They all nodded at each other, took a deep breath, and were off again, this time with Cassie leading the way along the trail and Callum bringing up the rear. “I never wanted to burn this forest down, but it seems it can’t be helped,” Callum said, loud enough for Cassie to hear.
“The rain that’s coming should take care of the fires,” Cassie said.
“How do you know that it’s going to rain?” said James. Even with Cassie’s limited experience with noblemen, she could tell he spoke Gaelic with a very upper-crust accent.
“I can smell it in the air,” Cassie said.
“Cassie’s a better woodsman than all of us combined,” Callum said. “She knows what she’s talking about.”
Cassie was glad that it was too dark for the men to see her blush.
They reached the horses without any obvious pursuit, so Callum helped Samuel ease the unconscious prisoner off his shoulder and onto the ground. Samuel straightened his spine with a snap, crackle, pop.
“We should hurry,” Cassie said. “That guard on the palisade raised the alarm and the soldiers will be on us in no time.”
“Come here, Cassie,” Callum said. “Do you recognize him?”
Cassie crouched beside the injured prisoner and brushed the hair back from his face. “Oh no!” she said.
“Who is it?” Callum said.
“This is Lord Patrick Graham’s son, John,” she said. “He’s fifteen.”
Callum bent to feel the pulse at John’s throat and then said to James and Samuel, “Did you say, back at the lodge, that your captors brought him in later?”
James nodded. “That is correct.”
“Where are the rest of the prisoners?” Cassie said. “I watched the MacDougalls lead you away from the ambush site. There must have been at least a dozen of you.”
“They separated us from the main group after the first night we spent at Mugdock,” said James. “You were watching the ambush?”
Cassie nodded but didn’t feel the need to elaborate. “Why did they keep the two of you together?”
“I’ve asked myself that many times in the last few days,” Samuel said. “It can only be because of Lord Callum, though how Alexander MacDougall knew about our relationship, I don’t know.”
Callum exchanged a look with Cassie. “Kirby,” she said.
Callum stood. “We have no time for this riddle. We need to move. Listen.”
Cassie had been patting at John, looking for wounds, but her head came up at Callum’s warning. Sound traveled more easily in the dark. Now that he’d mentioned it, it was easy to make out the shouts of men in the distance.
“James—you ride with the boy on my horse,” Callum said. “Samuel, you take Cassie’s.”
“My lord, there’s no need—” Samuel began.
“You’ve been hiding a long gash down your leg,” Callum said. “It may no longer be bleeding, but you’re still lame. Get up there!”
James and Samuel didn’t argue further. Both mounted the horses, and then Callum and Cassie struggled to get John’s unconscious body in front of James. He held John’s waist and allowed the boy to rest his head against his collar bone. The ride would be awkward, but worse would be throwing John across the horse’s withers and letting him hang there upside down.
Callum set off with James and John, holding the reins of his horse and trotting beside it. Cassie followed with Samuel. It was dark under the trees, but the horses maintained a sure-footed pace. They could see better than humans in the dark, and the path was well-used and free of obstacles. While he trotted beside James, Callum gave him the rundown on what had been happening since the ambush.
“As I said, Kirby,” Cassie said.
As the tale wound down, Samuel, who’d been listening too, said to Cassie, “I never liked him. He was always slippery, even for a bishop.”
“Well, now we know him to be a traitor,” Cassie said.
Samuel turned in the saddle to look behind them. “I don’t see our pursuers yet.”
“I should have shot that man on the wall-walk,” Cassie said. “I choked.”
“You got everyone out of the fort,” Samuel said. “That was the important thing.”
“It was dark and I thought the soldier was too far away to make a viable target,” Cassie said. “I didn’t want to waste my last arrow, but if I’d at least tried, he might not have been able to tell anyone what he saw.”
Samuel shrugged. “It might have delayed the pursuit but all they would have had to do was check the hut. Lord Callum cut a hole in the wall, Cassie. There was no disguising the direction we went.”
“Maybe we should double back?” Cassie said.
Callum overheard her question. “Better to cross the river and head north,” he said.
“We should continue east, my lord,” said James. “The Priory at Inchmahome will shelter us.”
“The MacDougalls will know that you know it’s there,” Callum said. “If they don’t catch us, that will be the first place they’ll look.”
The trees thickened, indicating they’d reached the Narrows, the stretch of water before the loch became a river.
“Then I offer my castle at Doune as an alternative,” said James.
Cassie tsked through her teeth. “That’s twenty miles away. And again, it’s east. If we go just a little further, we’ll reach a ford and we can cross the river as Callum suggested.”
“No direction is going to be safe,” said James.
They reached the ford and stopped. The trail continued to the east, while another began on the other side of the ford. Cassie looked back, listening for the sound of the pursuit. Callum ran a hand through his hair. “We can’t split up. We must choose now.”
“I fear for John’s life if we don’t find shelter soon, my lord.” James wasn’t willing to defer to Callum. He was a Guardian of Scotland and not used to resistance to his plans any more than Callum seemed to be.
“I fear it too,” Cassie said. “I hate that John was caught up in the fighting and has been mistreated, but if we go to the priory, can we protect him and all the monks once we’re there?”
None of the men said anything, and that was answer enough. No.
Callum turned to Cassie. “Can you tell what’s wrong with John?”
She shook her head. “He has no open wounds. Perhaps a closed wound has turned septic?”
“He hasn’t woken up even once,” Samuel said.
“A blow to the head might have put him in this state,” Cassie said.
“He needs help, Cassie,” Callum said, in modern English. “Am I making the wrong choice not going to the monks?”
“I don’t know,” Cassie said, “but I trust you and I trust your instincts. Just decide. They’re coming, Callum.”
“I hear them.” Callum grabbed the bridle of James’s horse and pulled the horse down the bank and across the ford. Cassie followed, trotting through the water next to Samuel’s horse. She could smell the sweat and the blood on Samuel’s clothes and was glad that the horses weren’t spooked by the fear in all of them.
By now their pursuers were close enough that Cassie could see the light from their torches. “How many do you think there are?” Cassie said to Samuel. “We never pinned down their exact numbers.”
“Only ten escorted us here, but more came after they locked us up,” Samuel said.
“They lost three in the hut,” Cassie said, “and two at the entrance to the fort.”
“How did that happen?” Samuel said.
“I shot them.”
Samuel merely nodded. “They don’t have horses or they might have caught us by now.”
“Come to think of it, I didn’t see any horses in the fort,” Cassie said. “How did you get to the lodge, Samuel?”
“We walked.”
Cassie didn’t know a lot about the nobility of the Middle Ages, but she knew enough to know that noblemen didn’t walk. Lucky for James, he didn’t have to walk now, though he might as well have been for
all the progress they were making. In the last fifteen minutes, clouds had come up, sweeping across the moon and making it more difficult to see the path ahead. They needed torches to see properly, but darkness was preferable to giving away their position.
On the north side of the river, the terrain forced the horses east, even though Callum didn’t want to go in that direction. His head swiveled constantly to the left, searching for a pathway that would take them up and over the hills to the north. After a hundred yards, the trail broadened, which made the going easier, and then they reached a fork in the road that looked familiar to Cassie.
“Wait a minute!” Cassie left Samuel’s side and hurried to catch up to Callum. “I know where we can go. I’ve been on this path. It climbs steeply but then descends into a little village that sits between two lochs to the north of here. It’s a five mile walk, so it’s not close, but it’s closer than Doune Castle. I can’t promise that we’ll be safe, but a healer lived there four years ago. Plus, we’ll be nearer to Stewart lands.”
“It seems quite a chance to take on a four-year-old memory,” said James. “I’d prefer to try somewhere else—”
A man shouted behind them. James snapped his mouth shut and everyone looked back. Lights from the oncoming torches bobbed and weaved in the distance. They were still a good quarter mile away.
“Surely they can’t see us,” Samuel said. “It’s too dark.”
“They’re at the ford,” Callum said. “We can’t wait for them to decide to cross it. If they look for our footprints on this side of the ford, they’ll know where we are and they’ll be coming fast, unburdened by a wounded man as we are.”
“Lead James and Samuel to the village, Callum,” Cassie said. “I’ll keep following this path. We need them to think we’re still headed for the priory.”
Callum grimaced but gave the order. “Go, James. Do as she says.” Callum slapped the rump of James’s horse and it headed up the path. Samuel’s horse followed, but Callum stayed where he was, looking down at Cassie. “It would be better to stay together.”
“I know what I’m doing,” Cassie said, even though she didn’t, quite. “We need to divert them. Though he would never say so, Samuel is barely holding onto that horse.”
“I should be the one to lead our pursuers away,” Callum said.
“No,” Cassie said. “It’s your protection James and the others need if this trick doesn’t work. I have only one arrow and am no good with a sword.”
Callum leaned in close. With just moonlight to see by, the only part of his expression Cassie could make out was the glint in his eye, but that was enough to know how much he didn’t like this plan. “I’m trusting you to take care of yourself. Be careful.”
“I will.”
She didn’t hug him this time. There was no time anyway, and she hadn’t yet decided if the first one had been a good idea or not. Then Callum was gone, racing up the path after James and Samuel. Cassie pulled her cloak from her backpack and followed him a few steps up the trail. The voices of the pursuers echoed along the river. It sounded as if some of them were arguing, just as Callum and James had argued. They were giving Cassie a chance to put more distance between them and her.
Cassie needed to convince the men who followed them that they’d continued east. She swept her cloak through the dirt and smoothed out the few foot and hoof prints the others had left. Fortunately, the warm sun of today had dried what had already been hard-packed earth. She’d come down this trail from the village four years ago; it looked as if the people in this region still used this avenue often.
Cassie couldn’t recreate hoof prints, but she ran forward and back along the ten yards of trail immediately to the east of the turnoff, trying to simulate the passage of several people. To judge by the torchlight, the pursuers had finally decided to split up, with a portion of them heading east along the south side of the river, and others following Cassie and her friends across the ford.
As a last deception, Cassie rammed the edge of her cloak down onto a branch of a gorse bush that grew beside the trail. The cloth caught and she jerked at it, mimicking what could have happened if she were really fleeing down this path. Her breath caught in her throat when it wouldn’t tear. She’d allowed their pursuers to come closer than she intended—a matter of a few dozen yards. Finally, the corner ripped, leaving a square of fabric behind on a thorn.
As Cassie ran down the trail, she risked another glance back. By the sound of tramping feet and loud voices, at least a dozen men had crossed the ford. The path continued straight on and Cassie followed it to a point where the trees grew so close together on either side that they formed an arching canopy overhead. It was pitch dark underneath them, made worse by the clouds that had increased in number and played hide and seek with the moon. The lack of light forced Cassie to slow even more.
She squinted into the darkness, trotting twenty yards down the trail by feel until an unseen tree root tripped her. She fell forward, stinging her hands and knees, and decided it was time to change tactics. She reached for a low branch above her head and swung herself off the trail and onto the hill that rose up beside her to her left at a sixty degree angle from the path.
Cassie crouched in the leaves at what would be head height for someone on the trail, listening for the men who pursued her. She couldn’t see a thing. After a minute, she realized they weren’t coming.
Crap!
Cassie climbed straight up the hill on her feet and hands like a monkey, heedless of the brambles and bracken that scratched her face. She found a vantage point that allowed her to see where the pursuers had stopped. They’d passed the turnoff Callum and the others had taken, but they hadn’t continued down the trail to the east more than twenty feet.
Thanks to the torches they carried, Cassie could see the men clearly as they conferred. They seemed to be arguing again; then one of the men threw up his hands and turned away. With a broad sweep of his arm, he gestured the men to follow him back the way they’d come. Almost gagging at how badly she had failed Callum, Cassie pulled out her bow. She took a deep breath, trying to calm her pounding heart, aimed carefully at the leader, and loosed her last arrow.
And then she ran.
Chapter Thirteen
Callum
Callum spent the first ten minutes of his hike up the trail cursing himself. He should have been the one to decoy their pursuers. Why had he let Cassie do it?
“She’s quite a woman,” Samuel said once Callum caught up with the horses. Callum didn’t think he’d ever heard him use quite so dry a tone.
“Don’t I know it,” Callum said. “I can’t believe I let her talk me into this.”
“She seems to know what she’s doing,” Samuel said. “Where’d you find her?”
“She found me,” Callum said. “She rescued me from the pile of bodies in the road after the MacDougalls left me for dead.”
Samuel shook his head. “Scotland will feel the repercussions of this week for years to come.”
“It’s not over yet, either,” Callum said.
“Thank you for the rescue,” Samuel said softly.
Callum glanced up. He couldn’t see much of Samuel’s face, but it looked more drawn than it had been earlier, even in his prison cell. His wound was hurting more than he let on. “You’re welcome. You would have done the same for me.”
Samuel put his lips together, seemingly pleased at Callum’s expression of confidence in him, but Callum knew it to be true.
“While I am delighted to know that Robert Bruce believed his duty was to come after me, I wish he had solicited the support of the other Guardians before he acted—and certainly before he burned out the Black Comyn,” said James, from just ahead of them.
“Who happens to be another Guardian of Scotland,” Callum said.
“Exactly,” said James. “I have supported Robert Bruce’s claim to the throne. What is his son doing?”
“The father might not know, or if he does know, might not have appro
ved his son’s actions,” Callum said, not using Grampa Bruce’s nickname in polite company. “To be fair, we have no proof that the eldest Bruce is involved in any of this, and only Kirby’s word of the involvement of John Balliol.”
“I am very disappointed in Kirby,” said James. “I feel as though I should have known something wasn’t right about him when he snubbed you at Carlisle.”
“He snubbed you too,” Callum said.
James shifted in the saddle and didn’t answer, so Callum didn’t continue the conversation. The man had a lot on his mind, perhaps the most minor of which was the fact that he was fleeing for his life over a mountain.
The road continued to climb, but the trail was good and the horses navigated it without difficulty. Callum had to trot to keep up, and he was glad for all those hours he’d spent training in the winter and spring. The soldier’s mentality in this world was remarkably similar to that in the old one: a man trained constantly, hoping his skills would never be used, but was prepared to use them if he needed to. Callum’s training had saved his life many times, even before the ambush on the road.
Callum hoped that Cassie’s experience would save her now. He cursed under his breath again. Where was she?
After approximately two miles, the path leveled out. They’d reached the heights above the river and the loch. With the rise in elevation, the wind picked up and even Callum could smell the change in the weather of which Cassie had spoken. They continued as best they could for another mile, though more clouds blew in every minute and it was becoming difficult to see anything at all when the moon wasn’t showing. After another mile, the path started to descend.
“Callum!” Samuel said. “Someone’s coming!”
Callum swung around.
“I hear running feet,” Samuel said.
“Go! Go on!” Callum tossed his friend the leading reins.
Samuel caught them in midair. James dug his heels into his horse’s sides, clutching John to his chest. Though Samuel would have waited with Callum, Callum slapped the horse’s rump and got it moving too.
Exiles in Time (The After Cilmeri Series) Page 16