Highlander Redeemed (Guardians of the Targe Book 3)

by Laurin Wittig

  CHAPTER TEN

  SCOTIA TRAILED CLOSELY behind Duncan, wishing she were a wood sprite so she could lift a tree root to trip him as he stepped over it, or she could shift a stone and cause him to fall into one of the many burns they had crossed this morn. She looked up, wondering if it were indeed still morn, but the tree cover was so thick little light made it to the forest floor, and ’twas impossible to see how far the sun had traveled in the sky. She tripped, and only just avoided stumbling into Duncan’s broad-shouldered back, thanks to her much improved balance from the training she had been doing.

  “Do you need to rest?” he asked, but he did not slow.

  “Nay,” she said, “I do not.”

  “Good.”

  And he continued on, his ground-eating pace never wavering. She knew he was angry with her . . . or maybe just irritated. He hated it when she was right and he was wrong, but he’d never gone to such lengths to punish her for it. She wasn’t wrong when she talked of killing English soldiers. She had seen men die before, recently even. A full dozen English soldiers had died at the Story Stone . . . At the thought of the stone she knew where they were headed, and it had nothing to do with the knowing of her gift. Duncan wanted to confront her with the battle, thinking it would change her mind about killing English bastards, but he was wrong.

  She might not remember everything that had happened there, but she remembered enough and had the scar on her neck to remind her each and every day of what it meant to kill or be killed. Returning to the place would change nothing, but Duncan would not believe her, so she had no choice but to convince him by doing whatever he had planned for her.

  However, as they drew nearer and nearer to the Story Stone meadow her stomach began to fill with the fluttering of dragonflies, and her heart started to pound in her ears. She let her heavy targe slip off her forearm, catching it by one of the sweat-damp leather straps that had chafed a raw spot on the inside of her arm.

  Her targe banged into her anklebone and she must have made a sound, for Duncan looked back over his shoulder. He gave one slow shake of his head when he espied her shield, but said nothing.

  The damn thing banged against her ankle again, and she quickly pulled it back onto her arm, wincing, but not letting a single sound free.

  Bring your weapons. Hah. It was not as if she were going to use them on this venture, and this was the first day she’d had a real practice sword to work with. He’d said ’twould strengthen her arm. Ah, this trek with weapons was surely another of his ways of strengthening her as well as being a test of her resolve to do whatever he required for her training.

  She felt like a fool for not understanding that immediately. Everything they did during their days together was part of her training . . . well, except for that kiss. She pushed away the softness the memory of that kiss always brought on. She had no time for softness. The English would be upon them again soon, and she had little time to prove her worth as a warrior.

  She stood straighter, bent her elbow so she could hold her targe firmly up where it would protect her torso, and picked up the pace of her steps. She would prove that she was strong—strong enough to wield a real sword, not just a weighted wooden blade, strong enough to be a real warrior, not just a lass in training—and if it took a long trek with weapons and returning to the site of the Story Stone Battle to prove that strength, then she was up to the task.

  DUNCAN STRUGGLED NOT to drum his fingers on his thigh. Scotia was the one who had told him long ago that he did that when he was worried, and he did not want to give her any clue that he was having second thoughts about this lesson.

  The bodies of the fallen had been buried, so the full loss of life would not be visible, but he knew there would be ghosts. The echoes of the battle would linger in the air just out of hearing. The fight would be all around them, like wraiths in the night. Anyone who had ever walked the ground where men died in battle would know what had happened here, would feel it in the prickles of their skin, would hear it in the unnatural silence that always blanketed such places. The Highlands were rife with battlefields, and even the animals tended to avoid them.

  Scotia needed to understand that battle, that killing, should be her last choice, not her first. Killing was hard on the soul, even when it was justified, and certainly she was justified in her desire to protect and avenge her family and land. But Duncan could not bear to imagine how killing someone herself, looking into that person’s eyes as the life drained out of them, would either destroy her or harden her heart, as it did warriors. Despite what anyone believed, he knew Scotia’s heart was big and vulnerable, though she hid that with her rebellion and of late with her anger.

  As they drew close, the muted light of the Story Stone meadow filtered through the dense wood. Duncan stopped, preparing himself for what came next.

  “I ken well where we are, Duncan,” Scotia said from behind him. He glanced back, surprised to find her changed from the bedraggled, tired lass she had been when last he’d looked back at her.

  She stood tall, her targe held firmly where it should be, rather than dangling from her fingertips. Determination had replaced the glow of irritation in her eyes, and her chin was raised just enough to make her look strong and sure of herself.

  “I ken why you brought me here,” she said, but the words were not tinged with anger or disdain as he had expected, and there was something in the quiet of her voice that told him she was not as sure of herself as she tried to appear. The lesson had already begun.

  “Do you?” he asked.

  “Aye.”

  But he didn’t think she really did.

  “There is never good that comes of battle, Scotia. I ken you mean to fight the English, but do not fool yourself that any good will come of that. You will know the necessity of killing, but you will also know the torment of taking a life.”

  Her dark brows arrowed down over pale eyes, lending sharp angles to her face that offset the full, sensuous mouth that distracted every male who had ever been in her company. Or at least it distracted him.

  “I will know no torment when I kill an English soldier, and neither should you.” She took a deep breath. “They killed my mum. They killed Myles. I made a vow to avenge their deaths, and I will do that without torment or guilt.”

  “You will feel torment at the very least, Scotia,” he said, forcing his wandering thoughts back to the moment. “It happens to everyone, especially in your first battle. I ken you are angry, hurt, and bent on vengeance—I want that every bit as much as you do.”

  “You do not act like it.”

  “I will choose my time to claim that vengeance, and I promise, if you are ready to fight, you will be right there by my side.”

  “I will be ready. If we had spent this day working with this”—she laid her hand on the pommel of the wooden sword—“I would be that much closer to ready.”

  “Nay, one day will not change things much, but you are growing more skilled each day, and today will strengthen you in ways you ken not. You are smart, strong, agile, and—” He almost said passionate but quickly thought better of that. “And a force to be reckoned with when you set your mind to something, as you have done with your training, but you are also impulsive, denying those strong traits in favor of letting your emotions sway your decisions. People died because of that—Myles in the forest, a dozen soldiers here. Can you say, truly, that does not haunt your dreams?”

  She looked toward the meadow they could not yet see. “I can. The deaths do not haunt me. I was not responsible for the soldiers killing Myles. I was not responsible for the choice those same soldiers made to take me hostage and wait for the clan here. ’Tis unfortunate I did not set my mind to becoming a warrior sooner.” She glared at him. “At least then I could have killed a few of them myself.”

  Duncan wanted to reach out, to touch her hand, or her shoulder, to see if she was as brittle as she sounded, but he did not. Now was not the time for softness on his part. Now was a time to see if she had any ca
pacity for taking responsibility for these deaths herself, and to see if she could hold up under the weight of such a responsibility if she did. Only when she could master both would she be mentally, and emotionally ready to go into battle, to take a life.

  “Follow me,” he said, leading her past several graves where the earth had yet to settle from the recent burials of the English fallen. They quickly completed their journey to the edge of the meadow, to the edge of the battlefield.

  “Look and see exactly what you wrought.” He grabbed her wrist and pulled her out onto the spot where most of the melee had happened, where most of the English had died. ’Twas only providence that had kept their own warriors from the same fate.

  “You and I were safely out of the worst of it, hiding in the wood with Rowan and Jeanette while the lads fought for their lives, for their homes, for their families,” Duncan said as he scanned the scene of the battle, as he let the sorrow and pain of the place sink into his bones so he would never forget. “You are responsible for what happened here, Scotia. Your unwillingness to do as you were told by your father and your chief led to the death of Myles, the deaths of these English soldiers, and the injuries your own kinsmen sustained in a battle we were not prepared for. Can you not see that? Can you not feel that?”

  He glanced over at her when she did not reply. Her fingers were tracing the still visible line at her throat where an English soldier had tried to slice her. Her eyes were big. Her breaths were so shallow and fast he could not see any rise and fall of her chest. She swallowed again and again. Regret made him sigh. He hated being so hard with her, but he knew he had to make this point. She could not go into battle thinking only of the killing, not of what the killing meant. For if she did not understand that, she would not understand that her own life was always at risk, too, and a warrior who did not understand that was a danger to everyone she fought beside.

  “If you do not understand the consequences of taking a life, you will not value your own, and that makes you take unnecessary risks. It makes you a danger to all you fight with and for, as Malcolm learned the hard way. Warriors will not trust you, no matter how well trained you are, until you prove that you hold their well-being at least equal to your own, until you prove that preserving their lives and your own is more important to you than taking one from your enemies.”

  “I understand all too well the consequences of a life taken, Duncan.” She still ran her fingers over the scar on her neck. “I felt no remorse when you and Malcolm relieved that gap-toothed soldier of his life. I feel no remorse, no torment, no grief that all of those men had their lives taken here. They had no compunction about taking a life. Why should I?”

  “Do you really want to be like them?”

  “Nay!” She turned on him, throwing her targe hard to the ground. “I am nothing like them. That you could ever think such a thing says you knew nothing of those bastard Sassenachs and know even less of me. I want vengeance. ’Tis a noble thing. They wanted only to rape, to kill all of us, to steal away the Targe stone and Rowan for their damned king. They fought because they were told to. I fight for vengeance. I am nothing like them.”

  And then she froze, tilting her head a little to the side as if she were listening to something he could not hear.

  “Scotia? What is it?” He scanned the edges of the meadow, searching for anything that might catch her attention, but other than a few birds flitting in the trees there was nothing that he could discern.

  “We need to go out to the Story Stone,” she said, her attention still apparently on whatever she was listening to. “There is a sword there, the sword that belonged to the gap-toothed bastard. It is to be mine.”

  “How do you—’Tis a knowing?”

  She nodded and turned her attention to him. “My first thought was to run directly out there without telling you what I was after, but that would be reckless, and might put you in danger, so I am not doing that. I am telling you I need to go out there. I know it. Will you help me do that safely?” And then she picked up her shield and settled it on her left arm and waited.

  She presented him with as good a lesson as any since she didn’t seem to get the one he had brought her here for. She would need a real sword eventually, and he had not thought how he would obtain that for her without revealing her secret, so they might as well collect one now. If he didn’t trust her knowing he would never consider going out there, and he marveled that once again she was given knowledge of something that triggered a strong emotion in her—hatred, this time.

  “How would you go about retrieving this sword while keeping us both as safe as possible?” he asked.

  SCOTIA SPRINTED TOWARD the Story Stone upon its hillock near the center of the wide-open meadow from the same place Duncan had emerged to rescue her the day of the battle—’twas the point where the forest was closest to the stone. Duncan was hard on her heels. She knew he was still uncomfortable exposing them like this, but they had found no sign of anyone, English or otherwise, who had been near the Story Stone meadow since the battle, so he had admitted he could find no reason to keep her from her prize.

  She skidded to a stop as she reached the top of the small knoll. A hand, severed cleanly at the wrist and the flesh mostly gone now, lay palm up on the ground. The dagger that had come so close to ending her life, the blade smeared black with her old blood, was still clenched by bone fingers.

  All at once the events of the battle came rushing back at her, as if the memories had been waiting here for her to return. It was almost as if it happened all over again, except this time she was watching from a short distance outside her body, as she was thrown to the ground, then bound to the stone so tightly she could barely draw breath or move her arms. She watched as the twelve English soldiers formed a ring around the stone, as she screamed at them, yelling whatever she could think of to discomfit them. She saw herself praying for the death of each and every one of the soldiers—a horrible, painful, lingering death. And she remembered the moment she had heard the clan’s signal, a quiet call of a tawny owl, like a war cry in her mind. It was only then she had realized that she hadn’t been sure they would come for her.

  “Scotia?” Duncan rested his hand upon her shoulder, startling her out of her memories. She shrugged him off as she turned her attention away from the gap-toothed bastard’s severed hand, to the stone where she had sat helpless for hours as the soldiers amused themselves by taking turns telling her the vile things they would do to her once they had dispatched her kin. The rope that had trapped her lay at the foot of the stone, sliced through by the gap-toothed man after she had kicked him in the ballocks.

  As he had held her tight against him, his rancid breath rushing over her, and his dagger at her throat, he’d cursed her. “’Twould be safer to shelter with a nervous mother wolf than you,” he’d hissed in her ear.

  And that was when the wind hit, whipping up a maelstrom of dirt and grit. She hadn’t known it was an unnatural wind at the time, driven by the twin gifts of Jeanette and Rowan, though she had felt the raw power of it. She still found it hard to believe there were two Guardians, with her, as always, the one left out.

  She let her gaze drift up the ancient standing stone that was at least half again as tall as Duncan. She hadn’t really seen it when they’d brought her here, and though she had heard of it she knew nothing more than its name, the Story Stone. She’d never actually been to it before that day, and even then she had not had much opportunity to look at it. She circled around it, taking in the weathered corners of the monolith, the dark silvery grey of the stone itself, decorated here and there by pale silvery-green lichens and bits of bright green furry moss. And carvings.

  She stopped, staring at the side opposite the one she’d been tied to. The early afternoon sun hit the stone at a perfect angle to cast the shallow carvings in shadow while illuminating the face of the stone.

  There at the top was the triple swirl within a circle symbol. She blinked, sure she was wrong, but there it was, the same s
ymbol that was carved into the Targe stone Rowan always carried with her. It was also painted in the center of the ermine sack that held the Targe stone, and was incised on the large rock in the grotto where Jeanette had come into her Guardian gift.

  And below it was another symbol: the broken arrow. It was just as she’d seen it painted inside the Targe sack just yesterday. It was the one symbol left without anyone to claim it.

  “Duncan?” She looked about and found him scanning the forest at the edge of the meadow. “Did you see something?”

  He glanced over his shoulder at her. “Nay, but that is no reason to let down our guard.” He cocked an eyebrow at her, as if to admonish her for losing herself in her memories. “Do you remember that day any better from here?”

  “I do.” She shuddered a little and forced herself not to touch her neck.

  “Good. Do you see that it was not glorious? Only painful and filled with death? Can you feel it all around you?”

  She looked around, taking in the entire meadow, marveling that the battle itself had been mostly confined to a small area opposite where the Guardians had constructed their barrier, made only from the power of the Targe stone. The barrier had driven the English away from her at the stone, all except the gap-toothed bastard. But she could remember naught after Duncan had taken her hand and dragged her away from the stone. She nodded, unable to speak around the lump that lodged in her throat.

  “There is no sword here,” he said, disappointment pulling the corners of his mouth down. “We should go.”

  It was only then that Scotia remembered why she had insisted they come out here to the stone. She had known there was a sword here for her. Was she wrong? She looked about quickly, but the symbols on the stone once more captured her attention. As she looked closer she could see the faint lines of other symbols carved into the stone below the ones she knew from the Targe and its sack. She reached up and ran her fingers along another carving. This one, upon closer inspection, appeared to be a melding of the three symbols from the edge of the Targe sack, as if whoever had carved them here had carved them one on top of the other so that they were jumbled together, the broken arrow weaving through the other two.