Warrior and the Wanderer (30 page)

Lachlan stepped into Ian’s blurry view. He looked down from beneath that flop of dark hair, and the dusty green eyes that looked so very dead.

“I ken ye,” he said. “Ye sang before the queen regent and the wee King before ye bedded my wife. Yer fame is far flung,
bard
.”

“And apparently short-lived,” Ian countered. “Kill me like you did with Bess and be done with it.” He held his breath and waited for Lachlan’s response.

“Why would I wish to kill anyone?” Lachlan asked.

Ian swallowed against the tip of the blade that pressed against his jugular. “Then where is she, you bastard?”

Lachlan blinked and glanced at the guard who pressed Ian’s genitals under his foot. He nodded. The guard smashed his foot harder into Ian. Pain like no other tore through him.

“Ye think I’m a fool?” Lachlan asked.

“I know you’re a fool…and a murderer of Bess’ brother,” Ian managed through the blinding agony.

Lachlan smiled thinly. “Oh, that. ’Twas a hunting accident, but my wife didn’t believe me.”

“Especially since you told her you murdered her brother while you chained her to a rock.”

“The ravings of a female. The same ravings she gave to me after I found her and brought her back to my castle.”

Ian’s body tightened. “Where is she?”

Lachlan cocked his head a little, one eye gleaming. “She isnae dead, bard,” Lachlan said.

Ian didn’t have time to feel relief at the news as one of Lachlan’s minions smashed the handle of his sword straight down between his eyes.

Chapter Seventeen:
007

B
ess awakened with a start.

She blinked the sleep from her eyes several times before glancing to the small window of her garret.

Morning mist swirled angrily outside foretelling a storm soon to come.

She tried to sit up in her nasty wee bed but could not. Lachlan had seen to it that she would not be able to leave unless she could take the bed with her. She had considered that after spending half the night struggling against the seawater soaked ropes that tightened as they dried. Her ankles and wrists were bound tightly to the four corners of the humble bed. Her thoughts had wandered beyond her struggle centering on Ian and his fate.

The first part of the evening she had heard him singing, drunken songs, odd tunes, that had become decidedly odder and more slurred as the evening wore on. Then there was silence. That was the worst thing of all, the torturous silence. After a span of forever, she heard Lachlan and some of his warriors speaking in hushed tones that faded down the winding stair. Then more horrible silence.

Sometime in the silence and consuming darkness she had fallen into a fitful sleep.

“Ian,” she sighed. “Where are you, my love?”

Regrets flooded into her heart as fast as the wind that pushed through the small open window. She had not told Ian she loved him, had not told herself she loved him until she had been taken from him and imprisoned in this castle. She feared she would never get the chance to tell him.

The door creaked open. She turned her head quickly away from the window.

Ian? she thought hopefully, desperately.

Not on this misty, boiling stormy day. Of course not.

She strained against her binds and bared her teeth at the intruder.

“Sleep well, my darling wife?” Lachlan asked strolling across the floor to her. His confident demeanor turned her blood to ice.

“I’m no’ yer darling wife, ye pestilence.”

“Prove it—” He stopped at the foot of her bed. “No, wait, I take that back. I have already proved that ye’re no’ my wife. Another has ruined ye for me.”

She stared at him. He knew something, some horrible something.

Her heart suddenly spoke for her, shoving aside her good sense to hold her tongue.

“Where is the bard?” she asked.

The smile Lachlan gifted her was as welcome as a sack full of vipers. “Funny,” Lachlan said. “He asked the same about ye.”

He leaned over the bed and slowly reached into the swag of plaid across his chest. Bess strained against her binds. Lachlan had to know about her and Ian, and Ian was surely dead and soon she would join him in that mysterious eternity.

Lachlan produced his dirk. The blade honed to sharp perfection glinted dully in the grey morning light that seeped into the garret.

“Just do it, ye unholy bastard. Ye may murder me, but ye willnae ever get Campbell land or the loyalty of my clan. The king kens ye. I’ve told him that ye murdered my brother, his loyal protectorate of royal land to the west, and that ye tried to murder me.”

Lachlan leaned so low over her that she could feel his hot breath on her exposed ankle. “What proof have ye? What proof could ye possibly have taken to the queen regent or His Majesty’s councilors to make them believe that I tried to murder ye?”

“The mettle of ye is all I need.” It was all she dared confess. If Ian were alive, and she prayed furiously that he was, she would not give away another reason for him to incur Lachlan’s wrath.

“A weak proposition, my dear,” he said. Quickly, he slipped the blade under the rope that held her right ankle to the bedpost. With one rough jerk he sliced the rope, freeing her leg.

Bess kicked her foot into the dead center of Lachlan’s grinning face. The crunch that followed was unmistakable.

His head snapped back. He stumbled and fell solidly on his backside a raging river of blood coursing from his broken nose.

“Bloody bitch!” he tried to scream at her. Instead it sounded like,
“Nuddy nitch!”

Bess did not hold back her laughter.

Lachlan scrambled to his shaky legs. The blood flowed from his chin and dripped to his tunic staining it in crimson rosettes. He stared at her in surprise and anger, the dirk still in his fist.

“Right,” he said over gnashed teeth. It came out,
“night.”

He stormed to the door and screamed out into the corridor and down the stair, “Guards!”
“Nards!”

Bess did not laugh this time. Her smile quickly faded when she looked down at Lachlan’s feet.

He was wearing Ian’s well-cobbled, from-the-future boots.

Ye could never fill those boots, ye bastard, was her first thought. Her next thought ripped through her.

Ian MacLean was dead.

She heard the guards pounding up the stair. She knew she would have little time to mourn him.

* * * *

Shackled and manacled, Lachlan’s guards dragged Bess out of Duart Castle and onto the rocky, storm-tossed heath. She would have walked to her doom herself, but the bastards gave her no chance to do so. She was just fodder for some unspeakable horror their chief had planned for her.

Rain battered her face and body. Her clothes clung wetly to her legs, and her hair hung down in front of her eyes in limp, dripping strands. The shackles rubbed red, raw places on her ankles. Her feet were bare. Lachlan’s men pulled her across the stones and moss. She fought for purchase with the ground, anything to show resistance, strength, and the courage that was slipping from her soul.

Lachlan was going to try and kill her again. This time, she feared, he would be successful.

He sat astride his black mount beside a worn-looking dogcart to transport her to the end of her life.

She tried to dig her toes into the ground, but the stones and her shackles kept her from doing so. The brutes dragged her to the cart and tossed her inside.

“Ian!” she managed to gasp, her voice raw.

He lay across the length of cart, lifeless in the straw. His wrists and ankles were bound with chains like her own. If she did not see the forceful rise and fall of his broad chest under torn and bloodstained linen and plaid she would have thought him dead.

She placed a trembling hand against the side of his face, stroking the hard bristly jaw. His brow wrinkled as if she had caused him great pain while he slept. Or was he coming out of an unwanted sleep delivered by Lachlan? The large welt on the center of his forehead told her “aye”.

“What have ye done?” she asked Lachlan without taking Ian from her stare.

“Revenge, my dear. This is the man who took yer special gift away from me.”

“A gift I would never have given to the likes of ye, if I had it to give.”

“’Twas no’ a question. ’Tis fact I speak.”

“What have ye done to him?”

“What he deserves, but I’m no’ finished. Ye both shall get eternity together. ’Tis my gift to ye.”

“Then best be done, and quick about it,” she said, never taking her gaze from Ian’s lifeless body.

Pulled by one stout ox, guided by one of Lachlan’s minions, the dogcart rumbled forward over the stony ground, heading into the stormy, rain swept morning.

Bess hunkered down, sheltered from the rain, but not from the wet. She worked her hands down Ian’s still body. She paused at his tunic. It was slashed open diagonally across his chest. Carefully she opened the fabric to reveal a long, thin crimson cut. The blood no longer flowed. She was grateful it was not a deep wound.

The wind swept into the cart, chilling her to her bones. She felt along Ian’s body, hoping to find a weapon, but knowing he did not carry anything but a disarmingly beautiful voice. She found nothing but more bruises and gashes.

The rain fell harder, and the wind heightened. She could hear the surf of the Firth of Lorn crashing on the beach. She raised her head above the side of the cart and looked down the cliff, a great scree of loose stones that ended on a grey sandy beach. The tide was low and incoming like the day Ian had rescued her. Far off from the beach she spied the rock Lachlan had chained her to. Stormy waves lapped at the base of the slippery monolith. The tide was low, very low. But soon it would cover the rock—

She stopped. Her gaze caught something in the very low tide that she had not noticed the day Lachlan tried to drown her. Another rock. Smooth and silvery slick. It had not been there before.

A hand grabbed her ankle, squeezing it. She wrenched her gaze away from the new apparition in the firth just as the cart tilted downward on the slippery scree and looked down. She fought to conceal the smile that threatened to cross her lips and give herself away.

Ian was looking up at her, a half-grin on his perfect lips. Another day, another
time
she would have thrown temptation aside and kissed him. This day and time she would keep the secret that he was awake.

She looked into those amber eyes and know he was ready for something. Hope and the warrior surged within her.

This day death was no longer a forgone conclusion.

* * * *

Ian closed his eyes as soon as the wagon stopped at the bottom of a long bumpy slope. Best to keep up the ruse that he was quite out of it. Bess played along with him. Of course, he had not been faking it when Lachlan and his goons had really sent him to lalaland. He had awakened in chains, in the bed of a stinking wagon, with Bess.

She was unharmed as best as he could tell. Her face was paler than normal, but there was a certain measure of defiance in her gaze. She was ready for a fight.

The cart swayed as one of the goons climbed inside. Ian could only tell this from his private darkness by the nauseating stench.

“To yer feet, lassie!” the goon ordered.

The cart rocked a little as Bess stood. The clinking of her chains grew increasingly distant as she was born away from him. He forced his eyes to remain closed, his breathing to remain shallow.

A moment later the cart swayed again. The boards creaked and groaned. Both goons were in there with Ian. Their stench assaulted his nose. They grabbed him, slid him out of the cart, and dropped him to his side onto what felt like sand. The surf roared to his left. Bess made cries of protest to his right.

“Ye tried this once before, ye stinking bastard! Ye failed miserably!” she cried.

In the echo of Bess’s declaration, Ian was lifted from the sand by his armpits and dragged. His kilt hung from his body in one soggy, rain-soaked mass as the goon squad dragged him through the shallow surf. He could hear Bess ahead of him, shouting profanities. She was putting up as good a show as he was.

Well, part of it was show, he knew, but most of it was pure Warrior Princess.

He was hefted up out of the shallow water and placed on something very wet, slimy and hard, a rock. He did not have to open his eyes to know Bess was there with him. She brushed her fingers lightly over the back of his hand.

Then he heard the sound of metal on metal. Lachlan, or one of his goons, was pounding the chain between his ankles into the rock. An echo of metal pounding upon metal told him the same was happening to Bess’s chains. She had also stopped protesting.

“I’ll no’ fail this time,” Lachlan decreed. “We’ll leave the ox and cart here to burden both of yer bodies back to yer clan in Inverary after the ride has claimed you both.”

“Yer confidence reeks of stupidity,” Bess snapped.

“As much as yer love for this bard,” Lachlan said. “Take care, my dear.”

The sound of splashing heralded his retreat on horseback.