by Jill Barnett
She stood there for a long time without saying a word, battling the demons of motherhood.
“Did he say anything to you?” Donnald asked. “Did he meet with anyone recently?”
“He said naught to me.” Her words were terse and she looked thoughtful. “We should send for Mairi. Perhaps she will have some knowledge.” She shook her head and stared off at the wall for a long time. He could hear the choked tears in her voice when she said, “Is there naught you can do, Donnald? Can you not find him and stop him before all is lost to him?”
“I sent men in all directions looking for them, and I rode straight here.”
She placed a gentle hand on his shoulder and said, “You must be exhausted. Come inside where you can bathe and have some wine.”
“Wait.” He pulled her into his lap and she quickly maneuvered so his face was next to her unscarred side. Leaning against her soft skin, he closed his eyes, took in the weak, sweet scent from the rose petals she used to store her linen underclothing, and deep in his heart he wished she loved him enough to let him lean his brow upon her scarred skin.
15
“Applecross, Dingwall, Suddy, Cromarty, Plockton, Garve, Kyle, Avoch, Knockbain, and Wester,” Glenna recited. Places to avoid. She led Skye not in the southern direction she believed Montrose had been taking her, but due east from Beauly, where at first she had gone through the woods in a southerly direction, then guided Skye along a stream and doubled back, twice and in two different directions, covering her tracks, and leaving false ones.
He would never know she was headed for Inverness.
For half the day she had crossed through the long, wooded grounds of the Great Glen, riding through streams of water and away from, or skirting around, villages and hamlets she and her brothers had plundered.
Her brothers’ sweet faces came flooding into her mind and she wondered what they were doing this day, and did they miss her as sorely as she missed them, as if she had left part of herself with them, an arm, a leg, a piece of her heart. She lost herself in thought for a few memories, ones that stole some of the life from her.
The silence stretched onward, until she heard nothing but the crush of Skye’s hooves on the leaves and pine needles beneath her, and then her heart beating loudly in her ears. The realization hit her that she was more alone than she was comfortable. On the island, the quiet had always felt peaceful, soft, and not empty like it did now. She had sought out time by herself. She was quickly becoming a stranger, she thought, and rode onward.
At the place where the stream turned to falls, tumbling down to a river below, she stopped to refill her flask and remounted. As she moved on, the song of a lark made her look up through the trees, but it stopped singing when a devilish black rook shrieked loudly and flapped its wings, diving like a spear and scaring the lilt and bird music before it flew away.
Overhead, a patch of blue sky stared back at her as if it had eyes.
The clear blue of his eyes.
A hare suddenly scampered out from beneath a fern and her heart caught in her throat.
Overhead a hawk circled, only to light in the high branches of one of the tallest trees and she could hear the sound of an animal thrashing through the brush, eerie and strange and a little frightening.
It was as if there was no other living human soul in the world. Urging Skye forward, she held her breath, and then finally exhaled as she rode out from under a dark stand of larch and pine and reined in, sagging slightly in the saddle, her heartbeat slowing and her hands relaxed.
Before her spread a vast and open river plain and the air was dry and warm as a fur-lined cloak, and tasted of summer, unlike the fecund and verdant dampness of the woods—a metal taste reminiscent of blood on the tongue. The high sun had cooked away the last of the night’s dew on the grass, and to her left, a marten scurried through a crackling nest of needles and larch leaves to disappear into a hole.
Skye shied slightly and she controlled her with slight pressure from her knees, which were fairly numb from her dog’s weight. Fergus lay limply in front of her, slung like a grain sack across the saddle, unmoving. But once she shifted, one of his eyes popped open and he was staring dully up at her. “You are awake. Poor dog.” She stroked his neck, feeling like the worse kind of monster. “Beer is not for hounds, you foolish thing.” A couple of breaths and his sad eyes drifted closed again. “And spiked beer is for big, brawny barons who….” Her words trailed off. She couldn’t muster up anything horrible enough to squelch her feelings of guilt.
Had he awakened by now and discovered her deceit? He would be angry enough to spit daggers, that she knew. His expression of anger was burned into her memory, so different from how he looked at her the day before.
The image of him in the stable at Beauly came flooding into her mind, Montrose laughing, his eyes the exact color of a perfect sky, crinkled at the corners and changing his whole face and demeanor, the flash of white, even teeth, his ample height and impressive breadth, looking ludicrous in the way his clothes and face were dripping water as he stood threatening to soak her to the bone.
Her mind’s eye switched to the tender, odd look in his eyes when she was singing—a look she had never seen on a man—and then the stiff tension in his muscles and the sense of panic emanating from him as he ran down the narrow abbey hallways with her shaking in his arms…the warmth of his body when she was ill, both there and on the ship’s crossing…his mouth on hers.
Such thoughts. She was twisted up inside them, these games inside her head, trapped, and tangled in even sillier dreams she dared not allow herself to think about. Montrose, Al and El, her father dying…her father lying…not her father after all. Her father, the king.
Oh, God…would the king ever let her be? If she could stay hidden for a long time would he forget about her? Would she ever be free?
Men, she thought with disgust. May St. Columba take them all! If she were violent, she would want to hit something. “Yesterday does not matter,” she said aloud stubbornly, as if by doing so she could believe it as truth.
The past was merely that: past.
She used her hand to shade her eyes against the startling bright sun, as her squinted gaze followed the bare leg of road cutting through viridian grass and a lazy scattering of chalky rock; it led through the last span of land between her and the port burgh of Inverness, which was large enough to keep her safe, with cross streets and its trade market.
Cast in the blue haze of distance and perched on a distant crag was the castle; she could make out the notched teeth of its crenelled walls. Below it, a wide silver ribbon of water, the River Ness, which curled off into Moray Firth and was trimmed in lines of the town’s staggered buildings a good league away. From here, they looked like nothing more than a game board of merels.
A startling shout, the snap of a whip and a curse to the “slowest beasts this side of Cromarty” pierced her lonely silence, and soon the slow, creaking sound of a wain came from a nearby bend in the road. Oxen, huge and horned and knotted, pulled a lumbering wagon which slowed as it grew closer. Stacked up the sides of the cart bed, burgeoning bundles of plump corn threatened to burst from their tethers.
“Good day to you, lad!” The driver wrapped the thick leather reins securely around his fist and pushed back his hood of brown wool worn above a saffron tunic of trade's linen. His face was kindly, eyes bright and cheeks red as island deer, but the right side of his face was misshapen and twice the size of his other.
He rested his reins on his knees and uncovered his head to reveal hair the color of iron, blackish flecked with gray. The oxen must have stopped, although considering how slow they had been moving, Glenna wasn’t certain. “Good day,” she said.
“What have you there?” The man sounded as if he had a mouthful of stones and she stared without thought at his swollen face. He was looking at Fergus--a large furry lump in front of her.
“My hound.”
“Is it dead?”
“Nay. Dead dru
nk,” she fabricated, figuring it was a half-truth. “He lapped up more ale than a brewer earlier.”
The man gave a bark of laughter then grabbed his cheek and groaned. “This blasted tooth! “ He pulled a small pot from his cloak, dipped in his fingers and rubbed them on the back of his mouth. “Wintergreen oil,” he explained and tucked the pot away. “Barely a league of road left ahead of me and I can seek out the clever hands of the town barber. Won’t be too soon enough, I say. With this fat load I should be wanting to head straight to the mill, but—“ He put his hand on his fat cheek. “I will stay in town for I cannot take another eternal night of this. You’re headed for town, laddie?”
“Aye.”
“I’d welcome the company. Will take me mind off the Devil’s own throbbing pain.” He cast a quick nod toward the wagon and winced slightly. “The hound can rest in the back of the wain.”
She looked down at Fergus, knowing he would be most comfortable in the wagon, sleeping off his stupor on a bed of corn husks rather than ribs rattling as she and Skye rode on.” And his weight was causing her limbs to go uncomfortably senseless. She eyed the man’s wain and its precarious load and wondered where Fergus could sleep safely and not fall off.
“Do not fash yourself. We’ve plenty of room for him. See? There is dip in the midsection.” He stood. “Come. Hand him up to me, laddie, and rest your animals for a while.”
So with Skye tied to the back of the wain and Fergus asleep in the middle of the load, Glenna took to posing as the lad Gordon of Suddy, the best she could invent in the spur of the moment, and she rode companionably into the town of Inverness on a sunny afternoon settled on a wain bench next to the loquacious Heckie of Drumashie. He told her tales of his past and his family, his wife who was the daughter of a sea merchant and, he, with hectares of fertile land given him as reward for saving the son of his overlord, a story he chewed her ears over with flourish and as much drama as an Angevin bard.
Heckie of Drumashie was a man of many words and even more gestures.
Soon black-faced sheep could be seen grazing contentedly on the low rises, and dairy cattle munched on fathoms of clover speckled with yellow flowers. Scattered along the outskirts of town were perimeters of low stone fences and crofts covered in thick thatch, built of solid wattle and daub that sparkled in the sunlight with newly lime-washed walls, surrounded by freshly mown fields, one with a lumbering spotted sow and gaggles of children laughing, chasing.
A woman with her blue skirts tucked up into her girdle stood hoeing rows of turnips and onions, and another tossed feed to red-brown hens with feathers all-a-flutter as they pecked heartily at the ground near her wooden clogs. Off in the distance, men tilled the grain fields and others were bailing up huge rolls of fresh golden-green hay, while large-bedded hay wagons lined up to be loaded. Wagons stacked high with faggots cut from the forest for cook fires moved past the town’s perimeter ditches and disappeared into the bowels of Inverness. Everywhere she looked was another teeming eyeful. To see so many people caused a humming deep inside her. She was not so alone, and she smiled.
“Aye, ‘tis a sight, is it not?” Heckie said with admiration. “To see a holding where the lord and the sheriff don’t bleed all the wealth out of the land and its people. Even the likes of Munro the Horrible wouldn’t dare plant his greedy feet onto charter land of the king, Himself.”
Her smile disappeared. She didn’t know which name upset her more, Munro the Horrible or her father ‘Himself.’ She paused before speaking. “When the king Himself has been living in exile for so many years past?” The words spilled like toads from her mouth. “What king does not rule his land?”
She could feel Heckie’s look without a glance.
“I would expect a laddie from Ross-shire to know more of how the winds blow,” he said quietly and pulled on the reins.
She stared at her hands in her lap, knowing she could not tell him the truth, that she knew little of kings and politics living not in Ross-shire but in the isolation of the outer islands, where rare news was more of the Norse machinations than much of their own homeland. That she was not a lad.
What would he say were she to pull off her hat, let down her hair, and declare she was the daughter of Himself?
Did that make her Herself?
If Heckie of Drumashie knew he was sitting next to the daughter of the king she suspected the news might actually render the man speechless.
She searched for a lie and settled on the truth. “I do not know much of the workings of politics and the rulings and rights of kings. I never dared ask why he is in exile, having lived with the belief that the king was so far from my place in the schemes of the world and therefore had nothing to do with me. I have only known that the king has been away for as many years as I have breathed this air.”
So Heckie explained the king’s exile, the great battle on the day she secretly knew she was born, and Heckie’s story made her understand betrayal on a grander scale than she would have ever thought she could fathom before the last few days.
“…. And later we heard that the great and lovely queen had died, with her newborn child, in a fire in the woods, while the king was taken prisoner, and none ever knew if it were the king’s enemies that got to her.”
From Heckie she heard of such tales of the treachery that for the first time she understood the thin thread of control and slim trust available to anyone with royal blood. He told her of the king’s cousin, who challenged her father’s right to rule through his mother’s line and with coffers of gold and silver from his many ransoms bought easy rebellion from some lords who swore fealty to her father, but behind his back plotted to oust him.
“He came back to Scotland once, Himself did,” Heckie said. “But a traitor was privy to the secret plans, and as the king and his men rowed ashore, the barons and their mercenaries attacked and he took an arrow deep in his side. On the ship was a man from Jerusalem who studied Eastern medicine, and he held the king together until they landed in Brittany. The French king’s chirurgeon brought him back from death throes, but his recovery was long and difficult. ‘Tis said he was betrayed by one of his closest friends…the name bandied about was Sir Ewan Robertson.
For a brief moment she wondered if she had misjudged her father. She still ached from her own experience with betrayal.
“There is fresh rumor brewing about. First heard a fortnight ago.”
“What kind of rumor?”
“That Himself is coming home.”
She knew the rumor was no rumor but the truth. Her father was coming back. Would his enemies again try to kill him? How could he ever trust anyone?
Heckie was watching her quizzically.
“I do not know what to say except it would seem to be folly for him to risk his life again. Why would he?”
“Because his blood is that of kings,” he said simply.
He spoke with honest reverence about her father and his courage, and his tone was filled with pride. She felt suddenly small, and for the first time she wondered at her blood. What did she carry beneath her skin that drove her and made up her being? So many unanswered questions.
They drove past the deep defense ditches lined with stone and into Inverness proper, where buildings huddled close together like foot soldiers, shoulder to shoulder, as if there were only bare enough plots of land for the four corners of each one. Up from the dirt street, a blanket of dust swirled around the ox team, dusting their black coats with a fine veil of red dirt.
That the thoroughfare was not muck-ridden was extremely rare.
From what Heckie said, drain gutters and cess channels were built behind the buildings, as they were in Edinburgh and London. And though there were dogs and pigs and chickens occasionally roving in the streets, there were far more people moving to and from the market crossing; it stood ahead them, where the crowds thickened and one could hear the hawking of goods, pipe and drum music, and the buzzing voices of trade.
Heckie turned the wain down a side stre
et and stopped in front of a narrow, stone based building with blood-red painted shutters. A barber sign swung on an iron hook above the door, a thick oak timbered with red and white-lime painted trimwork. He assured her he knew of a stable where she could safely board and care for her horse and hound while she explored the temptations of the market. In exchange she would stay and watch the loaded wagon while Heckie took care of his tooth pain.
Glenna knew she could not stay in the town indefinitely—she would have to move onward—but the size and crowds of Inverness afforded her more anonymity than a village and she needed supplies. For a short time, perhaps a few days, she could lose herself here.
* * *
Lyall lost her trail again. He reined in and rubbed his brow, took a long deep breath before he glanced up through the trees at the sun to gauge how much time he’d already wasted.
Too long. For every movement of the sun across the broad blue sky, she was getting farther and farther away.
Frustrated, angry at himself for letting his guard down--and wanting to whack the little witch for being so quick-witted--he turned around for the third time and went back to the place where she had entered the stream. He dismounted and carefully tracked her on foot, walking on the rocks and stopping to examine anything, until finally he found one deep hoof print between some rounded stones, not on the east side as he had expected, but on the west side of the stream.
West? He stared into the trees. He didn’t for a heartbeat believe she would go back toward the abbey. He looked westward, then north, checked both directions for trees with broken twigs and branches, marks that proved she had ridden past, and then searched the areas for hound and horse dung, anything to give a clue of her direction. But he found nothing.
Back by the stream he kicked aside some fallen leaves, hunkered down. There, finally, he saw a trace of hoofmarks that had been brushed away. He shook his head, half admiring her.