The Ghost (Highland Guard 12) (5 page)

Had Felton not been the one to suggest it, Alex might have been glad not to have to face his former friends just yet. Hell, he was glad—Felton or not. He’d hoped to never be in this position.

A few moments later, the bulk of the army rode off, leaving Alex, the dozen men he’d brought with him from his estates in East Lothian, and the fifty or so servants and skilled laborers who accompanied the army, from the stable lads who tended the horses, to the smiths and their apprentices who repaired the armor and shoed the horses. The “small army” as it was called was a vital part of any conventional force, but it also complicated the process and prevented them from moving quickly. By contrast, the small strike forces that Bruce employed weren’t hampered by all the added weight and logistics. That was part of what had made them so successful.

The first clash of battle sounded like a thunderclap; it filtered through the cold evening air as if it were a hundred feet away rather than a half-mile or so. The roar of the attack, the shouts of surprise, the clatter of steel . . . the cries of death. It was fast and furious. Or at least it should have been with nearly two hundred men to forty. But after about five minutes something changed. There was a shift in the sounds of the battle that told him something had happened. A short while later, he found out what.

One of Pembroke’s men-at-arms came racing back. “Take what you can and make for the castle. The Scots are on their way.”

Alex swore. “What happened?”

“Carrick’s men weren’t alone. The Earl of Moray and at least another fifty men were nearby and came as soon as they heard the attack. We were forced to retreat. Sir Aymer and the others are racing to the castle.”

Being right didn’t make Alex any less furious—or frustrated. Sometimes it seemed as if the wall he’d been banging his head against in Scotland had followed him to England. For two years, he’d been trying to get the English to stop underestimating their opponent so they would see a reason to negotiate and bring an end to this bloody war. But all that men like Pembroke seemed to see were their superior numbers, armor, and weaponry. Things that hadn’t stopped Bruce’s men for eight years. Pembroke might have double Carrick’s men, but the arrival of the king’s nephew would have changed the odds. Alex ought to know, as he’d been responsible for some of the Earl of Moray, Sir Thomas Randolph’s, training himself.

Alex shouted orders for his men to take what they could of the valuable plate and the silver Sir Aymer was bringing north to pay the garrison at Carlisle, rounded up the livestock, and ordered the small army to follow the old Roman road to the castle, which should only be a few miles away. The small army wouldn’t be hurt. No matter what horrible stories they told of the “barbarous Scots,” Alex knew that Bruce had given orders only to kill those who fought against them. It was the cattle and coin to provision the army that he was after.

There was nothing barbarous about Bruce’s men, but it wasn’t until Alex had tried to cure the English of all their ignorant misconceptions and beliefs that he’d really understood it himself. The Scots might be terrifying and appear out of the darkness like brigands, but they weren’t.

But unfortunately, unlike the small army, Alex and his men wouldn’t escape death so easily if Bruce’s men caught up with them.

Alex didn’t delay, heading straight for Pembroke’s cart to retrieve the silver.

He’d just shoveled the last of the fifty pounds’ worth of coins from the wooden box into a linen sack to make it easier to fit in a saddlebag, when he heard the not-so-distant sound of approaching riders.

With a curse, he handed the bag to the last of his men and told him to go. They were leaving a lot of valuable goods behind, but there was no help for it.

Knowing Bruce’s men would be on him at any moment, Alex mounted his horse and took one last look around. A movement out of the corner of his eye stopped him cold.

Bloody hell, where had she come from? A wee lass, not much older than five or six, had just emerged from the trees. Alex watched in disbelief as she started to cross the road that was directly in the path of the oncoming horsemen. He shouted a warning, but she didn’t give any indication that she’d heard him. Couldn’t she hear the horses?

She must have felt them. She stopped suddenly—right in the middle of the road—stared down at the ground, and froze. She had her back to him, but Alex didn’t need to see her face to know that it was struck in terror.

Go
, he told himself, looking in the direction of the road leading to the castle.
You can still escape. They’ll see her in time
.

But it was almost dark, and she was wearing a black cloak . . .

She turned and saw him. Her eyes widened, and for one hideous moment, Alex’s mind flashed back to another. He saw another little girl with wide eyes and full of terror staring at him, but this time from the open door of a loft in a barn with flames jumping all around her.

Flames that he had set.

Oh God, I have to reach her in time. Please let me reach her in time . . .

The memory cleared, but not the sense of urgency. He knew he couldn’t take the chance that they wouldn’t see her. He wouldn’t see another innocent life put at risk—not when he could stop it.

He swore again and swung his horse toward the girl. He didn’t have much time. The first rider had just appeared perhaps a hundred feet behind her. They weren’t much farther away than Alex.

He sure as hell hoped his sword skills hadn’t diminished as much as he feared in the past two years, because even if this worked, he was going to be fighting for his life in a few seconds.

With a snap of the reins and a click of his heels, his stallion shot forward. Staying low over its neck, Alex held the reins in one hand and slowed just enough to lean over and wrap one arm around the girl’s shoulders and drag her out of harm’s way. Turning his horse in to the trees, he set her down. The pounding of horses stopped. Aware of the riders circling around him in the darkness, he told her to go.

Big, dark eyes in a tiny pale urchin’s face stared at him mutely.

Nay, not mute, he realized,
deaf
. That’s why she hadn’t heard him or the horses. It was the feel of the ground shaking that had alerted her to danger.

“Go,” he repeated again, pushing her in the direction of the trees. “You’ll be safe.”

She must have understood his meaning if not the words, because she gave him a frantic nod and scurried off into the trees.

Even before he looked up, Alex felt a chill of premonition as the men who’d surrounded him emerged from the darkness. The hand reaching over his back for his sword stilled.

Damn it, it couldn’t be.

But it was.

The blood drained from his body in a violent rush. He muttered a harsh curse, recognizing the familiar blackened nasal helms, soot-stained faces, black leather studded
cotuns
, and dark plaids.

Hell, he wasn’t ready for this. He wasn’t sure he’d ever be ready.

His hand dropped to his side. After fighting alongside these men for seven years, he knew better. He was good, but single-handedly defeating nine warriors of the Highland Guard was beyond any one man’s skills.

Alex had always known he might pay with his life one day for what he’d done, he just hadn’t anticipated it being so soon.

A familiar voice broke through the silence. “I see you are still polishing that shiny armor of yours,
Sir
Alex.”

A
LEX BRACED HIMSELF
for the condemnation and hatred, as he turned to face one of the most feared men in England, his former partner and hate-everything-English, Robbie Boyd.

But nothing could have prepared him for the stab of guilt that plunged through his gut when he saw the look of betrayal in the eyes of the man whose friendship and respect he’d struggled for so long to earn. At times Alex thought he had, and at others, it felt like all he was doing was banging his head against that wall.

You did what you had to do. He never trusted you anyway. You were never really a part of them
. But the guilt coiling in his chest didn’t seem to think that was enough.

“You didn’t get enough of rescuing
fair
maids in Scotland, so you had to stab us in the back and go to England instead?” Boyd said.

Alex flinched. Though he’d anticipated the blow, it didn’t make it any easier to withstand.

He didn’t miss the emphasis—or the sarcasm. Boyd’s wife was known as “The Fair Rosalin” after her illustrious ancestor “The Fair” Rosemund Clifford. When Alex had still been with the Guard, Rosalin had been taken hostage after a retaliatory raid in Norham to secure her brother’s agreement to a truce. To say that Alex had clashed with Boyd over the taking of the hostages (Rosalin’s nephew had been taken as well, although the boy had managed to escape) was putting it mildly.

Making war on women and youths was bad enough, but when Alex guessed that Boyd had taken Rosalin to his bed, the dishonor done to her while in their care had seemed the final blow.

Alex just couldn’t do it anymore. He could no longer be party to such dishonorable acts done in the name of war.

Not just Boyd’s, but his own as well.

Alex couldn’t forget how close he’d come to doing something for which he could never forgive himself—that little girl’s face in the flames was never too far from his mind. He’d reached her in time, thank God, and pulled her from the flames of the building to which he’d set fire in that same retaliatory raid in Norham. But that was the moment he knew something had to change. Holding the sobbing child in his arms whom he’d almost accidentally killed, something in him had snapped.

This wasn’t right—no matter how just the ends—and he couldn’t do it anymore.

He couldn’t set fire to one more barn, see one more town razed, or one more innocent harmed. There had to be another way than the “eye for an eye,” “you raze me, I’ll raze you more” mentality that had defined the war in the Borders for so long on both sides.

In that child’s tear-stained, smoke-blackened face, Alex realized it was never going to end. Not like this. It had become a war of attrition that could and would go on for years, with Alex’s people in the Borders—and little girls like this—the ones who suffered.

He knew he had to do something. Something drastic. Something that might make a difference. Something that actually had a chance of putting an end to the damned war.

It had become painfully clear that that something wasn’t going to be fighting for Bruce with the Highland Guard. It wasn’t that Alex had never fully embraced the pirate style of warfare, which went against everything he had been taught was honorable as a knight, but it wasn’t getting them anywhere—not anymore. The skirmishes, ambushes, and raids that had given Bruce a foothold were never going to give him the definitive victory he needed to signal God’s judgment in the righteousness of his cause and force the English to accept him as king. Only a pitched battle—army meeting army—would do that, but Bruce vehemently refused to do something so risky. Why should he, when he could go on as he was until the English gave up?

If Bruce wouldn’t end the war with a battle—and God knows Alex had tried to persuade him—it would have to be done with a truce. And Bruce wasn’t the one who needed to be convinced to parley. It was the English. The only thing Alex could do was to try to end the war from the other side, using reason, negotiation, compromise, and the influence he’d once had as a former English baron to help them see the value in peace and bring them to the bargaining table.

It would be a difficult task—hell, a Promethean one—but God knew, it would be better than raids, hostages, and burning barns with innocents.

When Rosalin decided she wanted to return to England, Alex had “rescued” her—as Boyd had just accused him—by escorting her. Alex didn’t know what Boyd had done to win her back, but it must have convinced her that he’d changed. For Rosalin’s sake, Alex hoped so.

Unlike Rosalin, however, Alex hadn’t gone back.

He told himself he was still fighting for Bruce’s place on the throne, but he knew his former brethren wouldn’t see it that way. To them he betrayed them—stabbed them in the back—and his reasons for switching sides wouldn’t matter.

They wouldn’t care that it was the hardest decision he’d ever had to make in his life. That he’d agonized over it for months. That leaving the Guard had been like cutting off his own arm—with the damage he’d done in removing his tattoo he practically had. That it had torn him apart for weeks . . . months . . . hell, it still tore him apart.

Now here he was facing not God’s judgment in the righteousness of his cause, but his former brethren’s.

He was a dead man.

Ignoring Boyd’s jibe about the knife in the back, he said, “Aye, well, I didn’t think you’d see her in time, and I doubt even someone who blackens their armor would let a little girl get run over if he could stop it.”

He heard a sharp laugh from the man next to Boyd. “He has you there, Raider,” MacSorley said.

But any thought that Alex might find sympathy from the always jesting and good-humored seafarer was lost when their eyes met. MacSorley’s face was a mask of betrayal every bit as hard and impenetrable as Boyd’s. They all were: MacLeod, MacSorley, Campbell, MacGregor, Boyd, Sutherland, MacKay, Lamont, MacLean, and one face he didn’t recognize beneath the helm.