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“Ho!” Haley heard the surprise in his voice as he rushed to

catch up. “Ho, girl!”

She walked faster, then faster still. If he was going to talk to her like a horse, let him try to corral her like one.

A clearing lay ahead. The trees thinned, and their leaves glowed light green from the growing sunlight.

“Ho!” His voice was angry now.

But her smile only grew broader as she broke into a jog.  She needed to reach the clearing. The sound of his breath closed in, echoing through the silence of the woods.

She burst into a run, stopping just a few feet outside the edge of the grove.
 
Wait.

Her father's voice came to her then, so clear, so eerily vivid as to almost break her concentration.
 
Wait for it.

It wasn't until she felt him burst into the clearing that she finally spun to face him. She pivoted hard, the busk in her hands, the full force of her weight behind it. She spun and slammed it into the side of his head with a satisfying crack.

“Home run, motherfucker.” Her voice was giddy, a match to

the high pitch of adrenalin that trembled through her.

She came back to herself at once. She needed to run. Fast.

She figured she had five minutes tops before Campbell came to see what was taking them so long.

But first… She knelt and grabbed the man's pistol and tugged the small leather bullet bag from his belt.

She needed gunpowder.
 
Where would it be?

She patted down the man as quickly as she could, hoping he was truly out cold. Then she felt it. A hard, oval bulb in his breast pocket. Using the very tips of her fingers, she peeled open his soiled and smelly coat. An uneven pocket had been stitched in as an afterthought, and the dull stopper of a brass priming flask poked out from the top.

Hurry up.
 
She grabbed it, shoved it and the bullet bag in her corset, then stood and scanned the horizon. Hills and

more hills. She'd need to go back up and over the

mountain range.

Her heart sank. The gravelly hillsides and low-lying tangles of brush wouldn't provide any cover.

She rubbed her thumb distractedly over the pistol's wooden grip.

Campbell had ponies. And though they were rugged animals, there would be no way they could make it easily over the steepest peaks. She didn't know about his other clansman, but she knew she could beat Campbell in a footrace.

Fat sod
. Haley broke into a run.

As she pumped her arms in the hard slog up the first slope, she came up with as many British slang terms as she could for Campbell.

Bloody porker.

Bollocks. Wanker. Ugly shite
.

Her own version of a mantra.

She switched the gun to her other hand, clutching the thick handle tight.

Catch me if you can.

* * *

MacColla squatted, scanning his eyes along the terrain.  Two sets of footprints had left the castle, marked clear in the dirt just outside the entrance. Men's boots, not walking in a straight line. They would've carried her then.

He stood, inhaling sharply. It had been a mistake to stop at  Fincharn. The lass had been injured, though. They'd needed to rest. Jean too. Neither would've been able to

press on at the pace he'd have liked.

And now he was suffering his mistake.

Their tracks were clear enough, scuffed along gorse and

scrub, headed for a distant grove on the outskirts of

Scrymgeour's land.

MacColla jogged toward it. His claymore thumped against his back with each stride. Stirring him, spurring him.

He'd   underestimated   Campbell.   Or   rather,   he'd underestimated what Haley meant to the man.

Who is she and what does she have to do with Clan

Campbell?
 
His own clan's sworn enemies.

She clearly wasn't a spy. He thought of that handprint on her pillow.
 
If blood had to be spilled in the taking of her…

The thought drove him into a run.

The lass was strange. Strong and beautiful, in the guileless way of a wild creature. He felt a spark of desire whenever

he saw her now. A dead man would, to glimpse those

mysterious gray eyes.

He had to admit he'd wanted her from the start. Even

before MacColla had known they shared a common enemy.

He reached the trees. Squatted again, then went to hands and knees looking for the traces that were harder to pinpoint in the dense undergrowth.

Snapped branches. A spot where the carpet of leaves had been disturbed to reveal the damp, dark loam beneath.

He stood, walked slowly, hands on his knees as he bent close to the ground and followed the tracks to a clearing.

A pile of dirt and ashes were all that was left of a small fire.  Leaning over, he traced his fingers through the cinders.
 
Still warm.

They hadn't been gone long.

He circled the camp, saw scuffs where hooves had shuffled along the rotted leaves. Three sets. Her two captors had met up with another.

Campbell?
 
He could only hope. He yearned to fight the man. Longed for it.

MacColla's father and brother had lost years of their lives in a Campbell dungeon. Countless of his MacDonald clansmen had lost their lives fighting Campbell men, and  MacColla had dreamt of the day he could take his revenge .

He found two more sets of tracks, human, and heading deeper into the trees. At one point in the trail, underbrush had been scuffed away, revealing a small patch of silt. And a single footprint.

A small, bare foot.

“Och, Haley lass,” he muttered, tracing his finger along its

outline.

MacColla stood and jogged again, as fast as he could while still marking the tracks. He came to a clearing, and the laugh rumbled low from his chest before he could think to keep silent.

A Campbell man, lying in the brush . Dead or near to it.

“Good girl,” he whispered, grinning his relief.

She was a fighter.

He'd find her and fight with her. Two on two.

MacColla liked the odds.

Chapter Sixteen

Shit. Shit shit shit.

Haley cursed, and then let loose a chuckle, giddy with nerves and fear.

She'd crested the first hill and came to rest, concealed by a rocky outcropping on just the other side. Her chest was killing her. She was winded, and each heaving breath shot pain through her torso.

She thought she'd load her weapon, and wait. But she examined it now, turning it in her hands. Cursing again, she tilted it toward the sunlight. It was a pretty little pistol, made of a simple dark wood capped with steel accents that shone a dull gray in the morning's watery light.

And of course it had to be unlike anything she'd ever fired.

It was a predecessor to the flintlock. She thought of  Graham's gun from the museum and gave another muted laugh. Here was her theory. Right here in her hands.

Not many flintlocks in the first half of the seventeenth century.

How the hell
, she wondered,
 
do you fire this thing
?

She'd shot plenty of black-powder weapons for her research, but she'd never laid her hands on something like this.

She was pretty sure it was an early
 
snaphaunce
.

They were called dog lock pistols, referring to the catch that locked the cock into the safe position. As she recalled, it was a gun used by the English soldiers.

Of course.
 
The Campbells had sided with the Covenanters in the Wars of the Three Kingdoms. And the Covenanters often found themselves on the same side as Cromwell's

Parliamentary soldiers. It made sense Campbell would have access to guns used by the redcoats.

She retrieved a bullet from the leather pouch and saying a prayer she didn't blow her hand off, proceeded to load the weapon, carefully pouring in powder, dropping and tamping down the ball, then pouring a measure more powder in the pan.

She leaned back, and the rock at her spine felt cool. She realized she'd worked herself into a sweat. Shutting her eyes, Haley tuned her senses outward, listening for the  Campbell clansman she knew would find her.

* * *

Campbell put his hand to his forehead, shielding his eyes from the sun. “There.” He pointed to the steepest area of the slope. A narrow stripe of  dark gray spoke to scree recently displaced.

His man had been searching for tracks along the low valleys between hills, but Campbell had suspected

otherwise. If the woman was canny enough to smash in the  head of one of his best men, she'd not scramble  hysterically into a trap.

With them on horseback, staying to the lower elevations would corner her as easily as a hare in a hole.

“Do we ride up then?”

Campbell sneered. “Neither of us is riding up that.”

He puckered his lips in thought. Studied the terrain to either side, then up along the mountain.

“Off your horse,” he commanded. “I'll cut her off low on the  other side. You race and catch her above.” He wheeled his

mount around. “And one more thing, lad?”

“Aye, sir?”

“If you don't catch her”  - Campbell gathered his reins in  tight fists, the stout pony prancing anxiously beneath him  “don't bother coming back.”

Campbell kicked his horse, galloping into the valley and toward his Inveraray Castle beyond.

* * *

He tracked the horses to the base of one  of the steeper slopes. He studied the rise. The gravelly hillside told a clear story. One man hiked up and another rode off.

MacColla raised his hands to the grip of his sword and leaned his head back to stare up into the glare.

Her tracks were there too , in the scree, a thick line edged by two thinner ones. Her hands and feet scuffling up the hillside. Chased.

Hissing a curse, his eyes scanned the foot of the slope, following the tracks where they headed into the valley.  They were fresh. The ponies had  left a trail that was easy to read, cutting a wake of broken branches and trampled leaves in the gorse and brush.

Campbell.
 
Campbell wouldn't have climbed a mountain  -not when he had a man to do it for him. It was Campbell who would've ridden off, riderless mounts beside him.  Campbell who now headed in the direction of Inveraray  Castle.

“By crivens,” he muttered. MacColla deliberated for a  moment. Looked back up the hill and down again to the  valley. “Damn it and damn it to hell.”

Campbell was close. Too close to ignore. And alone. That was what clinched it. MacColla could blindfold himself, tie both hands behind his back, and still he'd best Campbell in a fight.

Campbell was close, and he had to get him.

MacColla turned, looked back up the hill, staring up at those tracks as he began to jog backward toward the valley.

Away from Haley. He tried to ignore the sharp twinge in his chest.

Haley
, He had to hope she'd be all right. She was a fighter.

Braw, but canny too, using her brains and her strength.

“Good Christ, lass.” he whispered. MacColla turned his

back to her trail and took off after the Campbell. “Be safe.”

He broke into a hard run, willing his physical exertion to push images of her from his mind. But those gray eyes haunted him, and he ran harder.

He would catch the Campbell and kill him.

He could come back for Haley.

He was too close to stop now.

And then he heard it. A shot cracked high above. Trees grew scant in the hills, and there was nothing to stop the sound of gunfire from echoing  down to where he'd stopped, panting, deep in the valley.