Exiles in Time (The After Cilmeri Series) (22 page)

A second man had been standing to the
right of the first, waiting for the door to open. He reached for
the hilt of his sword as Callum pushed through the door. Callum
took a step and jammed the palm of his left hand underneath the
man’s chin. His teeth snapped together, his head fell back, and he
collapsed to the floor. The back of his head hit the ground with a
nauseating thud, but because the floor of the hut was made of dirt
not stone, Callum didn’t think he’d killed him, even if he’d
knocked him out.

Callum turned to look at the first
man, who was struggling to his feet. Callum recognized him as one
of the men who’d dropped out of a tree at the ambush on the road.
Even with that knowledge, Callum didn’t want to kill him if he
didn’t have too. He took one step and then directed a kick at the
man’s jaw with such force that the man fell back and lay
still.

Callum spun on his heel, looking for
someone else to fight. James and Samuel gaped at him from the floor
by the south wall. A third man Callum didn’t recognize lay beside
them. His friends were bound at their wrists and ankles and tied to
iron stakes that had been driven into the ground. Both James and
Samuel strained against their bonds, but the third man—more of a
boy, really—remained slumped on the floor.

“
Praise be to God,” said
James as Callum took the fighting axe of one of the downed soldiers
and tried to hack through the links that attached James to his
stake. “The dead one has the key to our shackles.”

Callum found the keys and freed his
friends. Then he clasped Samuel’s forearm and helped him to his
feet. “I am glad to find you here.” That was the understatement of
the year.

“
I’m glad to be found,”
Samuel said.

Callum glanced at Samuel’s face.
Despite what had to have been a desperate few days, Samuel’s eyes
remained bright, and at the moment, full of humor.

“
Who is he?” Callum put his
hand to the boy’s neck, feeling for a pulse.

“
We don’t know,” Samuel
said. “He hasn’t woken since they brought him in.”

Callum frowned. “He wasn’t a member
our company?”

“
No,” Samuel
said.

James went to the entrance and peered
through the crack between the frame and the door. “How many men do
you have?”

“
Ah … it’s just me and a
woman friend.”

James turned to look at him. “You’re
jesting.”

“
No,” Callum said. “You’ll
see.”

Callum picked up the axe again. His
experience at Mugdock had given him an idea. “I don’t think we can
risk leaving by boat as I’d hoped.”

“
Then how—” said James,
just as Callum took a huge swing with the axe, directing the blow
at the side wall of the hut. The boards splintered.

“
Looks like freedom to me.”
Callum swung the axe again. Three more blows and he could put his
boot through the remaining boards to create a hole in the
palisade.

After his initial open-mouthed
astonishment, James helped Callum clear away the last of the
splinters. Then Samuel lifted the mystery boy onto his shoulder in
a fireman’s carry. James went through the opening first, followed
by Samuel, who needed Callum’s help to maneuver his burden through
the three foot wide opening. Callum was taking a last look back,
one foot already on the ground outside the palisade, when the door
to the hut opened. The man in the doorway hadn’t been expecting
anything untoward. He stared at Callum for half a second, and then
opened his mouth to shout: “The prisoners—!”

“
I’ve got this, Callum.”
Cassie thrust her bow past Callum’s shoulder and loosed an
arrow.

The man fell backwards, the arrow
through his throat.

Chapter Twelve

Cassie

C
assie closed her mind. She’d gotten good at it over the years,
and really, what was there to think about? The man was dead and
she’d had no choice but to shoot him if they were going to get
away.

When that axe head had come through
the side of the palisade with the force of an oncoming train,
Cassie hadn’t been looking for it. She’d been staying to the woods
on the eastern side of the fort, waiting for Callum to come around
the wall, either by slogging through the water on foot or in his
little boat. She’d been too busy lighting fires to follow his
progress initially, but from brief glances through her scope when
she’d had the chance, she’d seen the line of men with buckets start
near the western palisade wall. She’d known then that if Callum
found the prisoners, there was no way he was leaving in that
direction.

The fires she’d lit in the hills
around the fort had been designed to keep the defenders guessing
and afraid of the army that had been brought up to attack them.
Overall, Callum’s plan had worked better than Cassie had hoped or
imagined it could. While a half-dozen men fought the fire in the
main building, the rest watched the perimeter from the wall-walk.
Earlier, a group of four had charged out of the gate and … well …
Cassie had been waiting for that. She’d put arrows in two of them
without killing them and narrowly missed a third before all of them
scrambled back inside.

Personally, if she had to choose
between going down in flames in a lodge that didn’t belong to her
and charging out of it to do battle, she would have chosen the
latter too. Too bad for them that she’d been waiting.

“
It would have been smarter
for the defenders to evacuate into the water,” Callum said as they
raced for the trees. “They have the boats for it.”

Cassie figured that Callum was just
making conversation to distract her, but she was grateful to him
nonetheless. She feared an arrow would strike her in the middle of
the back at any second in repayment for what she’d done. “Maybe
they view it as a path of last resort,” Cassie said.

Callum sniffed. “Likely, none of them
can swim and they fear the deep waters of the loch.”

As they reached the trees, Cassie
whipped out her last arrow, set it into her bow, and looked back. A
man standing above the eastern palisade shouted and pointed towards
her. Cassie hesitated, gauging the distance and the angle of the
shot. She didn’t want to waste her last arrow on someone she could
barely see, when more men might be coming any second.

“
Leave him, Cassie,” Callum
said. “We need to go.”

Cassie nodded. She turned and ran
after Callum, deeper into the trees. “Where are the other
prisoners?” Cassie said. The two able-bodied former prisoners loped
ahead of them, holding a steady place despite the burden one of
them carried. Cassie checked behind her. She couldn’t see the lodge
anymore, but she could smell the smoke.

“
I didn’t have time to
ask.” Callum said.

“
I moved the horses back to
the first spot, just off the trail,” Cassie said. “They may be a
bit spooked from all the smoke.”

“
You’re
amazing.”

Cassie blinked away a vision of Callum
wrapping an arm around her shoulders, pulling her close, and
kissing her. He did none of those things and it was probably just
as well.

Instead, Callum added, “I’m going to
thank God every day for the rest of my life for putting me in your
path.”

Callum kept on going through the
trees, leaving Cassie shaken. He’d done nothing but tell her how
great she was. He probably had no idea that he was the first person
she’d hugged in five years. It was as if she hadn’t known she was
starving until presented with food.

The two men Callum had rescued finally
came to a halt. One of them bent over, his hands on his knees,
breathing hard, while the larger of the two rested his shoulder
against a tree. Cassie couldn’t believe he’d managed to carry his
burden that far. Callum took a moment to wave a hand. “James,
Samuel, this is Cassie.”

They all nodded at each other, took a
deep breath, and were off again, this time with Cassie leading the
way along the trail and Callum bringing up the rear. “I never
wanted to burn this forest down, but it seems it can’t be helped,”
Callum said, loud enough for Cassie to hear.

“
The rain that’s coming
should take care of the fires,” Cassie said.

“
How do you know that it’s
going to rain?” said James. Even with Cassie’s limited experience
with noblemen, she could tell he spoke Gaelic with a very
upper-crust accent.

“
I can smell it in the
air,” Cassie said.

“
Cassie’s a better woodsman
than all of us combined,” Callum said. “She knows what she’s
talking about.”

Cassie was glad that it was too dark
for the men to see her blush.

They reached the horses
without any obvious pursuit, so Callum helped Samuel ease the
unconscious prisoner off his shoulder and onto the ground. Samuel
straightened his spine with a
snap,
crackle, pop
.

“
We should hurry,” Cassie
said. “That guard on the palisade raised the alarm and the soldiers
will be on us in no time.”

“
Come here, Cassie,” Callum
said. “Do you recognize him?”

Cassie crouched beside the injured
prisoner and brushed the hair back from his face. “Oh no!” she
said.

“
Who is it?” Callum
said.

“
This is Lord Patrick
Graham’s son, John,” she said. “He’s fifteen.”

Callum bent to feel the pulse at
John’s throat and then said to James and Samuel, “Did you say, back
at the lodge, that your captors brought him in later?”

James nodded. “That is
correct.”

“
Where are the rest of the
prisoners?” Cassie said. “I watched the MacDougalls lead you away
from the ambush site. There must have been at least a dozen of
you.”

“
They separated us from the
main group after the first night we spent at Mugdock,” said James.
“You were watching the ambush?”

Cassie nodded but didn’t feel the need
to elaborate. “Why did they keep the two of you
together?”

“
I’ve asked myself that
many times in the last few days,” Samuel said. “It can only be
because of Lord Callum, though how Alexander MacDougall knew about
our relationship, I don’t know.”

Callum exchanged a look with Cassie.
“Kirby,” she said.

Callum stood. “We have no time for
this riddle. We need to move. Listen.”

Cassie had been patting at John,
looking for wounds, but her head came up at Callum’s warning. Sound
traveled more easily in the dark. Now that he’d mentioned it, it
was easy to make out the shouts of men in the distance.

“
James—you ride with the
boy on my horse,” Callum said. “Samuel, you take
Cassie’s.”

“
My lord, there’s no need—”
Samuel began.

“
You’ve been hiding a long
gash down your leg,” Callum said. “It may no longer be bleeding,
but you’re still lame. Get up there!”

James and Samuel didn’t argue further.
Both mounted the horses, and then Callum and Cassie struggled to
get John’s unconscious body in front of James. He held John’s waist
and allowed the boy to rest his head against his collar bone. The
ride would be awkward, but worse would be throwing John across the
horse’s withers and letting him hang there upside down.

Callum set off with James and John,
holding the reins of his horse and trotting beside it. Cassie
followed with Samuel. It was dark under the trees, but the horses
maintained a sure-footed pace. They could see better than humans in
the dark, and the path was well-used and free of obstacles. While
he trotted beside James, Callum gave him the rundown on what had
been happening since the ambush.

“
As I said,
Kirby
,” Cassie
said.

As the tale wound down, Samuel, who’d
been listening too, said to Cassie, “I never liked him. He was
always slippery, even for a bishop.”

“
Well, now we know him to
be a traitor,” Cassie said.

Samuel turned in the saddle to look
behind them. “I don’t see our pursuers yet.”

“
I should have shot that
man on the wall-walk,” Cassie said. “I choked.”

“
You got everyone out of
the fort,” Samuel said. “That was the important thing.”

“
It was dark and I thought
the soldier was too far away to make a viable target,” Cassie said.
“I didn’t want to waste my last arrow, but if I’d at least tried,
he might not have been able to tell anyone what he saw.”

Samuel shrugged. “It might have
delayed the pursuit but all they would have had to do was check the
hut. Lord Callum cut a hole in the wall, Cassie. There was no
disguising the direction we went.”

“
Maybe we should double
back?” Cassie said.

Callum overheard her question. “Better
to cross the river and head north,” he said.

“
We should continue east,
my lord,” said James. “The Priory at Inchmahome will shelter
us.”

“
The MacDougalls will know
that you know it’s there,” Callum said. “If they don’t catch us,
that will be the first place they’ll look.”