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Gavin Macgregor’s boots cracked the dry dirt and the crispy grass under his feet as he drove himself faster and faster up the hill towering above ground north of Edinburgh, far from his life, from his worries, from his friends and his single enemy which had, with the events of three days past, become two enemies. Three if he counted King George, although he was fairly sure some minor theft in Scotland didn’t much trouble the Hanoverian prince.
Blowing in wind so strong even his big, fat kilt-pin didn’t keep the cloth down, the gusts against his legs bristling Gavin’s spirit. Up, up, up he went, past a small family with three boys throwing a ball and a man and woman embraced against a rock.
Up, up, he went, pounding the earth so hard that each time he stepped, shocks crawled up the tight muscles of his calves. He sucked a deep lungful of clean air, the sort that it was hard to find in a city, even in Edinburgh.
The rocky hill disappearing around him was said to be the place where Camelot once stood, back when the Britons weren’t British. Back when his people were free and the only lords who demanded tribute of their peasants were decent, because if they weren’t, some noble knight came around and lopped off their heads. At least that’s how it was in the legends. Maybe how it should be, no matter how savage that might be.
Up further, he looked down to see the family already disappeared into the misty fog that hung heavy, a cloud settled down around the ancient mound. As he looked all around, he noticed there was only a little ways to go until he reached the summit of his brief climb.
The air, cool and thick, seemed to pulse against Gavin’s flesh and permeate him when he breathed. Somewhere off in the distance, he heard pipes. The sound of a funeral procession, perhaps, or the sound of a celebration, he wasn’t quite sure. In either case, he thought about the past two years and then thought about Fort Mary.
Back there, far away from London, far away from kings and their squabbles, those had been happier times. The few encounters he had with little Kenna Moore and her warm smile, and the way she’d opened her eyes wide when he pressed the thistle into her palm warmed his heart.
Gavin’s boots scraped over a little pile of bones, the remains of some small bird. Below him, the pipes were joined by a pair of drums playing slightly different rhythms. He thought he recognized it, but couldn’t be sure.
He imagined the great hump he climbed actually being Camelot. Over here, a wall and back there, the entrance to the keep, where Arthur sat, resplendent and decent, surrounded by knights tall and short, fair and foul. Lancelot of the lake to his left, Guinevere to his right, when she chose to come, was stealing glances behind his back at her lover. He knew all the stories. Loved them as a boy, and he kept right on loving them as a man grown, Gavin did.
“Loyalty,” his father told him as he closed the dusty pages of a book so old the cover was gone. He knew it used to say Mallory though. “Loyalty and honor, boy, that’s what makes a man. Lancelot had both, then he lost them to his lust and then he got them back. What you lose, is only lost forever if you let it be. Do you understand?”
He remembered his father’s huge beard, braided down either side of his mouth. His da’s mustache was dark brown but the hair on his chin was the color of rust, so the braids looked like a frame about either side of his chin.
In Gavin’s mind, he sat on big Robert Macgregor’s knee and thought about what words like honor and loyalty meant.
Without realizing it, Gavin had hopped up to the rock jutting from the top of the hill, and was staring down over the city below him. If he turned to his right, he knew Macdonald’s mansion was somewhere off in the trees, though he couldn’t see where exactly. And he knew that somewhere along the road snaking off behind that great, greedy house was a carriage trundling along, filled up with fat Laird Macdonald.
And then, he thought about the girl who was in the carriage with him. Taken by some half-forgotten oath spoken before she was born, and given up, taken away from the only place she’d ever really known.
Gavin turned south, toward the city. He stared at Edinburgh castle, and thought about Robert the Bruce, who led an army that was raised as a simple act of revenge. The Bruce led an army and made his people free, he remembered his da telling him as he read poem after poem about the Bruce, and about William Wallace, the fallen martyr who died to make Scotland free.
Far below, the pipes swelled. Gavin finally recognized the slow lilt of a funeral dirge. He wondered if the person who died had lived a good life, a long life. Something, blown on the gusting wind, thumped against his foot and he bent to pick it up.
His fingers closed around a hard, spiky ball fringed with purple.
“Thistle,” he said to himself. He wrapped his hand around it, and made a motion to hurl the flower off into the mists below, but stopped short. His hand fell to his side.
“Honor and loyalty, boy. Two things no one can take from you. No matter whether you’re rich, or poor. Starving or fat. The lord of a castle, or lying half dead in a gutter, you can have them, or you can’t. Do you understand what I mean?” The words vibrated in his chest.
Gavin started down the side of the hill opposite the one he’d come up. He clenched the thistle in his fist, so that the spines pressed into his palm.
“I think I do, Da,” he whispered. “I think I understand.”
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As soon as Gavin pushed open the waist-high door to where he and John had made their headquarters underneath the Prince John Tavern on Rose Street, he heard booming laughter. Someone new, he thought, someone come to join our little band?
“Gavin!” Red Ben Black’s voice boomed through the room and took Gavin off guard. “I thought you’d got lost out on your walk!”
“Didn’t expect to see you, Ben.” Gavin said with a smile.
“Call me Red. Me wife does, and I’ve got used to it.” He laughed again and slapped himself on the belly before drinking an entire mug of the tavern’s thick, black beer in one go. “Good,” he said, dragging the back of his hand across his lips.
“Red Ben here has come to give us some news that I thought you’d find interesting.”
“Oh? Why’s he drinking beer?”
“His preference, friend. I offered him real drink.” John held the bottle with two fingers, and poured the amber fire into Gavin’s hardened clay cup.
“Red Ben Black,” Gavin said. “What can we do for you?”
“Well,” the big man said, “you know how I said that the lord of the manor had gone north to Fort Mary to fetch his bride? He’s come back. Or rather, is on the way back. The house got a missive from him this morning informing us to have a – I quote – sufficient banquet – end quote – for him upon his return, which should be tonight. Assuming, of course, his lordship doesn’t break his carriage again.”
“How would that happen?” John said as he grabbed a haunch of unidentified burned meat. “Roads aren’t that bad between the Lochs and here.”
“They are when you’re as wide as Laird Macdonald,” Red laughed. “But listen boys, we should go.”
“Go? Where?” Gavin sat down and took a drink. “I just got here.”
“Aye, but there’s something you’ll want to see. Get up! No time to explain. Oh, and Gavin? Here.” Red Ben tossed a bundle of something that Gavin grabbed out of the air.
“What’s this?”
“We’re going to a party, aren’t we?”
“Are we?”
Ben pursed his lips. “Suppose I didn’t tell you that bit, ah?”
“Suppose you didn’t.”
“Well you seemed so interested in the lass that I thought you might like to see her. And anyway, Macdonald is a nasty, cruel man, the sort that could stand a chopping down.”
A grin spread across Gavin’s face.
“Oh wait, wait, no, no, no, Gavin!” John said. “You can’t be taking this seriously. You’re going to a party at the house of a man you just robbed? Twice?”
“We,” he said. “We just robbed.”
“Right, of course, that’s what I meant. This is insanity.”
“And not just me.”
Gavin grabbed the wadded up fabric and stood. He stretched it out and held it up in front of John.
“Do you have another of these for John? I think he’d look just wonderful wrapped in some of that Macdonald red and green, don’t you?” He made his hands into a square frame and laughed.
“Aye, I do. But you’ll both need to be ready. I doubt getting in will be as easy as it was when the house was empty. You’ll have to at least be clean enough to pass for nobility.”
The three men nodded to one another, threw back their drinks, and gathered their things.
Red Ben stepped in front of the other two men in the doorway and turned back to them. “One more thing, Gavin,” he said.
“We’re to run all the way there?”
“No, no,” the big man laughed. “Although it might be just as bad. After tonight, I’m leaving Macdonald’s employ. Tired of the abuse. Instead, I’m your new man.”
Gavin and Two-fingers exchanged a couple of cocked eyebrows.
“You’re sure about that?” Gavin said. “It’s a dangerous road we travel. And you’ve got Alice and the children-”
“Alice,” Red Ben said, “is more dangerous than Macdonald could ever manage to be.”