DARE THE WILD WIND (16 page)

Fenella's face lit with hope and relief.  "Oh, Brenna, I knew you'd never stand by and let Iain die."

"I promise you I won't," Brenna answered, feeling stronger than she had in days. 
Cam might need her, and it was certain Iain needed help.  She couldn't fail either one of them.

"Fenella, leave the castle the way you came, openly by the main gate and the bridge.  Meet me at Culley's old croft."

"That burned last year?"  Understanding dawned in her gray eyes.  It was a deserted shell now, with no one to carry tales.

"And what of you, my lady?" Morag interrupted.  "Do you mean to fly from yon window over the moat?"

Brenna sent her old nursemaid a sudden and determined smile.  "I mean to be carried out the gate in state."

Morag gazed at her as if she was mad, and Brenna gestured to the linens newly stripped from her fat feather bed. 

"I don't think a sheet or two will be missed.  And who in this household will remark on it as strange if you're struck by a sudden urge to clean?" Brenna nudged with her toe at the carpet of rushes strewing the chamber's stone floor.  "In fact, I think all the rooms in this wing of the castle need freshening."     

Morag's puzzled frown changed.  "It's spring, right enough," she said in grudging, uneasy tone.  "But you'd be daft to do such a thing, and I'd be addled to let you."    

"I'd walk over a bed of nails to get to
Cam," Brenna said with a look that silenced her.  She whirled back to Fenella.

"Take this."  She slit the lining of the petticoat.  Her mother's collection of jewelry spilled out in a bright cascade on the bed.  She scooped up a gold and opal ring, and held it out to Fenella.

"Wait for me at the croft.  If I haven't met you by
midday, don't tarry any longer.  Sell the ring for what you need."      

The other girl nodded.  Brenna would do well to make her way to the burnt
out cottage by noon.  If she was delayed or caught, Fenella had to go on alone.  Cam and Iain's lives might hang on how quickly help could reach them. 

Brenna gave her a quick embrace.  "Go now.  And take care."

She pushed Morag out the door after Fenella, in search of brooms and extra pairs of hands.  Morag was quickly back with the castle's slowest
witted maid, raising a cloud of dust smelling of mold, though the rushes still held the faint scent of the dried herbs scattered to keep them fragrant. 

Abed, Brenna threw the counterpane nearly over her head with a protest at the stir of dust, grumbling noisily at being disturbed, and tossing now and then under the covers.  At last, Morag spoke.

"Done, m'lady.  We'll leave you to your sleep now."  Morag harried the girl's steps.  "Go on with you, and sweep the room across the corridor.  And mind you don't miss the corners."

Brenna sat up when the chambermaid was gone.  "Did you ask for
Duncan?"     

Morag nodded.  She had guessed that
Duncan had been Brenna's confederate on the day she slipped away to meet Iain at the abbey, and she knew how much the stout gruff clansman despised Malcolm.  If today's bundle of discarded rushes was heavier than most, Brenna knew she could rely on Duncan to swallow any complaint. If her plan went awry, Brenna would have to curse Duncan roundly for finding her out and betraying her to Malcolm.  And count on his good sense to pretend he had meant to do exactly that from the start.

Brenna would have to travel in the plain garb of a common Scotswoman, even to the hobnailed brogues she wore in the muddy lanes of the village to call on the sick.  She gathered the handful of necklaces and rings into a small leather pouch she tied at her waist, then slipped a coarsely
  loomed woolen gown over her head.  In Morag's frayed plaid, she looked the part of a crofter's daughter.  Brenna tucked her custom smithed dirk into the sheath bound above her ankle, and slipped a
skeen ochle
as added protection in her sleeve.

"If I'm discovered," she told Morag, "I'll say I crawled inside while you were belowstairs in the kitchen, that you knew nothing about my plan."

Then it was time.  Morag helped her into the nest they hollowed in the center of the large hempen sack already stuffed with rushes bound for the village midden and burning.      

Brenna blessed Morag for being a zealous housekeeper.  Though she served as Brenna's maid, Morag was in charge of the upstairs staff.  She had swaddled both Brenna and Malcolm, and he seldom interfered in Morag's domain.  Morag declared that consign
ing soiled rushes to the fireplaces left an unholy stink in the castle for days.  Instead she insisted the stained carpeting be put to the torch on the open refuse heap outside the walls of the keep.

Cocooned by sheets and petticoats to shield her from the pricking of the bag's innocent outer layer, Brenna drew up in a ball, knees beneath her chin.  No outline of her body could be visible as the bundle was carried down the stairs and out to the cart that rattled daily to the village.  Morag knotted the cord at the top of the heavy burlap sack, and stepped briefly through the door into the corridor.  In a moment, Brenna heard the door swing wider, and
Duncan's grumbling burr. 

"Don't fash yourself, woma
n.  It's a sad day when a braw man sinks to carrying rubbish for the females of the clan."

"That day came a long time ago for you," Morag told him tartly.  "Have a care, or you'll end mucking out the stables instead."

"And how long have you had the Laird's private ear?"
Duncan said in a lower and suddenly playful tone. 

Morag let out a squeal between outrage and delight.  Startled,  Brenna realized he had taken a liberty with Morag.  The idea of two people of their age frolicking this way had never occurred to her.  Embarrassed to eavesdrop, she hoped Morag would forgive her.

"Go on with you, you rogue," Morag said in a choked, strict voice.  "I've too much work to dally, and so do you."

"What a look you're giving me, woman,"
Duncan complained.  "If you don't have a mind for my company, you've only to tell me."

"I have told you," Morag said in a sharper tone.  "Now take the rubbish, and be on your way."

Duncan
snorted, and Brenna heard his booted feet crossing the stone floor.  Then he took hold of the sack and grunted in surprise at its weight.  A silence fell.  Brenna knew he must be looking around the room, belatedly aware what her absence meant.

Brenna's breath stopped for a second.  What if he wanted no part of this?  If the Prince's defeat had shaken him to caution?  In a quick motion, he slung the sack and Brenna over one brawny shoulder.  She landed with a bump, and heard him chuckle, but he gave no other sign he knew he carried more than bundled rushes.

"If you can't find a kind word for a man, you'll scare the entire race of us away."

"Good riddance, if none of them behave any better than the likes of you," Morag retorted shortly. 

Duncan
said no more, shifting her weight to shoulder it more squarely as he turned toward the door.  But Brenna had detected a girlish note in Morag's voice she had never heard before.  She wondered what other secrets Morag and the rest of the staff kept from Malcolm and from her.  Then she bounced over Duncan's shoulder down the corridor toward the servants' stairs.  Voices passing them warned her to tuck her head and hug her knees grimly and painfully to her chest lest any slip reveal a dangling foot. 

As they started down the winding steps,
Duncan stumbled under her weight, and almost lost his footing.  For a few heartstopping seconds, Brenna was sure they would tumble headlong to the bottom.  Then with the strength and agility that had made him her father's champion at tossing the caber, he righted them both.

"'Tis naught, lass," he said in a low, rumbling voice.  "There's none on the stair to see."

Brenna felt a pang of guilt at testing
Duncan's devotion so sorely.  "Duncan, I'm too great a weight for you," she whispered.

"None of that," he told her.  "I've carried men twice your size on my back."

But Brenna knew more years had passed since those days than he would admit, and she could only hope she wouldn't prove too great a burden for even the stout
Duncan to bear.

                                     *****

Another bundle thumped atop Brenna's in the cart.  The tangle of sheets wound around her shifted and pressed against her nose and mouth, and she fought sudden suffocating panic.  But she couldn't move.  The cart was in view of everyone in the courtyard.  Struggling against the instinct to claw for air, she drew a starved breath through the soiled shroud of linen.  She nearly gagged at the stale mildewed smell of the rushes, but her lungs drew in a shallow fill.          

"That's the lot,"
Duncan told the driver.  "Be off afore you block His Lordship's carriage on the bridge."

With a jolt, the wheels bumped forward over the stones of the courtyard, jarring Brenna's teeth and jouncing her with bruising force against the rough wooden bed of the cart.

At the gate,
she half expected one of the guards to signal them to halt.  But no one stopped them.  The cart clattered out onto the planks of the bridge.  Then they were across, on the rutted track on the opposite side of the moat.

Brenna worked her hand down to the dirk sheathed at her ankle.  She would have to cut her way free, but not until they reached the cover of the low thatched dwellings lining the village's single street.  She had to spring off the cart before they reached the midden where the castle's refuse was burned.  The keeper who lit the fires might not get to the task straightaway, but she didn't care to be singed, or worse, making her escape.  Brenna felt sure
Duncan's eye was on the cart.  But he couldn't follow her too closely without stirring suspicion, and there was still a risk.

Rounding the crook in the road, they drew abreast of the first house in the village.  A chicken squawked almost under the wheels of the cart, but no voice scolded and shooed it to safety.  Most of the women in the village had gone to the river to wash clothes or to join their husbands in the fields, carrying even their infants in soft slings on their backs. 

Brenna could only hope the old women left behind dozed too soundly in
their kitchens to be roused. She gripped her dirk.  The twist of sheets and jumbled petticoats wound around her, a snarled web that bound her.  Then she freed her arm, and thrust the blade through the linen and bramble that imprisoned her.  Hand and arm stung and scratched, she felt the taut stretch of hemp and pierced it with the dagger. 

Brenna slit the sack open and warily pushed her head and then her arms out.  Rolling the bundle atop hers a little aside, she saw the driver still hunched over the reins, his back to her.  He gave no sign he had heard her.  Scarcely daring to breathe, she wormed her shoulders and stiffening limbs free.

The short street was deserted.  Then, as Brenna prepared to jump, a dog ran from a narrow side yard, barking.  She willed him away, but he gave chase, yapping frantically alongside.  The driver straightened and started to turn.  Heart contracting, Brenna ducked behind the cart's piled bundles.  The aging clansman made a disgusted sound and cursed at the dog.  Then he spat into the road, and bent over the reins again. 

Quickly, she swung off
the back of the cart, landing as lightly as she could.  Gravel crunched under her clumsy leather brogues, but the wheels drowned the sound.  The spotted  mongrel leaped joyfully at her, and Brenna held out her hand, palm up, to him.  Pushing a wet nose against her face, the half  grown pup let her scratch him behind the ears.  Springing up, she dashed between two of the houses, the dog at her heels.  Leaning for a second against a rough stone wall, she stretched the kinks out of her cramped legs.  The dog regarded her with a disappointed air.  Then, losing interest, it yipped off again after the retreating cart.

She skirted close by the walls of the low row of dwellings.  At the last house, she drew Morag's plaid up to cover her bright hair.  She would have to risk the open.  She dared not run.  She began to walk at a sedate pace away from the village, toward the glen that fell away from the moor.  Topsoil on the moor was too thin to grow crops, but the clan tilled narrow fields in the glen.  From a distance, she hoped the castle guards would think her a village wife only now joining her husband at his labor.

Then she heard a new rattle of wheels on the drawbridge.  Malcolm.  She had forgotten he was setting out in his coach for
Inverness.  And she was still only yards from the road.  If she kept her back to him, he might not catch a glimpse of her face.  But no clanswoman failed to curtsy to her chief as he passed.  Wrapping the plaid closer around her face, she half turned as the equipage rolled by her, bobbing low, her eyes fixed on the ground. 

She steeled herself for a shout, a command to pull in the horses.  But it didn't come.  Slowly Brenna lifted her head to watch the back of the coach jounce away.  Malcolm hadn't so much as looked her way. 

Glancing up at the sun's path in the sky, she quickened her steps.  Malcolm's early
  morning leavetaking had been delayed by a broken wheel on his coach.  Now it was almost noon, and Fenella wouldn't wait much longer.  Brenna cut toward the croft.   The cottage was only a burnt  out skeleton at the far end of the narrow valley.  A low stone fence marked the smallholding off from common clan land, and the low pitched thatch roof was gone, claimed by the flames that had driven old Culley from the hut.