Across a Dark Highland Shore (Hot Highlands Romance Book 2) (3 page)

Bothen leaned down, grabbed the braid near her neck, and swiftly sawed off the golden knot with his dirk. It was the same blade he’d used to kill the two men who’d recently challenged his leadership of the clan—men who were unlike Bothen; men who would’ve been kinder to their suffering clansmen.

Isobel fought the bile rising in her throat as Bothen held up his prize for all to see. “Behold, the long, golden braid of a witch!” There were cheers all around.

The tears flowed freely now and Isobel did not try to hold them back.

Bothen yanked her to her feet and she was pulled outside into the stinging cold. He still clutched her severed braid in his chapped, meaty fist. The jeering, blood-thirsty crowd, led by Glynis, Forba, and Bothen, followed the burning barrel through the spitting snow and ice as Isobel was carried along to the hill by the chapel. There were people behind her and pressing in on both sides, sneering and scoffing and forming a tight box of angry flesh about her.

The wind was biting and harsh, and snow had piled against the outside of the chapel. The grey stone of the small building was forbidding without the light of candles in the branched chandeliers within, without voices raised high and joyously in song, or the ringing of bells. Inside, the mural paintings with stories from scripture, the carved statues of saints, and the elaborate stone tombs of past chieftains and nobles lay in chill silence. The villagers and clan members were frenzied with fear. Isobel knew then that fear caught and spread more quickly than fire.

Several men erected a stake and a rope was placed about her neck to hold her straight, to keep her from crouching down and hastening her death.
They wanted the fire to climb slowly. They wanted to see her scream and suffer, despite all she had done to help them with her knowledge of healing. Their fear was greater than their appreciation of her skills. Still, she would no’ regret all that her mother had taught her before she’d died, about herbs and potions, poultices and charms. About strength and courage. She had not survived the years after her mother’s death to face her own without dignity.

Though she trembled, Isobel looked straight into the faces of the mob. She thought of those she’d helped, of the little clay models of arms and legs, the votive offerings she’d made in the chapel in the name of the sufferers so that God might relieve them of their ailments. She thought about the charms she’d spoken, the herbs that had eased their suffering, the ear aches, toothaches, and stomachaches she’d chased away, the poultices applied to ragged sword, arrow, and axe wounds after battles, the rags applied to feverish brows.

“Burn the witch!” they began to chant. “Burn the witch! The witch will suffer!” Wynda, one of the only friends Isobel had ever had, was among those screaming for Isobel’s death by fire. “Send her back to the fires of hell!” Wynda cried.

Isobel gritted her teeth.
She was numb with fear but wouldna cry out. She wouldna scream as she burned.
She focused on the tiny village crofts in the distance, the wide, frozen loch where she swam in the summer, now heaped with snow, the bare trees and the cold, stark beauty of the ben. Her eyes swept the young elms at the edge of a flax field that was stubbly in the summer months, and she thought of the sun in August, how it felt warming her skin. Her mother’s necklace, which was close to her heart, comforted her.
Once fire had tried to claim her and she had escaped its clutches. It didna appear she would be so lucky this time.

She twisted at her ropes, wanting to live, but she couldn’t move. Silently, she prayed.

“Bothen, you pile too much wood at her feet!” Glynis said. “She is slight. She will burn too quickly!”

Bothen grunted. “Yer right, Glynis. We dunna want her to burn too quickly.” Bothen removed some of the wood. “If only we had more witches to burn! We could put all of this wood to proper use!”

Isobel could smell the wet, stinking wool of Bothen’s plaid, and the smoke and burning tar of the barrel made her cough. She thought of Joan of Arc, a sister in Sight, a brave young woman who had been burned at the stake for heresy just a few years before Isobel had been born. She’d heard stories about Joan, tales that had circulated far and wide, to villages and towns, carried by dusty travelers. Despite being misunderstood and feared, Joan had led a humbled and bedraggled French army to victory over the English so that Charles the VII could sit on the throne. Soldiers, wearied and exhausted, were willing to fight without pay just to be at her side.

But after Charles was crowned king, clerics and courtiers turned against her, as well as bishops, friars, and priests, all of whom had devoted their lives to the Roman Catholic Church. They envied the voices that came so easily to Joan. Why would God speak directly to a slip of a girl, a peasant no less, and not to them? They were threatened by a young woman wearing a man’s battle armor and commanding thousands of men.

Joan was wounded twice, an arrow slicing into her shoulder during the Orleans campaign and a crossbow puncturing the soft flesh of her thigh during her failed attempt to free Paris.

The king she fought so valiantly to see crowned did not cherish conflict, and when Joan was captured and became a prisoner of England, he let his advisors make decisions. They told him to wait and see what happened. So he waited while French people marched and lit candles, demanding Joan’s release. They prayed for her in great cathedrals and humble shrines and in their small cottages. Children, like Isobel, went to sleep with stories of Joan’s holiness and brave deeds in their heads. Yet the English called Joan a clever witch, a devil worshipper, a camp follower. During her captivity, Joan had her hair chopped off like a boy’s. Isobel’s hair was now like a boy’s, and she was tiny too, like Joan of Arc had been. Tiny and misunderstood. But no one was marching here and demanding Isobel’s freedom.

During her trial for heresy, Joan told people that angels and saints instructed her to deliver France from the invading English and to establish Charles, the uncrowned heir to the French throne, as the country’s rightful king. She said that when she had visions, she saw bright light, and she heard the voices more clearly when bells sounded.

Sometimes Isobel saw bright light, too. Sometimes she even saw spirits. She heard her mother’s voice now:
Be brave Isobel. Be like Joan of Arc.

They’d made Joan wear a pointed cap with the words “Heretic, relapsed, apostate, idolater” written on it. They’d shaved her head. There had been a large sign above the stake they’d tied her to that read: “Joan the Maid, liar, pernicious, seducer of the people, diviner, superstitious, blasphemer of God, presumptuous, misbelieving in the faith of Jesus Christ, idolater, cruel, dissolute invoker of devils, apostate, schismatic and heretic.” Joan couldn’t read the insults, though.

Joan was burned in the Old Marketplace in Rouen, and the fire was raked aside so the crowd could see by her naked and charred body that
she had not escaped death
. The fire was then relit, and oil was added to burn way any souvenirs people might take home and keep as relics of the saintly Maid of Orleans. Isobel had heard a legend about Joan; a pure white dove had miraculously flown from the fire as her soul left her body.

As Bothen readied the torch that would set Isobel ablaze, Isobel prayed that her soul would be lifted up with the wind like a white dove—that it would fly all the way to the stars, where there was no greedy flame and no pain and no one calling her witch.

The clan yelled and cheered as Bothen’s arms lowered the torch toward the kindling at her feet. Isobel could not feel her fingers or her toes; she was numb with cold and shock. She closed her eyes.

A moment later she snapped them open as she heard a whirring in the air.
She knew that sound well; it wasna the sound of wood catching fire.

Bothen lay on the icy ground at her feet, the torch that would’ve ended her life spinning and sputtering harmlessly on the glistening, crusted snow. Bright, red blood gushed from an arrow embedded in the torn flesh of Bothen’s back, just as it had been in her vision.

Bothen did not move. Glynis screamed and her eyes went wide with horror. “Hag! What fresh sorcery is
this
?” She picked up the torch as if she would finish the job that Bothen started. A circle of five warriors mounted on horseback emerged from the swirling, white mists, and Glynis froze in fear. All held bow and arrow at the ready, and the crowd stepped back, suddenly aware of their own danger and vulnerability.

Glynis, at the forefront of the crowd now, let the torch drop. She sank to her knees and began wailing and pulling at her hair. Her expensive ribbon came loose and the wind pulled it away, a small, blood-red slash disappearing into unending sheets of freezing snow.

Because of the weather, the warriors had the backs of their plaids drawn up over their heads. The man in the middle of the circle of men slowly lowered his hood.

Isobel’s heart raced in fright. It was the warrior who had haunted her dreams….

By now she was sobbing tearlessly. There was a sprig of crowberry on his plaid, just as in her dreams, indicating he was ready for battle.

Though seated, she could tell he was clearly taller than the other men. His midnight-black hair hung to his shoulders. His eyelashes were dark on his cheeks, and his heated hazel eyes gazed straight into hers with an emotion she could not read. He had a rugged, square jaw with a dusting of dark whiskers and he wore a hard frown. A jagged scar ran the length of one side of his face. Even with the scar, it was an extraordinary face. His lips moved, and his deep, commanding voice made Isobel shiver.

“There will be no witch burning tonight, clan MacKinnon.”

2

The dark-haired warrior looked at Glynis. “Ye there, on yer knees. Get up and unbind her.”

Glynis, sobbing, had to step over Bothen’s bloody body to do the warrior’s bidding. She fumbled with the ropes that bound Isobel to the stake. “I canna untie her! She’s bound too tightly!”

He raised his bow and arrow slightly and pointed it at her heart. “I’m an expert bowman, as ye can see by the worthless fool who lies dead at yer feet. Unbind her and hurry. Before I lose patience. Ye see how the Maclean deals with impudence and cruelty.” He paused. “Perhaps ye’d like to be tied to the stake in her place?”

The crowd murmured, stepping further away from Glynis.

Isobel averted her eyes from Bothen’s form, trying not to recall the times that she and other women of the keep and the village had picked their way through the muddy, gory aftermath of battle in a mist-filled glen, working together, singing sadly, retrieving arrows, and ministering to the wounded, the smell of death all around them. Some of the fallen warriors had also been stripped naked, robbed of their dignity even in death.

She could not help thinking about the time too, that the shot was thickest, and the women and small children gathered up arrows in armfuls and carried them to those who were on the keep wall, the sounds of bloody battle and men fighting and falling raging all around. Her step brother Calum was not the only man she’d seen fall from a tower.

Glynis struggled with the ropes and finally the cords were undone.

Isobel stumbled forward, falling on her hands and knees before the warrior and his horse, her hair ragged and short now, her face streaked with dirt and blood. Her severed braid lay on a snow bank where Bothen had haplessly discarded it. Despite feeling weak, she collected her breath and steadied herself. She looked unflinchingly into the eyes of the black-haired one. “I am well pleased to meet ye, my lord, even if ye are the devil himself.”

He arched a dark eyebrow and looked surprised but quickly masked it. Isobel saw that he smiled slightly, but his eyes did not. She had the thought then that if he truly smiled, it would be both brutal and mesmerizing.

“Ranulph, the grubby witch-child rides with ye.”

The warrior named Ranulph handed his bow and arrow to the giant, red-bearded man on the horse beside him, dismounted, and strode over to Isobel, his boots kicking up swirls of snow. He helped her up and then onto his horse, and grumbling, swung up behind her, wrapping her in his long plaid against the cold so she was settled inside it, against his broad chest.

“No’ my favorite way of keepin’ warm, nestled against a MacKinnon witch, but it’ll have to do,” Ranulph said. “I’ll no’ harm ye, little lass,” he added. “So dunna cast any wicked spells my way. If ye feel the need to change someone into an ugly, pimpled toad, change Dugald there. He’s shaggy as a Highland bull but beneath all that hair he looks like a toad anyhow.”

The red-bearded man named Dugald who sat the horse next to Ranulph guffawed. “Ranulph, yer mouth talks and shit falls out.”

Isobel shivered violently and Ranulph wrapped the plaid tighter. “Och, but why can’t she ride with Dugald?”

Dugald handed the bow and arrow back to Ranulph and shook his head, a warning in his eyes for Ranulph to stop talking.

The grim, black-haired warrior ignored both Ranulph and Dugald and spoke again to the muddled crowd. “Dunna follow us unless ye want Maclean arrows in yer backs or broad-axes in yer skulls. The news of yer unprovoked attack against the MacAlisters has spread far and wide. Though enemies to Maclean, what ye did to them was despicable. Ye slept among them as peaceful guests, rose up, and raped, killed, and butchered them. Ye showed no mercy. And now ye’ve taken to witch burning? Yer clan is a sarding disgrace.”

He nodded to his men, and the half circle of towering, prancing war horses—their muscled, glossy flanks glistening in the cold—swung around. As they galloped back into the snowy mists, the dark swallowing them up as if they were ghosts, Isobel overheard one of the women exclaim, “Leith Maclean! So, the witch meets the devil himself!”

After Leith Maclean and his men had ridden away, someone had thought to light the fire. But as there was now no witch to burn, only a handful stayed to watch the flames dance and rise toward darkened skies.

Sunrise was late on winter mornings. With the MacKinnon clan long scattered back to the recesses of their keep and the villagers to their tiny crofts, the first pale light of dawn brushed the horizon. In the soft, harsh glow of the winter sun, the hissing, burning barrel finally crumbled to the ground in charred pieces, signaling the start of the New Year. But no one was there to snatch up the embers for good luck.