Seacliff (42 page)

A brief, violent bout of trembling overtook her, and she waited until it was over, then pushed herself to a sitting position and gingerly rubbed the back of her head. She must have tossed and turned uncontrollably during the nightmare, because the ache in her head was real. She grimaced, pulled the cloak protectively around her, and stared at the glowing embers of the fire she’d built just inside the cave’s mouth. Those, she thought, were the creature’s eyes. And the scar she had seen indicated Flint as surely as if his name had been branded on the creature’s forehead.

The sky outside had turned a dismal gray, and water dripped through the tangled vines partially obscuring the cave’s entrance, collecting in a shallow basin worn in the smooth rock. Though it was not the most pleasant sight or sound she’d ever experienced, the cave was somehow comforting. She felt safe, which helped to drive off the nightmare and bring her back to where she was.

And that, she thought sourly, was… lost.

She had ridden like a madwoman across the valley floor, the roan stretching and striding as it had never done before, catching the fear, the excitement, and the urgency in her voice as she exhorted it onward. By the time she’d reached the foothills to the north the cannonade of thunder had subsided somewhat and left her with a steady, chilling, driving rain. Through Carver’s farm she pounded, through the thick underbrush beyond, and onto what she hoped was the trail Randall had told her about. But it must have been the wrong one. Or he had been mistaken. She rode for hours, until well past dawn, the roan tiring, stumbling, and nearly throwing her off several times until she dismounted and walked alongside it. She stopped only once, to eat a large piece of bread she had taken from the kitchen and hidden in a pocket of her cloak. She sat on a boulder and gnawed on it nervously, seeing in the rain shadows lurking over her, hearing between peals of thunder and cracks of lightning the hoofbeats of frenzied pursuit.

It was then that she began to laugh. Giggling at first, then sprawling on the broad-topped stone and lifting her face toward the sky as she laughed with abandon. Pursuit there very well may be, even in this hellish storm, but the sight of the villagers brawling in the front room, the vicar sprawled, legs akimbo and eyes popping with astonishment, Flint and Bradford—dear, dear miraculous Bradford—pitching off that first step… all of it was too wonderfully delightful not to laugh at.

She had done it. She had actually escaped! As she struggled to her feet and onto the roan’s back, she thought, God help the man who tries to stop me now.

The road ahead of her rose gently, skirting the summits shrouded in thick cloud, crossing white frothing streams on wooden bridges that swayed alarmingly in the wind. By sunset she could barely grip the reins and lead the horse to a relatively sheltered plot beneath a thick stand of evergreens. There, with the cloak wrapped snugly around her and a clump of moss for a pillow, she slept until daybreak. When she awoke she felt like a deer at bay. Sleep left her in a rush, and she was on her feet, positive she was surrounded by a hundred of Flint’s men, all waiting for her to move before they put their swords to her. But she was alone, and the worst of the storm had apparently passed. She spent another day riding, climbing higher and higher into the mountains, the trail narrowing at times to almost nothing, so little used was it. Fog filled the tiny valleys below her, and the heavy mist clung to her face like a clammy woolen veil.

By then she was less afraid that Flint’s men might be riding hell bent behind her than she was of missing any signs that would lead her in the right direction—to the outlaws.

By the end of the second full day her meager supply of food was gone.

Early the third morning the roan was panicked by something moving in the thick underbrush flanking the trail. The horse bolted, and Caitlin barely had time to twist her hands into its mane to avoid being tossed off its back into the mud and undergrowth. The ride was precarious, branches whipping overhead and tugging at her hood, scratching her back, lashing across her face, and raising fierce welts on her cheeks. It was odd, riding astride like a man, but she quickly adjusted, jamming her knees into the horse’s sides and letting it have its head, hoping it would tire itself out before speeding into a killing run.

Alongside an engorged stream they raced, Caitlin wrestling to keep the spooked horse from attempting to ford. A sudden, open field proved tempting, and it swerved, nearly toppling her from her perch as it leaped over a low copse of brier and headed toward the dark wall of forest on the opposite side.

She saw what was coming long before it happened, but with a curious sense of inevitability, she could think of nothing swiftly enough to prevent the onrush of events. The roan plunged into the woodland, a low-hanging branch lashed Caitlin across the chest, and she was swept from the saddle with a short, piercing cry. Unconsciousness immediately engulfed her, and when she finally came to, she was alone. The roan had fled. Her breasts ached as she gulped for air, and when she sat up she realized she’d fallen on a bed of pine needles, which had protected her against broken bones, though not against scratches. Recovering somewhat, she beat her thighs with her fists in frustration. Scrambling to her feet, she looked around at the field. The mist had enshrouded it, but she was positive she saw darker shadows plunging through the tall grass toward her.

There was no time to hunt for the mount or to do anything more than check to be sure she still had the slender dagger. Then she moved into the trees as quickly as her dull aches and scratches would permit her, and felt the ground rise beneath her feet. Every so often she dropped down on a boulder to rest and to check the trail below.

Night fell. The mist was swept away by a wind far warmer than that which had driven her to this point, and when she looked up she could see patches of stars through the sodden foliage. They were small comfort. Stars, to her mind, also meant the possibility of a moon. And moonlight would mean keeping to shadows, and slowing her already curtailed pace.

She judged the time to be shortly before midnight when she rounded a sharp bend in a narrow deer trail and saw the cave. Initially, she was wary. Though the prospect of dry ground and the protection of the mountain, however brief, was extraordinarily tempting, there was also Flint’s pursuit to consider. She seldom thought actively about her pursuers, knowing that Flint himself would have caught her long before this; someone else must be out searching for her, and it had only been by the sheerest of luck that she’d gotten this far without capture. Perhaps, she thought wryly, getting lost had actually been a help instead of a hindrance. If any of Hint’s men knew about the hunting trail, they would more than likely search it. Since she’d not been on this other trail for two days, she might very well be in no immediate danger at all.

But danger was danger, immediate or not.

The cave might well serve as her prison as well as a temporary resting place.

She heard the faint, haunting cries of a pack of wolves somewhere off in the forest. Instinctively she knew they were miles away, but the very thought of rounding a bend and coming up on a wolf was enough to send her scrambling up the slope. She fought her way through the screen of dangling vines and slipped into the darkness.

There she built the fire. There she had the nightmare.

There she awoke on the fourth morning after leaving Seacliff to see the gray morning promising more rain.

Slowly, she stood and walked to the mouth of the cave, parted the vines, and looked out. The hill sloped sharply downward beyond the trail, dropping off into a thick profusion of trees. She could see across their gently swaying tops, to the land that leveled into a funnel-shaped valley and climbed almost instantly to a much larger hill. Crags and cottage-sized boulders marked its summit; fog curled around its dark face; and the distant shadows of hawks on the wing crisscrossed its peak.

When she stepped outside and looked to her right, toward home, the view was the same as when she looked left.

And in the presence of the awesome beauty surrounding her she felt the first stirrings of despair.

It was all very well to say that she had evaded her pursuers, that her life would be spared, at least for a while. But what good was that when she was utterly and completely lost? There were no familiar landmarks. She could have been in the middle of Prussia for all she knew. And though she had prided and praised herself, on the daring of her flight, she’d also managed to forget to ask Randall one vital thing—how to make contact with the outlaws. Naively, she had just assumed that if she ventured into their domain, they would find her and all would be taken care of. And maybe, if the storm hadn’t been so fierce and so long-lasting, her scheme might have worked.

And maybe, she thought glumly, King George will come down the trail on his fat white horse and show me the way himself.

A sigh, and she reminded herself that recriminations were not going to get her where she wanted to go. Choosing a direction, she slipped and slid down the slope to the trail, foraged through some brush for berries to eat now, and berries to pack into her cloak, and moved on. Northward. At least she might stumble into England again.

Right now, however, she was in the middle of a land that seldom, if ever, saw the trace of a human footprint. And the longer she walked the more she felt at the same time gently humbled and strangely excited. It was an exploration, a discovery, and she found herself attempting to memorize the lay of the land just in case she should ever come here again.

Midday saw the gray considerably lightened, the temperature warm as spring, and the soles of her feet aching in her boots. More and more often she rested by a silvery stream, or in the shade of an oak or hickory hundred of years older than she. She no longer had the feeling she would be recaptured at any moment; and once she recognized that fact, she also felt disturbingly alone. Wood-lore, she admitted somewhat glumly to herself, was not her forte. She’d never learned to make a snare from sapling and vine; she had no idea how to fashion a bow from a branch—or for that matter, even what tree one should take the branch from in the first place. When she saw a family of deer in a meadow on an opposite hillside, she pulled out her small dagger and stared at it angrily.

“What good are you going to do me now?” she muttered at it, and almost flung it away.

The cloak, which had dried out overnight, provided scant protection against the immensity of the wilderness she found before her. The trail was long since gone, vanished by degrees into low grasses and a series of connecting glens the beauty of which, on any other occasion, would have brought tears of joy to her eyes.

A waterfall spilling what looked to be diamonds into a rainbow-hued pool stopped her for an hour. She sat on the bank and watched the swirling water, mesmerizing herself until she had to force herself to get to her feet and move on.

Northward. She at least knew how to orient herself by using the sun’s position in the sky as her compass.

Deeper into the mountains she moved, where the forest hid even the dimmest glow of the sun above the clouds, where the shadows beneath the closely spaced trees seemed darker, more forbidding, more fearful.

As what little light there was began to fade, Caitlin searched for a place to spend the night. Until now she had been walking as if in her sleep, numbing her mind against the thousand tiny aches and pains that had settled in her calves and thighs, in the small of her back and between her hunched shoulders. By refusing to permit herself to think she was able to pass the day without noting the passage of time, to move from place to place without measuring how far she had gone each hour.

But once she brought herself back to the present, she had to bite her lips against exhaustion and pain. One step more, she told herself; one step more is one step farther away from Flint. You can’t stop now. After coming all this way, you can’t stop. Griffin is there, you see, just on the other side of that hill, through that stand of maple and hickory, in the shadows there on the other side of that stream. He’s there. He’s waiting. If you stop now he’ll think you aren’t coming and he’ll move on, and you’ll never meet him, and you’ll wander forever and a day and never be found.

There. There, by that boulder. See? I told you, Cat. I told you he’d be waiting!

She blinked and rubbed a weary hand over her eyes. Now her mind was playing tricks on her. Now it was telling her there was a man standing in the shadow of a boulder nearly as tall as a young tree, by the side of the trail. She didn’t ask herself where or when she had picked up the trail; she was just on it again. Just as that man standing by the boulder and watching her was just there. It happened, that’s all, and she should count herself lucky that…

She stopped, suddenly realizing that what she was thinking and what she was seeing weren’t part of a walking dream.

The forest she had entered was mostly evergreen, the lowest branches waving high above her head. Slants of light cut through the gloom, outlining pockets of ground mist, adding a shimmering silver to the bark and to the raindrops still caught in low holly shrubs. One of those spears of light reached over the top of a convoluted brown boulder, creating beneath it a wedge of shadow in which stood a man. She had no idea how long he had been watching her, but there was no question that he could see her. He was wearing over his narrow shoulders a dark cloak much like her own, the hood over his head, the hem just barely above the damp, soft ground. Boots, breeches, and shirt were streaked with new and old mud, and beneath a wide-brimmed brown hat—again, much like her own—she could discern a stern, ragged face framed by a heavy black beard.

As far as she knew, there were no villages nearby.

The man, then, either had to be one of those she was seeking, or one of Flint’s men who had somehow circled ahead of her.

The notion of running fled as fast as it came. She was too tired, and she had no idea where she could run if a chase began.