Praise for Sophia James:

‘James weaves her spell, captivating readers

with wit and wisdom, and cleverly combining

humour and poignancy with a master’s touch

in this feel-good love story.’

—RT Book Reviews on HIGH SEAS TO HIGH SOCIETY

‘Putting a hero bent on revenge and the “perfect” lady

together is a recipe for conflict. Add the warmth of the

holiday season, delightful children, pride, passion and

a ruthless villain, and you have James’ heartwarming,

fast-paced holiday romance.’

—RT Book Reviews on MISTLETOE MAGIC

‘Award-winning author Sophia James

kicks off proceedings with

CHRISTMAS AT BELHAVEN CASTLE:

a gripping tale of second chances, forbidden attraction

and unexpected passion!’

—Cataromance on Gift-Wrapped Governess anthology

They had broken through and flooded into the castle just as she had sat down for a rest. She had not had the time to gather her gloves or headgear but had been caught in the flight downstairs, where she now fought back against as many of the enemy as she could.

‘Nooo!’

A keening cry of fury rent the air around her, turning the hairs on her arms up into panic as her eyes caught sight of the one she had thought never to see again.

Marc!

Here.

In the mail of King David, sword tipped red.

A traitor and a betrayer. A man who would leave the Keep of Ceann Gronna with secrets in his head, to return a brace of months later and use them against those who had only been kind.

A payment of death for the gift of life. She could smell the sea spray on him as he jostled closer, his eyes cold with the knowledge of retribution and deceit.

About the Author

SOPHIA JAMES lives in Chelsea Bay on Auckland, New Zealand’s North Shore, with her husband, who is an artist, and three children. She spends her morning teaching adults English at the local Migrant School and writes in the afternoon. Sophia has a degree in English and History from Auckland University, and believes her love of writing was formed reading Georgette Heyer with her twin sister at her grandmother’s house.

Previous novels by the same author:

FALLEN ANGEL

ASHBLANE’S LADY

HIGH SEAS TO HIGH SOCIETY

MASQUERADING MISTRESS

KNIGHT OF GRACE

(published as The Border Lord in North America) MISTLETOE MAGIC (part of Christmas Betrothals) ONE UNASHAMED NIGHT ONE ILLICIT NIGHT CHRISTMAS AT BELHAVEN CASTLE (part of Gift-Wrapped Governess anthology)

Did you know that some of these novels are also available as eBooks? Visit www.millsandboon.co.uk

Lady with
the Devil’s Scar

Sophia James

www.millsandboon.co.uk

For the Chelsea Bay Book Club … my group of warrior women.

Chapter One

1346—Fife Ness, Scotland

Isobel Dalceann saw the shapes from the beach, beyond the waves, turning in the current, dark against silver. Eight or more of them, lost in the grey swell of stormtide as mist swallowed outline.

‘There,’ she shouted to the two men beside her. ‘Two hundred yards out.’

The Heads yielded an odd wreck of a boat sometimes or the carcase of a sea creature long since dead … but this? Dusk spread from the west, burnishing lead with a blushed quiet pink and changing something that was not known into something that was.

‘People!’ Ian voiced the knowledge first. Not wood or fish or the trunk of a tree that had slipped into the brine somewhere near Dundee before travelling south in the cold currents, but people. People who would drown unless she helped them; she had always been a strong swimmer.

Stripping off brogans and tunic, she removed the dirk held by straps against her ankle and ran.

The water took her breath before she had crossed the first waves, long beaching swells with the chill of the northern climes on their edge; when her hair knotted around her arms, forcing her to tread water, she rebound it tight.

Ten yards away Ian shouted and Angus responded, the next breaker lifting them all and aiding direction. She could hear the beat of blood in her ears as the wash took her under. Counting the seconds to surface, she kicked her feet hard and broke through just short of one of the survivors.

An open cut from elbow to shoulder bone wept red into the sea, swirling in the foam before being lost to the great vastness of the German Ocean. He barely registered her presence as she paddled across, noticing for the first time that another lay beside him.

‘I will take him while you swim in,’ she shouted above the wind as rain started, each drop forming bowls on the surface, tiny pits in a boiling sea.

‘No.’ He held on with the tenacity of one who would not let go, green eyes steeled into resolve; as Isobel looked closer, she saw the man between them was long dead.

‘He’s gone. The sea has taken him.’

Shaking his head, he turned from her, shoulders hunching into grief. The curl of his fingers tightened even as she watched, dimpled white and marred with bruises as he breathed in once and then twice, garnering strength and regrouping will. How often had she done the same herself, the loneliness of everything unbearable?

‘Let me help,’ she called, ‘for the shore is far away.’ Her touch against his shoulder roused him from his own private hell as he gazed at her with all the arrogance of one unused to direction.

Isobel pushed down a stir of unease. Even the few paltry moments that she had been in the ocean had chilled her and she wondered how these people could have survived for so long.

‘H-help the others behind me f-first.’ When he shifted his hand to cradle the head of the man he supported, a thick band of wrought-plaited gold lay at his wrist.

No simple sailor, then, plying the straits between England and Scotland to gain a living. His accent held the softer beat of another more foreign land.

A shout behind made her turn. Isobel saw that Angus panted with cold, his legs treading water with exaggerated hurry as he tried to keep warm. Fear struck deep. Two hundred yards from safety, with the rolling edge of a sea storm coming in from the east. Behind him two men were trying to rise on his bulk in their fight to gain breath.

Lord. The sea claimed its victims without recourse to any fair play or just reserve. Swimming over, she clouted the oldest man hard across the head, breaking his grip and pressing against his throat, pleased as his eyes rolled into white. Then she did the same to the youngest.

‘Que Dieu nous en garde!’ Marc muttered. The woman with the scar from one side of her face to the other was killing those with him one by one and the chill that held him stiff with cold meant he could do nothing about it.

Guy was dead. He had known it all of an hour ago and still his fingers could not open to simply let go.

The water beneath him called, an easy rest and an ending, and the strength that had held him to the task of rescue was suddenly gone. He could not care. It was finished. As his fingers opened and his eyelids rested he felt the warmth that had long since been leached from his body return in a quick and bright light.

Scotland. His father’s land. He had not quite made it.

‘Hold him from behind,’ Isobel instructed Angus. ‘Do not let him turn for he will pull you down in his panic.’

‘I cannae handle the both of them, mind.’ Angus’s words were thrown through the gathering wind.

‘Then choose the youngest.’ Such a choice out here in a sea that was rising held no guilt for Isobel. The fittest would survive and be done with it.

But the green-eyed stranger was gone, too, pulled beneath the sea by lethargy, his red sleeveless surcoat with the bright gold braiding disappeared. She should leave him, of course, should take the advice she had just offered Angus, but a stronger force willed her to action. Diving down through the murky water, she saw him turn towards her, as if he had known she might be there, glances catching through the brine, the white of his skin the colour of death.

One last kick and she reached out to snag cloth before hauling him up into the dusk and air. They surfaced like a log might in a swollen mountain stream, a curtain of foam and salt lashed around them, rain stinging skin.

Thumping his back hard with the heel of her hand, she felt him take a breath, the rise and fall of his chest strong as he coughed, a hacking endless bark that dislodged the water he had swallowed. His hair lay around his face in tousled dark-blond tails, wiped back as he found breath in a hard movement, his lips blue.

Around her the cries of the survivors told another story. One stranger perished here and another there. They floated away with their faces down in the water, swirling as leaves in the current.

She could not save everyone with a changing stormtide on the turn for out. All the will in the world could not alter what happened to those too long in the hands of the sea as the heat of skin cooled and relaxed into death.

But the green-eyed stranger hung on through the breakers, his mouth tilted towards the air, the cold chattering of his teeth like a drum beat as they came closer to landfall. He was using his strength to help her, too; she could feel his legs move against her own until his feet found purchase on the ocean floor.

He was tall, then. Much taller than her husband had been before …

But she did not think of that as she brushed away anger and watched him stand, the sea to his waist now, every second showing more of a man who looked nothing like anyone from around Fife. Menace and danger lingered in the long bones of his body, the fancy surcoat with its plaited braiding belying the man beneath.

‘I can m-manage,’ he said abruptly and turned to watch her two men find the shore, each bringing with them a survivor from the stricken boat.

Three people out of eight, was her anguished thought. Lord God, that it could have been more.

The fierce desolation in his eyes told her that he also counted, though he was swaying with cold, tiredness and injury, the open gash on his arm pulled apart by the sea into a lengthy, grim, dark line on his upper arm. It no longer bled. Isobel wondered whether that was a good sign or a bad one.

‘We are camped in the trees and there is warmth there.’ She did not like the anxiety she could hear in her words, as though it might be important to her that he did live, but he was barely listening as he walked across to his friend and spoke softly in a language she recognised as French. Both turned to the line of bush behind them as if weighing their chances of safety.

‘How is it you are called?’ His voice was stronger now as he switched back to English.

‘Isobel Dalceann. My home lies two days’ walk west along the coast from here.’

She saw how his glance took in her sodden hose, tight about her legs, her ankles full on show. It had been so long since she had worn the garb of a woman that she’d forgotten that those who did not know her might find it odd. Without meaning to she smiled and saw the sting of it in his eyes. Her scar, probably. It always puckered badly over one cheek when she showed emotion.

With the night coming on, however, she had had enough. She had risked her own life and any criticism of what she looked like or dressed like would have to wait till later. There were rabbits skinned and trussed near the fire and a half-a-dozen fish wrapped in leaves beside them. Once they had eaten their fill and found blankets to shelter beneath she could determine just what it was these newcomers sought and how quickly she could be rid of them.

‘Sacrée Vierge.’ Marc could hardly place one foot in front of the other one as he came into the camp under the trees, his head spinning in a way that made balance difficult. Perhaps it was the blood loss or the cold or simply the near-transportation of his soul from this life to the next one, leaving flesh behind. He had seen it before on the battlefields in France, the astonishment of death greater even than the fear of it. The anger in him rose as he refocused on that about him.

It was dark beneath the cover of the canopy of trees and afternoon rain had left a dampness that was all-encompassing.

Simon looked as exhausted as he did. The other survivor’s name he had no notion of, but fancied him to be one of the deckhands on the boat into Edinburgh. The young man shook so much that he needed to be carried between the arms of the two men who had swum out. Marc knew that he would not last long. The woman was ordering everyone around and the knives strapped to her ankle and belt were sharp.

‘Where exactly are we?’ he purposefully asked in French. The blank response confirmed what he had suspected. None spoke the language. He was glad, for it allowed Simon and him privacy to decide what to do.

‘They are all well armed and we are both injured. We will need to wait for our moment.’

Simon nodded. ‘At a guess I would place us somewhere on the Nose of Fife just north from where the Firth enters the coast down into Edinburgh.’ His hand ran across his upper thigh, a bruise seen through the tear in his clothing. His voice sounded rough. ‘What do you imagine they mean to do with—?’

The question was cut off by the sudden intrusion of one of their saviours looming close as the cross at Simon’s neck was ripped away. The ring on his finger was gestured to next.

When he went to protest Marc stopped him. ‘Wait. It is only the trinkets they need, after all; as payment for our lives, I’d deem it fair.’

Stripping his bracelet from his wrist, Marc placed it on the ground. As he did so he looked up and saw the woman watching him, a scowl on her face and anger in her brown eyes. She glanced away as soon as she perceived his notice and continued to tend to the fire and food.

Her hair had escaped its binding and fell in a sheer dark curtain to her waist. In the building flame there were lights of shot red amongst wet ebony and he was surprised by the want that surged inside him as he thought of what it might feel like to touch.

Shaking away such nonsense, he sat on the ground and leaned back against a tree, feeling better with the strong solidness of wood behind him.

‘Where are you from?’

Her voice was hard, the frustration in it unhidden. He noticed she did not ask for names.

‘France.’ He had decided that there were only certain pieces that needed telling. ‘The boat we were on was blown off course and overturned in the storm.’

Her attention was drawn to the other men beside her, their words rising in anger as they squabbled over the jewels. She stopped them with a short command, though the oldest of the pair drew his hands into fists and punched the air, twice.

Intentions!

Staying expressionless, Marc looked back at the woman. Her fingers had crept to the knife at her belt, relaxing as she saw one of her men move off into the forest, though when she gestured to the other to tie them up Marc swore beneath his breath.

He could fight, he supposed, and win, but with an arm that needed some attention and Simon with a leg that was taking him nowhere he thought it better to wait.

The rope was thick and well secured, putting them a good length away from each other. When the man was finished Isobel Dalceann checked the ropes herself. Her flesh was freezing as her arm brushed against her prisoner’s and he thought for the first time that she was good at hiding her feelings.

‘We’ll unfasten you when the food is ready, but at every other time you will be tethered until we decide what to do with you. After dinner I will tend to your arm.’

Her last sentence heartened him. If she meant to kill them, surely she would not waste any time caring for them first? Then the import of what she said sunk in. The gash was deep and the light was bad and the few belongings seen in this provisional camp pointed to the fact that medical care would be at best basic.

‘I can wait.’

His saviour began to laugh and there were deep dimples in both her cheeks. He heard Simon next to him draw in breath and knew that his thoughts were exactly the same as his own.

This warrior queen was the most beautiful woman he had ever seen, despite the scar and her garb and the grimace that was her more normal expression. Looking away, he tried to take stock of such thoughts and failed. Beneath his tight hose lust grew. God … the world was falling topsy-turvy and he could stop none of it. Shifting his stance, he bent his knees.

‘Wait for what? Edinburgh is almost a week’s worth of walking from here and by that time your arm …’ She stopped, her teeth worrying her bottom lip. ‘The sea may have cleaned it, of course, but the bindings holding you are well used.’

He frowned, not understanding her reasoning.

‘It is my experience that filth often finishes what a blade begins.’

Riddles. Another thought wormed into his head. Was she one of the silkies that the legends from these parts were full of? He had never seen a woman so easily able to manage the sea before and the colour of her hair was that of the sleek black coats of fur seals often sighted off the coastline.

Lord. The blood loss was making him unhinged and those knowing eyes so full of secrets were directing him to imagine things that would never come to pass.

He looked away and did not speak again.

The stranger would be screaming before the night was out despite the careful diction in his sentences. Isobel was glad for it, glad to imagine the weakness in him as he submitted to a mending that would not be easy.

He unsettled her with his verdant, vivid eyes, his high-priced golden bracelet and his French accent. Ian had wanted to kill him, finish him off and be done with any nuisance or trouble, but the thought of his blood running on the ground as his soul left for the places above or below filled her with a dread she had not felt before. They were probably David’s men, newly returned from France with the fire of the power of the monarch in their bellies, and no mind for the ancient laws.

What would they know of her and of Ceann Gronna?

‘Unmarriageable Isobel’ she was called now; she had heard it from a bard who had come to the keep with a song of the same name.

Swearing soundly, she returned to the food, panic subsiding as the everyday task took her attention; two days’ walk to the keep and another two to Dunfermline where the strangers could be sent by ferry across the Firth towards Edinburgh.

She wished Ian and Angus had not been with her, for she would have to watch them and the foreigners at the same time. Anything of worth had been taken, after all, and now their presence could only be a bother. Isobel doubted the third man would last the night, given his colour, but there was little in truth she could do about any of it.

She hoped that the green-eyed man would speak the French again so she might overlisten and at least know just what his intentions were.

The jewellery might tell her something of them, of course, but she did not wish to ask Angus for a look at the haul just to probe into the mystery of who he was. Nae. Better she never knew and sent him on, out of her life and out of her notice.

The simple silver ring on her own finger tightened as she turned it, a lifetime pledge reduced to just two years, and then a yoke of guilt. Sometimes, like now, she hated who she had become, a scavenger outside the new system of government imposed on the old virtue of possession, leaving no true home in any of it. Even the ground did not speak to her as it used to, whispering promises of the for ever. Once the system of lairdship had ruled this place, the great estates handed down through the generations, like treasured possessions and always nurtured. Until King David had come with his fealty and his barons, taking the land by force and granting it to his own vassals for their allegiance and loyalty.

Now possession was tempered by blood and war and betrayal. Sweat beaded beneath the hair at her nape and if she had been alone she might have lifted the heavy mass away from her skin and simply stood there.

But she was not alone.

She could feel his eyes on her back like a hawk might watch a mouse crossing a field. Waiting.

Had he not said exactly that to his friend as he sat there against the tree, his hose tight in places that made the blood in her face roar.

‘Alisdair.’

The name came beneath breath like a prayer or a plea, invoking what was lost and would never be again. She was glad when Angus reappeared from the forest with a bundle of dry tinder and a good handful of blaeberries.

Chapter Two

The fish and rabbit were tenderly cooked and when the one she called Ian might have given them only a very small portion she had gestured him to ladle out a full plate, with a crust of hard black bread in the juice.

The boatman had eaten nothing, his head lolling on to his chest in a way that was worrying. Marc saw the woman bring an extra blanket and lay him down on it with care. He also saw that she did not bind him again, but left him free. To die in the night without fetters, he supposed. Perhaps there was some folklore from this part of the world that a man should meet his maker unconstrained.

After she had finished with his comfort she came to him, loosening the ties at his wrists and directing him to come to the fire.

There was a flask of whisky waiting and she motioned him to drink. The brooding in her eyes lent him the thought that she had not meant to do this at all and he swallowed as much as he could before she took it back. He was pleased to feel the burn of it down his throat as an edge of calm settled.

He would need it. Already she had lifted her knife.

‘I have to remove the bad skin.’

He had not even answered before she poured whisky across his gash, fire against the hurt and his heart beating as fast as he had ever heard it.

Flames lightened her eyes into living gold and her fingers on the blade were dextrous. He saw she had another scar running from the base of her smallest finger right across the foot of her knuckles to the thumb. He wondered if she had got that at the same time as she had received the one on her face.

‘If you stay still, it will help.’

The message in her words was plain. Move and the agony will be greater. Like a challenge thrown down into the heart of mercy.

He wished he had a piece of leather to bite upon, but she did not offer it and he would not ask.

‘You are experienced in the art of healing?’

At this question both the men behind her began to laugh.

‘The art of killing more like,’ one of them muttered.

He saw her grasp tighten on the blade, an infinitely small movement that suggested wrath a hundred times its size. He trusted it also signalled care or humanity or just simple expertise. At the moment it was the best he could hope for. Marc was surprised when she spoke again and at length.

‘From experience I find healers are women with little mind for the ordinary. My opinion of them is tempered by their need to eke out some existence in a world that might otherwise be lost to madness.’

This train of thought was to his liking. ‘So you are not of that ilk?’

‘Witches and fairy folk are born into the lines that whelp them.’

As Isobel raised her blade into the light the dancing flames were reflected in silver.

‘But your line was different?’ Suddenly he wanted to know something of her. With her mind distracted by his pain and hurt, she might be persuaded to answer him.

But she remained silent, her lips firm as she cut into his flesh, the roiling nausea that had been with him since the rescue at the beach rising up into his throat as bile.

‘Lord Almighty.’

‘You are a religious man, then?’

‘If I said that I was would it help my cause?’

‘With your God or with me?’ she countered, turning the knife into live tissue and watching as blood filled the wound.

He swallowed.

‘There is sand and grit in the furrow and it must be removed.’

‘Grain by grain?’ He visibly flinched and she stopped for a second to watch him, a measured challenge in the tilt of her head and so close he could feel the warmth of her breath.

He shook and hated himself for it, but even as he held his hand to anchor the elbow to his side he could not stop it.

Shock, he thought; a malady that men might perish of as easily as they did the cold. On an afterthought he glanced over to the boatman on the blanket and saw that he had stopped breathing.

‘He left us as I poured the whisky across your arm.’ Isobel Dalceann’s words held no whisper of sorrow even though she had tended him. ‘Tomorrow would have been too hard for him to manage, so our Lord in his wisdom has seen him walk along another path.’

Two things hit him simultaneously as she uttered this. She was a spiritual woman and she was also a practical one. For some obscure reason both were comforting.

The pain, however, was starting to war with the numbness of whisky and he stayed quiet. Counting.

By the time he had got to a hundred and she placed her knife back on the hook across the fire he knew he was going to be sick.

She turned away and did not watch him throw up even though she had promised herself that she would. But this man with his bruised green eyes and gilded surcoat was … beguiling. No other damn word for it.

As long as he did not look as though he might fall over and mark the wound with the earth she would wait; patience had always been her one great virtue, after all.

‘Are you finished?’ She wished she might have inflected some empathy into the query, but the others were watching her and they would not expect it.

Nodding, he straightened. He still shook, though not with the fervour that he had done before.

‘The poultice I have prepared will numb any pain you have.’ God in Heaven, now why had she said that?

A slight smile lifted his lips. ‘Do I dare hope that the Angel of Agony has a dint in her armour?’

‘The needle that I will sew your hide up with is not my finest.’

‘Where is your finest?’

‘Lost in the skin of a patient who had no time to sit longer.’

‘A pity, that. Not for him, but for me.’

Unexpectedly she laughed out loud, as though everything in her world was right.

Ian stood and sidled closer. ‘Have ye drunk more of the whisky than ye used on him, Izzy?’ he asked and picked up the cask. Snatching it from him, she placed it on the ground and plucked an earthenware container from her bag. Sticks of fragrant summer heal and dried valerian were caught in twists of paper, but it was the rolled and cleaned gut of a lamb that she sought.

Taking the long sinew between her fingers, she wished the stranger might simply faint away and leave her to the job of what had to happen next, for no amount of alcohol would dull this pain.

With the needle balanced across the flame, she dunked the gut in boiling garlic water before threading it, feeling the sting of heat on her skin. A gypsy she had met once from Dundee had shown her the finer points of medical management and she had never forgotten the rules. Heat everything until boiling point and touch as little as you needed to. Alisdair had bought her silver forceps from Edinburgh after they had been married, but they had been lost in the chaos of protecting Ceann Gronna. Just as he had been! She wished she might have had the small instrument now with its sharp clasp and easy handling.

Her patient’s arm glistened in the firelight, the pure strength and hard muscle, defined by the flame, tensing as she came closer.

‘If you stiffen, it will hurt more.’

He smiled and his teeth were white and even. Isobel wished he had been ugly or old.

‘Hard to be relaxed when your needle looks as if it might better serve a shoemaker.’

‘The skins of all animals have much the same properties.’ Pulling the flap of skin forwards, she dug in deep. The first puncture made a definite pop in the silence, but he did not move. Not even an inch. She had never known a patient to sit so still before and she kent from experience just how much it must hurt.

She made a line of stitches along the wound. Blood welled against the intrusion and his other hand came forwards to wipe it away. She stopped him.

‘It is better to let it weep until the poultice is applied.’ She did not wish to tell him again of her need for cleanliness.

He nodded, his breath faster now. On his top lip sweat beaded, the growth of a one-day beard easily seen, though he turned from her when he perceived that she watched him.

‘The woman has the way of a witch. I do not know if we should trust her.’ His friend spoke in French, caution in his words, but the green-eyed one only laughed.

‘Witch or not, Simon, I doubt that the physic at court could have made a better job.’

Court? Did he mean in Edinburgh or Paris?

Flexing his arm as she finished, he frowned when the stitches caught.

‘It would be better to keep still.’ She did not want her handiwork marred by use.

‘For how long?’

Shrugging, she took the powders up from their twists of paper and mixed them on the palm of her hand with spit. A day or a week? She had seen some men lift a sword the next evening and others fail to be able to ever dress themselves properly again. Positioning his arm, she placed the brown paste over the wound and bound it with cloth, securing the ends with a knot after splitting the fabric.

‘By tomorrow you will know if it festers.’

‘And if it does?’

‘Then my efforts will be all in vain and you will lose either your arm or your life.’

‘The choice of Hades.’

‘Well, the Sea Gods let you loose from the ocean so perhaps the Healing God will follow their lead.’

She was relieved as he moved a good distance away.

Everything ached: his arm, his head and his throat. The rain from above was heavy, wetting them with its constant drizzle.

He slept fitfully, curled into the blanket like a child, waking only as the moon waned against the coming dawn. Isobel Dalceann sat upright against the trunk of a tree. Her hair now was bunched under a hat so that the raindrops fell off the wide edge to dribble down the grey worsted wool of her overcoat. One hand played with the beads of an ebony rosary, glass sparking in the fire-flames and the way her lips moved soundlessly suggested an age-old chant. He could not take his eyes away from a woman whose knife lay across her knees, ready to take a life after spending the whole of an evening trying to save one.

‘I know you are awake.’

He couldn’t help but be amused. ‘Hard to sleep with the possibility of losing my arm on the morrow.’

‘How do you feel now?’

‘Sore.’

‘But not sick?’

He shook his head.

‘Then I should imagine you will get to keep it, after all.’

‘Your bedside manner lacks a certain tenderness.’

She smiled. ‘Ian hoped you might be dead by now. We placed the other man back into the outgoing tide and he’d like to do the same with you.’

‘Unshackle us and we will walk away in any direction you choose.’

‘The problem with that is you have the way of our names and our faces, and there are many who would hurt us here in the ancient hunting grounds of the Dalceann clan.’

‘If we gave our word of honour to maintain only silence …?’

‘Words of honour have the unfortunate tendency to become surplus to survival once safety is reached.’

‘Then why did you swim out to us in the first place?’

Her eyes flickered to the empty skin at his wrist.

‘The gold?’ He pushed himself up to a sitting position. Streaks of red-hot pain snaked into his shoulder. ‘You could not have known that we were adorned with such before you reached us.’

He caught the white line of her teeth. ‘But we could hope.’

‘Only that?’

She remained a shadow amongst the trees, her legs against her chest with a blanket around her shoulders. ‘A boat left the Ceann Gronna keep two weeks ago bound south with a dozen of our men aboard and Ian, Angus and I came from the keep to see if we could see any sign of its return. We thought it might be the vessel that had foundered.’ Her hand stilled for a moment on the count of the beads and she switched languages with barely an inflection of change. ‘You spoke with your friend today of a physic at court. Which one do you hail from?’ He was astonished.

‘You speak French?’

‘Fluently. My mother was from Antwerp.’

‘It might have been wiser to keep that to yourself.’

‘As a weapon?’ Deep dimples graced each cheek as she placed her fingers across her mouth. For the first time since he had been in her company he saw the coquette she might have played so very well in any other lifetime. ‘Why would I have need of one? Your friend can hardly walk with his bruising and your arm is bound and useless. Are you right-handed?’

‘Yes.’

‘Then let us hope you have had practice with your other arm to fend off the enemy.’

‘Why? Are they close?’

‘You are looking straight at one, monsieur. As close as breath.’ No humour at all lingered.

‘A woman who has saved me twice can hardly be classed as an enemy.’

‘The most cunning of foes are those you know and trust.’

He knew she spoke from her own experience but, with a little chink of goodwill settling between them, did not wish to mention it and ruin the discourse.

Besides, here in the night with the moon upon them and the quiet call of birds that did not sleep, either, there was a sense of camaraderie he had never felt before with any woman.

‘What is your name?’ Her question came after many moments of silence and he hesitated. How much should he tell her? He opted for caution.

‘James.’

She turned it on her tongue twice. ‘I had a brother of the same name.’

He noted the past tense.

‘My mother took him with her when she left my father. I was six. He was three. The boat they used to escape foundered off Kincraig Point and they were both drowned.’

Her head tipped up and he saw her eyes watching him in the moonlight. Why had her mother not taken her? He did not like to ask the question, but she answered it for him anyway.

‘Enemies can operate under the guise of love just as easily as they can do hate, and it is my experience that all parents have their favourites.’

‘God.’ His expletive was filled with all the anger she must have felt as a six-year-old.

‘Were there other siblings?’

‘You ask too many questions,’ she said and stood, stretching. The outline of one breast was easily seen against her tunic where the material had slipped to allow the soft abundance an escape.

Mon Dieu, he was turning into a man he did not recognise.

Was it the light-headedness after the doctoring that had him ogling a woman who might still be tossing him back into an outgoing tide come the morrow?

But there was something about her, with her long dark hair and her prickliness, a female set apart from others and fierce. He could not think of even one man of his acquaintance who would have braved such a cold and angry sea.

He also wondered how long she had lived rough like this, lost from society and the discourse of other women.

Her travelling companions lay over the other side of the clearing, their snores mingling with Simon’s, a whisky pouch beside them, and an array of knives and crossbows against a rock at the ready.

Enemies. Everywhere.

The day pressed upon him with all its unexpected turnings. Guy lost, Simon saved and his arm sewn up by a woman who looked like a battered angel. With a sigh he closed his eyes and drifted into sleep.

She could hear him breathing, evenly, slumber taking over from pain.

He lay with his good arm tucked under his head as a cushion against the hardness of the ground, the drizzle sitting on his hair like small jewels. He was a puzzle, this James, with his careful green eyes and his golden bracelet and his way of making certain that all those about him were safe. She had heard the boatman and the one called Simon talk of the way he had rescued them from the trappings of rope and sail as the boat had foundered, clawing his way back to find whoever was left. The marks of bruises all over him told her that the task had not been easy, either, and his vigilance and guardedness here even in the face of pain was unrelenting.

Swearing beneath her breath, she balled her fists and listened to him take breath, quiet in the night and comforting. It was this comfort that had led her to speak of her mother, a subject she had not shared with one other person in all of her life. All twenty-three years of it. Lord, it seemed like so much more.

James. He didn’t suit the name, she thought. Too proper for a man who looked as he did. Too very orthodox and prim. She wished he might wake up so that they could talk again out here in the night alone with the rain to shelter their words from the others, but the day had exhausted him and she was glad that he lay in the arms of rest.

She couldn’t sleep because there were too many thoughts in her head, too many memories dredged up: her mother’s sadness and her father’s fury when he realised that his wife had escaped through one of the sea caves under Ceann Gronna. He had ranted and raved on the high battlements for all of the hours of the storm and when Isobel had gone to him to try to help he had pushed her away, screaming his hatred. Such recollections made her melancholy, a small child blamed for all the self-absorption and egotism of her parents.

She needed some space away from this stranger with all his questions inciting unwanted confidences she had never told another soul. Ian would not hurt them unduly for she had made sure he had understood the consequences should he fail to protect them.

Careful not to wake anyone as she packed up her things, she lifted a branch and disappeared like a ghost into the thickness of the forest.

Chapter Three

Isobel Dalceann was gone when he awoke next, the headache he had felt coming in the night now a pounding curse.

Simon looked about as bad as he felt, the shaking the boatman from Le Havre had been consumed by touching him now, and the red in his eyes as bright as blood.

The two Scotsmen sat by the fire, warming their hands across flame.

‘Is there water?’ Marc’s question was directed at the younger man.

‘It depends who’d be a-wanting it,’ the one called Ian answered, his arm coming up to hold the other back from the task of offering succour. Angus, he remembered Isobel Dalceann had called him. The lad looked remarkably like Ian. Perhaps they were kin?

‘My friend is hot …’

‘Then a swim in the cool of the ocean might do him good.’ He rose now and sauntered towards them, malice drawn into the long bones of his body.

‘I noticed a stream on the way here yesterday. That might do even better.’

Scowling, Ian changed the subject altogether. ‘The insignia on the bracelet we took from you—what does it mean?’

‘I picked the piece up in a trading city in the north of France. Perhaps it denotes a family connection or the acknowledgement of some property.’

‘Or perhaps ye are here to spy for the king?’

‘Philip the Sixth of France is too busy with his own problems to be burdened with those of Scotland as well.’

‘I was speaking of David of the Scots.’

‘As a purveyor of fine cloth newly come in from Brittany, I leave politics to the domain of those who understand them.’ Marc made his accent subtly stronger and shrugged his shoulders to underline the point. Indifference held its own defence. It was the intricate little gestures that made a person believe in a ruse rather than the large ones. How long had he known that? With difficulty he stood.

‘Cloth like that of your surcoat?’ Angus’s question implied interest.

‘Indeed.’ The scarlet velvet was rich in the morning light as he looked around.

‘Where is the woman?’ Trying to take any interest from the query, Marc knew he had failed when the other struck him full in the face. Reeling, he regained his footing, a trail of blood dripping across his left eyebrow turning the world red as the soldier’s instinct in him surfaced.

‘Isobel Dalceann is nothing to you, understand, for I saw the way you looked at her with the firelight in your eyes and want in your belly.’

The Scotsman drew a knife as he spat out the words; kicking out, Marc upended him, using the moment’s uncertainty to kick harder. Long years of practice made the task so easy he could have done it in his sleep. When the man lay still, he turned to find the younger one gone, the water pouch abandoned on the track. Laying his bound palms across the smooth earth of the pathway, Marc listened to movements fading into silence. He made for their keep probably. Isobel Dalceann had already told him it was within walking distance of less than two days west.

Edinburgh lay in the very same direction, on a fortified inner bay of the Forth, at least four days’ hard walk and Simon in no fit state to do any of it.

Grabbing Ian’s knife, he held the blade against the rope at his wrist, sliding back and forth in order to break the bonds. When he was free he cut the ropes binding Simon. His arm hurt like hell at the movement and bright red spread across the bandage, dripping off his fingers in a slimy viscosity. Wiping them against velvet, he looked around. A crossbow had been left and a blanket. Beckoning Simon to collect them while he knotted the discarded ropes into a longer length, he bound Ian to a hefty trunk of tree.

Not dead.

Part of him knew he should pull back his neck and slit his throat here in the quiet of the glade and out of the sight of others, but Isobel Dalceann had smiled at this Scotsman in the way of a friend and there was some hesitation in him that was disturbing, some unfamiliar notion to please.

Simon was coughing in an alarming manner, the breath he took shallow and fast.

‘I a-am f-freezing.’

Marc knew the opposite was the truth for he had felt the hot flush of skin as he had untied him. He stripped his tunic and the blanket away, then they made for the stream crossed yesterday back at the headland off the beach. His friend’s shaking had worsened, the slight tremors giving way to an uncontrolled jerkiness which lessened a bit as Marc dumped him into the water and held him there. Resistance faded as cold ran across heat.

‘God,’ he muttered as the red in his own arm spread into the stream and Simon began to cry.

Biting down on her bottom lip, Isobel thought of the moment her life had changed, from one thing to the other and no chance of turning it different. Her hand lifted to her face and traced the edge of scar into the hairline just below her left ear as consequences settled across her like a stone. If she could go back two years she would have and if she could have gone back another five then all the better again.

So many damn years of war! They were etched into her face as hard lines of age. Alisdair dying by her father’s hands, yet even as he had left this world her husband had incited mercy and pardon until blood dribbled down the side of his mouth, taking away words. Her father had always been unstable and she had spent much of her youth avoiding his heavy right arm. He hated her because James had gone and she was left, a daughter who looked too much like his ‘treacherous wife’.

The anger that congealed inside her sometimes stymied breath and, stopping beside a tree, she hung her head across her knees, fighting terror.

It always happened like this, unexpectedly vicious, the regrets of a lifetime channelled to that one horrific moment with never any solace.

Fingering the silver ring on her finger, she was glad for it. Inside the band Alisdair had engraved the word BELIEF. She had wondered if he meant belief in God or in him at the time he had given it to her. Now she used the word to mark her life. Belief in what she was doing was just. Belief in protecting those still left at Ceann Gronna. Belief in the old rights of land law and clan.

She looked to the west. Clouds darkened the horizon and the rain was falling harder than it had in the night. The pathways home would be muddy and difficult and the time it took to get back to the keep would double in such conditions.

She had been gone for four hours already and the sun was up. She needed to get back to make certain that the strangers were shepherded out of the Dalceann lands. With grim determination she turned to walk against the wind.

She saw the green-eyed one and his friend from a distance on the slopes a good two miles from where they had camped, but Angus and Ian were not with them. Her head tilted to one side, listening. Where the hell were her men? Why had they let these two make their way unaided towards Edinburgh?

James had removed the scarlet surcoat and wore it inside out now, the dark satin of the lining blending into the colour of the trees. The one named Simon hung on to his elbow, more in hindrance than anything else, his limp pronounced.

With care, Isobel skirted into the bush, watching as they came up towards her. James saw her first. Congealed blood lay on the white linen strips she had protected his wound with and he carried the arm high against his chest.

As he smiled she swallowed down a sudden and inexplicable need to touch him and her breathing tightened.

‘Where are the others?’

‘The taller man is tied up in the glade we slept in—’

She broke over his words. ‘Alive?’

When he nodded she felt relief flare in her eyes. ‘And Angus?’

‘Run off … several hours ago.’

His face in the light was harder than she remembered it to be and she saw Ian’s knife tucked beneath his belt.

His glance took in the brace of pigeons she had captured on the incline at the Alamere Creagh before coming back to her face. She saw him frown before he turned away.

Isobel Dalceann was like the space between lightning and thunder when all of the world holds its breath for what was to come. A woman apart from others, incomprehensible and unexpected.

He wished that just for a moment she might be gentle or kind or vulnerable, might smile or shake her head in the way of one who was uncertain, might come forwards and offer solace to Simon.

But she did none of these things as she gestured them to follow, only minions in her wake as the forest closed in about them, holding back the bands of rain. The dead birds hung at her side like an omen.

His arm ached hot and throbbing and the weight of Simon pulled him sidewards. Even a fool could see that if a village did not come soon he was done for and Isobel Dalceann was far from a fool. They came down tall dunes of sand into a sheltered bay, butterflies and flowers bordering a stream.

‘Put him here,’ she said finally as Simon gestured he could go no further. Laying down her own blanket, she knelt at his friend’s side.

Her hand ran across the injured leg and she felt the bruise rise up against her palm, the heat of infection surprising her. Last night this man had shown no sign of any injury save that of the ocean-cold in his bones and she cursed beneath her breath as she recognised her oversight. She should have tended to him hours ago when the fingers of badness might have been expunged more easily and the shaking had not overtaken all sense of ease. With a quick slash of her blade she opened the torn material in his hose from groin to knee. The swollen flesh on his upper thigh had been crushed and she knew instantly that there was nothing more that she could do. Bending to his chest, she listened for the pulse of blood.

‘Can you help him?’ There was a tone in James’s voice she had not heard before.

‘Help comes in many forms.’ Isobel was careful to take the emotion she felt away from her answer as she dribbled water through cracked and shaking lips, waiting for a moment while he swallowed to give him the chance to savour the wetness. Already she could feel the rattle of death in his chest, reverberating against her arm, a soft portent of an ending that was near. ‘My father used to say help was always only fiscal, but my husband insisted it was otherwise. He was a man inclined to the spiritual, you understand, before he died. Your friend here, though, needs another gift entirely and any aid given to another in reaching the afterlife easily has a reward all of its own.’

She saw the quick flicker of rebellion in his leaf-green eyes before he had a chance to hide it, loss entwined amongst anger. Biting down on her own grief, she laid her hand across the dying stranger’s throat, feeling the beat, weaker now and more erratic in the last emptying of blood.

He would still hear, she knew, still make sense of a world fading into quiet and she wanted him to understand the music inherent in a land his dust would be for ever a part of.

‘The smell of the sea is always close in Fife. We’re used to that here, used to living with the wind coming up the Firth funnelled into briskness and calling. The birds call, too, the curlews and the linnets, their song in the birch and the beech and the pine, and further west Benarty guards the heavens and gathers the clouds.’

Her land, its boundaries drawn in blood and fought for in a passion that was endless. The earth here would guard Simon, fold him into her warmth and hold him close. These were the old laws of dying, the rules that had been forgotten in the new kingdom of Scotland because men looked forwards now and never back.

She should be numbed to death, immune to its loss, but she was not and even a stranger who had walked with her for less than a day was mourned.

She had been married once? The thought made him stiffen as he watched her speak of the streams and the mountains and the flowers in springtime. Like a song of the living to the ears of the dying, he was to think later, and a prayer for transport somewhere easier and without pain. Her eyes remained dry.

A gift she had said, and indeed it was that, devoid of angst or panic or alarm. Simon simply slipped off and never moved again as she invoked a pathway to Heaven and talked of a good man that she wanted him to find there named Alisdair.

When death began to cool his flesh she stood, a little off balance. He would have liked to offer her his help, but he was uncertain as to whether she would accept it or not. As they looked at each other, the distance of a few feet felt like the world.

‘What was he to you, this Simon?’

‘A friend.’

‘And the other man, the one you held safe in the sea?’

‘Guy. My cousin.’

‘Then you are blessed with the love of others.’

The love of others! If only she knew. He stayed silent as Isobel turned Simon towards the ocean.

‘Spirits look eastwards for their home.’

‘I have not read that in any Bible.’ He tried to keep his voice even.

‘Some things are not written. They are simply known.’ Clearing a path to the sea, she uprooted bracken and small plants to leave an easy access.

He waited till she had finished before reaching forwards to take one of her hands. When he looked down he saw her fingernails were all bitten to the quick and that there was a wedding band on her marriage finger.

‘Thank you.’

She did not pull away, but stood still, her eyes this close ringed with a pure and clear gold. He tried not to glance down at the scar she wore so indifferently.

‘How long have you been married?’

She broke the contact between them with a single hard jerk. Lord, was nothing ever simple with her? Her hair had escaped the confines of a leather band and the lad’s hose had dropped to the line of her hips, and where the short tunic had hitched upwards the gap showed a good expanse of skin.

‘How old are you?’

‘Twenty-three.’

‘You look younger.’

‘Do I?’ For the first time since meeting Isobel Dalceann, he detected feminine uncertainty and a strange feeling twisted around his heart.

She had rescued him from a raging sea and sewn his arm up without flinching, yet here when he gave her a compliment she blushed like a young girl. The contradictions in her were astonishing.

‘We will wrap your friend in a blanket and leave him undisturbed until help arrives.’

‘Help?’

‘Angus will bring others.’

‘Tonight?’

‘Perhaps.’ Gathering a handful of sticks from the beach, she placed them in a pile. The scar on her hand in the fall of the eve was easily seen and he wondered again who had hurt her so very badly.

‘The keep you mention, is it your family’s?’

‘Aye, it is that and by virtue of long possession. The Dalceann have ruled the land around Ceann Gronna for centuries.’

‘ So you hold tenure direct from the Crown?’

Suspicion sparked across her face, changing eyes to deep brown. ‘Where exactly did you say you were from?’

‘I didn’t.’

‘But not from Edinburgh?’ The brittle anger in her words was palpable.

‘No. Burgundy.’

The tinder was set in the small fire and he flinted it, blowing at the flame until it took. Soon there was a blazing roar.

Isobel plucked the birds and threaded them through a stick she had sharpened with her knife. They were held in place by two piles of stones across the flames, more embers than fire now. She had added other berries he did not recognise, their red skins splitting in the heat. Everything she did showed prowess, competency and a knowledge of the bounty of this land.

‘What did you do there in France?’

‘Many things.’

‘Was soldiering one of them?’

He stayed silent. With no idea of the leanings of the Dalceann cause save the knowledge of an ancient patriarchal title, he needed to be careful. The unrest in Scotland had filtered into France, after all, and David’s hold on the country had always been tenuous. Edward the Third of England had his champion in the factions of Edward Balliol and the vagaries of clan law had never existed under simple allegiances.

Besides, his head swam in a way that was alarming and the prickling heat from the flames made him move back into the cool. If he had been stronger, he could have walked away into the night and tracked west along the Firth, but the shaking that had plagued Simon was beginning to plague him, too. Grinding his teeth together, he swallowed and closed his eyes to find balance.

He rarely answered a question, she noticed.

She also noticed the sweat on his brow and the way his cheeks had flushed with heat. It was his wound, no doubt, the badness settling in. She should unwind the cloth and wash the injury over and over with water that was too hot to touch, infused with the garlic she had so carefully stored at Ceann Gronna.

But here in the open, with nothing save that which she had already used, she wondered if it would not be better to leave it till the morrow when they reached the keep.

If she was a proper healer she might have been able to make the call, but warfare had taken up all the years of her life and it was true when Ian had said that she was more skilled in the art of killing.

Still she did have valerian and the special medicine from England to stop him thrashing about and hurting himself. He would be thirsty and the powders were tasteless. Her fingers felt the paper twists in the pocket of her tunic and she held them safe in her palm. James was large so the dose would be high. Not so high as to kill him though, she amended.

She smiled as she saw his gaze upon her.

‘I will fetch cold water from the stream before we eat.’

The rain sounded far away. He felt it on his face when he tipped his head, but the sky that it fell from was blurred and hollow, no true sense in any of it.

Isobel Dalceann sat watching him, the meat between them blackening on the stick, overcooked and forgotten. He should have moved forwards and taken it from the flame, but his hand felt odd and heavy, too much weight to bother with.

Closing his eyes, he opened them again, widening the lids in a way that allowed more light.

‘How do you feel?’

Her words were flat.

‘How should I feel?’

‘Tired?’

Understanding dawned. ‘You put something in the water?’ He made to rise, but his knees buckled under his weight and he fell to the side heavily. She did not blink as she watched him struggle.

‘Why?’ It was all he could manage, the numbness around his lips making it hard to speak. His tongue felt too big in his mouth.

‘Because you are a stranger,’ she answered, ‘and because everything is dangerous.’

He conserved his breath and closed his eyes. Was the concoction lethal? Already his heart was speeding up and sweat garnered in the cold. He should have been more on guard, he thought and swore at his own stupidity.

‘You won’t die,’ she said flatly, the firelight falling in rough shadows across her eyes. ‘It is an opiate of valerian and gentle unless you fight it.’

Such a quiet warning. He almost spoke, but the dark was claiming him, his world spinning into all the corners of quiet.

She cushioned a blanket beneath his cheek and another across his shoulders. Her fingers she passed beneath his nose, glad when she felt the gentle passage of air. She had not killed him and, unconscious, her prisoner would be so very much easier to protect.

Already she could hear them coming through the trees, the light that she had noticed reflected in the hills above a good few hours ago giving her knowledge of their presence.

Angus would be leading them and he would be looking for vengeance. Please God, that James had told the truth about leaving Ian alive, for if he had not …

She shook her head, repositioning her knife on the inside of her kirtle’s sleeve. These days she trusted no one, for David’s edict calling on the forfeiture of Dalceann land made everything tenuous. Troublesome vassals needed replacement with more amenable ones, after all, and there were many lining up for the rich largesse that was Ceann Gronna.

Even this one, perhaps? Her eyes went to James’s face.

He looked so much softer in sleep than in wakefulness. His nose had been broken somewhere in the past, the fine white line on the ridge leaving a bump to one side. His clothes still worried her, for the velvet surcoat was finely stitched, every seam doubled into dark green ribbon and his bliaud was of fashionable cotton. For the first time she saw a scar just above the fleshy cushion of his palm, dangerously close to the blue lines of blood at his wrist.

No small wound that. She imagined how it must have bled out and the effort it would have taken to quell such a flow. It looked deliberately done, too. Like the mark of a sacrifice.

But there were voices now, only a few hundred yards away. Positioning herself before him, she watched the track from where her clansmen would come, on the other side of the clearing.

Andrew came first, followed by Angus. Both looked for Ian.

‘Your brother is back in the glade where I left you, Angus,’ she said.

‘He hurt him. The one from the sea. He kicked out with his hands tied and brought him down. If he has killed him …’

‘He says he did not.’

As his glance flicked across to James, Angus pushed forward, intent written in every line of his face.

‘No.’ Isobel held the knife where he could see it and he stopped.

‘I am a Dalceann …’

‘And he is asleep.’

‘Drugged?’ Andrew spoke, his voice imbued with the quiet knowledge of something being not quite as it ought.

‘Aye. The wound ails him. I stitched it and cleaned it, but it still bleeds.’

‘And the other?’

‘He died a few hours back. The cold of the sea sat inside him like ice.’

A dozen Ceann Gronna soldiers shuffled into the clearing as they spoke and Isobel tipped her head at their coming, their full-length mantles folded against the chill.

‘I want this stranger unhurt. We will send him by boat to Edinburgh with the ferrymen from the landing-place and he will be no further nuisance.’

‘Nae.’ Angus paced across the other side of the fire. ‘He is not one of us. I say kill him here and now and be rid of any menace.’

In response Isobel kneeled beside James. Pushing back her sleeve, she made a cut in her palm and another across the thickened skin below the strange mark on his wrist. Pressing them together, she smelt the rusty tang of blood.

Hecate, Cerridwen, Dark Mother Take Us In

Hecate, Cerridwen, Let Us Be Reborn.

The oath of loyalty and attachment echoed around the clearing.

‘You would protect him for ever?’ Andrew asked the question.

She shook her head, knowing he was her enemy. ‘Nae. But I swear by all the gods of this place that I will protect him for now.’

Chapter Four

He was naked.

He knew that as easily as he knew he was safe.

Isobel Dalceann was there in the shadow just beyond the candlelight, watching him with her dark eyes and stillness.

‘Water.’ He could barely get the word out.

She moved forwards and he saw that one eye was swollen, the deep bruise on her cheek below grazed into redness.

‘Who hurt you?’ His whisper was barely audible as she leaned forwards to hear.

‘I fell.’

He did not believe it, nor did he understand the shift of caution in her eyes or the gentle way she took a cloth and ran it across his chest.

‘It feels good.’ All the skin on his arms was raised with pleasure, leaning into the cool, and he saw she had a band of cloth wrapped around her palm. Another hurt. He tried to reach up and touch it, but she stopped him.

‘You must rest. Your arm has festered and only strength can save you now.’

His arm? Sliced in the sea. He remembered the boat bound for Edinburgh. He remembered the wave as it had caught them broadside, turning the vessel into the cold and green, the ropes tethering him and the sailcloth, people calling from everywhere.

He had cut free as many as he could with his knife and released them. Simon. Guy. Etienne and Raoul. Then the wooden splint had come down from the mast, broken by force of wind and wave above, turning sharp.

Aching now. Right down to his fingers in a cramping stiffness. A band circled his arm, white linen soaked in something that smelt like overripe onion and herbs strangely mixed. He could not move a muscle.

‘My sword hand?’

‘Ian says cloth sellers should have no need for such a weapon,’ she returned.

‘You found him, then, in the glade?’

‘Worse for wear with the knots you fashioned. It would have been a slow death had we come too late.’

‘Like this one is?’

Her pupils dilated. Always a sign of high emotion. Marc shut his eyes. She thought that he would die soon. Tonight even, he amended, looking at the ornate golden cross above his bed.

Other words came close. An ancient chant in the firelight! Isobel Dalceann lifting his palm against her own and cutting it open, blood mixed in an oath of protection. Was he going mad as well?

The glow from the candle hurt even though his eyelids burnt in fever.

‘Where am I?’

‘Ceann Gronna. My keep on the high sea cliffs above Elie.’

The sea was close, the moon seen through the space between skin and stone at the window. No longer full.

‘How long?’

‘Three days.’

He breathed out, nausea roiling his stomach. Even in Burgundy when the arrow had pierced his armour and gone deep into his back he had not been as ill.

‘You have tended me, then?’

Sickness. The room was full of its grasp. Basins, cloths and vials of medicine lined up on the table. His clothes were neatly washed and folded on the seat of a white ash wooden chair decorated with bands of vermilion paint. He wished he might have stood and taken charge, but not one muscle in his body would obey a command.

Helpless. The very word stung with shock.

‘You have spoken in your sleep in French of battles and of death. It is just as well that none here understand you.’

He turned then, away from her eyes, because there was a question in them that he had no answer for.

Are you an enemy?

Once I was, he wanted to say, but now? The bruising on her cheek was dark.

He should have kept silent, should have held his tongue even in the grasp of delirium. So many damn secrets inside him.

‘When you are better, you will be sent by boat across to Edinburgh.’

‘Better?’ The word surprised him. She thought he would survive this, then, this malady. Relief had him reaching out and taking her fingers into his own. Just gratitude in it. The cool of her skin made him realise how hot he was.

Isobel stood still, the nighttime noises of a sleeping keep far from this room. Her room. His fingers were strong like his body, the skin on the pads toughened by work. She felt them relax as he fell into sleep again, but she did not put his hand down as she should have, did not move from her position at his side, watching him in the midnight.

Marc. He had said his name was that when she had called him James, shrugging off the other name with agitation. He had said other things as well in his delusion that had made her glad she was alone, his green eyes glassy with the fever that raged through him, taking sense.

A warrior. She understood that now by all the other marks on his body, sliced into history. Neither an easy life nor a safe one, for fire and shadow sculptured the hardness in him lying on her bed.

He had spoken of some things that she had no knowledge of and of other things that she did.

Things such as the sovereignty accorded to David of the Scots and the ambitions of Philip of France. A king’s man, then? If Ian or Andrew had heard the words he would be long gone by now, breathless in the raging seas off the end of the Ceann Gronna battlements, only memory.

Why did she protect him?

Her eyes travelled over his body, masculine and beautiful, and with real regret she covered the shape with a thin linen cloth. Wiping back her hair with the sudden heat, she felt the raised ridge of scar and frowned.

Broken apart. By trust. It would never happen again.

With a ripe expletive she turned from the sleeping stranger and walked to the window to watch the water silver in the Scottish moonlight.

The knock on the door a few moments later pulled her from her thoughts. Andrew stood there, a pewter mug of ale in one hand and the remains of a crust of bread in the other. He walked over to Marc and laid a finger against his throat, before coming back to the doorway.

‘He is still out, I see. Ye’ll be needing help I’m thinking, lass. This captive is a way from healthy and the rings beneath your eyes are dark.’

Shaking off his concern, she faced him. ‘He is making progress, none the less. A day or two and he will be fit to travel.’

‘To Edinburgh, then. Is that wise?’

‘He has not seen the keep or the structures within it. Nor will he be given knowledge of the tunnels or of the entrance from the sea. He knows only this room,’ she added. ‘We will blindfold him when he leaves so that nothing is seen.’

‘Something is always seen, Isobel, and he looks like no cloth merchant I have ever encountered.’ The frown on his brow was deep. Concern for the security of the Ceann Gronna Castle, Isobel supposed, and those within it. A just concern, too, and yet …

‘If we kill him in cold blood we are as bad as those who come to oust us.’

Andrew laughed. ‘When David sends the next baron this summer to try his hand at the sacking of the keep, you might think differently.’

‘So you would have him as dead as Ian wants him?’

‘Not dead, but gone. The day after tomorrow even if he is no better. Do ye promise me that?’

The cut on her palm stung when she shook his hand and her right cheek ached from where Angus had hit out in the clearing after she had invoked the protections.

Probably warranted, she thought. She didn’t recognise herself in the action, either, as for so many years any stranger trespassing on the Dalceann lands had been sent away without exception.

Why not him?

Why not bundle him right now into a blanket and dispatch him west? He could take his chances of survival just as the others had taken theirs, and if God saw fit to let him live then who was she to invite danger to her hearth?

The Ceann Gronna hearth. She remembered when as a little girl her father had remodelled the fireplace in the solar, burying iron beneath the stones for preservation.

Lord, and then her father’s actions had inveigled them all into this mess when he had stood against the king in Edinburgh and demanded that the lands around this place would be for ever Dalceann. He had taken no notice of any arguments Alisdair had put forward, but had forged on into a position which he was caught in. The armies that had followed him home had been undermanned and he had easily rebuffed them, but by then they were outlawed. Surrender would undoubtedly mean death to them all and Isobel had long been one to whom strategy had come easily.

At twenty she had planned the defence of the next attack and the one after that. Now, they stood on the edge of the cliff with the world at a distance and no other great vassal of the king had ventured forth to try his hand at possession. Not for two whole summers.

So far the magic in the hearth had held. Except for Alisdair. But even his bones lay here in the earth of the bailey, defended by high walls of stone.

The unassailable Ceann Gronna Castle of the Dalceann clan.

‘We cannae hold on for ever, ye ken, Isobel. The new governance has its supporters.’

She nodded because truth was an unavoidable thing. When the time was right some of the Dalceanns would leave the keep by sea. Already the ground to the south was prepared. A different ruse and one bought with the golden trinkets and jewellery found in the French boat that had sunk a good two years before. There was still some left in case of trouble, hidden in the walls of her chamber. Alisdair’s idea.

‘If this stranger is as inclined to violence as Ian believes him to be, it would make sense to bind him in the dungeon under lock and key.’

‘You speak as if I could not subdue him, Andrew, should he become restless.’

‘Could not or would not, Isobel? There is a difference.’

His voice held a note of question and it saddened her. He had always been the father her own had not been—a man of strong morals and good sense.

A moan behind had her turning.

‘I will think on your words, Andrew, I promise.’

She was glad when he merely nodded and moved off, leaving her alone to tend to the green-eyed stranger.

She had said something of sea tunnels, Marc thought, and of an entrance from the water, but with Isobel beside him again, her hand across his brow, cooling fever, he filed the information away to remember at a later time.

His arm ached, small prickles of it in his chest and neck, the water she helped him sip tainted with a herb he did not know the name of.

The door held a key in the lock and there was rope in the shelf of a small cabinet. A fine woollen cloth hung on the wall by the bed. All things he could use to escape if he needed to he thought. But not yet. The weakness in him was all consuming and the dizziness took away his balance.

‘You need to get stronger,’ she said and her tone was angry. ‘For my protection has its limits, Marc’

Marc felt his lips tug up at each end. Not in humour, but in the sheer and utter absurdity of it all. God, when had he ever depended on anyone before and how many thousands had always depended on him? She had the way of his name, too. The fever, he supposed, loosening his tongue in the heat of swelter.

‘They would kill me here? Your people?’

She nodded. ‘For a lot less than you would imagine.’

‘And you? Are you compromised because of it?’

When she did not answer he swore, the night in the forest coming back to him. Lifting his right hand, he motioned to the wound.

‘Your blood and mine?’

‘The spirit of guardianship must be honoured in the proper way. It is written.’

‘A useful knowledge, that.’

‘You speak as if you do not believe it.’

‘Believe?’ Turmoil and battle were all he had known for a long time now. But Isobel smelt of fresh mint and soap and something else he could not as yet name. He closed his eyes so that he might know it better, every sense focusing on the part of his skin where her hair brushed against him, soft as a feather.

Hope!

The word came down with all the force of a heavy-bladed falchion—he who had led armies for the king against the great enemies of France for all the years of his life. Trusting no one. Guarding any careless faith.

It was the sickness, perhaps, that made him vulnerable or the mix of her blood against his own, inviting exposure.

He wondered just what she would do if she knew who he truly was and pressed down the thought.

Just now and just here. A room in a keep above the sea, its buttressed walls holding in a danger that it had long tried to keep without. He closed his eyes to stop her from seeing what he knew lay inside him, fermenting in the deceit, and was glad when she left the room.

She had seen the look in his eyes and needed to think. Seen the danger and the menace and the hidden knowledge of threat. Not to her though, she thought, as she went down the stairs, the heat of his fever imbued into the very tissue of her skin. She had locked the door and taken the key to keep the others out.

Safety again. For him.

Turning the silver band on her finger, she remembered the man who had put it there. Gentle. Manageable. Alisdair had railed against her father’s strong denial of David’s right in managing his kingdom and had warned him of the pathway fraught with danger that he would tread should he demand authority of the Dalceann tracts.

All his warnings had come to pass, save the one of losing his own life while in the process of trying to change her father’s mind.

She swore beneath her breath. ‘Listen to your heart, Isobel,’ her husband had said time and time again as they had lain in their curtained bed above the storms thrown in from the churning German Sea. ‘King David’s Norman education is changing everything in Scotland and only those who can change with it will survive.’

Slapping one hand against her thigh, she leaned back against a wall. Solid and cool, it steadied her.

Alone.

God in Heaven, why should such aloneness today be any worse than usual?

It was because of this outlander.

It all came down to him. His skin beneath her fingers as she wiped his brow. His breath against her face when she leaned in close, eyes of deep clear green shored up by carefulness.

His body marked by war and battle. She had told no one that!

Neither had she disclosed the silver ring she had found buried deep in the pocket of his gilded surcoat and engraved with the royal mark of King David.

Another day and she would have him gone. She swore it on the soul of Brighid, the Celtic Goddess, the keeper of the sacred hearth and the patroness of women.

Isobel Dalceann came back to him as the sun fell low against the window and she brought a mash of sorts with bread soaked in milk. He ate it as if it was his very last meal and felt stronger.

‘Thank you.’

Again. It seemed of late he had been indebted to this woman time after time.

Waving away the words, she countered with her own question. ‘Are you one of David’s men?’

She had found the ring, he supposed. He should have tossed it when he had the chance, but the piece held a value to him that was sentimental and he had not wanted to.

‘Once I was,’ he replied.

‘And now?’

‘It has been a while since I was in his company.’

She moved back and he knew he had erred.

‘You knew him, then, personally.’

The furrow on her brow deepened. Thinking. He could almost see her brain turn.

‘My mother was from the House of Valois in Burgundy. David of Scotland gave me the ring when he lived there.’

‘Under the protection of Philip the Sixth?’

So she knew her politics. He nodded.

‘You are a friend of the king’s, then?’ The words fell into the silence of the room, the talk marking him off as … what?

When she breathed out heavily he knew she had not wanted this truth. A simple soldier or sailor would have been so very much easier to deal with. Still, in the face of all her assistance he found it difficult to lie.

‘Many here at Ceann Gronna have already died under the guise of David’s ambitions.’ Her voice was flat and hard.

‘And I can promise you that I should not wish to bring one other person here harm.’

She swore again at that, a ripe curse that was better suited to a man. The lad’s hose were tight against the rise of her bottom and despite his sickness he felt his body react.

‘If I was braver, I would slit your throat as surely as you wanted to slit Ian’s.’

‘What stops you, then?’

‘This,’ she answered and leant down into him, her mouth running across his lips. Not gently, either, but with a full carnal want that left him reeling. He felt her bite his bottom lip before her tongue probed, felt the sharp slant of desire and the fierce pull of lust. Felt her fingers on his face and throat and then on his nipples pinching, the rush of hunger acute. When she had finished she moved back, wiping the taste of him away with the top of her uninjured hand.

‘There is not much to hinder the path of a woman taking a man.’ Her eyes went to the stiff hardness that was so very easily seen through the thin linen cloth covering him.

‘Men hold to the premise of self-satisfaction far more than any woman is likely to, you see. A small caress here, a whisper there, the cradling of flesh between clever fingers …’

Hell, she was a witch. He looked away because every single thing she said was true and because the need to come right then and there before her was overriding.

He had not kissed her back. The knowledge of it ran into her veins and made her step away, his face dim in the shadow. If a man had taken liberties like that with her, she might have killed him, quickly, with the knife she always kept in the leather holder under the sleeve of her kirtle.

But he seemed at home in silence as he waited for her to speak, his palms opened on the bed beside him as if the matter had not compromised him in the very least.

Perhaps it is the mix of our blood that has tainted me, she thought, as he began to speak.

‘How long ago did your husband die?’

‘Two years ago in the coming spring.’

‘Have you lain with another since?’

The question shocked her because she had counted her many months of celibacy every night since the sea storm.

The very thought of it made her ashamed. A woman who might sacrifice everything for the quick tug of lust. And she knew what obligations kept her here, above the water watching out for her enemies.

She had not forgotten the promise made to her husband the day he had died, the day she had tried to take her father’s arrow from him, embedded in his body.

‘You shall always have my heart, Isobel,’ Alisdair had said, as the blood filled his mouth in bubbles. ‘So could I take yours with me?’

In death he had meant. In the last breaths of thought.

She had laid his hands across her breast above the beat of loss, his fingers long and slender and soft. She could still feel them there sometimes as life had left him, tugging against the ebb of death.

Twenty-one and abandoned to any other hope of passion because those clansmen gathered about her dying husband had all heard his plea and her whispered answer.

‘Yes,’ she had said through the ache of sorrow, every day and every moment she had spent with him imbued in that answer. Until now when another power had turned her, the longing of lust snaking inside deadness. She was glad for the hard measure of this stranger’s cock beneath the cover because at least some part of his body had wanted her in the same way that she had wanted him.

It still stood proud and he made no move to hide it, lying there like an offering he had no mind to give.

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