"To meet Neacail of Glengalda."
"But he is not yet recovered," Hildegarde exclaimed. "How does he plan to fight in such a weakened state?"
Rowena gripped the windowsill, her mouth pinched white. "I suppose that depends on whether he is the Earl of Dunmoral, or the Dragon of Darien at the time."
20
She was a princess who had lived in a turreted palace and who rode beribboned ponies in a pasture, but her life had not been a fairy tale. Her mother had died of blood poisoning when Rowena was three, and the royal family had never recovered from losing the high-spirited woman who had been its heart and guiding hand.
Bereft of a mother's wisdom, Rowena's sister Micheline had become a rebel. Rowena, a lonely child, had taken solace in nature, in archery and forbidden walks through the forest. She had spent most of her life trying to make her grieving father smile.
Prince Randolph barely knew his children existed. He fought petty wars as a distraction. His heart had never healed from losing his wife.
Rowena loved him anyway, but wished that for once he would take responsibility for his own welfare. She saw nothing otherwise but a sad life of obligation before her, of battling little wars that would drain her land and spirit dry.
Here at Dunmoral she had finally found a world where she was allowed to live. To test her feminine powers. To follow her inner longings. To suffer heartache because the man she loved had misled her and she loved him anyway
Queen Mary or Elizabeth?
Mary-Elizabeth.
This isn't the solar at all. It appears to be the chapel.
Of course 'tis the chapel. Silly me…
The rasp of stone scraping against stone startled her. She swung around and saw Jerome emerge from a frayed tapestry that concealed a side panel behind the molded fireplace—the secret passage Hildegarde had missed. Her breath quickened, but she remained in control. A scream, she knew would bring Dainty charging into the room.
Her arrogant young cousin was dressed in a brown hunting tunic and wolfskin cape. Her gaze went to the silver-scrolled pistols in his belt. He looked like a child playing soldiers.
"Rowena." He did not sound like the young boy she remembered who set rabbits free from huntsmen's traps. "I eavesdropped in the kitchens. One of the servants found this at the abbey crossroads. It belonged to Frederic, did it not?"
Rowena stared down at the shorn length of cloth he showed her. It was the sash and gold medallion Frederic had carried with such pride against his heart. Flakes of dried blood darkened the metal. She swallowed, feeling a wave of lightheadedness wash over her.
"I'm going to look for him," Jerome said. "He might have fallen into a ravine, unable to send for aid. He is not a young man. Will you help me?"
Silence fell. Dainty stood guard outside her door. Hildegarde had ventured down to the kitchens to oversee supper preparations, afraid they would be poisoned if she did not supervise the making of the soup.
Hildegarde and Rowena had liked Jerome as a child. But time and ambition stood between the two cousins. Was it possible the rebels hoped to put Jerome on the throne as their puppet? Had he really traveled here to engage her help, or to make certain she did not return home? Her father's warnings about trust echoed in her mind.
"You were always good at finding people in the forest," he said earnestly. "Animals and people."
It was true. Rowena possessed a gypsy's sixth sense when it came to following trails. She knew intuitively when a path had been disturbed. She was patient and perceptive and in touch with her instincts. Yet the Highland hills were not the familiar woods of home. The very mist here vibrated with mystical secrets.
She made the choice to trust her cousin, as she had decided to trust Douglas.
"Give me a moment to change."
He sighed in relief. "Hurry."
Douglas cantered across the inhospitable heath, clumps of turf flying in his wake. Cold air stung his face as he rode against the wind that came shrieking down from the mountains. It was still early afternoon, but eerie burgundy-gold clouds darkened the sky. A storm would break before twilight.
'Twas the kind of day that made even a pirate pray.
Aidan remained behind him, standing look-out on a lonely crag. They had searched every stream, cave, and copse in a widening circle for a place where a band of outlaws could take refuge.
Once the storm struck, they would have to find shelter themselves.
Douglas slowed his horse. A buzzard circled a distant cairn. He motioned over his shoulder to Aidan. He saw him draw a pistol from his belt.
"Don't come with me," Douglas said as the man reined in beside him. "This is a good place for an ambush."
Aidan's gaze lifted to the cairn in cool agreement. "Aye."
Douglas eased off his horse. He unstrapped his sword and secured it between two smooth oblong stones. Behind him Aidan readied his pistol and crossbow and laid both across his lap.
The wind had quieted. Douglas walked through the cairn, dying stalks of brown heather brushing his legs. He carried his pistol in his right hand, a dirk in the other. His shoulder ached, but sheer determination enabled him to ignore this weakness.
He sensed Aidan raise his bow.
He started to climb the hill to the cairn. The buzzard melted away into the blackening sky. A predator would not hover above a party of armed men.
A dead man was another matter.
His stomach tightened as he turned the body over. The man's velvet tunic had been slashed from throat to midriff. Blood from countless stab wounds had seeped through the cloth.
"Frederic," he said with a sigh. He'd barely recognized the princess's advisor, but the blue Hartzburg cross embroidered on the man's empty scabbard gave away his identity.
The attack had been brutal and clumsy. Wolves lying in wait, except that those animals did not maul for sport.
He pressed his thumb to the man's throat without thinking. The faintest pulsebeat throbbed, a thread of life, so tenuous he could have missed it. Frederic's breathing was so shallow he could not hear it. Yet there was hope.
A shadow fell across the cairn. Douglas looked up to see Aidan standing over him with an enormous flat stone.
Aidan gave Frederic a sympathetic look, lowering the stone. "I will bury him if you ride ahead."
"No. He still lives." Douglas's voice sounded as hoarse as the cries of the ravens coming from the abandoned abbey beyond the hills. He was thinking of how he would explain this to Rowena.
He would be responsible if Frederic died. The elderly man would have been safe if Douglas had thwarted Neacail's violence in the first place.
"I will take Frederic back to the castle before the storm breaks. Perhaps his injuries are not as grave as they seem. Bring me the extra plaid from your horse, Aidan, and with luck we will not concern ourselves with the grim business of digging a grave."
Dainty was furious and afraid. He'd failed Douglas now twice in a row. How was he going to explain that a mere woman had tricked him? Why had he trusted her when she'd asked not to be disturbed in her room? The castle was a blasted honeycomb of secret passages.
"That idiot Baldwin was right," he said to himself. "What does a pirate want with a damn princess anyway?"
Hildegarde's hysterical ranting echoed in his ears as he thundered across the drawbridge. He had raided the guardroom and armed himself with every weapon he could lay his huge hands on. Dainty was determined to take on the Devil himself to save her.
"My lady will be dead by the time you find her!" Hildegarde shrieked as she pitched a shovel at him from the gatehouse. "This land is full of wolves and wickedness. What if Jerome has carried her off while you dozed at her door? What if villains have slit her throat while I made soup?"
Dainty drew a draught of damp air into his lungs. He doubted 'twas Jerome, or wild animals that he and Rowena would have to worry about.
'Twas the Dragon's wrath when he discovered that his right arm had let him down again.
Dougl
as leaned across the table, his face as gray as granite. "Woman, if you do not cease that bawling, I will not be responsible for my actions. When did your lady leave?"
Hildegarde moaned into her hands. "I don't know. Jerome took her. She left me a note—they were looking for poor Frederic. What if the men who attacked him find her? Why did I let her come here? Why?"
Douglas backed away from the table, regretting the time he had already lost returning to the castle. He could not afford to ready more fresh horses and provisions for a long hunt.
The storm had broken, and raw fear raked his mind at the thought of Rowena wandering beyond his protection.
21
Rowena's lips were numb with cold and pray-ing. "This isn't right, Jerome. Frederic was worried sick about leaving me alone. He would have at least sent me word of his whereabouts."
"I told you." Jerome's gaze darted nervously around them. "I told you that you should have taken asylum in France instead of Scotland. The people here are half-pagan."
Her laughter floated into the still air. "And we at Hartzburg, with our worship of mountain trolls and sorceresses, are not."
They rode bareback on the mare Jerome had stolen from one of the guards patrolling the loch. Rowena had diverted him by skimming stones from a tree on the water's surface. It was a ploy she and her cousin had used as children.
A couple of hoodie crows cawed from a stand of skeletal alders.
"Birds of death," Jerome murmured.
"You sound like Hildegarde." Rowena spurred the mare forward. She wore a pair of green woolen hose beneath the rucked-up skirts of her riding habit. "The poor woman is probably convinced by now that you've abducted me."
She felt him stiffen against her. "As if I'd hurt you."
She forced a smile. "You suggested only seven months ago that Papa imprison me in the dungeon if I refused to marry the Duke of Vandever. You said I needed peace to think."
"For the good of Hartzburg," he said indignantly.
"More evil has been excused by those same words, Jerome. I won't marry that man."
His knee bumped against hers. The sky had turned sullen, shedding only pinpoints of light that stabbed the forest like spears. "Because of Matthew the perfect and pompous?"
"Why does everyone think I am in love with Matthew?" she asked in annoyance.
"If you won't marry Matthew, then why refuse the duke? They are both handsome men."
"I don't know," she said. "Perhaps they are not my destiny."
He scoffed at her. "Destiny, Rowena. I warned your father he shouldn't shelter gypsies in the castle."
"There is love as a consideration," she said dryly, "or rather the lack of it."
"A woman of your position cannot squander her life on ideals."
"Why not?" she said quietly.
" 'Tis the earl, isn't it?" he mused aloud. "The dark warrior always wins. You let him kiss you. I would not have believed it if I hadn't witnessed the shocking act myself. He would have been hanged for daring as much at home."
She grinned crookedly and said nothing, remembering the powerful thrill she had felt down to her toes when Douglas kissed her. The memory of it warmed her even now. There could be no doubt her Dragon had come to care for her, that she had won his warrior's heart.
Or that he faced deadly danger, perhaps at this same moment. Her grin faded as fear for him gripped her. How easy 'twould be for the raiders to ambush him, and no one would know of it for days.
"Let's go back," Jerome said without warning. " 'Tis going to storm. I shouldn't have brought you. We will return and ask the earl to help when he returns from his quest."
They had ridden into the pinewood shadows of a ridge that overlooked the winding road to the castle. Rowena urged the horse down toward the fringe of forest on the other side, an area thickly clothed in bracken and bramble fern.
"I saw something. A man's cloak."
Jerome wriggled around. "I don't like this."
"Neither do I," she said. "Look, fern doesn't grow like that." She halted at the edge of an ash coppice that was interspersed with overgrown hazel and holly. A woolen plaid hung between two trees.
" 'Tis a hiding place," she whispered. "You can watch the road from here and not be seen."
"I see naught but tangled thorn and dying foliage," Jerome exclaimed.
"The woman is right, laddie."
The crude voice came from the surrounding trees. Before Jerome could raise his musket, trapped between Rowena's cloak and her backside, he was hauled backward off his horse by a small group of Highlanders in filthy plaids who burst from the underbrush.
Rowena sat motionless on the mare. Part of her upbringing, ironically enough, had consisted of the appropriate behavior during a political abduction.
She tucked her shaking hands into the sable muff suspended from her waist on a gold-linked chain. She did not want to show her fear, to give them any more power over her than the physical.
A short man with blackened stumps of teeth, his hair in greasy braids, tore off his bonnet and swept her a mocking bow. "Welcome to hell, Yer Highness. We have just recently learnt of yer esteemed identity. Did ye enjoy the present my brother left in yer room?"
"Dear God." She leaned down to examine him. "You need a dentist! You look like an All Hallows' Eve turnip head with hollowed-out teeth."
He frowned in confusion. "What does that mean?"
"She said ye're as ugly as a rotten turnip," one of his men laughed.
Rowena's heart hammered against her breastbone. A Damascus-steel sword dangled at the spokesman's waist, inscribed with a blessing from her godfather, the Archbishop of Hartzburg. Her composure crumbled. She knew the sword had belonged to Frederic, that they had found him. She prayed his death had been swift. She prayed she would remain strong.
No one seemed to know what to do with her.
Then one of the outlaws holding Jerome motioned to the man who wore Frederic's sword. None of the outlaws were Neacail of Glengalda. Rowena had gotten a fairly good look at Neacail's coarse-featured face that night he'd fought Douglas on the bridge.
This man was apparently another of Neacail's lawless relatives.
"What do we do wi' her, Eachuinn?"
He walked up to Rowena, eyeing her with suspicion. She stared at the dried blood on his breaches, wishing for Douglas, trying not to think of what Frederic had suffered. Of what might befall her.
"Pig," she said in her low smoky voice. "Swine. Offal of a maggot. May you be carried to hell in a burning chariot."
He turned pale under his pockmarked skin. His men laughed again, albeit uneasily this time. "She's curst ye, Eachuinn."
"A burnin' chariot. 'Twill be the first time ye'll ride like gentry."
"Awful maggot. That's ye, man. A squirmy wee grub."
"She's a witch, mayhap," someone murmured. A muscle twitched under the man's hollow cheek. "Then let's take her up to the Witching Stone and let her summon her master."
"Neacail will want a ransom fer her," said a man positioned in the trees. "Should we not wait until he returns?"
Echoes of thunder resonated across the moor as the men debated the matter. Rowena glanced once at Jerome's face and saw that he looked ashen with terror in the diffused light. Jerome had dreamed of fighting battles, of proving himself a hero. Reality was not the epic battle with a rainbow at the end he had expected.
Her sable muff, and the pistol within, were suddenly torn from her grasp. Three men pulled her to the ground, feigning concern when she fell to her knees. Rough hands gripped her shoulders, her hands. She heard Jerome cry out a warning, and she closed her eyes.
Rowena managed to control her fear, relying on faith.
The outlaws didn't know it yet, but her instincts told her they weren't going to live long enough to collect any ransom.
Douglas and Dainty reached the hill where Neacail's men had taken Rowena within a minute of each other. Dainty's first thought when he saw Douglas cantering toward him, his face black with fu
ry, was "I'm a dead man. I ought to just lie down on my goddamned sword."
But Douglas didn't waste his energy; he was staring up at Rowena lashed to a standing stone on the crest of the hill, the wind tearing her hair into ribbons around her oval-shaped face. Her riding habit had been shredded into rags. Her white throat glistened in the rain. Her eyes were closed, her neck twisted at a peculiar angle, and for a moment he could not breathe or move, wondering if she were even still alive.
She turned her head. Relief replaced the fear that paralyzed him; blood rushed back into his limbs and brain in a burst of rage he could barely restrain. To see his lady thus abused enraged him beyond human endurance.
She looked pagan and beautiful and rigid with resigned terror, a medieval sorceress in silken rags who was stirring up an unearthly storm. He swallowed over the knot in his throat.
He glanced at the giant beside him. "Where is her whelp of a cousin?"
"In the cave with the outlaws," Dainty said.
Dainty had never seen Douglas like this. His eyes burned with an unholy light. His being pulsated with a charge that seemed to harness the raging elements around them. Pirating had always been a game. This was not.
"Is the lad dead or alive?" Douglas asked.
"Alive the last I saw," Dainty said.
Douglas was silent, coiled energy gathering as rain washed down on his rugged face. Uncertainty darkened his gaze as he realized that Aidan was already halfway to the hill. The man crawled from stone to stone like an adder in the concealing blackness of the storm. Douglas knew he could trust him.
"Sir," Dainty said, shifting with impatience.
For the first time that day, Douglas really looked at his friend. "My God," he said with humorless smile. "A monster in mail-armor. You're a one-man arsenal, aren't you?"
Dainty grinned, ready to pay any penance. "I raided the guardroom before I left the castle."
A coat of chain mail covered his brawny chest. A steel fist-shield hung beside the sword at his waist along with a pole-ax. He was holding a medieval morning star, the spiked metal ball on a chain and handle that could smash a man's head open with one blow.
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