Sky
, this book might never have come into being. And thank you to my exceptional, always gentlemanly agent, Jacques de Spoelberch, who asked me that day, “So do you think there’s a story?” To which I, of course, replied that there definitely was. For sure. Then I ran around shrieking, tearing my hair out, praying for a story to fall out of the sky and land on my pages. Fortunately, Dougal arrived to save the day.
Thank you to all the friends and family who read my early drafts and assured me this novel was as good as the first one. And to those friends and family who haven’t read it until now, thank you for supporting me blindly. Your belief in me means so much.
Thank you to my online friends and editing clients who have encouraged me all along this exciting process. And to the generous book bloggers and reviewers who helped a debut author reach further than I ever imagined I could.
Working with history allows me to meet passionate people who are often generous when asked to help. Without Scotland’s Lawrence Clark, bushcraftventures.co.uk, I’m not sure how Dougal would have survived such a tight spot. Thanks, Lawrence.
Thank you Kaki Warner, Joanna Bourne, and Madeline Hunter, wonderful authors all, for taking me under your beautiful wings.
Thanks, Mom, for always believing I could do whatever I said I wanted to do.
Thank you to everyone who loved
Under the Same Sky
and recommended it to their friends. It’s an honor I never dreamed possible.
Most of all, thank you to the patient, generous, wonderful love of my life, Dwayne.
And thank you to the loves of
our
life, Emily and Piper.
And Murphy the dog.
And the chickens.
PART 1
Dougal
CHAPTER 1
One of Many
Dougal was no stranger to the voices of the dying. He was a warrior, born and trained to kill. Death was simply part of his life. In the heat of battle, blood roared so ferociously through his head, he barely heard the sounds of men drawing their last breath.
But on this bloody morning in April 1746, one voice cut through the curtain of noise. The sound was small, almost buried beneath the misery, and yet he heard it, a voice he knew so well: his father’s voice.
His father had known this would not go well. Earlier that morning, Dougal had looked into Duncan MacDonnell’s liquid blue eyes, tearing from the cold, and had seen the knowledge. When Duncan gathered his sons to him for what would be the final time, there was defiance in the set of his bearded chin.
“I’m proud o’ ye, my lads,” his father had said. “An’ I’m proud to be here wi’ ye.”
Dougal remembered the weight of his father’s hand as it had clapped on to his shoulder. Then the cannon had started up and the hand was gone, grabbing for pistol and sword.
When the battle began, the four had gone in together as they always did—Dougal, his brothers Andrew and Ciaran, and their father Duncan. Andrew always ran at Dougal’s right flank, his father and their younger brother, Ciaran, at his left. The MacDonnell men fought in pairs. Dougal and Andrew had trained to fight side by side, covering each other’s more vulnerable points. Together they were an invincible force. Since Ciaran was the youngest, he and their father fought together, Duncan taking Ciaran’s weaker side. But when Dougal looked beside him sometime later, it was his father, not Andrew, next to him. The English had managed not only to decimate the Scottish army, as ragtag as it was, but to fracture his family’s tiny battalion.
“Where are your brothers?” his father had hollered. They seemed to have vanished, swallowed up by the smoke-heavy mist.
Dougal glanced around and spotted Andrew, leaning in to take a swipe at a redcoat. Ciaran was a few steps back, watching, sword at half-mast. Andrew finished defending his younger brother, then swung around and yelled something Dougal couldn’t hear. But in Dougal’s mind Andrew’s words were clear:
“Kill or be killed, Ciaran! Fight, damn it!”
“There, Da!” Dougal yelled, pointing across the field. “Andrew’s just saved Ciaran’s arse again.”
His father nodded shortly, his face haggard behind a shaggy beard. “They’ll do. Let’s you and I go then.”
The two roared into the thick of things, black-haired demons with fury burning in their eyes.
But now the fire had been extinguished from his father’s. One minute he was beside Dougal, cursing the English in furious Gaelic, hacking through them as if he swung an axe through trees. Then he was on his knees, gaping into the victorious expression of one of them. The soldier’s bayonet was sunk deep in Duncan’s chest. Duncan’s filthy hands, emptied of their own weapons, clutched at the blade, heedless of its edge as it sliced through his fingers.
Dougal thrust his sword through the soldier’s back, then fell to his knees at his father’s side.
“Da?” he cried. “Da!”
Duncan’s eyes had begun to glaze into an opaque stillness Dougal had seen too many times. Blood snaked from the corner of Duncan’s mouth, but he tried to smile, pulling back his lips and showing teeth dark with blood.
“Proud of ye, son,” he grunted.
“No, Da! Hold on!”
But Dougal knew, as his father knew. Nothing could be done for Duncan.
They were in an area to the side of the main field, slightly out of the range of the oncoming missiles of grapeshot and cannonball. Dougal dragged the anchor of his father’s body out of the way, avoiding the incoming tide of foot soldiers. Duncan needed his son, needed
someone
, and everyone else was gone. Dougal hunched beside the shuddering body, bracing his father with one arm, gripping his sword defensively with the other. Just before he had to rise and fight, he heard his father’s last breaths, a weak gasp, then a lifeless whistle as his lungs released air for the final time.
“No!” Dougal cried, rage and grief roaring like flames in his chest. His breath came in gasps as he set his father on the ground and bent over the still chest, forcing tears to stay within. There was no time for them now. “I fight for you, Father,” he said, then leaned forward to kiss the clammy brow.
Turning away, Dougal threw himself into the battle like a man possessed. These men would pay. They would pay with their meaningless lives for the only one that had mattered. Dougal was a
ban-sidhe
, a whirling monster sick with rage, black eyes burning through a face smeared with filth and blood.
Such was his trance that he didn’t notice the five sweat-soaked redcoats surrounding him until the black mouths of their muskets yawned at his head.
“’Allo, you scum-suckin’ toad,” one yelled over the battle noise, peering at Dougal through his sights. He took a moment to spit to the side and peruse the fallen bodies at Dougal’s feet, then set his chin back to the handle and squinted. “We’ll ’ave yer ’ead for all this mess, we will.”
Dougal stood panting, his face twisted with fury, either hand clenched around the hilt of a different sword. He drew a blackened arm across his brow to clear his eyes of stinging sweat, lifting his upper lip in an instinctive display of teeth. “No’ one of ye to pull the trigger? Go on then. Afraid I’ll come back from the grave to haunt ye? Clever bastards, ye are. For I will. I will remember each of ye. I’ll tear yer hearts through yer teeth while ye watch.”
A cannonball ripped through the air twenty feet away, crashing through trees, men, mules, anything in its path. Muskets flashed, men shouted, but the nervous glance exchanged by a couple of the soldiers seemed more related to Dougal’s threat than to the obvious physical one. They shuffled nervously and two muskets wavered, but at a grunt from the lead soldier, they snapped back into position.
The first soldier smiled and gave Dougal a knowing wink. “You ain’t comin’ back, mate. Where you’re off to, they don’t let you come back. Tell you what, though. We won’t kill you just this minute. We’ll ’ave a bit of fun with you first, right? And when we’re done, I’m willing to wager you’ll wish one of us ’ad shot you. An’ then maybe we’ll just take you wif us when we go ’ave a little visit with your mother and sisters, shall we?” He nodded at Dougal’s two swords, dark with blood, held in readiness at the warrior’s front and side. “Drop those, would you?”
“I won’t,” Dougal assured him.
The soldier shook his head with apparent disappointment, as if Dougal were an obstinate child requiring discipline. “Oh, you will.” He jerked his chin toward a soldier behind Dougal, who, on cue, slammed his musket into the base of Dougal’s skull.
W
hen Dougal awoke, he lay on his stomach, unable to move. He opened his eyes but kept his head down, leaving his cheek to chill on a bed of mud. The air was still, its quiet engulfing the ringing in his ears. Battle sounds had ceased. It was done. The back of his head felt as if a horse’s hoof had dug into it, with the weight of the beast behind it, and his eyes throbbed from the pressure. His shoulders ached. He tried to bring one palm to his forehead but discovered his hands were tied and bound behind his back. His feet were tied as well.
So,
he thought.
My head isna the worst of my worries.
He wasn’t alone. He lay among others of his kind, all similarly trussed, most groaning with pain. From his vantage point, facedown in the dirt, Dougal didn’t think any of them seemed too badly injured. That meant, he assumed, they were to become prisoners of the damn English dogs, slaves to their demeaning whims. From the furious Gaelic grunting going on around him, Dougal knew some of the men here would rather die than face that prospect. Rather slit their own throats than submit to English rule. But Dougal had other thoughts. He would survive, if only to make the English regret everything they had done to him. To his father. To his brothers.
Where were his brothers? Not here in this writhing mass of captives. He studied the group as closely as he could, checking each dirty face, listening for familiar voices, but found nothing of them.
Very carefully, trying to ignore the crushing agony at the back of his neck, Dougal turned his head so he faced the battlefield. As he’d thought, the fight was done. A pall of thick smoke still hung in the mist, stinking of sulphur and death. Wincing at the pain, he peeled his cheek from the wet ground so he could see farther. He narrowed his eyes, watching dark, red-tinged figures wander through the field. Occasionally the sharp crack of a musket cut through the fog. Putting the badly injured out of their misery, he figured. Maybe that was a blessing, to end the suffering. If they weren’t hurt too badly, it appeared they ended up here on the ground, tied like a beast.
Dougal’s gaze picked out two of the distant soldiers and followed their movements. They walked, stopped, then leaned down, jerked back up, and repeated the motion. Strangled sounds of men were cut suddenly short. Dougal shuddered and thought of his brothers again, this time with more urgency.
Please God
, he prayed.
Don’t let them be lying injured on that smoke-shadowed moor.
Not
shot to pieces and still breathing.
Because those poor souls were being systematically dispatched by English bayonets.
“Wherever ye are, brothers, I go wi’ ye in spirit,” he murmured, then lost consciousness again.