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“Twenty-eight!”
Alan whipped Gavin across the back. He made no noise, but it wasn’t for numbness, or for going unconscious. The sheriff had weakened. The blows had simply stopped hurting.
“Rodrigo!” He shouted. “Get back here! What is that awful noise?”
“Perhaps you should go look?”
“Rodrigo! Where is that awful Spaniard?”
“I told you to be nicer to him, he’s probably left.”
The sheriff turned to Gavin and glared as the door creaked.
“See? He knows what’s good for him.”
“Rodrigo, tell he what on Earth all this-”
“Quiet.”
“You can talk?” The sheriff said, his mouth falling open.
“Sit down.”
“What’s going on here – hey, who are you three? Kenna? How did you get here?”
“Kenna?” Gavin said. “Is that you?”
Her arms felt like heaven swallowing Gavin whole. He opened his puffy, blood-shot eyes and when she smiled at him, all his pain, all the bruises and cuts and scrapes and everything else melted away. When her lips touched his forehead, Gavin’s whole body stiffened and then relaxed. She sat down, holding his head in her lap, pushed his hair out of his eyes.
“It’s you, isn’t it? It’s really you?”
“Last I checked,” he smiled through his cracked lips and Kenna stooped to kiss him.
She smothered him, from the top of his forehead, to as far down on his neck as she could reach, in sweet, hot little kisses.
“How did you find me? How did-”
“Ach, you and the talking,” Kenna said with a grin. “It was your friends. They’re the ones what found you. I hadn’t a clue you’d even been taken anywhere until Macdonald let it slip. All I did was come along for the ride.”
“What’s the meaning of this? Rodrigo? What are you doing?”
“What I should have done a long time ago, but was too afraid.” Metal slid against leather.
“Put that down! I pay you to guard me and here you are pointing a – ouch!”
“I’ll do it again if you keep talking,” he said. “Probably harder. Sit down.”
Alan sat.
“On the floor. Hands behind your back. Good. Red Ben?”
“Aye, with pleasure.”
Thin ropes wound tight around the sheriff’s hands and cinched down so hard it hurt. Ben tugged the slip knot and twisted it just a little tighter than it needed to be, but the sheriff’s yelping and squealing got him excited.
“Tell me if you can move them,” he said, laughing.
“Wh – what are you going to do to me? What is that noise?”
“The...ach, that noise,” Lynne said. “That’s all your prisoners escaping. All the ones you’re kept here to watch? They’re all leaving. They’ve got the key to the front, but I expect they’re mad enough to make their own doorway. And the way they were rampaging around, you’d think they were as excited to get at you as we were to find Gavin.” Lynne said, looping a finger in John’s trousers.
“You let them...you let them out? How could you? That...there’s no way the King will renew my appointment.”
“Oh,” Rodrigo said. “I thought I was doing you a favor. As much as you complained about this post, I thought you’d love to see it disappear behind you on your way back to England.”
“Y – yes, but not in the back of a prison carriage! I’ll be put in the tower for this!”
“I doubt that very much,” John said. “In fact, I’m a wee bite doubtful you’re to get out of here at all. Those are some very rambunctious prisoners you’ve got. Only a matter of time until they find their way here, dinna you think?”
“No...no, you can’t do that to me. They’ll tear me apart!”
“Hungry too, I think.”
“No!”
“You won’t be hurt by them,” Rodrigo said in that dark leather voice. “They won’t have the chance.”
He slid the flat of his sword along Alan’s throat, then his cheek.
The sheriff began to wobble back and forth. His cheeks turned bright red to match the color of his nose. And then he began to weep.
“Help me,” he said, “help me get away. I don’t deserve this. I don’t-”
“Yes you do,” Gavin said. “You deserve every ounce of pain and horror you could ever have. For what you’ve done to this town, to these people, you deserve everything he wants to do. Help me up.”
As soon as he stood, Gavin’s knees went weak and he fell, but Kenna caught him and got under his arm to hold him up.
“You are a despicable man, Alan,” Gavin said. “Despicable in every way I can think of, and many that I cannot, but that will probably occur to me shortly when I’m regretting what I’m about to do.”
Every face turned to the beaten, half-broken man who propped himself up on Kenna’s shoulder.
“If we kill him, and believe me, I know how good it would feel, then we’re no better than he. If we beat him, torture him, and leave him to be slaughtered by the starving prisoners running amok, then that is certainly what he deserves. But it’s also what every single one of us, to a man – or to a woman – wants to end.”
“But Gav, he’s the whole reason we’re fighting this battle. People like him. The English that come up and try to tell us how to run our lives, and then when we refuse, they murder us and steal our land!”
“No.” Gavin said. “It’s not him. He’s a pawn in a game so big that he can’t even see the board. A single cog in a clock. To give him any more power is to give him too much. Alan has no power. He was sent up here, to be the law in a place he hates, a place that the King sees as a lawless wasteland, because he canna even control himself much less anyone else. He grovels to Macdonald and to the others. He runs from victim to victim, torturing, raping and beating. And for what? What’s he gotten himself?”
By then, Alan had joined his weeping with incoherent babbling. Every now and then, he eked out a plea for mercy.
“You’ll get mercy from us – put down your sword, Rodrigo – we’re better than him. All of us are. And so we’re going to give him mercy.”
“Th – thank you. You’re a good man, you’re a g-great man!”
“Don’t start. I said that we were to give you mercy, you wretched sheep’s arse. But I can’t say the same for the court to which you’re delivered.”
John and Lynne began to laugh, Red Ben smiled, and Kenna stroked Gavin’s arm. Only Rodrigo remained angry.
“What about the harm he’s done? What about his undying cruelty and savagery? If he’s taken to some magistrate’s court, he’ll be set free as sure as the sun rises tomorrow. He’ll be back with more men, more power and more-”
“Ach, that’s true and that’s exactly why we’re not taking him to a magistrate’s court.”
“What?” Alan said. “But that’s the law!”
“Aye, it might be the law in England. In England.”
Alan’s blubbering turned back to weeping.
“Pick him up. We’ve got a long ride ahead of us.”
“But, but where are you taking me?”
“Well, I dinna about Kenna, but I’ve a mind to see home again. Ah! Watch the squeezing,” he grinned. “He did a number to me. But as long as we’re going that way, we can leave you in Glasgow if you’d like.”
“If you take me there, I won’t have a chance!”
“Still have more of a chance than anyone gave the people in this prison. If you keep talking, I’m going to change my mind about Rodrigo there sliding his steel in your belly.”
Alan’s mouth snapped shut.
“Ben, get him. Let’s go home.”
Gavin turned to Kenna, and his legs wobbled again but she caught him. “Truth be told I could let him scurry back to England with his tail betwixt his legs and be happy, just so long as I get to carry you back to Fort Mary and give you a herd of red-headed little whelps.”
“Ach, Gavin, you’re a wee bit forward, dinna you think? Haven’t asked me yet.”
“The bowels of a prison’s no place for a proposal,” he said.
“Well then, Gavin Macgregor, you’re just going to have to wait on your plans for a herd of sprouts until you find some place you think to be more fitting.”
He smiled and turned from her, barely able to take his eyes from the deep green of Kenna’s.
“Hang on tight!” Red Ben said, hoisting the sheriff onto his back. “But if you choke me, I’ll be throwin’ you off and letting the prisoners have their way.”
Into the darkness of the hall, walked six pairs of feet.
One pair waggled in the air.
“You go on ahead,” Gavin said to the others. “Kenna and I will hobble along behind. Meet you at the Black’s?”
“Aye,” John and Red Ben said.
“What’re we to do with him?”
“Whatever you like. We’ll hitch him to the back of the horses when we two leave for Fort Mary. But we can decide all that when we get to the house.”
He tugged on Kenna’s arm a bit harder when the others were a little further down the hallway. And then, when she walked under a torch and the orange light bounced off her hair, he reached up, took her shoulders in his hands, and pushed her against the wall.
“Ooh! Gavin, what are you doing?”
“What I shoulda done instead of leaving Fort Mary to come down here and fight. What I shoulda done when I was sixteen year old and looking at you from across a meadow. What I shoulda done every time in my life when I didn’t.”
“Wh – but Gavin, what about Macdonald and all of that?”
“He won’t matter. Word’ll get to the King about this sooner than word about that deal they wanted to push through. And even if it doesn’t, the Earl of Dorchester isn’t going to want to buy a pile of land upon which such wild savages as we dwell.” A twinkle in his deep blue eyes caught Kenna off guard.
“Savages such as you, such as I.”
He kissed her lightly at first, his lips brushing against hers and his hands sliding down her sides.
“Is that what we are, Gavin Macgregor? Savages?”
Gavin pulled away from her, sucking her lip softly between his and tasting every inch of the woman he’d loved for his entire life for the first time. He tilted his head to one side.
“Ach, you may be more savage than me by twice.”
So close that their breath mixed between them, the walls around the pair seemed to vanish. Kenna slid her hands down Gavin’s arms, her fingers bouncing over every little muscle and tendon. She looked down at his chest, then back into his eyes, lost in the ocean she found.
“How did we come to this, Gavin Macgregor?”
“I dinna,” he said. “But I’ll not make the same mistake again.”
“And what mistake is that?”
She closed her eyes and Gavin kissed her along her jaw, behind her ear. Kenna’s skin prickled to life where he kissed, and where the heat from his palms burned through her dress.
“What mistake, Mr. Macgregor?” She said. She moaned softly as his lips moved down her neck to the slope of her shoulder where he pushed aside the collar of her tunic and kissed again. “What mistake won’t you be making?”
“The one where I let you get away. I can’t wait, Kenna. I can’t stop myself. I’m...”
“Shh...” she said putting her finger to Gavin’s lips. “We have an audience.”
Gavin looked to where she tilted her head.
Red Ben Black, John Two-Fingers, Lynne and Rodrigo all stood silently, as though they were waiting for something. Lynne seemed to have something in her eye for all the misting up she was doing. She squeezed John’s hand in hers and pulled him close. Rodrigo had a quirk in the corner of his mouth. John was beaming and gripping Lynne’s hand right back, and Red Ben had a grin that stretched from ear to ear.
The sheriff had evidently been too much for one of them to bear, and was a bit unconscious.
“Go on, you lummox! Don’t make her wait all day! Or night, whichever.” John said.
Lynne elbowed him in the ribs.
Gavin bent one of his knees, and then rather collapsed onto the ground. He held on tight to Kenna’s hand and pulled himself to one knee.
“Kenna Moore,” he said. “Will you do me the honor of making me the happiest man who's ever lived?”
“Ach,” she said blushing. “You want me to make you oats when we get to the Blacks?”
“No, I want you to be my wife.”
Ben, Rodrigo, John and Lynne all leaned forward. No one, except the sheriff, took a breath.
“I thought you said you were going to wait until we were in a better place and hopefully we were alone! I’ll be the happiest woman in the world if you can give me a herd of little red-headed sprouts. Of course I’ll marry you!”
Cheers burst through the prison halls, around the bends and through the bars.
Cheers filled the Edinburgh night as the prisoners streamed out and into freedom.
But inside, the cheers were louder still.
“Get up you oaf,” Kenna said, and kissed Gavin again as soon as he did. “Let’s go home.”
Kenna pulled Gavin to his feet and he threw his arms around her, holding her close against his chest. He kissed her once on the cheek, breathing her in. He kissed her behind the ear, and made her moan.
“What’s this?” He said as his lips found the cord about her neck.
“What do you think?” She pulled out the glass pendant that Macdonald had ripped from her and Olga fixed. “I never lost it.”
“The thistle...”
“Aye, Gavin Macgregor. You had me before we ever spoke a word. Let’s go.”
Arm around her shoulder, Gavin limped and Kenna held his hand tight to her chest.
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THE END