by Anya Karin
They stared at each other for a moment that stretched longer and longer. Slowly, carefully, both men moved closer, then further.
“We’re in a bit of a hurry, John,” Lynne said from behind him.
John was in a different world. The last time he drew, it was against three very large men in the tavern he and Gavin called home. They got drunk, got rowdy, and tried to rape the woman who owned the place. John didn’t like that, and so in a few seconds, he gained an ear, three fingers and somehow a toe before Gavin made him stop short of painting the walls red.
John was at peace.
Rodrigo squeezed Kenna when she wiggled.
“Put her down,” John said. “I’ll still fight you, but let’s not get her in the way.”
“Mhm.” He pushed her away.
Kenna ran over to join Lynne, who put her arm around the trembling girl, but never took her eyes off the two men who had resumed their slow, patient dance.
Round and round the two of them went. Neither man seemed interested in breaking the silence with a blow.
“Ben,” John said. “Get up and go over to them.”
When the big man made a move toward Rodrigo, John waved him away. “This is my fight,” he said in a whisper.
“I can’t decide if they’re going to kill each other or kiss,” Lynne said to Ben, breathlessly.
“Your stance,” John said. “It’s strange. Where did you learn to fence?”
Rodrigo grunted, his eyes never moved from the hand holding the long-knife. He lunged, but kept his rapier upright. John didn’t fall for the feint, but instead lashed out and drew blood from the Spaniard’s other arm, just above the wrist.
“You don’t have to talk to say a lot of words, you know.”
Rodrigo smiled and then raised his shoulder as though he was stretching out a cramp. His eyes never left John’s hand.
Each time John attacked, Rodrigo moved just enough to make him miss, never an inch more. It was as though he knew exactly the length of the knife and the precise length of John’s arms. Another swipe, another dodge.
“The way you move,” John said. “You’re practiced, aye? I’ve never seen anyone so fluidly, so – hyah!”
Rodrigo’s blade flashed, orange under the torchlight, and caught John on the chin ever so slightly, just to show that he could. John wiped the blood with the back of his hand and smiled a grim smile.
John moved next, a wild slash that Rodrigo parried with ease, and on the follow through, thumped the hilt of his sword on John’s back and pushed him into the wall.
“I can’t believe this!” John spun and crouched into a low stance and measured his opponent again.
John deflected a careless blow with his dirk and lunged forward, sure that his knife was about to sink ten inches into Rodrigo’s stomach, but again the main twisted at the very last second, turned away, and his sword whistled through the air, and struck John on the side.
“John, look out!” Lynne cried, but too late.
As he recovered from the stinging in his side, Rodrigo swept his feet out from under him and a half second later, Rodrigo’s eyes finally moved from the knife in John’s hand to the sword at John’s throat.
“No!” Kenna shouted. “Don’t hurt him! He’s just trying to save his friend! He’s trying to save my Gavin!”
She ran to where the two men had ended their dance, and straight into Rodrigo’s extended arm.
“Rodrigo, no! Stop! I know...I know about you and about the sheriff.”
His eyebrow rose, and Rodrigo relaxed his sword arm enough to keep the tip from piercing John’s throat, but he didn’t look away.
“I, uh, I yield if that helps your decision.” John’s knives clanked to the floor.
Kenna grabbed the outstretched hand and held on.
“I know your wife, Rodrigo, she told me about everything. She told me about Alan making you leave your home and making you come with him and about how she took a job at Macdonald’s horrible estate just so she could stay with you and she told me about-”
“He didn’t make me come.”
Four jaws hit four chests at the same moment.
“I wanted to come. I wanted away from Barcelona and the wars. I wanted to stop fighting.”
“You wanted to stop fighting, so you took a job as a bodyguard?” John said.
“It...makes very little sense when you put it that way.”
Rodrigo’s arm relaxed further and John scooted backwards.
“But I wasn’t forced. That warty little man couldn’t make me do anything.”
“And yet,” Kenna said, “here you are, fighting people you don’t know and standing guard outside a door while someone gets beat half to death!”
Lynne put a hand on Red Ben’s chest to stop him from getting any closer. “I think she has this,” she whispered.
“I don’t see what choice I have.”
“Yes you do,” Kenna said. “You know exactly the choice you have. You can take the sheriff’s blade away from your throat just as easily as you took yours from John’s.”
Rodrigo heaved a heavy sigh and sheathed his rapier.
“I’d drop it, but it’s very expensive. I’ll already have to oil the blade and hone it. If I dropped it on the ground, it’d need a smith.”
“Right,” Kenna said. “I’m sure that’s true. Tell us, Rodrigo. You dinna have to help, just tell us where the sheriff has Gavin.”
Behind Lynne and Red Ben, a great noise began to swell through the halls of the prison.
“What’s that?” Rodrigo said.
“Oh, that noise? That’s the prisoners.” Lynne answered. “We may have let them go.”
“May have?”
“I’ve known one Spaniard before you, and between the two of you I know you’re proud people and honorable ones,” Lynne said. “The people in this prison don’t deserve to be here, and you know that.”
Rodrigo pursed his lips and stiffened. He looked back and forth between Kenna and Lynne.
“She’s right, you know,” Kenna said. “I can see it in your eyes. You don’t like what’s happening here either. You don’t like injustice and cruelty. You could have slashed his throat if you wanted, but you dinna do that. You’re no simple tough, Rodrigo.”
“What am I, then?”
The clamoring grew nearer.
“You’re a man who can save a lot of lives. All with one decision.”
“And that’s a decision that should be made quickly,” John said. “The natives are restless, and they’re getting close.”
Something behind them crashed and the hooting, screaming cacophony was almost on them.
John started to talk, but Kenna waved him quiet.
Once more, Rodrigo looked around between the four people staring at him, lingering on Kenna longer than the rest. Slowly, he started to nod.
“Follow me.”
Chapter Seventeen
“Twenty-eight!”
Alan whipped Gavin across the back. He made no noise, but it wasn’t for numbness, or for going unconscious. The sheriff had weakened. The blows had simply stopped hurting.
“Rodrigo!” He shouted. “Get back here! What is that awful noise?”
“Perhaps you should go look?”
“Rodrigo! Where is that awful Spaniard?”
“I told you to be nicer to him, he’s probably left.”
The sheriff turned to Gavin and glared as the door creaked.
“See? He knows what’s good for him.”
“Rodrigo, tell he what on Earth all this-”
“Quiet.”
“You can talk?” The sheriff said, his mouth falling open.
“Sit down.”
“What’s going on here – hey, who are you three? Kenna? How did you get here?”
“Kenna?” Gavin said. “Is that you?”
Her arms felt like heaven swallowing Gavin whole. He opened his puffy, blood-shot eyes and when she smiled at him, all his pain, all the bruises and cuts and scrapes an
d everything else melted away. When her lips touched his forehead, Gavin’s whole body stiffened and then relaxed. She sat down, holding his head in her lap, pushed his hair out of his eyes.
“It’s you, isn’t it? It’s really you?”
“Last I checked,” he smiled through his cracked lips and Kenna stooped to kiss him.
She smothered him, from the top of his forehead, to as far down on his neck as she could reach, in sweet, hot little kisses.
“How did you find me? How did-”
“Ach, you and the talking,” Kenna said with a grin. “It was your friends. They’re the ones what found you. I hadn’t a clue you’d even been taken anywhere until Macdonald let it slip. All I did was come along for the ride.”
“What’s the meaning of this? Rodrigo? What are you doing?”
“What I should have done a long time ago, but was too afraid.” Metal slid against leather.
“Put that down! I pay you to guard me and here you are pointing a – ouch!”
“I’ll do it again if you keep talking,” he said. “Probably harder. Sit down.”
Alan sat.
“On the floor. Hands behind your back. Good. Red Ben?”
“Aye, with pleasure.”
Thin ropes wound tight around the sheriff’s hands and cinched down so hard it hurt. Ben tugged the slip knot and twisted it just a little tighter than it needed to be, but the sheriff’s yelping and squealing got him excited.
“Tell me if you can move them,” he said, laughing.
“Wh – what are you going to do to me? What is that noise?”
“The...ach, that noise,” Lynne said. “That’s all your prisoners escaping. All the ones you’re kept here to watch? They’re all leaving. They’ve got the key to the front, but I expect they’re mad enough to make their own doorway. And the way they were rampaging around, you’d think they were as excited to get at you as we were to find Gavin.” Lynne said, looping a finger in John’s trousers.
“You let them...you let them out? How could you? That...there’s no way the King will renew my appointment.”
“Oh,” Rodrigo said. “I thought I was doing you a favor. As much as you complained about this post, I thought you’d love to see it disappear behind you on your way back to England.”
“Y – yes, but not in the back of a prison carriage! I’ll be put in the tower for this!”
“I doubt that very much,” John said. “In fact, I’m a wee bite doubtful you’re to get out of here at all. Those are some very rambunctious prisoners you’ve got. Only a matter of time until they find their way here, dinna you think?”
“No...no, you can’t do that to me. They’ll tear me apart!”
“Hungry too, I think.”
“No!”
“You won’t be hurt by them,” Rodrigo said in that dark leather voice. “They won’t have the chance.”
He slid the flat of his sword along Alan’s throat, then his cheek.
The sheriff began to wobble back and forth. His cheeks turned bright red to match the color of his nose. And then he began to weep.
“Help me,” he said, “help me get away. I don’t deserve this. I don’t-”
“Yes you do,” Gavin said. “You deserve every ounce of pain and horror you could ever have. For what you’ve done to this town, to these people, you deserve everything he wants to do. Help me up.”
As soon as he stood, Gavin’s knees went weak and he fell, but Kenna caught him and got under his arm to hold him up.
“You are a despicable man, Alan,” Gavin said. “Despicable in every way I can think of, and many that I cannot, but that will probably occur to me shortly when I’m regretting what I’m about to do.”
Every face turned to the beaten, half-broken man who propped himself up on Kenna’s shoulder.
“If we kill him, and believe me, I know how good it would feel, then we’re no better than he. If we beat him, torture him, and leave him to be slaughtered by the starving prisoners running amok, then that is certainly what he deserves. But it’s also what every single one of us, to a man – or to a woman – wants to end.”
“But Gav, he’s the whole reason we’re fighting this battle. People like him. The English that come up and try to tell us how to run our lives, and then when we refuse, they murder us and steal our land!”
“No.” Gavin said. “It’s not him. He’s a pawn in a game so big that he can’t even see the board. A single cog in a clock. To give him any more power is to give him too much. Alan has no power. He was sent up here, to be the law in a place he hates, a place that the King sees as a lawless wasteland, because he canna even control himself much less anyone else. He grovels to Macdonald and to the others. He runs from victim to victim, torturing, raping and beating. And for what? What’s he gotten himself?”
By then, Alan had joined his weeping with incoherent babbling. Every now and then, he eked out a plea for mercy.
“You’ll get mercy from us – put down your sword, Rodrigo – we’re better than him. All of us are. And so we’re going to give him mercy.”
“Th – thank you. You’re a good man, you’re a g-great man!”
“Don’t start. I said that we were to give you mercy, you wretched sheep’s arse. But I can’t say the same for the court to which you’re delivered.”
John and Lynne began to laugh, Red Ben smiled, and Kenna stroked Gavin’s arm. Only Rodrigo remained angry.
“What about the harm he’s done? What about his undying cruelty and savagery? If he’s taken to some magistrate’s court, he’ll be set free as sure as the sun rises tomorrow. He’ll be back with more men, more power and more-”
“Ach, that’s true and that’s exactly why we’re not taking him to a magistrate’s court.”
“What?” Alan said. “But that’s the law!”
“Aye, it might be the law in England. In England.”
Alan’s blubbering turned back to weeping.
“Pick him up. We’ve got a long ride ahead of us.”
“But, but where are you taking me?”
“Well, I dinna about Kenna, but I’ve a mind to see home again. Ah! Watch the squeezing,” he grinned. “He did a number to me. But as long as we’re going that way, we can leave you in Glasgow if you’d like.”
“If you take me there, I won’t have a chance!”
“Still have more of a chance than anyone gave the people in this prison. If you keep talking, I’m going to change my mind about Rodrigo there sliding his steel in your belly.”
Alan’s mouth snapped shut.
“Ben, get him. Let’s go home.”
Gavin turned to Kenna, and his legs wobbled again but she caught him. “Truth be told I could let him scurry back to England with his tail betwixt his legs and be happy, just so long as I get to carry you back to Fort Mary and give you a herd of red-headed little whelps.”
“Ach, Gavin, you’re a wee bit forward, dinna you think? Haven’t asked me yet.”
“The bowels of a prison’s no place for a proposal,” he said.
“Well then, Gavin Macgregor, you’re just going to have to wait on your plans for a herd of sprouts until you find some place you think to be more fitting.”
He smiled and turned from her, barely able to take his eyes from the deep green of Kenna’s.
“Hang on tight!” Red Ben said, hoisting the sheriff onto his back. “But if you choke me, I’ll be throwin’ you off and letting the prisoners have their way.”
Into the darkness of the hall, walked six pairs of feet.
One pair waggled in the air.
“You go on ahead,” Gavin said to the others. “Kenna and I will hobble along behind. Meet you at the Black’s?”
“Aye,” John and Red Ben said.
“What’re we to do with him?”
“Whatever you like. We’ll hitch him to the back of the horses when we two leave for Fort Mary. But we can decide all that when we get to the house.”
He tugged on Kenna’s arm a bit harder
when the others were a little further down the hallway. And then, when she walked under a torch and the orange light bounced off her hair, he reached up, took her shoulders in his hands, and pushed her against the wall.
“Ooh! Gavin, what are you doing?”
“What I shoulda done instead of leaving Fort Mary to come down here and fight. What I shoulda done when I was sixteen year old and looking at you from across a meadow. What I shoulda done every time in my life when I didn’t.”
“Wh – but Gavin, what about Macdonald and all of that?”
“He won’t matter. Word’ll get to the King about this sooner than word about that deal they wanted to push through. And even if it doesn’t, the Earl of Dorchester isn’t going to want to buy a pile of land upon which such wild savages as we dwell.” A twinkle in his deep blue eyes caught Kenna off guard.
“Savages such as you, such as I.”
He kissed her lightly at first, his lips brushing against hers and his hands sliding down her sides.
“Is that what we are, Gavin Macgregor? Savages?”
Gavin pulled away from her, sucking her lip softly between his and tasting every inch of the woman he’d loved for his entire life for the first time. He tilted his head to one side.
“Ach, you may be more savage than me by twice.”
So close that their breath mixed between them, the walls around the pair seemed to vanish. Kenna slid her hands down Gavin’s arms, her fingers bouncing over every little muscle and tendon. She looked down at his chest, then back into his eyes, lost in the ocean she found.
“How did we come to this, Gavin Macgregor?”
“I dinna,” he said. “But I’ll not make the same mistake again.”
“And what mistake is that?”
She closed her eyes and Gavin kissed her along her jaw, behind her ear. Kenna’s skin prickled to life where he kissed, and where the heat from his palms burned through her dress.
“What mistake, Mr. Macgregor?” She said. She moaned softly as his lips moved down her neck to the slope of her shoulder where he pushed aside the collar of her tunic and kissed again. “What mistake won’t you be making?”
“The one where I let you get away. I can’t wait, Kenna. I can’t stop myself. I’m...”