Exiles in Time (The After Cilmeri Series) (23 page)

The trees thickened, indicating they’d
reached the Narrows, the stretch of water before the loch became a
river.

“
Then I offer my castle at
Doune as an alternative,” said James.

Cassie tsked through her teeth.
“That’s twenty miles away. And again, it’s east. If we go just a
little further, we’ll reach a ford and we can cross the river as
Callum suggested.”

“
No direction is going to
be safe,” said James.

They reached the ford and stopped. The
trail continued to the east, while another began on the other side
of the ford. Cassie looked back, listening for the sound of the
pursuit. Callum ran a hand through his hair. “We can’t split up. We
must choose now.”

“
I fear for John’s life if
we don’t find shelter soon, my lord.” James wasn’t willing to defer
to Callum. He was a Guardian of Scotland and not used to resistance
to his plans any more than Callum seemed to be.

“
I fear it too,” Cassie
said. “I hate that John was caught up in the fighting and has been
mistreated, but if we go to the priory, can we protect him and all
the monks once we’re there?”

None of the men said
anything, and that was answer enough.
No.

Callum turned to Cassie. “Can you tell
what’s wrong with John?”

She shook her head. “He has no open
wounds. Perhaps a closed wound has turned septic?”

“
He hasn’t woken up even
once,” Samuel said.

“
A blow to the head might
have put him in this state,” Cassie said.

“
He needs help, Cassie,”
Callum said, in modern English. “Am I making the wrong choice not
going to the monks?”

“
I don’t know,” Cassie
said, “but I trust you and I trust your instincts. Just decide.
They’re coming, Callum.”

“
I hear them.” Callum
grabbed the bridle of James’s horse and pulled the horse down the
bank and across the ford. Cassie followed, trotting through the
water next to Samuel’s horse. She could smell the sweat and the
blood on Samuel’s clothes and was glad that the horses weren’t
spooked by the fear in all of them.

By now their pursuers were close
enough that Cassie could see the light from their torches. “How
many do you think there are?” Cassie said to Samuel. “We never
pinned down their exact numbers.”

“
Only ten escorted us here,
but more came after they locked us up,” Samuel said.

“
They lost three in the
hut,” Cassie said, “and two at the entrance to the
fort.”

“
How did that happen?”
Samuel said.

“
I shot them.”

Samuel merely nodded. “They don’t have
horses or they might have caught us by now.”

“
Come to think of it, I
didn’t see any horses in the fort,” Cassie said. “How did you get
to the lodge, Samuel?”

“
We walked.”

Cassie didn’t know a lot about the
nobility of the Middle Ages, but she knew enough to know that
noblemen didn’t walk. Lucky for James, he didn’t have to walk now,
though he might as well have been for all the progress they were
making. In the last fifteen minutes, clouds had come up, sweeping
across the moon and making it more difficult to see the path ahead.
They needed torches to see properly, but darkness was preferable to
giving away their position.

On the north side of the river, the
terrain forced the horses east, even though Callum didn’t want to
go in that direction. His head swiveled constantly to the left,
searching for a pathway that would take them up and over the hills
to the north. After a hundred yards, the trail broadened, which
made the going easier, and then they reached a fork in the road
that looked familiar to Cassie.

“
Wait a minute!” Cassie
left Samuel’s side and hurried to catch up to Callum. “I know where
we can go. I’ve been on this path. It climbs steeply but then
descends into a little village that sits between two lochs to the
north of here. It’s a five mile walk, so it’s not close, but it’s
closer than Doune Castle. I can’t promise that we’ll be safe, but a
healer lived there four years ago. Plus, we’ll be nearer to Stewart
lands.”

“
It seems quite a chance to
take on a four-year-old memory,” said James. “I’d prefer to try
somewhere else—”

A man shouted behind them. James
snapped his mouth shut and everyone looked back. Lights from the
oncoming torches bobbed and weaved in the distance. They were still
a good quarter mile away.

“
Surely they can’t see us,”
Samuel said. “It’s too dark.”

“
They’re at the ford,”
Callum said. “We can’t wait for them to decide to cross it. If they
look for our footprints on this side of the ford, they’ll know
where we are and they’ll be coming fast, unburdened by a wounded
man as we are.”

“
Lead James and Samuel to
the village, Callum,” Cassie said. “I’ll keep following this path.
We need them to think we’re still headed for the
priory.”

Callum grimaced but gave the order.
“Go, James. Do as she says.” Callum slapped the rump of James’s
horse and it headed up the path. Samuel’s horse followed, but
Callum stayed where he was, looking down at Cassie. “It would be
better to stay together.”

“
I know what I’m doing,”
Cassie said, even though she didn’t, quite. “We need to divert
them. Though he would never say so, Samuel is barely holding onto
that horse.”

“
I should be the one to
lead our pursuers away,” Callum said.

“
No,” Cassie said. “It’s
your protection James and the others need if this trick doesn’t
work. I have only one arrow and am no good with a
sword.”

Callum leaned in close. With just
moonlight to see by, the only part of his expression Cassie could
make out was the glint in his eye, but that was enough to know how
much he didn’t like this plan. “I’m trusting you to take care of
yourself. Be careful.”

“
I will.”

She didn’t hug him this time. There
was no time anyway, and she hadn’t yet decided if the first one had
been a good idea or not. Then Callum was gone, racing up the path
after James and Samuel. Cassie pulled her cloak from her backpack
and followed him a few steps up the trail. The voices of the
pursuers echoed along the river. It sounded as if some of them were
arguing, just as Callum and James had argued. They were giving
Cassie a chance to put more distance between them and
her.

Cassie needed to convince the men who
followed them that they’d continued east. She swept her cloak
through the dirt and smoothed out the few foot and hoof prints the
others had left. Fortunately, the warm sun of today had dried what
had already been hard-packed earth. She’d come down this trail from
the village four years ago; it looked as if the people in this
region still used this avenue often.

Cassie couldn’t recreate hoof prints,
but she ran forward and back along the ten yards of trail
immediately to the east of the turnoff, trying to simulate the
passage of several people. To judge by the torchlight, the pursuers
had finally decided to split up, with a portion of them heading
east along the south side of the river, and others following Cassie
and her friends across the ford.

As a last deception, Cassie rammed the
edge of her cloak down onto a branch of a gorse bush that grew
beside the trail. The cloth caught and she jerked at it, mimicking
what could have happened if she were really fleeing down this path.
Her breath caught in her throat when it wouldn’t tear. She’d
allowed their pursuers to come closer than she intended—a matter of
a few dozen yards. Finally, the corner ripped, leaving a square of
fabric behind on a thorn.

As Cassie ran down the trail, she
risked another glance back. By the sound of tramping feet and loud
voices, at least a dozen men had crossed the ford. The path
continued straight on and Cassie followed it to a point where the
trees grew so close together on either side that they formed an
arching canopy overhead. It was pitch dark underneath them, made
worse by the clouds that had increased in number and played hide
and seek with the moon. The lack of light forced Cassie to slow
even more.

She squinted into the darkness,
trotting twenty yards down the trail by feel until an unseen tree
root tripped her. She fell forward, stinging her hands and knees,
and decided it was time to change tactics. She reached for a low
branch above her head and swung herself off the trail and onto the
hill that rose up beside her to her left at a sixty degree angle
from the path.

Cassie crouched in the leaves at what
would be head height for someone on the trail, listening for the
men who pursued her. She couldn’t see a thing. After a minute, she
realized they weren’t coming.

Crap!

Cassie climbed straight up the hill on
her feet and hands like a monkey, heedless of the brambles and
bracken that scratched her face. She found a vantage point that
allowed her to see where the pursuers had stopped. They’d passed
the turnoff Callum and the others had taken, but they hadn’t
continued down the trail to the east more than twenty
feet.

Thanks to the torches they carried,
Cassie could see the men clearly as they conferred. They seemed to
be arguing again; then one of the men threw up his hands and turned
away. With a broad sweep of his arm, he gestured the men to follow
him back the way they’d come. Almost gagging at how badly she had
failed Callum, Cassie pulled out her bow. She took a deep breath,
trying to calm her pounding heart, aimed carefully at the leader,
and loosed her last arrow.

And then she ran. 

Chapter
Thirteen

Callum

C
allum spent the first ten minutes of his hike up the trail
cursing himself. He should have been the one to decoy their
pursuers. Why had he let Cassie do it?

“
She’s quite a woman,”
Samuel said once Callum caught up with the horses. Callum didn’t
think he’d ever heard him use quite so dry a tone.

“
Don’t I know it,” Callum
said. “I can’t believe I let her talk me into this.”

“
She seems to know what
she’s doing,” Samuel said. “Where’d you find her?”

“
She found me,” Callum
said. “She rescued me from the pile of bodies in the road after the
MacDougalls left me for dead.”

Samuel shook his head. “Scotland will
feel the repercussions of this week for years to come.”

“
It’s not over yet,
either,” Callum said.

“
Thank you for the rescue,”
Samuel said softly.

Callum glanced up. He couldn’t see
much of Samuel’s face, but it looked more drawn than it had been
earlier, even in his prison cell. His wound was hurting more than
he let on. “You’re welcome. You would have done the same for
me.”

Samuel put his lips together,
seemingly pleased at Callum’s expression of confidence in him, but
Callum knew it to be true.

“
While I am delighted to
know that Robert Bruce believed his duty was to come after me, I
wish he had solicited the support of the other Guardians before he
acted—and certainly before he burned out the Black Comyn,” said
James, from just ahead of them.

“
Who happens to be another
Guardian of Scotland,” Callum said.

“
Exactly,” said James. “I
have supported Robert Bruce’s claim to the throne. What is his son
doing?”

“
The father might not know,
or if he does know, might not have approved his son’s actions,”
Callum said, not using Grampa Bruce’s nickname in polite company.
“To be fair, we have no proof that the eldest Bruce is involved in
any of this, and only Kirby’s word of the involvement of John
Balliol.”

“
I am very disappointed in
Kirby,” said James. “I feel as though I should have known something
wasn’t right about him when he snubbed you at Carlisle.”

“
He snubbed you too,”
Callum said.

James shifted in the saddle and didn’t
answer, so Callum didn’t continue the conversation. The man had a
lot on his mind, perhaps the most minor of which was the fact that
he was fleeing for his life over a mountain.

The road continued to climb, but the
trail was good and the horses navigated it without difficulty.
Callum had to trot to keep up, and he was glad for all those hours
he’d spent training in the winter and spring. The soldier’s
mentality in this world was remarkably similar to that in the old
one: a man trained constantly, hoping his skills would never be
used, but was prepared to use them if he needed to. Callum’s
training had saved his life many times, even before the ambush on
the road.

Callum hoped that Cassie’s experience
would save her now. He cursed under his breath again. Where was
she?

After approximately two miles, the
path leveled out. They’d reached the heights above the river and
the loch. With the rise in elevation, the wind picked up and even
Callum could smell the change in the weather of which Cassie had
spoken. They continued as best they could for another mile, though
more clouds blew in every minute and it was becoming difficult to
see anything at all when the moon wasn’t showing. After another
mile, the path started to descend.