She forced herself to look at him, though she hated herself for repeating Arthur’s accusation. “He said that his father had you at the point of his sword, offered you surrender, that you accepted, but then killed him when he turned away.”
This time the flicker in his eyes could not be misinterpreted. Nor the tightening in his jaw or the white lines around his mouth. He was angry.
Angry, but not outraged the way he should have been.
The blood drained from her face. Oh God, it’s true.
The horror in her expression seemed to annoy him. “It was a long time ago. I did what I had to do. Colin Mor was growing too powerful. Encroaching on our lands. He had to be stopped.”
Anna felt as if she were looking at a familiar stranger, seeing the real man for the first time. He was still the father she loved, but he was no longer a man who could do no wrong. A man whom she did not question. He was no longer a god. Nay, he was frighteningly human. Flawed and capable of making mistakes. Big mistakes. Hideous mistakes.
Arthur was right. There was nothing her father wouldn’t do to win. Even the good of the clan would not stop him.
“You have little cause to judge, daughter. You who would let a traitor to your clan walk free.” His voice grew so hard it shook. “Do you know what kind of harm he could have done?”
He was right. She’d chosen to let Arthur go free, even knowing he could harm her clan, because she could not bear the thought of being the instrument of his death. “I didn’t want to see him hurt. I … I care for him.” She stopped. Suddenly, the tense he’d used struck her. Her heart pounded. “ ‘Could have’?” she asked.
Her father’s mouth was clamped tight, the whiteness of his lips stark against his ruddy, angered face. “You are fortunate that I was able to mitigate a disaster. My men surrounded Campbell when he tried to leave last night. He carried a message with him that proved his guilt.” His eyes flared dangerously. “A message that would have ruined everything.”
Anna couldn’t breathe as horror pounded her. Fear laced around her heart and squeezed. “What have you done with him?”
“It’s none of your concern.”
Tears burned the back of her throat. Her eyes. Panic seized her lungs. She could barely get the words out. “Please, Father, just tell me … is he alive?”
He didn’t answer right away, but watched her with a cold, assessing gaze. “For now,” he said. “I have some questions for him.”
She closed her eyes, exhaling with an overwhelming sense of relief. “What will you do with him?”
He eyed her impatiently. Clearly, he didn’t like her questions. “That depends on him.”
“Please, I must see him.” She needed to make sure he was all right.
He looked outraged by the request. “So you can let him go again? I don’t think so.” He clenched his mouth angrily. “It would serve no purpose. The man is dangerous and can’t be trusted.”
“Arthur would never hurt me,” she said automatically, then realized it was the truth. He loved her. Deep down she’d known it. It didn’t change anything in the past, but perhaps it could the future. Her heart squeezed. If he had a future. “Please?”
Her pleas fell on deaf ears, his dark-eyed gaze hard and unyielding. “Arthur Campbell is no longer your concern. You have done enough damage already. How can I be sure that you will not try to find some way to help him?”
The protest died in her throat. Truth be told, she wasn’t sure either. The fear that clutched her heart when she thought of Arthur imprisoned made her realize that her feelings for him were not so easy to put aside.
“I did not expect this from you, Anna.” The disappointment in his voice cut to the bone. Worse, she knew it was deserved. But she felt trapped—caught between two men she loved. He dismissed her with a harsh wave of his hand. “You will be ready to leave within the hour.”
She sucked in her breath. “Leave? But where?”
“Your brother Ewen is marching ahead of the army with a large force of men to bolster our defenses at Innis Chonnel; you will go with him. Once we have sent King Hood to the devil, you will visit my cousin the Bishop of Argyll on Lismore. There, you will have time to think about what you have done—and where your loyalty lies.”
Anna nodded, her tears coming harder. Clearly he didn’t trust her and wanted her gone from the castle while he was away.
She knew she’d gotten off lightly. Her father’s punishment could have been much more severe. But she couldn’t bear the thought of leaving Arthur not knowing what was to become of him.
“Please, I’ll do anything you ask. Just promise me you won’t kill him while I am gone.” She choked on a sob. “I love him.”
“Enough! You are trying my patience, Anna. Your tender feelings for the man have made you forget your duty. Only the knowledge that I might bear some of the responsibility for asking you to watch the man has spared you from a far greater punishment. Arthur Campbell is a spy. He knew the risk he took when he chose to betray us. He’s going to get exactly what he deserves.”
Arthur no longer felt a thing. He’d passed the point of pain hours ago. He’d been beaten, whipped, and had every finger in his hand broken by the thumbscrew. But he could taste the blood. The sickly, metallic scent filled his mouth and nose as if he were drowning in it.
His head hung forward, his hair—wet and caked with blood and sweat—shielding his gaze from the men around him. There’d been as many as a dozen to subdue him at some points throughout the night. Now, as the sunlight pierced the narrow arrow slits of the guard room, there were only three.
He was chained to a chair, but restraint wasn’t necessary. He wasn’t a threat to anyone anymore. His right arm had been twisted so hard it had popped out of the socket. His left hand hung useless at his side, every finger crushed one by one in excruciating slowness.
To think he’d laughed when he’d first seen the device. The small steel vise looked so unthreatening—certainly nothing that would compel him to tell them what they wanted.
But he’d quickly learned how something simple could exact terrifying amounts of pain. More pain than he’d ever imagined. He’d been one screw turn from telling them everything they wanted to know. He would have told them anything to make it stop.
“Damn you, Campbell, just tell them what they want to know.”
Arthur eyed Alan MacDougall through the clumpy veil of sodden hair. Anna’s brother stood near the door as if he couldn’t wait to get the hell out of there, his face strained and bloodless. It almost looked as if he were the one being tortured. Lorn’s heir did not have the stomach for this.
But his henchman did. Arthur had the feeling the sadistic bastard could go on like this for days.
Arthur could no longer speak, but he made a croaking sound and moved his head in a partial shake. Nay. Not yet. He wouldn’t tell them yet. But he no longer said never.
His head snapped back as the bastard hit him again with his chain-wrapped sledgehammer of a fist.
“Their names,” he demanded. “Who are the men who fight in the secret guard?”
Arthur no longer bothered to feign ignorance. They didn’t believe him. Anna had unknowingly doomed him. Lorn was certain that he knew at least one member of the infamous “phantom” guard because of what had happened in Ayr a year ago when he’d come to her rescue and the recent attack.
He couldn’t blame her for that. Nor, it seemed, could he blame her for turning him in. Sometime during the night—in between the beatings and the whip—he’d realized from the questions being pelted at him that he’d probably been wrong. If she had betrayed him, she hadn’t told them much.
He sensed the bastard’s fist going back again—a black spot on the edge of his consciousness. Instinctively, he braced himself for the blow, though he knew it wouldn’t help. From his size and the power of his punch, the henchman could have come from a long line of blacksmiths.
A knock on the door, however, gave him a moment’s reprieve when Lorn’s
henchman was called away.
Arthur slumped in the chair, trying to force gulps of air through his watery lungs. He had at least one broken rib, perhaps more.
“They’ll kill you if you don’t tell them,” Alan said.
Arthur took a moment to respond, trying to pull together enough strength to speak. “They’ll kill me anyway,” he croaked.
Alan didn’t look away, although from the way he winced, Arthur feared his face looked as bad as it felt. “Aye, but it will be far less painful.”
And quicker.
But Arthur had failed in so many ways already; he was determined to salvage what he could of this cursed mission. If he could go to his death without revealing the names of his brethren, he would die with some semblance of honor.
Still, it would be a Pyrrhic victory at best when his failures were so catastrophic. He’d lost everything. Anna. The chance to destroy Lorn and get justice for his father. And the chance to alert the king of the threat. Bruce and his men would be walking right into an ambush, and he wouldn’t be able to warn them.
He’d fail them, just as he had his father.
Being beaten to a bloody pulp, flayed to within an inch of his life, and having his fingers crushed one by one had kept his mind from wandering beyond the four stone walls of his prison. But in the small breaks, he feared the other consequences of his capture.
Lorn loved his daughter. He wouldn’t hurt her. But he had to ask. “Anna?”
Alan gave him a solemn look. “Gone.”
His stomach dropped.
Seeing his horrified expression, Alan hastily added, “She’s safe. My father thought it better that she be removed from the castle until—”
He stopped. Until I’m dead, Arthur finished for him.
Air filled his lungs again. She’d only been sent away. But then he remembered. “Not … safe,” he managed. With the battle coming, Bruce would have war bands all around them, closing in.
The grim line of Alan’s mouth suggested he didn’t disagree. But like Arthur, he’d been powerless to stop it.
“My brothers?” Arthur asked. Dugald and Gillespie might be his enemies on the battlefield, but he didn’t want them to suffer for his choices.
“My father had no cause to believe them involved. They were questioned briefly, and appeared just as surprised as the rest of us.” He paused, his gaze confused. “Why did you save my life? You didn’t have to.”
Arthur shook his hair away from his face to meet his gaze. “Aye, I did.”
Alan nodded with understanding. “You really love her.”
He didn’t say anything. What could he say? It didn’t matter anymore.
The door opened and Lorn’s henchman came back in the small room, a rope in his hand.
Arthur’s heartbeat spiked, an instinctive response to the danger.
“It’s time to go,” he said. “The men are ready to march.”
Arthur steeled himself, knowing his time was at an end. He’d won. They would kill him now. One small victory in a bitter sea of failure.
“He’s to be hanged, then?” Alan said.
The henchman smiled, the first hint of emotion Arthur had seen on his ugly, grizzled face. “Not yet. The rope is for the pit.”
The relief that crashed over Arthur told him he wasn’t quite as ready to die as he’d thought. After what he’d just been through, the dank hole of a pit prison would feel like heaven.
“Maybe the rats will loosen his tongue,” the henchman laughed.
Or a living hell.
The blast of terror that shot through him gave him a primitive burst of strength. He thrashed against the steel of his bindings like a madman. His bruised, shredded skin crawled with the sensations of the rats covering him.
He had to get away.
But he couldn’t. Chained and wounded, he was no match for the guardsmen who dragged him from the guard house to the adjoining room. In the end they didn’t bother with the rope, but just tossed him in.
Dark.
Squeaking.
Falling. Reaching.
A hard, bone-shattering slam.
And then—blissfully—only blackness.
Twenty-four
“Ewen, I’m afraid I’m in dire need of a moment of privacy,” Anna said, feigning a chagrined blush.
“Already?” He looked at her as if she were five years old. They were deep in the forest, near an old burial cairn, not two miles from the castle. “Why didn’t you go before we left?”
She shot him a glare that told him she didn’t appreciate him talking to her as if he were their mother. “Because I didn’t have to go then.”
He scowled. “We’ll stop when we reach Oban; it’s only another mile or so.”
Anna shook her head. “I can’t wait that long. Please …” She begged in a high voice, wiggling around in the saddle a little to emphasize the urgency.
Her brother muttered an oath, then turned to put a halt to the score of guardsmen who’d accompanied them on the roughly thirty-mile journey to Innis Chonnel—a journey that would be made much more swiftly by boat, but her father, before he’d sailed from the castle with his fleet, had decided it would be too dangerous.
“Hurry up, then,” Ewen said impatiently. “One of my men will accompany—”
“That won’t be necessary,” she interrupted hastily. It would ruin everything. “I …” She didn’t have to fake the blush this time. “I fear I ate something this morning that didn’t agree with me. It may be a while.”
Her brother looked properly mortified by her sharing of the too-personal details of a subject that shouldn’t be mentioned at all. Anna was appalled at herself for the nature and depth of her duplicity, but she needed as much time as possible to get away.
She had to get back to the castle. She couldn’t explain it, but ever since she’d left her father’s solar this morning, she hadn’t been able to shake the overwhelming sense of foreboding. Perhaps it had been triggered by something her father said, but she knew something was wrong—terribly wrong. The feeling had only gotten worse as the castle faded into the sunlight behind them. She didn’t know what she was going to do; she just knew that she had to do something.
They might not have a future, but she didn’t want him to die.
Since her father had left the castle just before they did, this was her chance.
Mustering as much dignity as she could—given the humiliation of having roughly twenty men watching her tread off to relieve herself—she accepted the aid of her brother’s squire to slide down off her horse, handed him the reins, and walked regally into the dense canopy of trees and bracken. The moment she was out of sight, she picked up the edge of her skirts and started to run.
It would take her about ten minutes to run back to the castle from here. How long it would take her to talk her way into the guard room where the prisoners were housed, she didn’t know. But she hoped she could reach it before her brother realized she was missing. It wouldn’t take Ewen long to figure out where she’d gone. And unlike her, he would be on a horse.
She raced through the trees, running parallel to but out of sight of the road, trying to make as little sound as she could. But the dry leaves and branches littering the forest floor made silence impossible.
She heard a sound behind her and wanted to howl with anger. How had they discovered her missing so fast? She ducked behind a large rock, hoping to hide, but found herself lifted off the ground from behind.
“Let go of me,” she said, trying to twist free. As she was expecting it to be her brother or one of his men, when she turned and found herself looking into the steely-eyed gaze of a brutish, nasal-helmed warrior, the blood drained from her body. She let out a cry of alarm that was muffled by his hand.
“Shush, lass, I don’t want to hurt you.”
His fearsome visage didn’t inspire a lot of confidence. He was built like a mountain, with rugged, rough-hewn features to go along with his bulk.
She forced herself to still, p
retending to believe him, then as soon as he relaxed, she kicked him as hard as she could with the edge of her booted heel and shoved her elbow as deep as she could into his leather-clad chest, wincing when she connected with the bits of steel.
He let out a grunt of surprise, but never loosened his hold enough for her to free herself.
She gazed back at him in frustration again, and she stilled—this time for real. There was something familiar about him. Nay, not about him, but about his attire.
She sucked in her breath. The blackened helm, the black leather cotun studded with mail, the strangely fashioned plaid …
It was the same distinctive warrior’s garb worn by the handsome warrior in Ayr and by her uncle. This man was part of Bruce’s secret guard.
A fact that was confirmed only a moment later. “I don’t think my former niece believes you, Saint.”
Anna gazed in stunned surprise as Lachlan MacRuairi emerged from the trees alongside another warrior.
“Saint, Templar,” he motioned toward her, “May I present the Lady Anna MacDougall.” He waved off the man holding her. “You can release her. She won’t scream unless she wants to see her brother and his men killed.”
Anna rubbed her mouth as soon as she was free, trying to return the sensation. She looked around. “There are only three of you.”
The men looked genuinely amused by her comment. “Two more than we need,” the third man said. He was slightly smaller of stature than the other two men—she was beginning to think being a muscle-strapped giant was a requirement for becoming a member of Bruce’s secret army—and beneath the shadow of his nasal helm his grin was both good-natured and friendly.
Templar, her uncle had called him. What a strange name. He was far too young to have fought against the infidel. The last crusade was over thirty-five years ago.
And he’d called the man who’d been holding her Saint. They must be noms de guerre—war names—she realized.