Ever My Love

by Lynn Kurland

  “Very,” she said. “And thank you.”

  “Godspeed, lass,” Mr. Campbell said, smiled again, then turned and walked away.

  Emma didn’t wait for him to even leave the front of her house. She went inside, shut the door, and changed into her preferred outfit for ghosting. She shoved Nathaniel’s dagger down the back of her belt, then looked at herself in the bathroom mirror. She took a deep breath, took her hair in her hand, and cut it off up to her chin. If nothing else, she would look like a boy. A bit of dirt smudged on her cheeks and she would be set.

  She grabbed her go bag, locked up, and hid her key. She would have run right off her porch, but she found that her way was blocked by one Patrick MacLeod. She pulled the dagger from the back of her belt.

  “I have the key,” she said succinctly—then it occurred to her what had happened. “You called Mr. Campbell.”

  “Actually, I didn’t,” Patrick said slowly. He looked at the dagger in her hand, then met her eyes. “If he came on his own, it begs the question why, doesn’t it?”

  “I’ll let you know when I find out.”

  He nodded, then tilted his head toward the forest. “I’ll walk with you to the trees.”

  She had to admit she was happy for his company, as strange as that sounded. They didn’t speak, but there was nothing left to say. They had talked about all the contingencies they could think of already. She had a backstory ready if she were found by Fergussons and she had a password to give to the MacLeods . . .

  She slowed, then stopped. She considered, then looked at Patrick, then thought a bit more.

  Funny things, those passwords.

  “Emma?”

  She shook her head. “I’m fine. Just thinking too much, but I’m done. Can’t afford it now.”

  “Sometimes that is best,” Patrick agreed.

  She stopped at the gate as confidently as if she could see it, which she wasn’t entirely sure she couldn’t. She made sure her small bag was strapped securely to her back, looked at Patrick, then attempted a smile.

  “See you on the other side.”

  “Back on this side, preferably,” he said dryly, “but aye. Good hunting.”

  She drew Nathaniel’s dagger, took a deep breath, then leaned over and shoved it into the ground.

  And the world felt as if it had cracked in two.

  She crossed through the gate before she could make a different choice, looked over her shoulder to see Patrick very briefly before both he and Nathaniel’s steel disappeared. That was something, she supposed.

  She stuck to the trees, keeping to as much shadow as she could manage. By the time she’d hid to avoid what looked like a scouting party going toward the MacLeod keep, checked her mind to make sure she hadn’t lost it, and paused to catch her breath and calm her nerves, it was twilight and she was closer to the Fergusson keep than she’d ever wanted to be. She ran bodily into someone before she saw him, which she knew should have alarmed her. She was fully prepared to find it was Gerald MacLeod come to kill her, only to find it was Mr. Campbell.

  Only about thirty years younger.

  Her Gaelic was awful, she was the first to admit that. She wasn’t sure telling him she loved him was going to fly, so she trotted out the second thing that came to mind.

  She held out her hand. “Siubhail,” she said easily.

  He looked as if someone had dropped a boulder on his head, but he took her hand just the same.

  “I need work,” she said, because Patrick had thought that might serve her well.

  Mr. Campbell, or his ancestor who looked just like him, nodded. “Thomas,” he managed. “Apprentice blacksmith.”

  Of course he was. Emma decided abruptly that she didn’t need to know more than that. She gave her little speech about being a journeyman blacksmith escaping a terrible master, all the while trusting that what she’d memorized thanks to Ian shouting it at her while Patrick was trying to kill her would do what it was supposed to.

  Thomas the blacksmith only nodded, wide-eyed, no doubt having been in those exact straits himself. When he invited her to come with him back to his master’s shop—at least that was what she hoped he’d been inviting her to do—she thanked him most kindly and followed him.

  It was fully dark before she reached the forge. She was happy to see that the village was mostly asnooze, as it were, and all she had to do was stand behind Thomas and let him negotiate for her. The head blacksmith, a man with absolutely enormous muscles in his arms, looked her over, then nodded shortly to a spot in the corner. She thanked him briskly, then decamped for her spot without further comment. She sat, then looked at the girl who was stirring something in a pot over a small fire.

  “Orphan,” Thomas said, coming to squat down next to her. He nodded at the dark-haired girl. “She’s a bastard, but we don’t care. She’s a good gel, so don’t vex her.”

  The girl looked up. Emma supposed it was years of pretending to yawn while being absolutely caught off guard that saved her at the moment. That girl looked almost exactly like a photo she’d seen of Nathaniel’s sister . . .

  “Ceana,” Thomas said, “give the lad dinner. He’ll begin work in the morning.”

  Emma ate what she was given and listened to the blacksmith discuss with Thomas and another of his lads the fact that they had a prize in the dungeon that pleased the laird enough to keep him off their backs for a bit.

  Or words to that effect.

  And all the while, that beautiful, dark-haired teenager watched her carefully, as if she didn’t dare hope for anything that might look like a rescue. Emma hadn’t anticipated having to help two people, but she didn’t think that would matter. There was no way she was going to leave that girl, a girl she would have bet her father’s fortune was Nathaniel’s mother, behind in Fergusson clutches.

  She made herself more comfortable on her scrap of dirt floor and tried not to sigh in relief, on the off chance that someone found that odd. She had arrived where she was supposed to, found shelter where she hadn’t dared hope for it, and still had all her gear with her.

  The first hurdles were behind her.

  That was enough for the day.

  Chapter 30

  Nathaniel wondered if it would be ungrateful to wish that the first thing to truly fail in his generally useful mortal frame would have been his ears, not his legs. He couldn’t feel his feet any longer, but he could damned well hear far too much.

  He wasn’t quite sure who was sitting right above him blethering on endlessly, but he had been privy to their discussions for what felt like at least a week. Their conversation seemed to lurch between discussing how many years it might take for them to rid themselves of all the MacLeod and Cameron clansmen in the area and how long they could starve the MacLeod bastard they had in their pit before he simply gave up and died.

  Fascinating stuff, truly.

  The only thing that brightened up yet another interminable day had been realizing that the keep seemed to be quieting down a bit sooner than usual. He had stopped trying to keep track of time in any fashion, but he had learned to at least differentiate between meals being served above. He was fairly sure he’d heard dinner making the rounds upstairs, but unfortunately his had been overturned and fallen through the grate. He could only stare at the heap of slop that resided a foot beyond his feet, which he could no longer feel, and mourn its loss.

  There came a time in a man’s life when even rat stew began to have a certain appeal.

  The hall above seemed to fall silent more quickly than usual, or perhaps he himself had slept and not realized it. The truth was, he was just too damned tired to care any longer. He was going to die. He was resigned to it. He just wanted to have it over with quickly so he wouldn’t have to listen to those punters above him speculate on how long his journey to the afterlife might be.

  In time, there was absolute silence. Well,
there might have been the occasional snort from the guards above, but the conversation had mercifully come to a stop. He closed his eyes and wondered if he could dream himself into the next life. His mortal coil was apparently too tenacious for a mere shuffling. He was going to have to use a pry bar if something didn’t change very soon.

  Such as, perhaps, the grate above him being moved.

  He would have winced at the scraping noise it made, but maybe they were sending lads to do men’s work because all the men were asleep. He watched numbly as a figure dropped down into the muck in front of him.

  Ah, demons now. That demon there, it was a slender thing and moved with a grace that Nathaniel had the energy only to envy. He watched without comment as the demon unlocked his chains, then shook him.

  “Let’s go, sport.”

  He was just sure he was either hallucinating or he had finally crossed over and landed not in Heaven but no doubt where he deserved to be.

  “Damn,” he rasped. “Hell?”

  “Escape,” the demon said. “You have to help.”

  He would have pointed out that there was no escape from the underworld even if his legs had been working properly, but the fiend from hell wasn’t listening. He thought he might have wept as his tormenter pounded on his legs, perhaps to bring feeling back to them. Odd that his disembodied spirit was so, er, corporeal. Was that how things were going to be, then?

  He supposed he should have discussed a bit more theology with his uncle when he’d had the chance.

  “Come on, Nathaniel, stand up.”

  Well, at least they knew him in hell. He supposed he should have been flattered. He saw the ladder come down and rest in the muck, which he supposed was a promising development. Perhaps they wanted him to climb to a different spot in the afterlife.

  He accepted help to his feet, then fell onto the ladder because it was right there in front of him. He clung to it until he thought he had stopped shaking enough to even attempt to lift his foot to the bottom rung.

  “Hurry, damn it, before we’re caught.”

  Ah, his rescuer didn’t want to live out eternity in a pit, either. He agreed that it was time to go and steeled himself for a last attempt to save himself.

  He climbed up the ladder even though the price was more than he thought was possible to pay.

  He fell onto the floor above, but there was apparently no rest for the weary. It had never occurred to him that in hell a man might be forced to continually stumble forward in something of a run. It had seemed more like a place where one sat down whilst being tortured. The endless need to keep moving was absolute torment.

  He realized one demon had turned into two. They wouldn’t let him stop, those two demons who kept harping at him with their soft voices and endless demands. He refrained from cursing them, because even in hell he was a gentleman, but he damned well thought many, many vile things.

  He wasn’t sure how long it was before they let him stop. He was fairly sure he wasn’t in the Fergussons’ keep any longer, because when he fell to his hands and knees, he landed on hard earth, not slime or stone.

  A flask was put to his mouth and he was commanded to drink. The whisky burned all the way down his throat to set up a bonfire in his gut, but he didn’t complain. It was truly the best thing he had ever tasted. He filed the incongruity of that away for contemplation later, then simply sat there for several minutes with his insides on fire, trying to keep that whisky down in his belly where it might do him some good.

  He realized eventually that his head was beginning to clear. He wasn’t sure if that was an improvement or not, but it was at least something different. He lifted his head and looked at his rescuers.

  It was Emma.

  And his mother.

  Nay, not his mother. The girl there looked like his sister as a teenager, but if that were the case, what the hell was she doing in medieval Scotland? He rubbed his eyes with the backs of his hands, but that accomplished nothing but getting slime in them. Someone did him the favor of wiping his face so he could again see his two rescuers. He would have fallen over from shock, but his abused body was apparently just too damned robust to put up with that sort of weak display.

  “This is Ceana,” Emma said carefully. “She’s been a servant in the Fergussons’ hall for ten years now.”

  Nathaniel looked from Emma to his—well, that had to be his mother. He gaped at her, then looked at Emma, trying to wrap what was left of his mind around the improbability of what he was facing.

  “I thought she should be rescued,” Emma said, looking at him pointedly. “You know. So she can get on with her life.”

  He would have nodded wisely, but he suspected that would lead him to planting his face on the ground in front of him, so he forbore.

  “Where was she?” he rasped as he slowly stood.

  “With the blacksmith,” Emma said. “The blacksmith has an apprentice whose name is Thomas. I think you would recognize him as one who has a long-standing fondness of blades.”

  He landed on his arse. He wasn’t quite sure how he’d managed to do it so gracefully—something to determine and admire later—then looked up at his two saviors. Emma was, well, Emma. His mother was, still, a teenager.

  “We should go,” Emma said in Gaelic. “Ceana, ready?”

  Ceana nodded, then looked at Emma. “I’m a MacLeod, you know,” she said quietly. She lifted her chin. “Not that I could admit as much before.” She paused. “I’m not sure I should admit it in the future either.”

  “Bastard of Malcolm?” Nathaniel asked hoarsely.

  Ceana nodded carefully. “And you?”

  Nathaniel nodded, because it was the best he could do at the moment. Ceana smiled and he thought he might want to weep. He had no idea how his mother had come to be in the past, much less how she had ever gotten to the future, but he was beginning to think there were quite a few things about life that he just didn’t understand.

  “Can you run?” Emma asked.

  “Do you have more whisky?”

  She nodded, then helped him drink the rest. He gulped it down, half surprised it didn’t immediately come back up, then took a deep breath. He accepted help to his feet, then waited until his head stopped spinning. “Ready.”

  “I couldn’t find your dagger,” Emma said quietly.

  “Best to leave it behind,” he said.

  “I have my own,” Emma said. She pointed to the blade shoved down the side of her boot. “If that’ll do.”

  He looked at her, that ragged-looking urchin with her shorn hair and filthy face, and thought he had never in his life seen anything more beautiful.

  “Marry me,” he said.

  “You’re under duress.”

  “All the more reason to have what I want whilst I can,” he said. He looked at Ceana. “I want her to wed with me. Should she?”

  Ceana smiled. “Aye, definitely.”

  “Well, there you go,” Nathaniel said. He looked at Emma in surprise. “Gaelic?”

  “Boot camp,” she said in English. She smiled. “Thank Ian MacLeod later.”

  “I will,” he said faintly. He took a deep breath and looked at his mother. “We’ll get you to Laird Malcolm. You’ll be safe there.”

  “And where will you go?”

  “Ah, back to our home,” Nathaniel said, half afraid that anything he said would result in his never being born. Why his mother had married his father, and in the future no less . . .

  And he’d thought his life was strange.

  “We need to go,” Ceana said. “They won’t sleep forever.”

  Nathaniel nodded and concentrated on moving as quickly as he could. The whisky helped. The thought of possibly standing in a shower at some point in the future helped even more. He would never again turn his nose up at anything left on his counter, especially moldy bread. At the moment, he wo
uld have been thrilled with just the green bits.

  He had no idea how quickly time was passing. It was the middle of the night, he was out of his head with exhaustion, and it was all he could do to keep moving. That was no doubt why they ran bodily into a small group of clansmen before he realized how little heed he’d been paying to his surroundings.

  He patted himself for a dagger, wanted to argue when Emma moved to stand in front of him with her blade in her hand, then realized there was no need for any of it. He could hardly believe his eyes, but the clansmen were MacLeods and they were led by none other than his uncle John MacLeod himself.

  “Ah,” he managed.

  John looked at Lachlan, a man Nathaniel had fought alongside for the past five years. “I need a moment with this one here. Keep us safe, if you will.”

  “Anything for a priest,” Lachlan said. He walked up to Nathaniel and put his hand on his shoulder. “We heard you were in the Fergussons’ dungeon. They’ll pay.”

  Nathaniel shook his head. “Not worth the trouble, my friend.”

  Lachlan looked at him. “If it soothes you any, we were on our way to rescue you, but looks as if there was no need.”

  “Nay, I had angels on my side this time.”

  Lachlan nodded wisely. “Off on another adventure, are ye?”

  Nathaniel nodded to Emma. “My woman has come for me. I’ll make my home with her clan from now on.”

  “More room there?”

  Nathaniel smiled. “Enough,” he said. “I’ll never have these hills far from my heart, though.”

  “If ye weep on me, Nat, I’ll stick ye.”

  Nathaniel smiled, then watched the man who had saved his neck too many times to count walk off and melt into the forest. He took a deep breath, then looked at his uncle. John had introduced himself to Emma, advised her to run away from his nephew as quickly as possible, then looked at Ceana and shook his head. He looked at Nathaniel and said absolutely nothing.

  Nathaniel lifted his eyebrows briefly, then introduced his mother to her future brother-in-law.

  “Ceana, this is John MacLeod. He’s the laird’s priest.”