DARE THE WILD WIND (18 page)

As the slim gold chain slid into her work
  hardened palm, Brenna suffered a pang of regret.  But if Fiona Dalmoral had lived, Brenna knew her mother would gladly have sacrificed every jewel she possessed to save the man Brenna loved. 

They heard the sound of more horses and men outside.  Brenna pressed a coin back into the hand of the older woman for the small bundle of malt loaf and cold sausage she tucked under her arm.

"Have a care, and hide the coin I've given ye," the other woman warned her as she followed Brenna to the door.  "I mislike Englishmen swaggering in my doors and ordering me about.  I mean to bury my strongbox before the moon rises tonight."

Brenna peered warily out before she stepped into the darkness, relieved to find the new riders had reined in at the front of the tavern.  Rounding the shadowy bulk of the inn, she darted toward the buttery.  Fenella started before she recognized Brenna.

"You were so long, I'd thought you'd been waylaid," she whispered in fright.  "A troop of dragoons just rode into the stableyard."

"Wait till they're inside."

Slipping to the corner of the low stone structure, Brenna watched the last of the cavalrymen crowd through the entrance to the inn.  Motioning to Fenella to stay close behind her, she stole from shadow to shadow toward the stable.  Canmore stood tethered to a post in the sideyard.  Despite their stealth, the stableboy appeared with a lighted lantern in his hand. 

"Filthy dogs."  He spat after the soldiers, rubbing his ear where one of them had cuffed him.  He gestured toward Canmore.  "The poor creature is fed and watered, but he's sore tired.  He'll not go far if you try to ride him on tonight."

"We've no choice," Brenna told him as she laid two small coins in his hand.  "Will you give my friend a hand up?"

He boosted the other girl onto the Clydesdale's back and turned to do the same for Brenna.  She shook her head.

"We'll save Canmore as much as we can.  And I'll need to carry the lantern to light our path."

"You mean to walk?" Fenella asked as Brenna took the reins to lead the horse away from the inn.

Brenna knew even the placid Canmore was likely to shy at the glare of a lantern held close above his head.  "We'll go no faster if I ride.  And it can't be very much farther now."

But it was a long weary way before the moon rose to light their progress across the moor.  It was tempting simply to slap the flagging Clydesdale on the rump and press on without him, but Brenna knew if
Cam or Iain lay forgotten on the battlefield, they might need the horse.  Between them, Brenna doubted she and Fenella could lift either of their men to the animal's back, but they could contrive a litter the Clydesdale could pull.

The chill of the April night crept through her tartan, and Brenna's legs seemed weighted with stones.  Well before the moon rose to light their path across the barren plateau, her feet burned with blisters from her clumsy, heavy shoes.  Grateful she could ease her aching arm at last, she extinguished the lantern.

Eerie in the ghostly light, the sweep of the moor seemed endless.  Only the lonely dark thrust of a boulder or the twisted branches of a skeletal, leafless tree loomed up to cast  misshapen shadows in a desolate landscape washed of color and life.

Her brogues caked with
mud, Brenna was too exhausted to spare Canmore any longer.  She found a flat rock to use as a mounting block and rejoined Fenella on the big horse's back.  Shreds of night fog began to reach spectral fingers across the heather and bracken crushed under the Clydesdale's great hooves.      

Hemmed by wooded hills and flanked in part by a swamp, the moor was bounded on one side by a long drop to the sea.  Fear grew in her they would lose their way in the ragged, patchy mist and ride off the cliff above the Firth or directly into the English camp.
Then, before they saw the dim mounded forms that darkened the half  obscured horizon, they caught the rotting smell of death.  Canmore threw back his head and shied.  Behind Brenna, Fenella choked and gagged, and leaned suddenly to one side to retch.  The sound all but prompted Brenna to do the same.

It took a sharp kick to force Canmore forward again.  As they drew closer, she made out the silhouettes of abandoned cannon and the carcasses of dead horses, their bellies already bloated and putrifying despite the wetness and chill.
And long low hummocks of newly turned earth, the mounded rise of common graves.

Brenna refused to let herself think that
Cam or Iain might be beneath one of those muddy scars in the moor.  Picking their way between the freshly dug graves, they moved toward the distant flickering lights of Culloden House.  And came at last to a part of the battlefield where the burial details were yet to finish their work.  Despair overtook Brenna.  Hundreds of men still lay on the moor.  How would they find Cam and Iain in this grisly harvest? 

Bodies sprawled in thickening stench, and there was an occasional weak cry from a wounded man.  Assailed by guilt, Brenna realized neither of them had given a thought to anyone but
Cam or Iain.  In the name of conscience, they should give what aid they could to any man still alive.  But she also knew that the comfort they could offer was small, and they would have to find Cam and Iain before first light if they meant to get them to shelter beyond the moor.

Brenna slid down again from Canmore's back.  "Hand me the lantern, and one of the lucifers the boy gave us at the inn."

Fenella had insisted on spelling Brenna by carrying the lantern and their two precious matches as they rode.

"Should we show a light so close to the English camp?"     

"If we want to find
Cam and Iain, we don't have a choice."

Striking the lucifer, Brenna lit the lantern again.  Its flare blinded her for a second, and then what the light revealed made her curse the Duke of Cumberland and every Englishman born.  Bodies torn and shattered by shot and cannon lay all around them, agonized faces staring blindly up at the cold, half
shrouded stars.  What madness made men do this?  Could it matter this much who wore a crown?

As Fenella dismounted and they moved across the battlefield, Brenna recognized the Macdonald plaid, and the tartans of Keppoch and Clanranald.  Bending to offer what comfort they could to any man they found alive, they moved with as much haste as possible through the strewn bodies.  Then, at last, with an ugly shock, Brenna saw an all
too familiar plaid. 

"Halt!  Stop where you stand."

Fenella gave a startled, terrified cry.  Freezing, Brenna wanted to loose an oath.  A MacCavan lay only yards away.

The voice moved closer in the mist.  "Don't move or you'll spit shot from your gullet."

"What kind of man keeps help from the wounded?" she demanded.

The figure of a soldier with a musket moved into the lantern's circle of light.

"More of their women."  He called out to comrades somewhere behind him, a little of his belligerence draining away.  A corporal, lanky and barely past the age of conscription, he had a coxcomb of dark spiky hair and a chalky face, and his scarlet
coated uniform hung awkwardly on his scarecrow frame.

"You have no business here, unless you want to get shot," he said in a voice far older than his face.

Fury Brenna couldn't repress boiled up in her.  "What right do you have to stop us?  Isn't what you've done to our men enough?"     

Now he was close enough to really see them.  And to be taken aback by the force of Brenna's anger.

"No more than they'd've done to us," he responded, his countryman's accent broadening as he took in Brenna's face.  The barrel of his gun still pointed at them, and he swung it away.

"Women, you say?" a rougher and more menacing voice came from another sentry a distance away in the fog.  "The sort for a bit o' sport?"

The corporal hesitated.  "A pair of crones," he shouted back.  "Poxed, by the look of them."

Brenna squeezed Fenella's arm to cut off her surprised protest.  The corporal put up his hand to silence them and took another stride closer. 

"You're in danger here," he told them in a harsh whisper.  "You'll do your men no good wandering the moor."

"We must find them," Brenna pleaded in a low urgent voice.  "They'll die if we don't."

"They're very likely already dead," he said bluntly.

Brenna shivered as if shaken by an ague.

"No."  Her fear and denial vibrated in the word.  "We can't believe that," she said in desperation.  "We know they're here.  We can't leave without them."

The cadaverous boy in uniform weighed what she said for a second.  Then he shook his head.        

"You're bloody mad.  You won't stumble across any man you're looking for before dawn.  Odds are they're already buried or taken away."

"We saw the MacCavan plaid just over there," Fenella broke in.  "You must let us pass."

"MacCavan?" he repeated.  He turned back to Brenna, an ominous light of recognition in his face.  She nodded, her heart hammering suddenly in her chest.

"If a MacCavan lies here, he must have been a courier.  Most of that clan fell on ground the burial detail has crossed."

"It can't be true," Fenella wailed in a thin voice.  "It can't."

For a second, something clogged and knotted in Brenna's throat.

"Even their chief?" she managed after a second. "Even Cameron MacCavan?"

His face changed at the name.  "Their chief?"

Brenna's hand caught at his arm.  "Yes.  In the name of God, tell us what you've heard."

His expression lightened, but only for a second.  "That the chief of the MacCavans was taken prisoner
,  on order of the Earl of Stratford."

Chapt
er 12

Fury choked Brenna.  Drake Seton wasn't content to see Cam and the Rebels brought to their knees.  He had to see Cam in irons.  The corporal's voice jerked her back to the smell of death and the raw cold night. 

"You can't stay here on the moor."

Brenna's fingers tightened on Canmore's reins, and she turned toward Fenella.  "We'll have to go to the English camp."

The lanky soldier's hand shot out to capture the horse's bridle.  "That you'll not do," he said forcefully.

"If
Cam is a prisoner there, I'm going to see him."

"The men in camp will tear the pair of you apart."

Inwardly, Brenna recoiled.  But she had come too far to let fear keep her from
Cam.  "I have to see him."

Their eyes locked for a second, and then the gaunt boy let out a harsh, resigned breath.  "I'll find out what I can for you.  But only if you listen to me."

Reluctantly, they allowed the corporal to lead them across the fog
shrouded battlefield toward the wooded hills.  In a small clearing well into the forest, he tied Canmore to the trunk of a tree.

"Stay here, out of sight.  I'll be back as soon as I can after first light."  Then he disappeared into the curling mist.  

"How can you be sure we can trust him?" Fenella asked.

"If he meant us harm, he could have led us to the other soldiers patrolling the moor.  He's put himself at risk to bring us here." 

Winding her plaid around her, Brenna lay down in a hollow beneath the spreading, gnarled roots of a tree.  Despite the jab of rocks and the hardness of the ground, she fell into a spent sleep, to wake to a chill gray light through bare branches overhead.  Her every muscle complained.  Fenella lay crumpled in slumber, her face wan, bruised circles under her eyes.  Sharply aware of thirst, Brenna heard the sound of running water close by.  Following it through the larches to a small torrent, she cupped her hands to drink and splash water on her face, then led Canmore to the stream. 

When she returned with the horse, Fenella was awake.  They divided the malt loaf and cold sausage from the inn.  Then, when Brenna began to despair the soldier would keep his word, dry twigs cracked on the leaf
  strewn floor of the wood.  A red coated figure threaded through the trees, and she recognized the corporal.

His eyes shadowed at the question in their faces. 

"Did you find
Cam?" Brenna asked in a rush. 

"Was Iain with him?" Fenella broke in.

"I can't say about your young  man, Miss Strath," he began with an apologetic glance at Fenella.  Then he turned to Brenna.   "I was too late to see Lord MacCavan."

"Too late...?" Brenna echoed, her vision dimming for a second. 

"One of the guards said he was brought in on a litter.  He was moved yesterday, with the first of the other prisoners."

"On a litter?"  Fresh dread rose in Brenna.  "Badly wounded?"

"Badly enough, from what I could get from the other guards.  Most of the casualties were out of their heads with fever.  The prisoners well enough to walk were chained together in irons, and the rest were put on carts.""

"How could
men with fever be moved?" Brenna demanded.  "How could an army surgeon permit it?"