Exiles in Time (The After Cilmeri Series) (14 page)

He strode to the door. Cassie and
Callum followed and turned to look as Lord Patrick headed up the
stairs to the wall-walk above the inner bailey. He stopped before
he reached the top, however, and although he pointed back at
Cassie, his words were for Callum. “Get her out of
here.”

Callum took a step towards
him. “Who comes? Who’s
they
?”

Lord Patrick cursed and trotted back
down the steps so he didn’t have to shout. “James Stewart was in
your company. There must have been someone else, someone who
supported Robert Bruce.”

“
Why would you say that?”
Callum said.

“
Who else of importance
traveled with you? You say the bishop is dead. Who else?” Lord
Patrick said.

“
King David sent a dozen
noblemen with Kirby, along with members of his own household,”
Callum said.

“
Robbie Bruce was there,
too, as his squire,” Cassie said. “His horse panicked and got him
away before the MacDougalls descended upon the English.”

Lord Patrick nodded. “So that’s it,
then.”

“
What is it?” Cassie
said.

“
Of all the luck.” Lord
Patrick looked up to the battlements as he spoke, not actually
talking to Callum or Cassie anymore. Then he glared at Callum
again. “It’s too late for regrets. You don’t know the Bruce as I
do. It is he who comes against me now and we’re all
dead.”

“
My lord—” John said from
the walkway above. Such was the tenseness in his voice that he
didn’t have to say more than that.

Lord Patrick looked at Cassie and
Callum. “If you knew Robert Bruce as I do, you’d know that the King
of England is the least of my concerns tonight.”

Chapter Eight

Cassie

C
allum and Cassie trotted up the steps after Lord Patrick, with
no need to discuss the fact that they weren’t going to heed his
admonition to flee. Not yet. Cassie didn’t feel any more than
Callum did that she could run away without finding out what had
happened to Callum’s friends. Even if Lord Patrick was telling the
truth—that the survivors of the ambush weren’t at Mugdock—someone
here would know where they’d gone.

They came out on the top of the wall
to find that Lord Patrick had been entirely correct about what he
faced and the immediacy of the danger. The Bruces had indeed come.
Their banner rippled from a pole driven into the ground just out of
arrow range, not that Lord Patrick had more than a half-dozen
archers in his garrison. Bruce seemed to have a few more—enough
anyway to loose the first rain of fire arrows at the castle.
Meanwhile, other soldiers set fire to the thatched huts outside the
palisade. Cassie hoped the villagers had sought shelter inside the
castle before the Bruces had arrived. Not that ultimate safety lay
there either.

Robbie Bruce had roused his family. It
seemed impossible to think that they could have gathered hundreds
of men in the few days since the ambush on the road, but if the
torches they carried were any indication, their numbers neared a
thousand. This had become more than a clan war. It was a kingdom
they were fighting for.

“
Those Bruces don’t screw
around, do they?” Callum said.

“
Not much.” Cassie took in
a breath. “We need to make sure the prisoners aren’t inside
Mugdock.”

“
You don’t think Lord
Patrick was telling the truth?” Callum said.

“
Do you?” Cassie really
wanted to know what Callum thought. He wasn’t a medieval man, not
by a long shot, but he seemed to understand the medieval mind far
better than she did. Even weirder, he seemed to want to
understand
her
.

“
I didn’t say that,” Callum
said. “You did see a MacDougall.”

“
He could have been injured
and left behind or been chosen to stay behind to keep an eye on
Lord Patrick.” Cassie paused. “You saw Lord Patrick’s face. He
didn’t know that Robbie Bruce had been in your company.”

“
And yet he feared
retaliation from someone—enough to call in his men from the
surrounding countryside,” Callum said. “He was prepared for
something bad to happen.”

“
But do you think he was
prepared for this?” Cassie said.

Callum faced the inner bailey and
didn’t answer. “Would this castle have a dungeon?”

“
No,” Cassie said, “at
least not like you might see in the movies. Prisoners would be
housed in a shallow basement like the one below the south tower.
Mugdock Castle is built on solid rock.”

Cassie gazed around at the sudden
burst of activity wrought by the arrival of the Bruces. She and
Callum were the only people in the entire castle not
moving.

“
We’ll have to check each
of the towers. I don’t think anyone is going to stop us today.”
Callum shot a glare at Cassie. “And don’t even suggest that we
should split up.”

Cassie hadn’t been going to suggest
it. She had her bow, still in its sling on her back, but she wasn’t
planning to take on the Grahams and the Bruces at the same time.
When she’d first come to Scotland, that bow had been all that stood
between her and starvation. Or rape. Growing up as she had, half on
the reservation and half off it, Cassie understood the importance
of family. Here, she was clanless, and that meant she was fair game
to anyone who could catch her. Until Lord Patrick had taken her
under his wing.

Cassie had seen the look that Callum
had given her when she’d talked to Lord Patrick. Like everyone
else, he thought that Cassie was, or perhaps had been at one time,
his mistress. She hadn’t been, however. Stereotypes of medieval men
aside, Lord Patrick was loyal to his wife. All the man wanted was
someone with a brain (which, sadly, his wife didn’t appear to have)
to whom he could speak freely.

Cassie didn’t mind. He was old enough
to be her father, a man Cassie had never met, and reminded her of
her grandfather, who’d helped raise her. Cassie missed her
grandfather every day, and it had been nice to have Lord Patrick on
the margins of her life.

“
Come on. I have a better
idea.” Cassie headed down the stairs and across the courtyard
without waiting to see if Callum followed her. After a few seconds,
he caught up and fell into step beside her. Nobody stopped them.
Nobody even looked twice at them. It gave Cassie hope that they
might be able to complete their search quickly, though no matter
how fast they moved, she didn’t yet have a plan for getting out of
Mugdock in one piece.

Cassie didn’t head straight for one of
the towers but led Callum to the kitchen, a squat building
separated from the keep by a walkway and from the other buildings
by a good thirty feet. It had been built that way so if the kitchen
caught fire (not an uncommon event), the flames might not spread to
the rest of the castle. Cassie had a friend of a sort, Isobel, who
worked there as undercook to Heck, the master of the kitchen. As
they entered, Cassie traded the smell of smoke and manure for wet
wool and baking bread.

“
Cassie! What are you
doing? You shouldn’t be here!” Isobel, her blonde hair swept back
from her face in a messy bun and her thick figure swathed in a
giant apron, kneaded a giant ball of bread dough.

“
So I’ve been told,” Cassie
said, “but I could say the same to you. What are you doing here,
making bread? The castle is under attack!”

“
Men still have to eat,”
Isobel said. “Have you seen who comes against us?”

“
The Bruces, we know,”
Cassie said.

Cassie lost Isobel’s attention as she
broke off to shout at a kitchen boy stirring a large pot over the
fire.

“
The village is already on
fire,” Callum said.

Isobel took in Callum with a glance
and then looked again at Cassie. “I heard. What do you want,
Cassie? This is no time for talking.”

“
Where are the prisoners?”
Cassie said.

Isobel bit her lip. She started to
shake her head but then stopped herself and said instead, “I
shouldn’t tell you, but since this is why the Bruce is here, it’s
not as if it’s a secret. They’ve all gone—the MacDougalls, that is,
and their prisoners too, though—” She paused as she thought some
more. “They left one prisoner behind, a Scotsman not from around
here, along with one MacDougall to keep an eye on him.”

Callum turned his face away from
Isobel and whispered in Cassie’s ear, “That isn’t exactly what Lord
Patrick said.” Then he straightened and said to the cook, “Where
were the MacDougalls headed?”

“
North to Dunstaffnage
Castle.”

“
What about the prisoner
who’s still here?” Cassie was disappointed to learn that Lord
Patrick could lie so convincingly. “Why was he left
behind?”

“
He couldn’t be moved,”
Isobel said. “He was just a soldier anyway, not like some of the
others. Not like the Stewart.”

Callum drew in an audible breath.
“James Stewart is alive?”

“
To judge by his cursing
all MacDougalls and Grahams for eternity, he’s well too,” Isobel
said.

“
They’ll use him as
leverage. That’s why they’re keeping him alive,” Cassie said to
Callum in modern English. “If they can’t have King David, they’ll
take what they can get.”

“
Perhaps Bruce knows that
the prisoners aren’t here, and that’s why he’s so quick to burn
Graham out rather than negotiate,” Callum said in the same
language.

Isobel’s brow furrowed and she glared
at Cassie. “You brought an Englishman here?”

Callum put out a hand in a gesture of
appeasement and said in Gaelic, “I’m a Mackay, from up north. I
have no dog in this hunt.”

But Isobel lifted her chin. “I won’t
say more. You should go.”

“
We’re going, Isobel,”
Cassie said, sorry to have their relationship marred because of
Callum, but she couldn’t fix it now. “Can you tell me where the
soldier is being kept?”

Isobel was still looking sullen.
“Donella has him with her.”

“
Thank you. Thank you for
helping us.” Cassie touched Isobel’s shoulder. “Take care of
yourself.”

Isobel was already back to her
kneading. “Go on with you. Until the Bruce burns us out, I have men
to feed. I’ll stop when Lord Patrick himself tells me to and not
before.”

Cassie backed away towards the door.
“Let’s go, Callum.”

Callum put his heels together and
bowed, prompting Isobel to pinch her lips together as she held back
a smile. “Go on with you!” She shooed him away with one
hand.

With a smile himself, Callum followed
Cassie into the courtyard again, but this time it wouldn’t be so
easy to get across it. The thatched roof of the barracks was on
fire and men had formed a line from the well, passing buckets of
water from hand to hand. More fire arrows flew towards them, more
than a dozen every minute.

“
We don’t have time to
help,” Callum said.

“
I know. Come with me.”
Cassie led the way around the far side of the keep, which hadn’t
yet been touched by the battle.

“
Which way to the postern
gate?” Callum said.

“
That’s what I’m showing
you.” Cassie held up her skirt with one hand as she sprinted
towards the inner gatehouse, which was still open, though it
wouldn’t be open for long if the Bruces breached the outer
palisade. Once through the inner gate, they skidded down the slope
from the castle into the outer bailey, which the palisade
protected.

"We’re running out of time,” Callum
said.

Cassie put a hand to her chest. It had
been too long since she’d sprinted. “Donella is the herbalist and
lives just there.” She pointed to a cluster of buildings built
against the southern wall. “She would have wanted the soldier close
to her if he was very ill, though since he’s a prisoner, I’m
surprised Lord Patrick allowed it.”

“
Maybe he didn’t want to be
a party to the murder of a member of the king’s company more than
he already was,” Callum said.

“
It depends on whether or
not he sheltered the MacDougalls by choice.” Cassie picked up the
pace again, jogging past the blacksmith works. John was among a
group of soldiers huddled nearby, but he didn’t look up as they
passed. “I can’t see him condoning the murder of King
David.”

“
Would he believe that King
David could be King Alexander II’s grandson?” Callum
said.

“
Everyone else does,”
Cassie said. “It was the talk of the countryside last Christmas. So
it’s true, about his mother?” Her brow furrowed. “I thought you
said she was from our time?”

“
She is,” Callum said. “So
no, it isn’t true. But David’s denials haven’t made any headway in
England. True or not, the people believe it. What clan did King
Alexander belong to?”

Cassie was silent a moment as she
tried to recall it. “The House of Dunkeld.”

“
Then that is the clan upon
which Graham and MacDougall have just begun a war, isn’t it?”
Callum said. “Isn’t that the fear we saw in Lord Patrick’s
eyes?”