by Syme, R. L.
One of the shadows moved next to her and she could see the outline of a weapon sticking up over what looked like a head and shoulders. Likely a sword.
It reached for her and her throat tightened.
“Anne, are you awake?” Broc’s familiar voice made her body ease, but she couldn’t make out his facial features well enough to feel truly relaxed.
“Broc, is that you?”
“You can’t see me?”
She squinted. She could just make out the apple of his cheek where the light struck it. “I can’t.”
“I apologize for frightening you. Your eyes will soon adjust and I hope it will give you more comfort.”
Anne rubbed her eyes and eased back against whatever hard-packed bump she’d been sleeping on. “Where are we?”
“Nearly to our camp. We’ll be arriving within the hour.”
“And where is your camp?”
Broc paused. She could hear, along the line, someone’s horse take off into a gallop.
“What was that?”
“We send out scouts every so often, just to make sure the way ahead is clear.”
“We’re not on the road, though.”
“No. We couldn’t do that.”
A tiny bit more light seemed to be illuminating them and Anne could just make out Broc’s face, the rough, bedraggled beard, and the cut of a stolen soldier’s uniform. What she’d previously thought a sword turned out to be a thick spear, which appeared to be strapped to his horse somehow.
“What happened back in Berwick?”
“I found you with the Sheriff and yo—” He stopped. Anne shook herself, trying to remember. Everything seemed a black blur in her mind.
“The Sheriff?” She tried to restimulate the storytelling, but Broc remained silent.
“What happened, Broc? You can’t keep it from me.”
Silence. Black.
She remembered that black, coming over her. Stealing over her, and her fear for her sister. Then she remembered hands around her neck. She remembered thinking she would die.
“I see I don’t need to remind you.”
“Where did you find me?”
“I came up from the store rooms with the soldiers’ uniforms and the man had you by the neck.” A tight, quick breath passed from his lips. “I would have killed him if I’d had a sword.”
Anne freed a hand and held it up. She didn’t want to hear any more. Simon Alcock was behind her, at last. The relief was almost blinding and brought a wash of tears to her eyes.
“I thought for sure he would be part of the fighting.”
“The escape hadn’t been discovered yet.” Broc handed her a flask and she drank greedily. The water was warm, but clean, and her throat was on fire. “We didn’t encounter our first resistance until well out of the city, before the rendezvous point.”
Anne stopped drinking. “The fight?”
“We lost a lot of men. Some were criminals from the dungeons, but all fought bravely for their lives.”
“How many men?”
Broc’s breathing was audible over the noise of the caravan. If he had been one of the architects of the escape, he appeared to be very downtrodden by the results.
“We lost seven in the initial skirmish with a small retinue of soldiers on the king’s road who recognized us for interlopers. They must have sent word ahead to Lowich and as we had to nearly fight our way through a garrison, we lost another nine.”
Anne gasped. It didn’t seem there’d been many more than that in the dungeons in the first place. She handed the flask back to Broccin and he took a swig.
“William was one of the fallen.” Broc’s voice hitched. “He was a good man. Stabbed in the back by one of the coward English.”
While she hadn’t known William more than as a co-conspirator, she felt somewhat responsible for his second capture. A tear slid into the corner of her eye and she uncovered a hand to wipe it away.
“I’m so sorry.” She sniffed away more tears. Loss couldn’t be helped in an escape. Still, to lose someone she’d known by name... It was a first for her. “I didn’t know him well, but he did his best to help me when I needed it. For that, I will remember him.”
“They’ve no doubt sent word back to Berwick by now, but after trudging up river in the shallows, we hope to have lost any trackers the Sheriff might send after us. No one knows where this camp is, so we will be safe here.”
They rode in silence for a beat while Broc fished in his saddle bags for something. He produced a piece of dried salt pork and she ate, hungrily. Anne couldn’t remember the last time she’d eaten.
“How long have we been on the road?”
“All day and now into the night.”
Anne swallowed a bite of the tangy, stringy meat and hoped it would calm her stomach.
“Thank you for saving me, Broc.”
His horse wickered, undoubtedly at the slow pace. He had a tight grip on the reins and the muscles in his forearms glinted in the moonlight as they rippled in use.
“It was mostly William. I knocked out the Sheriff and William kept me from beating him to a bloody pulp.” He straightened his shoulders and looked off to his left. “William is who you should really thank.”
Oh, Broc, if you only knew. You might wish you’d killed him after all. “I wish I could thank him. He was a good man, I’m sure.”
“He’s been with us nearly since the beginning.” Broc cleared his throat. “But we all knew what we signed up for when we joined with Andrew in the beginning. It perhaps means something different now that we have something to lose.”
Anne tilted her head. “Something to lose?”
“William was new-married. Less than a year, in fact. It reminds us that our lives are not our own.”
“I’m so sorry. I wish I could have been of more help.”
“Anne, you were instrumental. We could not have escaped in the first place without you.”
She clasped her hands under the blanket. Was that really true? Had she been that helpful? “I’m not sure I was much help, but I’m glad to do what I can.”
They continued in silence for several minutes. Broc kept his pace at her side and Anne laid against the hard lump behind her, trying to decide if she should sleep or rise.
“Even though you decry, I am grateful that you found me.”
He didn’t respond at first and she wished she could have seen his face. It had been so many years since they’d had a conversation of any consequence. While he seemed still the same man she’d known, only grown up a bit, she couldn’t be certain of how he would really respond to her, or what he would be thinking.
“No matter what power he has, no man deserves to treat a woman as such. He is a disgrace to mankind.”
Anne’s heart began to race. Broc, the poor fool, believed he’d saved her from something horrific. The truth was, the horror had already happened. This was just dessert.
And yet a tiny part of her, when she had seen the Sheriff’s face over her and felt his hands choking her life away, had still hoped for someone to save her. She had to admit, she’d wished for Aedan. Perhaps his brute strength or his hardened demeanor wouldn’t have left the Sheriff living, and as much as she was glad for her own safety, she couldn’t stop picturing the faceless woman pitching from a castle tower in the black of the night.
She would never be that woman again.
There was most certainly part of her that wished Broc had been Aedan, and that Aedan had kept beating the Sheriff’s head against the stone walls until the pig was dead.
“Well, I thank you for intervening,” she said.
“I couldn’t have lived with myself if I’d let him keep hurting you.”
The silence returned. The latent emotion in his voice brought hope to her heart. If he felt that strongly about her protection, perhaps he would honor their old agreement and marry her. That way, he could save her not only from the Sheriff, but from her mother’s machinations as well.
She would wai
t until they reached camp to ask him. Not only did she want that conversation to be a private one, but she also needed the time to plan out exactly how she would say it, and how she could then convince him to ride right back into Berwick, and the den of that monster he’d just escaped, in order to save Elena as well. Knowing Broc, it wouldn’t take much. He was loyal to a fault and fearless, as far as she could remember.
The only trick would be deceiving her own heart into thinking this was anything more than a marriage of convenience to a friend and a good man. And forgetting her growing fascination with a certain imperfect face.
That might be the best trick of all.
*****
Anne woke up when the cart jolted to a halt. Either the clouds had moved away or light came from another source, because she could now see her surroundings with more clarity.
The cart itself was larger than she had expected. Wide enough across and deep enough that she hadn’t felt the presence of the three other bodies. At least two of them showed signs of life, although that didn’t stop her shuddering at the thought of sleeping next to dead men.
She took a calming breath and sat up. The sides of the cart were low, perhaps only a foot or two in height, and easy to look over once she was upright. With a glance behind her, she noticed that whatever she’d been leaning on was also moving.
In the span of a moment, Anne was on her feet. Behind her lay two more men, side by side. She appeared to have been laying on another blanket that was stuffed against one of the men. She almost recognized the man. He was older, nearer her father’s age, likely, and had braided dark hair and a thick beard.
This was the man Broccin had been carrying and so carefully protecting in the dungeon. Thankfully, he appeared to be alive and awake. Paler than the man at his side, but living.
The man next to him either had not woken or had expired, because he lay completely still. She reached down to help the man who had served as her pillow.
“Thank you, lass,” he said in heavily accented Gaelic. She relished the familiarity of the language. He leaned on her for support. “I hope you slept well on the journey.”
“Let me find someone to help you.” Anne looked around, searching through the milling men on the ground. But before she found a familiar face, the pressure of the man’s arm released and she looked up to see that Broc had somehow climbed into the cart and taken the man’s weight on himself.
“Lachlan,” Broc said. “You seem to be healing some.”
The man laughed until a cough stopped him. “You treat me like an injured soldier.” He looked down at Anne with a wink. “I bear only the wounds of the dungeon, and it would likely do me better to walk around instead of be carried.”
Broc assisted him to the end of the cart as they stepped over the other occupants. “Wait there, my lady,” he called back to Anne.
“Lachlan would carry a sword if I let him.” Broccin jumped down then offered his shoulder to the man as he did likewise, but with a loud groan upon landing.
“I would do my duty, like any Scot.” Lachlan straightened as Broc moved around the cart and stood in front of Anne. He took her hand and escorted her to the end, as well.
She stood for a moment, looking out across the unfamiliar land in front of her. “Where are we?”
Lachlan took her other hand and the two men held her as she floated for the briefest of moments before her feet touched the ground.
“We’re just outside Belford.” Broc kept hold of her and hooked her arm around his. “Almost a day’s ride from Berwick.”
Belford. Belford. The name was so unfamiliar to Anne, it took her a moment to realize why.
“England?” Her voice carried more than she’d expected and several of the men moving around them stopped to stare.
Broccin pulled her away from the crowd of milling people. “Anne, you mustn’t draw attention to yourself. No one knows I’ve brought a woman here, save the few who were with you in the cart, and I’d prefer to keep it that way.”
“Why does it matter?”
He shifted uneasily. “Because this is a war camp, and typically when women are present in a war camp, it’s not for protection.”
“A war camp?”
“Yes.”
“We are at war with England?”
“As much as we can be when we have no central authority to declare it, but, yes. There are a few groups of us, fighting against the English, and Andrew thought to unite us.” Broc walked her around the cart and she saw they were parked on the edge of a hill that ran down the left side of the cart and into a tiny valley, the hillside dotted with tents and fires and men sleeping on the ground and on pallets. More men than she could count.
“We will only be here until sunrise tomorrow, when the last of the group will return, then we’ll move camp again.”
“Why?” Anne pulled on Broc’s arm and he allowed her to lead him back to the other side of the cart where she leaned against one of the big wheels. The soreness from her ride was beginning to kick in and it exacerbated the pounding in her head. Looking down the hill had almost been too much.
“We try not to stay in the same place for long. We know the English are looking for us, so we try to be as ghostly as we are able.”
“But why camp in England, then? What about soldiers stationed at Belford, or even those at Berwick or Lowich?”
Broc laughed and patted her back like a child. “There are even more English soldiers in the Scottish countryside than here, my lady. We are almost unmolested here.”
“Yet, still, you move.”
“Nowhere is completely safe for us.”
She couldn’t argue with his logic. Still, the thought of being a day closer to England than she’d been when she woke up in her mother’s clutches made Anne nervous.
“I can relate to that.”
Someone called Broccin’s name and he hurried to the end of the cart and raised his hand. He gestured to Anne to follow him and she made slower progress.
“Andrew calls me down to the fire.” Broccin held out his arm for her, watching her feet carefully. “You must be cold. Why don’t you accompany me?”
She grasped his arm and held him in place with her. “Could I speak to you for a moment first?”
At the end of the cart, Anne found not only Broc but Lachlan and two other men, all staring at her with expectant eyes, all silent. How keen.
“Can it wait until I see what Andrew needs? He was wounded in the skirmish and I’d like to assure that someone is caring for him.”
“I will wait here.” Anne placed her right hand on the cart and even the wood was cold beneath her fingers. She couldn’t deny, she’d rather sit by the fire, but she worried that if she allowed Broc to take her down into civilization, she would be forced to speak with him where others might overhear.
There would be nothing worse than asking a man to marry you in front of other people. It would be bad enough just in front of him, little as she knew him anymore. But short of a marriage, there was no way she could imagine she would be able to convince him to return for Elena.
Broc’s uneasy stance set the other men to shifting, as though the emotion were contagious. Finally, he nodded. Broccin released her arm and instead grabbed Lachlan’s shoulders and assisted the man in following him.
Anne noticed there were still men sleeping, or dead, in the back of the cart, so she walked to the front wheel and used it as a ladder to climb up into the driving seat. The horses were tied to a nearby tree that looked steady enough. She reached in the back for her blanket and laid down on the bench seat.
She could have sworn she only closed her eyes for a moment, but when Broc woke her, the light had come up significantly and the horses had been unhitched from the cart and were out of sight.
“I’m sorry to leave you for so long.” Broc put a big hand on her shoulder and his face was so close, she could smell the grassy, sweaty scent of him.
“I didn’t even know I’d slept.” She rolled around to sit up
and accidentally scooted even closer to him. Broccin backed up to avoid contact and as she straightened in her seat, Anne could feel the heat rising in her face.
“For several more hours. I’m sure it was good rest, and we’ll be here the rest of the day, as it is. Although now I have a more comfortable place for you to sleep.” Broccin offered her his hand and she took it, stepping down from her seat. The black horizon had taken on a blue tinge and the air was slightly warmer.
“I’ve made a bed for you in Elizabeth’s tent.”
“Elizabeth?” Anne wondered, securing her skirts around her.
“Andrew’s wife. She’s in camp with us and you’ll be safe with her.” Broc smiled and she remembered for a moment how handsome he really was.
“I feel safer with you.”
He shifted with discomfort. “Anne, I am happy to do whatever I can for an old friend. But I am no woman. Here, it is better for you to be with Elizabeth.”
“I hate to impose upon you further, after you’ve done so much for me,” she began. Broc stopped her with a raised hand and she couldn’t help smiling. He was nothing if not a humble man. Not the proud type, like others she knew. Like her brother. Or like Broc’s father, or younger brother, Malcolm. Or like Aedan. Proud men carried themselves with a certain something in their shoulders. Broc was certainly strong, like a warrior, but he didn’t have that arrogance.
The more she thought well of him, the more she could imagine being his wife. If she had known what her mother would do, given the title and income of the earldom, she may have married Broc when she’d turned fourteen, as her father had encouraged. But he’d been only seventeen himself, and it hadn’t been long after that his father had gone completely mad.
Knowing the old Earl as she did, she was glad not to have him as a father-in-law. Of course, the man was dead now. Anne crossed herself, self-consciously, and Broc smiled at her.
“I can see you having a conversation with yourself inside that head.” He touched a knuckle to her forehead, playfully, and it remained there for a long moment as his gaze held hers. But before she could think of what to say or do, he’d pulled away.