Читать книгу The Highlander - Heather Grothaus - Страница 8

December 1077

Conall MacKerrick trudged through the shin-deep snow of the wood, his eyes scanning the white powder for animal tracks, his heart heavy and weary in his chest.

Hopeless.

He glanced only briefly at the pronged indentations of a small deer track—the hoof mark was soft at the edges and half filled with fresh snow—that animal had passed hours ago. Pursuit would be pointless.

Conall slogged onward.

A howling wind whipped around the trees and seared his skin through his thin léine, prompting Conall to shrug his length of plaid tighter across his chest and tuck it more firmly beneath his belt and the straps of his pack. He hitched his bow and quiver higher onto his shoulder and then jerked at the tether pulling the small sheep behind him. The animal bleated and skittered to catch up.

Conall felt numb, and not entirely from the bitter cold blanketing his highland home. Here he was, the MacKerrick, chief of his clan, abandoning his town and the people he was to protect. And ’twas only for their own good.

Conall was glad his father was not alive to witness his son’s failure.

Conall’s wife, his newborn bairn, were dead. Was it only one turn of the moon since they had passed? Mother and daughter, both too small and weak to harbor life in this mean tract of Scotland.

It had been his brother, Duncan, who had grimly announced the birth, ducking out of Conall’s own house, his thin face gray and pained.

“’Twas a wee gel,” he’d whispered after a blink of mournful eyes. “Conall, they…Nonna didna—”

But Conall had not paused to hear the rest of his twin’s declaration. He had charged toward his low-roofed sod house and shoved open the door, going instinctively to the box bed at the far end. He chose to ignore the fecund smell of blood that caused the hairs on the back of his neck to bristle ominously. Perhaps it had not been too early; he’d heard no babe cry, but perhaps God would have mercy on him, just this once.

“Nonna,” he’d called gently. “Nonna.”

A plaid-wrapped bundle was snuggled against his wife’s side and even as Conall heard Duncan enter the house behind him, as he heard the wails of the townswomen gathered beyond his door—even as Conall reached out a trembling hand to lay it upon Nonna’s still bosom, he’d known.

They were both dead.

“I’m sorry, Conall,” Duncan had whispered.

God had no mercy for Conall MacKerrick.

The wind gusted again and the sheep bleated pitifully behind him, bringing Conall back to the present. He sniffed and swiped at his nose.

He’d left before dawn’s first weak rays crawled over the MacKerrick town this morn, despite Duncan’s and his mother’s protests. Nonna was gone. His child was gone. Conall would not burden an already sick and hungry people with their chief’s care throughout the remainder of the harshest winter he’d ever witnessed. If naught else, the MacKerrick was a skilled hunter. He would winter alone and seek out game in the deepest part of the wood. Should he prevail, he would return to the town.

Should he fail, he would starve.

In the meanwhile, he would use his self-enforced exile to mourn in private, and to decide once and for all what to do about the curse that plagued his town, the decades-old damnation set upon his clan name by a woman long ago passed from these lands. A curse that had grown more malevolent with each passing season. Their crops failed. They suffered drought, or flooding rains. Illness was a constant caller on the town.

And now Nonna and the bairn were gone.

Conall knew he would likely be forced to at last beg quarter from the clan to the south, as his father had refused to do, or watch his entire town die, person by person.

He knew each black word by heart, passed down to Conall with bitterness by his father, Dáire MacKerrick: Famine and illness are my gifts to you, you MacKerrick beasts, who have ripped my very heart from my bosom and fed it to the crows. So let those winged harbingers be aught that fills your bellies and let it be only their song that fills your ears until my return. For I will return. Only heartache and toil shall you reap until a Buchanan bairn is born to rule the MacKerrick clan. And when you are on bended knee, I will have my revenge.

By spring’s first thaw, should Conall still live, he would beg forgiveness from Angus Buchanan, for a wrong committed against the clan chief’s sister while Conall and Duncan still nursed in their mother’s arms. Although his people cried out against it as bowing to the Buchanan’s witchery, Conall knew ’twas likely their only chance for survival.

He traversed a narrow bog, tugging the sheep after him, and scanned the upper bank for the jumble of rocks that marked the path leading to Ronan’s old hut. He had not traveled this far to the edge of MacKerrick lands in months—mayhap more than a year—and he hoped that the long-abandoned hut in the vale was still habitable.

’Twas peace and solitude Conall so desperately needed, and he was certain to find it in his uncle’s hunting cottage, just beyond this bank…

He saw the weak column of filmy smoke from the roof before he smelled the smoldering peat.

And meat. He smelled meat cooking. Conall’s stomach growled.

With two more strides, the ancient sod house came into view, snuggled into the earth like a toadstool, its short wooden door standing slightly ajar.

Conall’s face darkened. He slid his bow and quiver and his pack from his shoulders and dropped the sheep’s tether, and reached for his sword.

Evelyn plucked the blackened strip of meat from the spit with forefinger and thumb, blew on it, shook it, then tossed it to Alinor, who snatched it from the air with an expert chomp. Two swift bites and the piece was gone. Alinor swiped a long, pink tongue over her pointed canines with obvious relish.

“Oh, I agree,” Evelyn said, retrieving another strip of meat. “Quite good.” She bit into the tough, half-burnt chunk, trying to rip off a piece small enough to chew. “A tad dry, though,” she amended around the mouthful of meat. She tossed the remaining hunk to the wolf lying nearby.

Alinor made quick work of the morsel and then set to licking the fur in front of the makeshift bandage wound around her middle.

“Itching, is it?” Evelyn asked, and then sucked her fingers clean before rising from the fire and limping the width of the hut to the ragged lengths of cloth dangling from the ceiling. She gripped several in her hands, testing their dryness, before choosing two and tugging them free.

She picked up the shallow bowl filled with melted snow and floating chunks of moss and returned to the wolf’s side, sinking to her bottom with a hiss. Her ankle, knee, and hip were improving each day, the swelling nearly gone, but each joint in her right leg was still painted with deep black and purple and green bruises.

Alinor flopped completely onto her side with a great sigh and stretched out her legs to either side of Evelyn. The wolf closed her eyes.

“You like this, do you?” Evelyn grinned, reaching for the knot and picking it loose. She slipped the bandage from beneath the animal and set it aside to be washed later, then reached for the gummy clump of moss pressed to Alinor’s ribs. She flung the soiled mass onto the fire.

The wound beneath had improved significantly. Although crusty, the skin around the long, ragged edges was no longer blazing red and emitted no foul odor. Evelyn could even see tiny black stubble in Alinor’s startlingly white skin where the fur was beginning to grow back.

Satisfied, Evelyn wadded up one of the clean strips of cloth and dunked it in the bowl, wringing the water from it before dabbing gently at Alinor’s wound. The wolf flinched slightly at first, but then relaxed again.

Thank you, God, Evelyn said silently as she tended the animal. She’d probably spoken the phrase a thousand times in the last—how long? Three weeks? Four? Evelyn was not certain how much time had passed since discovering Minerva’s dead mare, but in truth, it no longer mattered. She felt she could never be grateful enough for the divine intervention that had brought Alinor into her life.

Evelyn had thought she’d fallen into the very depths of the coldest, darkest hell after fleeing the gray wolves those many weeks ago. She’d landed hard on her right leg and hip and her breath had left her, as had her consciousness. When she had awoken, it was to a world of grainy darkness, a smell of rot and mildew, and to a screaming pain in her leg. She could feel cold, dry dirt and stone beneath her cheek and she wondered if she was dead, although she could not imagine who would have been about to bury her.

But there had been no soil pressing down on her, and so after mustering the courage to move her battered body, she’d dragged herself blindly along the packed dirt until she’d reached a cold, crumbly barrier. Evelyn had pulled herself up into a seated position when the watery-sounding whine first reached her ears. Her body went rigid, her mind still gripped by images of gnashing fangs and blood arcing through snowy air.

Her eyes traveled upward instinctively to find a ragged hole in the black above her, where foggy light filtered down. Was she trapped once again, this time in some sort of cave?

The whining sounded again and Evelyn shivered, even as the tone of the cry pierced her heart.

Hurts.

She listened to the animal for what seemed like an eternity, until tears ran down her cheeks and she sobbed into her elbow. Her fear waged battle on her soul. Yellow eyes and a twisting, fighting, black body filled her mind, and Evelyn knew ’twas the black wolf who cried.

Hurts. Hurts.

Evelyn began to drag herself along the dirt again, feeling the moist barrier with her fingers.

She touched rough wood and her palms skimmed up and down, testing its dimensions.

A door?

Her fingers caught on a rough L shape and Evelyn grasped it, pulled. Wood creaked.

She could hear the wolf still beyond the door and she wondered if she was not opening the gateway to her own death.

Hurts.

She pulled harder, and a weak sliver of gray light sliced across her face—fading daylight.

Evelyn grunted as she strained at the door and it dragged open at last.

The giant black wolf slumped not three yards from Evelyn in the growing, dense dusk. The animal’s head bobbed and swayed on its thick neck, its muzzle pointed at the ground. One paw was held delicately in the air, and a wide path of crimson snow led to the animal’s hindquarters.

Blood. The wolf’s blood.

The beast raised its yellow eyes to Evelyn, as if just realizing it was being watched. It whined again, faintly, and tried to scoot backward in the snow, away from Evelyn.

Hurts. Afraid.

But the wolf’s injured paw combined with its obvious blood loss conspired against the animal and it fell sideways with a frightened yelp. It struggled to rise again for a moment, but then gave up, its sides rising shallowly, the bloom of blood widening.

This animal had saved her life, of that Evelyn was certain. Although it might now mean her death, she could not watch it suffer. Would not.

Afraid.

Evelyn dragged herself through the doorway toward the wolf, her arms sinking nearly to her elbows in the snow, but she no longer felt the cold.

“Please do not kill me. Please do not kill me,” she breathed over and over as she neared the fallen animal.

Afraid. Afraid—afraid—afraid…

A sob caught in Evelyn’s chest. “I know, lovely. I am afraid, as well,” she whispered as she closed the gap.

Evelyn was finally close enough to the animal that she could have touched it. But she did not have the opportunity as the wolf abruptly kicked and yelped and tried to gain its feet.

Evelyn screamed and instinctively threw up an arm, but the wolf crumpled to the ground once more, its little remaining energy spent. Its ragged breaths squealed in its wide chest.

Hurts.

Evelyn drew a deep breath and moved closer to the enormous beast. Her leg throbbed and her heart pounded so that she fancied she could hear her ribs rattling together.

She saw the deep gouges in the wolf’s back and neck, the still-trickling stickiness on its muzzle and wide, black nose. But the ragged gash in the animal’s flank was the most dire—gaping, torn flesh revealing stringy muscle and a white chip of rib. Here, the blood flowed onto the snow.

How had it escaped when so outnumbered?

“Have a bit of a scrape there, did you, lovely?” she asked in a shaky whisper.

The wolf whined deep in its throat.

Evelyn looked back the way she’d come for the first time since crawling from her accidental shelter, and was so shocked at what she saw that, for an instant, she forgot her injuries and her fear.

It was…a cottage.

Of sorts.

Low, sod walls and a thatch roof poked out from beneath the snow on the bank behind it, and Evelyn realized she must have fallen through the smoke hole.

A cottage. Abandoned, obviously.

The wolf whined again in a series of short, breathy bursts and then Evelyn heard the chorus of howls from the wood beyond.

Her eyes sought the path of blood leading from the forest and she knew the gray beasts had likely torn what was left of Minerva’s mare to shreds and were now on the trail of the fallen black. Should they find the animal—and Evelyn, as well—injured and exposed as they were, Evelyn knew both their lives were forfeit.

She looked to the cottage door and then back at the black. To the door again, then the considerable mass of the wolf, trying to gauge the distance against her own meager strength.

The animal whined pitifully.

Afraid.

Evelyn closed her eyes. God, give me strength. Then she opened her eyes and without hesitation, laid a palm firmly on the black’s hip.

It flinched, whined again, but did not turn on her.

Deep in the forest, but closer now, gaining, the grays howled again.

Closing her mind to the fact that she was readying to take into her hands a deadly, wild, injured animal nearly equal to her own size, Evelyn slid through the snow closer to the black’s back, her hand never breaking contact with the animal.

She tried to steady her voice. “I’ll not hurt you. I’ll not let them hurt you,” she promised.

The wolf’s ears twitched, but it did not move.

So, before she could think better of it, Evelyn snaked an arm around the black, leaned into it, and pulled up.

The animal gave a weak struggle and an even weaker growl, but Evelyn did not loose it. Instead, she quickly fished her other arm beneath the wolf and lifted it to her chest, crying out in pain as she did so. Her back now toward the cottage door, she dug in the snow with her uninjured leg until her slipper found purchase with the frozen ground beneath and she pushed with all her strength.

They moved perhaps an inch.

She hitched the animal higher onto her torso, clasped her hands together in a tight fist beneath its chest, conscious of the warm blood soaking through her thin cloak and into her kirtle. The black suddenly went limp against her and Evelyn thought her arms would rip from their sockets.

She kicked again, pushed at the ground. And again. Over and over she crooked and then straightened her leg. Her muscles screamed, burned. She began to weep.

After what seemed an eternity, the doorway was at last at her back, a red path of blood spread cleanly over the crushed and rutted snow before her.

And the gray wolves burst from the woods.

With a final, scrambling shove, Evelyn slid into the cottage. She kicked the springy door closed and held her foot against it even as it shuddered, jarring her leg to her spine. She screamed in both pain and surprise.

One of the grays had thrown himself at the door with a furious snarl.

The black in her arms stirred and Evelyn let it slide to the ground. “’Tis all right, lovely—we’re safe,” she breathed. “We’re safe now.”

She spied a length of rough-planed wood leaning against the wall in the dim light of the hut, as well as the crude brackets embedded in both the door and the sod walls to either side. Without removing her bracing foot, she reached for the plank and stretched up to mate it with the brackets.

The door shuddered again and Evelyn skittered backward in the dirt. She felt a warm wetness on the back of her palm and snatched her hand to her bosom with a cry before looking down.

The black stared up at her through glassy, clouded eyes.

It had licked her hand.

Now, Evelyn hummed as she laid a fresh piece of damp moss against Alinor’s side and held the spongy mass in place as she slid the other wide length of rose-colored cloth—remnants of her ruined kirtle—under and around Alinor’s midsection. She fastened the rather fine linen bandage in a stiff knot and then, on impulse, tucked the ends into a pretty bow.

“Fetching,” Evelyn said, leaning back to inspect her handiwork.

Alinor’s thick tail thumped the dirt floor twice.

Evelyn ruffled the wolf’s fur and then rose stiffly, gathering up the used strips of cloth and then dropping them in a bucket near the door. While she set to laying more peat on the fire, Alinor, too, gained her feet and crossed the hut to enter one of the cottage’s odd indoor pens. The black lay down on the fresh pine boughs Evelyn had piled within and promptly closed her eyes.

The fire smoking in earnest now, Evelyn pulled the remainder of the cooked meat from the spit and laid it next to her dagger—its tip now broken and jagged—on the narrow plank set into the rear wall. The afternoon light was fading into an early evening and she made mental note not to forget the snow bucket when she and Alinor went out to seek their final relief. After that, they would barricade themselves in for the night.

The two already had some semblance of a routine to their days in the primitive shelter, one of gathering snow for drinking and washing, fallen branches to supplement the dwindling pile of ancient peat, and of harvesting meat. Evelyn would tend the wolf’s wound, and as the animal and Evelyn regained their strength, they took to walking in ever-widening circles around the cottage, looking for forage. Most days they returned empty-handed. Sometimes they would stumble upon a few nuts, only half rotted. Once, Alinor nearly caught a rabbit.

But they only explored when the sun was near its pinnacle, for the grays owned the forest from dusk till dawn, and even now they still stalked the hut and its occupants. Each night, after the door was closed and braced firmly, Alinor would lay in the rickety, narrow box bed at Evelyn’s side shaking, her ears pricking at the minutest sound, hackles raising when the grays called from the woods, taunting them. The beasts had nearly killed Alinor once, and they still wanted her. Hungered for her. Evelyn herself could still clearly see the grizzled gray leader in her mind—how he had looked into her eyes as if he’d known her, had been waiting for her to venture into that part of the wood…

Thoughts of the gray devils made Evelyn skittish, and so she jumped when Alinor gave a low growl. Alarm raised the hairs on the backs of Evelyn’s arms as she turned toward the door.

Surely ’twas too early in the day for—

Alinor shot to her feet with a bark, staring at the half-open door, her hackles raised in a prickly ridge above her bandage.

Evelyn frowned. Blasted beasts! If it was the grays, there would be no snow gathering, and no way to relieve themselves for the whole of the night, save the crude bucket. She stalked across the floor with a frustrated sigh, ready to close and bar the door.

But before she had reached even the fire pit, the door slammed against the wall, the frame instantly stuffed with a large, wide—

Man!

Alinor lunged with a snarl.