“If you tell me what’s going on, I can plead your case to King David,” Callum said. “I can tell him you helped us.”
That was exactly the wrong thing to say. Lord Patrick pulled away from Cassie with a jerk and put his nose into Callum’s face. “The day I need the King of England’s assistance is the day I lose my honor.”
He strode to the door. Cassie and Callum followed and turned to look as Lord Patrick headed up the stairs to the wall-walk above the inner bailey. He stopped before he reached the top, however, and although he pointed back at Cassie, his words were for Callum. “Get her out of here.”
Callum took a step towards him. “Who comes? Who’s they?”
Lord Patrick cursed and trotted back down the steps so he didn’t have to shout. “James Stewart was in your company. There must have been someone else, someone who supported Robert Bruce.”
“Why would you say that?” Callum said.
“Who else of importance traveled with you? You say the bishop is dead. Who else?” Lord Patrick said.
“King David sent a dozen noblemen with Kirby, along with members of his own household,” Callum said.
“Robbie Bruce was there, too, as his squire,” Cassie said. “His horse panicked and got him away before the MacDougalls descended upon the English.”
Lord Patrick nodded. “So that’s it, then.”
“What is it?” Cassie said.
“Of all the luck.” Lord Patrick looked up to the battlements as he spoke, not actually talking to Callum or Cassie anymore. Then he glared at Callum again. “It’s too late for regrets. You don’t know the Bruce as I do. It is he who comes against me now and we’re all dead.”
“My lord—” John said from the walkway above. Such was the tenseness in his voice that he didn’t have to say more than that.
Lord Patrick looked at Cassie and Callum. “If you knew Robert Bruce as I do, you’d know that the King of England is the least of my concerns tonight.”
Chapter Eight
Cassie
Callum and Cassie trotted up the steps after Lord Patrick, with no need to discuss the fact that they weren’t going to heed his admonition to flee. Not yet. Cassie didn’t feel any more than Callum did that she could run away without finding out what had happened to Callum’s friends. Even if Lord Patrick was telling the truth—that the survivors of the ambush weren’t at Mugdock—someone here would know where they’d gone.
They came out on the top of the wall to find that Lord Patrick had been entirely correct about what he faced and the immediacy of the danger. The Bruces had indeed come. Their banner rippled from a pole driven into the ground just out of arrow range, not that Lord Patrick had more than a half-dozen archers in his garrison. Bruce seemed to have a few more—enough anyway to loose the first rain of fire arrows at the castle. Meanwhile, other soldiers set fire to the thatched huts outside the palisade. Cassie hoped the villagers had sought shelter inside the castle before the Bruces had arrived. Not that ultimate safety lay there either.
Robbie Bruce had roused his family. It seemed impossible to think that they could have gathered hundreds of men in the few days since the ambush on the road, but if the torches they carried were any indication, their numbers neared a thousand. This had become more than a clan war. It was a kingdom they were fighting for.
“Those Bruces don’t screw around, do they?” Callum said.
“Not much.” Cassie took in a breath. “We need to make sure the prisoners aren’t inside Mugdock.”
“You don’t think Lord Patrick was telling the truth?” Callum said.
“Do you?” Cassie really wanted to know what Callum thought. He wasn’t a medieval man, not by a long shot, but he seemed to understand the medieval mind far better than she did. Even weirder, he seemed to want to understand her.
“I didn’t say that,” Callum said. “You did see a MacDougall.”
“He could have been injured and left behind or been chosen to stay behind to keep an eye on Lord Patrick.” Cassie paused. “You saw Lord Patrick’s face. He didn’t know that Robbie Bruce had been in your company.”
“And yet he feared retaliation from someone—enough to call in his men from the surrounding countryside,” Callum said. “He was prepared for something bad to happen.”
“But do you think he was prepared for this?” Cassie said.
Callum faced the inner bailey and didn’t answer. “Would this castle have a dungeon?”
“No,” Cassie said, “at least not like you might see in the movies. Prisoners would be housed in a shallow basement like the one below the south tower. Mugdock Castle is built on solid rock.”
Cassie gazed around at the sudden burst of activity wrought by the arrival of the Bruces. She and Callum were the only people in the entire castle not moving.
“We’ll have to check each of the towers. I don’t think anyone is going to stop us today.” Callum shot a glare at Cassie. “And don’t even suggest that we should split up.”
Cassie hadn’t been going to suggest it. She had her bow, still in its sling on her back, but she wasn’t planning to take on the Grahams and the Bruces at the same time. When she’d first come to Scotland, that bow had been all that stood between her and starvation. Or rape. Growing up as she had, half on the reservation and half off it, Cassie understood the importance of family. Here, she was clanless, and that meant she was fair game to anyone who could catch her. Until Lord Patrick had taken her under his wing.
Cassie had seen the look that Callum had given her when she’d talked to Lord Patrick. Like everyone else, he thought that Cassie was, or perhaps had been at one time, his mistress. She hadn’t been, however. Stereotypes of medieval men aside, Lord Patrick was loyal to his wife. All the man wanted was someone with a brain (which, sadly, his wife didn’t appear to have) to whom he could speak freely.
Cassie didn’t mind. He was old enough to be her father, a man Cassie had never met, and reminded her of her grandfather, who’d helped raise her. Cassie missed her grandfather every day, and it had been nice to have Lord Patrick on the margins of her life.
“Come on. I have a better idea.” Cassie headed down the stairs and across the courtyard without waiting to see if Callum followed her. After a few seconds, he caught up and fell into step beside her. Nobody stopped them. Nobody even looked twice at them. It gave Cassie hope that they might be able to complete their search quickly, though no matter how fast they moved, she didn’t yet have a plan for getting out of Mugdock in one piece.
Cassie didn’t head straight for one of the towers but led Callum to the kitchen, a squat building separated from the keep by a walkway and from the other buildings by a good thirty feet. It had been built that way so if the kitchen caught fire (not an uncommon event), the flames might not spread to the rest of the castle. Cassie had a friend of a sort, Isobel, who worked there as undercook to Heck, the master of the kitchen. As they entered, Cassie traded the smell of smoke and manure for wet wool and baking bread.
“Cassie! What are you doing? You shouldn’t be here!” Isobel, her blonde hair swept back from her face in a messy bun and her thick figure swathed in a giant apron, kneaded a giant ball of bread dough.
“So I’ve been told,” Cassie said, “but I could say the same to you. What are you doing here, making bread? The castle is under attack!”
“Men still have to eat,” Isobel said. “Have you seen who comes against us?”
“The Bruces, we know,” Cassie said.
Cassie lost Isobel’s attention as she broke off to shout at a kitchen boy stirring a large pot over the fire.
“The village is already on fire,” Callum said.
Isobel took in Callum with a glance and then looked again at Cassie. “I heard. What do you want, Cassie? This is no time for talking.”
“Where are the prisoners?” Cassie said.
Isobel bit her lip. She started to shake her head but then stopped herself and said instead, “I shouldn’t tell you, but since this is why the
Bruce is here, it’s not as if it’s a secret. They’ve all gone—the MacDougalls, that is, and their prisoners too, though—” She paused as she thought some more. “They left one prisoner behind, a Scotsman not from around here, along with one MacDougall to keep an eye on him.”
Callum turned his face away from Isobel and whispered in Cassie’s ear, “That isn’t exactly what Lord Patrick said.” Then he straightened and said to the cook, “Where were the MacDougalls headed?”
“North to Dunstaffnage Castle.”
“What about the prisoner who’s still here?” Cassie was disappointed to learn that Lord Patrick could lie so convincingly. “Why was he left behind?”
“He couldn’t be moved,” Isobel said. “He was just a soldier anyway, not like some of the others. Not like the Stewart.”
Callum drew in an audible breath. “James Stewart is alive?”
“To judge by his cursing all MacDougalls and Grahams for eternity, he’s well too,” Isobel said.
“They’ll use him as leverage. That’s why they’re keeping him alive,” Cassie said to Callum in modern English. “If they can’t have King David, they’ll take what they can get.”
“Perhaps Bruce knows that the prisoners aren’t here, and that’s why he’s so quick to burn Graham out rather than negotiate,” Callum said in the same language.
Isobel’s brow furrowed and she glared at Cassie. “You brought an Englishman here?”
Callum put out a hand in a gesture of appeasement and said in Gaelic, “I’m a Mackay, from up north. I have no dog in this hunt.”
But Isobel lifted her chin. “I won’t say more. You should go.”
“We’re going, Isobel,” Cassie said, sorry to have their relationship marred because of Callum, but she couldn’t fix it now. “Can you tell me where the soldier is being kept?”
Isobel was still looking sullen. “Donella has him with her.”
“Thank you. Thank you for helping us.” Cassie touched Isobel’s shoulder. “Take care of yourself.”
Isobel was already back to her kneading. “Go on with you. Until the Bruce burns us out, I have men to feed. I’ll stop when Lord Patrick himself tells me to and not before.”
Cassie backed away towards the door. “Let’s go, Callum.”
Callum put his heels together and bowed, prompting Isobel to pinch her lips together as she held back a smile. “Go on with you!” She shooed him away with one hand.
With a smile himself, Callum followed Cassie into the courtyard again, but this time it wouldn’t be so easy to get across it. The thatched roof of the barracks was on fire and men had formed a line from the well, passing buckets of water from hand to hand. More fire arrows flew towards them, more than a dozen every minute.
“We don’t have time to help,” Callum said.
“I know. Come with me.” Cassie led the way around the far side of the keep, which hadn’t yet been touched by the battle.
“Which way to the postern gate?” Callum said.
“That’s what I’m showing you.” Cassie held up her skirt with one hand as she sprinted towards the inner gatehouse, which was still open, though it wouldn’t be open for long if the Bruces breached the outer palisade. Once through the inner gate, they skidded down the slope from the castle into the outer bailey, which the palisade protected.
"We’re running out of time,” Callum said.
Cassie put a hand to her chest. It had been too long since she’d sprinted. “Donella is the herbalist and lives just there.” She pointed to a cluster of buildings built against the southern wall. “She would have wanted the soldier close to her if he was very ill, though since he’s a prisoner, I’m surprised Lord Patrick allowed it.”
“Maybe he didn’t want to be a party to the murder of a member of the king’s company more than he already was,” Callum said.
“It depends on whether or not he sheltered the MacDougalls by choice.” Cassie picked up the pace again, jogging past the blacksmith works. John was among a group of soldiers huddled nearby, but he didn’t look up as they passed. “I can’t see him condoning the murder of King David.”
“Would he believe that King David could be King Alexander II’s grandson?” Callum said.
“Everyone else does,” Cassie said. “It was the talk of the countryside last Christmas. So it’s true, about his mother?” Her brow furrowed. “I thought you said she was from our time?”
“She is,” Callum said. “So no, it isn’t true. But David’s denials haven’t made any headway in England. True or not, the people believe it. What clan did King Alexander belong to?”
Cassie was silent a moment as she tried to recall it. “The House of Dunkeld.”
“Then that is the clan upon which Graham and MacDougall have just begun a war, isn’t it?” Callum said. “Isn’t that the fear we saw in Lord Patrick’s eyes?”
“You may be right,” Cassie said.
They reached the six-foot-high wall that surrounded the kitchen garden. It had been built in stone to protect the plants from the wind that swirled through the courtyard year round, though it wasn’t blowing tonight. The garden lay on a slight south-facing slope to make the most of whatever sun peeked through the clouds.
Cassie pushed open the door in the wall and came face to face with the end of a pike. Her hands came up and she froze. Donella crouched six feet away with her weapon at the ready.
“Whoa.” Callum had come through the door right behind Cassie. He pulled up too, so close to Cassie that she could feel the warmth of his breath on her neck.
“Donella, it’s me. Cassie.”
Donella hesitated for another three seconds and then lowered her pike. “The Bruce is here.”
“We heard,” Cassie said. “We want to talk to the prisoner.”
Donella narrowed her eyes and looked past Cassie to Callum. “Who’s he?”
Cassie suspected that Callum was going to get that a lot, as long as he was with her and in Scotland. “Callum. A friend.”
“He a Bruce?”
“Mackay,” Cassie said.
Donella harrumphed at that, though what she meant by it, Cassie didn’t know. Every Scot knew something about every clan, good and bad, but the Mackays were from the far north and Cassie didn’t know how much contact the Grahams would have had with them. “Come with me,” Donella said.
This time of year, the plantings were well under way, though still small enough that if a fire arrow came down among them there wasn’t much to burn. So far the Bruces seemed to be focusing on getting through the palisade. That was on the north and northwest sides of the castle, not here to the south where the approach was steeper and the ground fell away to an elevation several hundred feet lower than the hill on which the castle rested.
Donella brought Cassie and Callum to her hut, ten feet wide and fifteen feet long. Its southern wall was the palisade itself. The hut had a thatched roof with a hole in the center to let out the smoke from the glowing brazier. Thick candles set in plates lit the interior.
Callum bounded towards the man lying on a pallet in the far corner but then pulled up, moderating his enthusiasm at the sight of the man’s wounds. He crouched to the floor. “Hello, Liam.”
“A tough one, he is,” Donella said. “They walked him here, but by the time he arrived, he was out of his mind, raving. Alexander MacDougall wanted to kill him rather than leave him, but Lord Patrick wouldn’t let him. I gave him a potion that put him to sleep. The MacDougall said that there was no point in killing a man so near death—though after the MacDougalls left, Lord Patrick said hastening it might have been a mercy.”
Callum took Liam’s hand in his. “I see a lot of blood.”
“The blood isn’t his,” Donella said. “He took a blow to the head and it looks like he used his forearm as a shield. I’ve splinted the arm and bound it. We’ll see about the head when he wakes.”
“We need to go now,” Callum said.
Men shouted outside the hut, calling for reinforcements on th
e palisade. Callum glanced up at Cassie and she nodded that she’d heard them too. It didn’t seem as if the palisade had been breached, but it had to happen soon.
“What if we waited for the Bruces to come to us?” Cassie said.
“I don’t trust them to stop long enough to listen,” Callum said. “They’re fired up, more so by the minute. No—” He shook his head. “I’m getting both of you out of here.”
“How?” Cassie said.
“I’ll carry him,” Callum said. “We can go over the wall.”
Cassie might have scoffed, but Callum’s intensity was such that she believed he really would. “He’s almost as big as you are, Callum.”
“You couldn’t carry him to Cassie’s house, much less all the way to Dundochill,” Donella said.
“I can walk,” Liam said and at Donella’s gasp added, “I’ve been awake on and off for a while now.”
Donella poked at Callum’s shoulder to move him out of the way and then crouched beside Liam. “Tricky, aren’t you?” She felt his forehead.
Liam brushed away her ministrations with his good hand and reached out to Callum. “Help me up.” His left forearm was tightly wrapped, and he held it gingerly to his chest. “I didn’t know where I was and thought it might be better for my health if I played I was asleep.”
Callum grasped Liam’s hand and levered him to a sitting position. “What happened to the rest of our company?” Callum said.
“Dead or captured,” Liam said.
“I realize that, but how many survivors were there?” Callum said.
“A dozen,” Liam said, which was what both Cassie and Donella had told Callum too. “Your friend, Samuel, was among them.”
Callum let out a sharp breath. “Thank the Lord. I was afraid to ask.”
“We heard in the kitchen that they’re being taken to Dunstaffnage Castle,” Cassie said.
Donella began to shake her head, but then she turned it into a shrug and reached for one of the salves on the table in the center of her hut.
Exiles in Time (The After Cilmeri Series) Page 10