Highlander Redeemed (Guardians of the Targe Book 3) (14 page)

“I will know no torment when I kill an English soldier, and neither should you.” She took a deep breath. “They killed my mum. They killed Myles. I made a vow to avenge their deaths, and I will do that without torment or guilt.”

“You will feel torment at the very least, Scotia,” he said, forcing his wandering thoughts back to the moment. “It happens to everyone, especially in your first battle. I ken you are angry, hurt, and bent on vengeance—I want that every bit as much as you do.”

“You do not act like it.”

“I will choose my time to claim that vengeance, and I promise, if you are ready to fight, you will be right there by my side.”

“I will be ready. If we had spent this day working with this”—she laid her hand on the pommel of the wooden sword—“I would be that much closer to ready.”

“Nay, one day will not change things much, but you are growing more skilled each day, and today will strengthen you in ways you ken not. You are smart, strong, agile, and—” He almost said
passionate
but quickly thought better of that. “And a force to be reckoned with when you set your mind to something, as you have done with your training, but you are also impulsive, denying those strong traits in favor of letting your emotions sway your decisions. People died because of that—Myles in the forest, a dozen soldiers here. Can you say, truly, that does not haunt your dreams?”

She looked toward the meadow they could not yet see. “I can. The deaths do not haunt me. I was not responsible for the soldiers killing Myles. I was not responsible for the choice those same soldiers made to take me hostage and wait for the clan here. ’Tis unfortunate I did not set my mind to becoming a warrior sooner.” She glared at him. “At least then I could have killed a few of them myself.”

Duncan wanted to reach out, to touch her hand, or her shoulder, to see if she was as brittle as she sounded, but he did not. Now was not the time for softness on his part. Now was a time to see if she had any capacity for taking responsibility for these deaths herself, and to see if she could hold up under the weight of such a responsibility if she did. Only when she could master both would she be mentally, and emotionally ready to go into battle, to take a life.

“Follow me,” he said, leading her past several graves where the earth had yet to settle from the recent burials of the English fallen. They quickly completed their journey to the edge of the meadow, to the edge of the battlefield.

“Look and see exactly what you wrought.” He grabbed her wrist and pulled her out onto the spot where most of the melee had happened, where most of the English had died. ’Twas only providence that had kept their own warriors from the same fate.

“You and I were safely out of the worst of it, hiding in the wood with Rowan and Jeanette while the lads fought for their lives, for their homes, for their families,” Duncan said as he scanned the scene of the battle, as he let the sorrow and pain of the place sink into his bones so he would never forget. “You are
responsible for what happened here, Scotia. Your unwillingness to do as you were told by your father and your chief led to the death of Myles, the deaths of these English soldiers, and the injuries your own kinsmen sustained in a battle we were not prepared for. Can you not see that? Can you not feel that?”

He glanced over at her when she did not reply. Her fingers were tracing the still visible line at her throat where an English soldier had tried to slice her. Her eyes were big. Her breaths were so shallow and fast he could not see any rise and fall of her chest. She swallowed again and again. Regret made him sigh. He hated being so hard with her, but he knew he had to make this point. She could not go into battle thinking only of the killing, not of what the killing meant. For if she did not understand that, she would not understand that her own life was always at risk, too, and a warrior who did not understand that was a danger to everyone she fought beside.

“If you do not understand the consequences of taking a life, you will not value your own, and that makes you take unnecessary risks. It makes you a danger to all you fight with and for, as Malcolm learned the hard way. Warriors will not trust you, no matter how well trained you are, until you prove that you hold their well-being at least equal to your own, until you prove that preserving their lives and your own is more important to you than taking one from your enemies.”

“I understand all too well the consequences of a life taken, Duncan.” She still ran her fingers over the scar on her neck. “I felt no remorse when you and Malcolm relieved that gap-toothed soldier of his life. I feel no remorse, no torment, no grief that all of those men had their lives taken here. They had no compunction about taking a life. Why should I?”

“Do you really want to be like them?”

“Nay!” She turned on him, throwing her targe hard to the ground. “I am nothing like them. That you could ever think such a thing says you knew nothing of those bastard Sassenachs and
know even less of me. I want vengeance. ’Tis a noble thing. They wanted only to rape, to kill all of us, to steal away the Targe stone and Rowan for their damned king. They fought because they were told to. I fight for vengeance. I am nothing like them.”

And then she froze, tilting her head a little to the side as if she were listening to something he could not hear.

“Scotia? What is it?” He scanned the edges of the meadow, searching for anything that might catch her attention, but other than a few birds flitting in the trees there was nothing that he could discern.

“We need to go out to the Story Stone,” she said, her attention still apparently on whatever she was listening to. “There is a sword there, the sword that belonged to the gap-toothed bastard. It is to be mine.”

“How do you—’Tis a
knowing
?”

She nodded and turned her attention to him. “My first thought was to run directly out there without telling you what I was after, but that would be
reckless
, and might put you in danger, so I am not doing that. I am telling you I need to go out there. I
know
it. Will you help me do that safely?” And then she picked up her shield and settled it on her left arm and waited.

She presented him with as good a lesson as any since she didn’t seem to get the one he had brought her here for. She would need a real sword eventually, and he had not thought how he would obtain that for her without revealing her secret, so they might as well collect one now. If he didn’t trust her
knowing
he would never consider going out there, and he marveled that once again she was given knowledge of something that triggered a strong emotion in her—hatred, this time.

“How would you go about retrieving this sword while keeping us both as safe as possible?” he asked.

S
COTIA SPRINTED TOWARD
the Story Stone upon its hillock near the center of the wide-open meadow from the same place Duncan had emerged to rescue her the day of the battle—’twas the point where the forest was closest to the stone. Duncan was hard on her heels. She knew he was still uncomfortable exposing them like this, but they had found no sign of anyone, English or otherwise, who had been near the Story Stone meadow since the battle, so he had admitted he could find no reason to keep her from her prize.

She skidded to a stop as she reached the top of the small knoll. A hand, severed cleanly at the wrist and the flesh mostly gone now, lay palm up on the ground. The dagger that had come so close to ending her life, the blade smeared black with her old blood, was still clenched by bone fingers.

All at once the events of the battle came rushing back at her, as if the memories had been waiting here for her to return. It was almost as if it happened all over again, except this time she was watching from a short distance outside her body, as she was thrown to the ground, then bound to the stone so tightly she could barely draw breath or move her arms. She watched as the twelve English soldiers formed a ring around the stone, as she screamed at them, yelling whatever she could think of to discomfit them. She saw herself praying for the death of each and every one of the soldiers—a horrible, painful, lingering death. And she remembered the moment she had heard the clan’s signal, a quiet call of a tawny owl, like a war cry in her mind. It was only then she had realized that she hadn’t been sure they would come for her.

“Scotia?” Duncan rested his hand upon her shoulder, startling her out of her memories. She shrugged him off as she turned her attention away from the gap-toothed bastard’s severed hand, to the stone where she had sat helpless for hours as the soldiers amused themselves by taking turns telling her the vile things they would do to her once they had dispatched her kin. The rope that
had trapped her lay at the foot of the stone, sliced through by the gap-toothed man after she had kicked him in the ballocks.

As he had held her tight against him, his rancid breath rushing over her, and his dagger at her throat, he’d cursed her. “’Twould be safer to shelter with a nervous mother wolf than you,” he’d hissed in her ear.

And that was when the wind hit, whipping up a maelstrom of dirt and grit. She hadn’t known it was an unnatural wind at the time, driven by the twin gifts of Jeanette and Rowan, though she had felt the raw power of it. She still found it hard to believe there were two Guardians, with her, as always, the one left out.

She let her gaze drift up the ancient standing stone that was at least half again as tall as Duncan. She hadn’t really seen it when they’d brought her here, and though she had heard of it she knew nothing more than its name, the Story Stone. She’d never actually been to it before that day, and even then she had not had much opportunity to look at it. She circled around it, taking in the weathered corners of the monolith, the dark silvery grey of the stone itself, decorated here and there by pale silvery-green lichens and bits of bright green furry moss. And carvings.

She stopped, staring at the side opposite the one she’d been tied to. The early afternoon sun hit the stone at a perfect angle to cast the shallow carvings in shadow while illuminating the face of the stone.

There at the top was the triple swirl within a circle symbol. She blinked, sure she was wrong, but there it was, the same symbol that was carved into the Targe stone Rowan always carried with her. It was also painted in the center of the ermine sack that held the Targe stone, and was incised on the large rock in the grotto where Jeanette had come into her Guardian gift.

And below it was another symbol: the broken arrow. It was just as she’d seen it painted inside the Targe sack just yesterday. It was the one symbol left without anyone to claim it.

“Duncan?” She looked about and found him scanning the forest at the edge of the meadow. “Did you see something?”

He glanced over his shoulder at her. “Nay, but that is no reason to let down our guard.” He cocked an eyebrow at her, as if to admonish her for losing herself in her memories. “Do you remember that day any better from here?”

“I do.” She shuddered a little and forced herself not to touch her neck.

“Good. Do you see that it was not glorious? Only painful and filled with death? Can you feel it all around you?”

She looked around, taking in the entire meadow, marveling that the battle itself had been mostly confined to a small area opposite where the Guardians had constructed their barrier, made only from the power of the Targe stone. The barrier had driven the English away from her at the stone, all except the gap-toothed bastard. But she could remember naught after Duncan had taken her hand and dragged her away from the stone. She nodded, unable to speak around the lump that lodged in her throat.

“There is no sword here,” he said, disappointment pulling the corners of his mouth down. “We should go.”

It was only then that Scotia remembered why she had insisted they come out here to the stone. She had
known
there was a sword here for her. Was she wrong? She looked about quickly, but the symbols on the stone once more captured her attention. As she looked closer she could see the faint lines of other symbols carved into the stone below the ones she knew from the Targe and its sack. She reached up and ran her fingers along another carving. This one, upon closer inspection, appeared to be a melding of the three symbols from the edge of the Targe sack, as if whoever had carved them here had carved them one on top of the other so that they were jumbled together, the broken arrow weaving through the other two.

“I have heard of this stone once or twice, but never has anyone mentioned these carvings,” she said, mostly to herself.

“Carvings?” Duncan asked.

“Aye, come around and look at this side of it.” He joined her, though his eyes were still clearly focused on the forest. She touched his arm to gain his attention, then she pointed up at the largest of the carvings at the top, the triple swirls within a circle. “Do you recognize that?”

Duncan glanced up at it, then shook his head.

“’Tis carved on the Targe stone, and painted inside the ermine sack.”

That got his attention. He stepped a little closer to her, standing almost shoulder-to-shoulder as he gazed up at it.