by Fiona Faris
She shivered in the night air. She could smell across the short distance the sooty warmth that was being given off by the glowing coals. It suddenly seemed genuinely inviting.
"I know, I know," she sighed wistfully, turning big doleful eyes upon the man who had spoken. "But I cannot sleep. I am homesick for my mother... And what harm can I do?" She raised her eyes pleadingly, almost seductively. "Just for a moment, I beg of you; just let me warm my hands by your fire before I return to my bed. I will be safe here with you. No harm can come of it."
After a moment's hesitation, the sentry stepped aside. She bestowed on him a smile of deep gratitude. She walked slowly past him, took up position on the far side of the brazier, facing the door to the range, and started laving her hands in the heat that rose from the glowing coals.
The two sentries turned and stood opposite her, with their backs to the door. Over their shoulders, she saw from the corner of her eye the door open, and the three clansmen emerge silently into the margin of the lurid light.
"Have you been in the service of the Campbell long?" she asked the sentries, anxious to keep them distracted from what was unfolding behind them.
Uilleam, Lewis, and Gillespie stalked stealthily towards the sentries on silent feet. Siusan saw that their dirks were already drawn. Their eyes gleamed thirstily.
"I've served the Campbells all my life," the older of the two sentries replied companionably, "just like my father and my grandfather before him. Young Teague, here, on the other hand..."
Siusan struggled against the temptation to watch the MacGregors approach. She fixed her eyes intently on the two men in front of her, trying to keep her expression neutral and friendly.
Before the sentry could finish telling her how Teague had come into the Campbells' service, the MacGregors were upon them. Clamping their hands over the sentries' mouths, Lewis and Gillespie quickly knocked them out. They fell limp in their assailants' arms.
Lewis and Gillespie let the unconscious men slide smoothly to the ground.
Siusan covered her nose and mouth with her hands and let out a small involuntary cry, at the brutality of what she had just witnessed and of what she had just been a party to. Her eyes were filled with horror, and she feared that her legs would give way beneath her. She staggered back and leaned her shoulders against the castle wall. She had just helped to assault an elderly man and a young boy, neither of whom had ever done her any harm.
“Did you have to knock them senseless?” she hissed, her voice trembling. “One was an old man, the other just a lad.”
She received no reply. Uilleam was already at the postern gate and hauling open the heavy wooden door. Siusan continued to stand transfixed by the two bodies.
She was vaguely aware of her name being called, but the call seemed to be coming from a great distance, and the voice sounded indistinct. She felt a hand on her arm. She looked down at it in astonishment.
She shrank away from Gillespie's touch, from the whole scene before her. Waves of faintness ebbed and flowed through her at a dizzying pace, but Gillespie grasped her more firmly, shook her, implored her, and pulled her towards the postern gate.
In a trice, they were through the gate and running silently around the base of the wall to where they had left MacCallum's coracle.
She looked at the clansmen, at Uilleam in particular, and wondered what on earth she had possessed her in agreeing to follow such a violent gang of cattle thieves.
Chapter Fourteen
Glen Shira
The following dawn
As dawn broke over Ben Lui, Siusan and the MacGregors disembarked onto the eastern bank of the lochan dubh. There, they retrieved their horses from MacCallum's croft and rode out at pace back along Glen Shira towards Glen Orchy. They knew it would not be long until the Campbells discovered that Siusan was missing and set out in hot pursuit.
Siusan was an expert rider and had no difficulty in keeping up with the three clansmen. They pressed on, putting as much distance as they could between themselves and the Campbells. It was mid-morning before they stopped to allow the horses to rest.
They stopped in a small copse of birks that grew beside the river. The high hills that surrounded them, and through which the Shira ran over its stony bed, were strewn with rocks. Apart from the river trickling over the stones and the distant 'wheep' of a curlew, the glen was wrapped in profound silence.
Siusan crouched over the flat blinns in the river-shallows and splashed her face with the ice-cold water, drinking only in small sips to prevent her stomach from cramping with the sudden chill of it. The water was sweet and refreshing, and she rubbed her wet hands over her neck and throat. The scent of the windlestrae, the tall dry grasses, came to her on a gentle breeze. The sky was overcast, but the air wasn't cold.
She looked around towards the men, who had stripped the horses of their saddles and saddle-cloths and were brushing the sweat and dust from their flanks. Uilleam was watching her, studying her openly and unashamedly, a pensive look on his face.
She shifted uncomfortably under his gaze. She had hitched her gown up to her knees before stepping out onto the flat stones; now she let the hem fall back down to her ankles, unconcerned that a corner of it had dipped into the slowly swirling stream that dallied among the rocks.
She suddenly felt vulnerable and nervous of the man. She knew that she was at his mercy, that she was exposed to his strength, there, in the seclusion of the hills. He could do anything he wanted with her, and she would be helpless to stop him. She did not like the way he was looking at her. There was a kind of covetousness in that look. He looked like a wolf that was patiently biding its time high on a hillside while keeping its eye on a flock of sheep in the valley below. She took comfort in the fact that he was there on the word of her father.
At the same time as she feared him, she was thrilled by his daring and his physicality. He was, she had to admit, a fine-looking man. The breeze lifted and dropped, lifted and dropped, his fiery red curls. He had a pleasant face: a strong square brow, piercing blue eyes, rugged cheekbones which bore a number of nicks and scars, and full lips. He stood with one foot raised on a tumbled rock, the kilt of his belted plaid falling from a powerful thigh and exposing the bulge of a firm, round calf-muscle. Over his open-necked saffron tunic, he wore a sleeveless brown-leather jerkin with horn toggles fastened through black leather loops. The firmness of his chest muscles was visible through the fabric of his tunic, and the flesh of his bare forearms was roped with twisting sinew.
An unwanted longing growled in her stomach at the sight of him.
Uilleam, meanwhile, found he could not keep his eyes off her. He would look away, to scan the hilltops for any sign that they were being overlooked, to his horse, whose needs he really should have been attending to, to the sky for any sign of rain… but found that his eyes were continually being drawn back to her. He watched how her long golden curls fell and danced around her face as it bent over the river, the line of her thigh where it stretched the fabric of her gown. He admired her resilience and the smeddum she had shown during their escape from Inveraray Castle. Above all, he noted with curiosity the strange and unfamiliar warmth he felt towards her, which was more than just the animal lust that usually governed his feelings towards young wenches.
Unable to thole his attention any longer, Siusan stood up and strolled a little distance away from him along the bank of the Shira. She distracted herself by watching the wagtails and dippers flit and freeze among the stones that littered the shallow waters of the creek, and the patterns that the river wove on its surface as it dragged itself around the larger rocks. She had so lost herself in her amusement that she did not see him until he was standing right beside her.
"You did well back there, lass," he began awkwardly, his voice low and resonant, as though he was shy of being overheard by his companions. "You did well to keep your head. I doubt we would have gotten out so easily if you hadn't shown us the postern gate and distracted those guards."
"I didn't want
you hurting any more of the Campbell’s men than you had to," she said, with an edge of sarcasm in her voice.
He snorted a single silent laugh.
"I'd have knocked out the lot of them to get back what is rightly mine."
She flinched at the sudden flare of anger that rose within her.
"I am not your property."
He looked at her sharply.
"Would you rather be the Campbell's?"
She met his sharp look with a challenging one of her own.
"I no more belong to Cailean Campbell than I belong to you," she replied, then looked away sadly, wistfully, her eyes scanning the middle distance on the opposite side of the river. "Not yet, anyway," she added. "I may be promised to him, but I'm not his yet."
"And you need not ever be," Uilleam insisted, flexing his shoulders, confident in his own ability to succeed in the end. "Promises can be broken. You can be mine yet."
She made no reply. She just gazed off into the middle-distance, the ghost of a smile and an almost imperceptible shake of her head suggesting otherwise.
"Though I wat," Uilleam continued, "there is a wee part of you that will never be anybody's."
She looked up at him curiously. Had she misjudged him, underestimated him? Did he understand her better than she had imagined he could?
"Come away, you two lovebirds," Lewis jeered. "It's time we pressed on. There will be plenty of time for your daffin once we're back safe in Glen Strae."
Uilleam growled and shot him a coarse gesture. Siusan's eyes narrowed in a puzzled frown.
‘Glen Strae’, did he say? Surely, he meant ‘Glen Orchy’.
No matter, she thought; it must just have been a slip of the tongue. She would soon be back with her people at Castle Clyth. Her father had had a change of heart, apparently. She would not be marrying Cailean Campbell after all.
Or, at least, so she hoped.
As they near the head of Glen Shira, however, Siusan noticed that they were turning aside from the road to Castle Clyth. She heeled her horse and rode up beside Uilleam.
"This is not the road," she challenged him.
Uilleam sighed deeply as if a moment had come around at last that he had not been looking forward to.
"It is the road we are taking," he grumbled.
"But it is not the road to Glen Orchy."
He let a long hesitant pause drag out before replying.
"I am taking you to Meggernie Castle," he told her. "You will be safer there. There is no guarantee that your people will not just hand you back to the Campbells, just for the asking of it."
She reined her horse to a halt.
"So, you were lying to me, when you said you had been sent by my father to return me to Clyth."
He halted his horse too and made a face.
"'Lying' is such a strong word..." he began.
"But 'lying' you were, to trick me into coming with you," Siusan said heatedly. "Well, I will go no farther with a liar and kidnapper. I am turning from your road to the road to Glen Orchy."
"Even if it means being sent back to Cailean Campbell?"
"If that is my father's wish, then yes, I will return tae Inveraray. It is a matter o’ honor."
They sat staring for a moment, staring each other down, Uilleam with a look of mild amusement on his face, Siusan with her chin raised in defiance.
"I must say, yer brother, James, made a fine show o’ fighting fer yer honor on the day that Cailean lifted ye from yer father's land."
She narrowed her eyes, and her nostrils flared.
"What do you mean by that?" she replied, the edge of a threat in her voice.
"I mean that, perhaps, the Gunns are not to be entirely trusted. Perhaps that brother of yours is scheming against me. He and Cailean Campbell are thick together, after all."
Siusan's knuckles tightened on her reins.
"My brother would never betray me," she affirmed in a low voice that was quivering with anger.
"He might not be thinking of himself as 'betraying' you," Uilleam laughed. "I'm sure he is just thinking of his own advantage, and of your best interests. I have no doubt that he thinks that Cailean Campbell is the best match, for himself and for his clan, and for yourself. The MacGregors, after all, cannot promise you silks and satins and bows."
"Well," Siusan shot back, "that is for my father to decide, not you. Good day to you sir!"
She made to wheel her horse around in the direction of Glen Orchy, but Uilleam reached out and grasped its halter.
"I think not," he told her. "You are coming with me, lass. And if you don't behave, I'll skelp your arse for the spoilt besom that you are and carry you to Meggernie like a sack of corn over my horse's neck."
Siusan's temper rose in sudden spate. She heeled her horse's flanks and pulled its head violently, trying to free it from Uilleam's grasp. But Uilleam held tight. She raised her hand and brought it across his jaw with a tremendous clatter."
"Right!" he said, seizing her wrist and sliding from his saddle.
He dragged her from her mount, knelt down, and drew her prone across his knee. With a mischievous glint in his eye, he brought the flat of his hand down several times on her rump, each blow eliciting a sobbing yelp.
Just as suddenly, he was back on his feet again with her slung over his shoulder. In a flash, he was back in the saddle with Siusan hanging across the horse's withers in front of him, a hand in the small of her back holding her firmly in place.
Siusan kicked and pummeled, tears of rage flushing a face that was contorted and livid with anger. Lewis and Gillespie chuckled and guffawed in amusement.
"You bastard!" she screamed, with a fury that all but strangled the words in her throat. "Let me down, you swine.
He slapped her once more on her backside.
"Behave, woman," he commanded with a laugh. "It's a long road to Meggernie. I wouldn't want to have to skelp you all the way."
She continued to kick and struggle for a few moments longer, but eventually, her struggling subsided, and she lay slack and breathless over the horse's neck, her anger reduced to a simmer.
"Alright," she conceded, resentfully. "I'll come with you. Just let me down, you brute."
Uilleam released his grip on her back and let her slither from the horse's withers onto her feet on the ground.
"Here," he said contritely, handing her the reins of her mount. “I am sorry for the skelping you. I promise it will never happen again. I hope your backside isn't too sore that you cannot sit on it quietly. Gillespie," he called to his companion. "Tie a trail rope to the halter of the lassie's mare. We wouldn't want it to bolt and carry her back to Clyth against her wishes, would we?"
Chuckling quietly to himself, Gillespie did as he was asked, and the party continued into Glen Strae and on towards the MacGregor stronghold.
Tears still streaking her cheeks at the insult her pride had suffered, Siusan wondered what further indignities lay in store for her there.
Chapter Fifteen
Meggernie Castle
The following day
The next day, James and Angus arrived at Meggernie Castle. Siusan waited by the door of the keep to greet them.
As they rode into the courtyard with their modest retinue of men, Angus looked strained and drawn. His face was ashen, and his shoulders stooped wearily over his reins. At the sight of him, Siusan's breath caught in her chest. This was not like her father. He seemed to have aged in the few days she had been apart from him. It was as if he had lost some of his vigor. She wondered how he would receive her. Would he be glad or angry to see her? Could he forgive her flight from Cailean or would he reproach her for it? He behavior would certainly redound badly on his honor in the eyes of the Campbells. She raised her hand in a hesitant greeting and offered a tentative smile.
James too looked out of sorts. His brows were drawn down in a dark frown, and he would not meet her eye. Banked-up anger smoldered in his gloomy eyes.
She felt a stab of anxiety at the awkwardness
of the situation. James was clearly unhappy at the turn events had taken. Was he also embarrassed and ashamed at having betrayed her to Cailean and at having stood aside when he had misused her so when he lifted her from the clearing? Perhaps, she thought, his black mood was due to his being just as anxious about confronting her again as she had been at the prospect of confronting him.
She bit her lip and focused her attention on her father.
Iain Mor emerged from the keep and strode past Siusan to greet his visitors.
"Failte! Welcome, Angus Mor, chief of the Gunns," he announced loudly, in a deep and sonorous voice. "Welcome to Meggernie.
A flush of sudden pride blossomed in Siusan's bosom at the respect with which Iain was receiving her father. Her father would be hurting with the shame of having failed to protect his daughter and of her having been lifted in the heart of his own domain. A wave of gratitude flowed from her towards the MacGregor. Such a reception would go a long way towards repairing her father's broken sense of honor. She smiled and silently acknowledged her gratitude with an almost imperceptible nod towards Iain's broad back.