Shana Abe (4 page)

“
A
black day,” said the old woman, stirring the pot over the smoky fire.

There was nothing to say to this. It was such an obvious remark that Kyla couldn’t even summon a proper response. She stared down at her hands, at the dirt beneath her fingernails that repeated washings could not remove.

“Ye’ll be leaving soon,” the woman continued. Outside the mouth of the cave a goat bleated in the darkness once, then again.

“Yes,” Kyla said.

“They’ll be looking fer ye.” The woman, Lorna, banged the wooden spoon against the rim of the pot.

“I know.”

But Kyla couldn’t seem to do much right now. Her hands lay open and lax in her lap, fingers curled upward. Her skin seemed very white to her; they could have been a ghost’s hands. She remembered how her mother used to pamper her own hands, rubbing them with special creams each night, keeping her own white skin so smooth and perfect.

Kyla’s hands were cut and blistered right now, unused to labor still.

“I’ll go before they come,” she said.

“Aye.” Lorna had been her uncle’s chatelaine for many years. But the modest manor was gone now. Tonight Lorna was just another of the homeless, the ragged remnants of a clan that would be living inside these rocky hills for a good
while to come, Kyla supposed. The entire village had been burned to the ground.

The cave was damp and cold, but then again, so the manor house had been as well. Lorna banged the spoon again for emphasis. “Yer father’s people will take ye.”

“I’ll go,” Kyla repeated.

“It’s fer the best.”

Again, another statement for which she could think of no reply. Was it for the best? She had no idea. Would the English chase her still? Did she matter to them now that Alister and Malcolm were dead? Would they persecute this clan further to flush her out?

Such heavy questions. She wished she had some answers for once.

The fire threw a dull light that gleamed against the gold hilt of the dagger Kyla had tucked into the sash at her waist. She had buried Alister without it. It had been their mother’s, a jeweled thing with a dangerously sharp blade. Kyla didn’t think either of them would mind if she kept it.

The goat bleated again, and a new shape stooped to enter the cave. It was Colin, ancient Colin, come to tell her to go. Kyla stood.

“We’ll give ye yer uncle’s horse, lass,” he said, not unkindly. “He’s a right brute, but ye’ve got a way with him.”

“Thank you.” Kyla picked up the leather saddlebags she had been sitting on and carried them out of the cave.

The night air was clear and sharp; it felt painfully good to take a deep breath. Malcolm’s stallion was remarkably uninjured from the battle, surely the only thing left so. He lowered his great, sleek head to her as she approached. Kyla ran her hand down his nose, then stroked his neck. An all-black horse, she thought with some amusement. How fitting the outlaw’s daughter would ride a black horse.

Someone helped her up, she didn’t notice who. There was no saddle, but sitting bareback was nothing new to her. Her skirts fell carelessly around her shins.

The circle of people around her were specters in the moonless night; distant, proud people who had reluctantly
taken her in with her brother, and now were thankfully seeing them both gone.

It wasn’t a personal dislike, Kyla knew. It was simply that they could not afford to house someone with such a price on her head. The wrath of the king was already great against these people. She was lucky they hated the English enough that they had not turned her over to them for the gold.

Colin handed her a weighted sack. “Food for four days, mayhap,” he said in his old man’s voice. “Head south, lass. Head for Glen More.”

“Thank you,” Kyla said. “Thank you all. I’m sorry.”

The stallion turned and the people parted for her to pass. There were no good-byes to follow her. The only sound to be heard was the steady
clip-clop
of the horse’s hooves in the dirt as she guided him south toward the English border.

For a while it was soothing just listening to the rhythm of the stallion’s steps. She drifted in and out of awareness, letting the animal set the pace and the direction. He knew the land better than she did, anyway. She was fortunate to have him. They didn’t have to give her anything. They owed her nothing, while she owed them more than she could ever repay.

The stallion took her to a loosely knotted forest of pine and birch. There were boulders and streams, but no real place to hide. Kyla patted the horse down as best she could and then lay down on the cold ground, using the saddlebags as pillows.

She didn’t care if Lord Strathmore and his soldiers found her. She didn’t care if they came and killed her in her sleep. There was even a part of her that wanted that, wanted an ending to this brutal life she had inherited.

She had deliberately left the stallion untied, free to roam if he wished. If the soldiers came, he could run away. He would survive.

That thought gave her some comfort as she sank into slumber.

But the soldiers did not come, no one came, and when she awoke the next morning the stallion was standing patiently nearby, grazing on a patch of wild grass.

Her cloak was still damp with dew from the ground, but at least it wasn’t raining.

“What ho, my friend,” she called to the horse softly, sitting up and stretching her sore neck. “Have you not the wits to abandon a lost cause?”

The stallion rolled his eyes in her direction but did not stop chewing. The crunching sound from his teeth seemed unnaturally loud in the forest. It made her realize abruptly that she had not eaten in over a day—years, it seemed—and so she opened the cloth sack Colin had given her and ate an oatcake in somber contemplation of the fallen log across from her.

Slowly, horribly, the feeling of numbness that had taken her over since the field of Glencarson was beginning to fade against the bright light of this new day. Reality was coming back, no matter what she did to let it know it was not welcome.

She was a gentlewoman, born of nobility, now utterly alone in the world, and utterly without recourse. Despite Lorna’s words, Kyla knew that her father’s people could not take her in, because her father had no people left. Malcolm had been their last slender thread of hope, and he had proven to be a false one.

The oatcake was gone too quickly but she was loath to eat another despite the rumbling in her stomach. She didn’t know what else she was going to do for food. There was a stream nearby, she could hear the treble gurgling of it from here, and so that might mean fish. She knew how to fish. Her father had shown her that much.

It had been at her own insistence. When it had become clear to her that Conner was not going to be shaken from the coils of grief that held him, it was she who had acted to save them. With the money she had taken with them she bought the necessary supplies for their journey. When the money ran out, she gamely tried to teach herself the survival skills needed. She nearly caught consumption from the dousing in the Highland waters she received while trying to catch fish with the blunt spear she had fashioned.

That had roused Conner—if only briefly. He had taken the spear and broken it over his knee in the first spark of anger she had seen in him since their mother’s death.

He had caught the fish that night. But she had watched, and learned.

It didn’t seem odd to Kyla that she had understood the import of what was happening those first ghastly days after the murder and her father had not. From the instant they had heard the news, he became as dead to the world as they had learned her mother was.

In truth, Kyla couldn’t recall how she had managed to behave so normally. She just knew if she didn’t, no one would, and then they would all be lost.

It was she who had held the household together for as long as she could in the face of the scandal. For days after the discovery of her mother’s body she had seen the speculation growing in the eyes of the servants, had noticed the subtle shifts in attitude that had affected the entire estate. It had been a creeping chill in the air, a lassitude of service, and that ever-present whispering hum of gossip she could not help overhearing but never quite make out.

When the nobles had begun to trickle over to Rosemead, they didn’t come to express their condolences, though the pitying looks they threw her seemed real enough. They came to stare at her father. They came to see the killer, to talk and gape with appalled fascination while he sat there, oblivious to all. It had terrified her to the depths of her soul.

The stallion finished with the grass and now strolled over to where she sat idle on the ground, staring into space. He bowed his head down next to hers and blew through his nose.

“Get enough to eat, friend?” she asked him, dusting her hands free of the crumbs from the cake. “I hope so. Let’s go see if we can find the water.”

The stream was farther than she thought, and by the time she led the big horse there the sparkling water was a welcome sight. The stallion waded in to drink and she followed, taking care to remain upstream.

Sunlight danced and winked over the liquid passage,
disrupted by her hands dipping into the stream and splashing handfuls of water over her face.

It was shockingly cold. Kyla sucked in her breath, then repeated the process. Belatedly she realized she had nothing with which to dry herself, and so she sat back against the bank of the stream and lifted her face to the sky, letting the water trickle away to nothingness.

She became aware of the evenness of her own breathing, of the steadiness in her arms as she rested her weight against them, and the soothing warmth of the sun on her skin.

Conner had not killed Helaine. But someone had, and in doing so they had managed to destroy her entire family. And now Kyla thought she knew what she would do next, after all.

She was young, she was strong, and she was clever. And she had nothing to lose. What was left of her old life was already dead. She would gladly risk this one to exact vengeance.

There was one man who held both the key to her questions and the burden of responsibility for the tatters of her existence. Her former fiancé had made a point to write to her, bragging about the note he held, the note that would save them. Then he had betrayed them all.

Aye, she would find the Earl of Lorlreau and he would give her some answers. He would, or she would kill him. Perhaps she would kill him anyway.

The hunted was about to become the hunter.

“
R
eally, Strathmore,” drawled Sir John Hindrige. “It was merely some miserable little Highland village, barely worth mentioning. I fail to see the cause for your rather excessive concern.”

Roland kept his back to the man, examining the courtyard scene below him through the thick, wavy glass of the window in the inn’s sole private parlor. Only the slight tightening of his hand on the windowsill betrayed the anger he felt.

“That miserable village,” he said quietly, “was the only
home to more than one hundred and fifty people, all of whom were innocent in this game.”

“Oh, come,” scoffed Hindrige. “Hardly innocent! They were harboring the fugitives! Malcolm MacAlister was sheltering them even as he taunted us! Those people got exactly what they deserved. They disobeyed the law. They disobeyed the king. They had to be punished.”

“Perhaps you are right.” Roland turned around and faced Henry’s minister of war. “But it was my job to punish them, not Reynard’s.”

“Well, as to that, I cannot help but agree with you. He overstepped his boundaries there. As I told you, the king has reprimanded him.”

“Yes.”

Roland turned back to the window. Below him bustled the population of this busy border town, securely on the English side of Hadrian’s Wall. His eyes picked out a woman down there, watched her bargain with a baker as she hung on to five children at the same time. He wondered how many children there in the Highlands were now homeless, orphans because of Reynard’s enthusiasm. How many of them would last the year without proper shelter?

A reprimand from the king.
Yes, indeed
, Roland thought sarcastically,
that was certainly a fitting punishment for the slaughter of a village
.

Hindrige spoke again around the joint of lamb he was eating. “Well, Strathmore. What now? You still have no proof of Rosemead’s death. If his children did survive, they are hardly likely to come forward at this point. You return to Henry empty-handed.”

Roland said nothing, watching the woman now head for the smithy, children scattered in a string behind her.

“She is most likely dead, you know,” said the minister in a different voice, somewhat gentler. “She would not have survived the winter in the wild. I heard she was a delicate thing, like her mother.”

“Perhaps.”

“You have no obligation to the family now. You know that.”

“So I keep hearing.”

Behind him Roland heard the minister sigh into his goblet of port. “A tragic thing,” he murmured, for surely the hundredth time since Roland had entered the little room at the inn for this meeting. “Such a lovely woman, the baroness. Such a tragedy. Who could have known.…”