| |
Obscure noises infiltrated the calm blackness, and Iain tried to clear his brain of the pain radiating through his entire body. Pain? He smiled. Whether in his mind or physically, he didn’t know and didn’t much care at that moment—he felt pain, excruciating agony, but that made him happy. He must still be alive.
Instantly, another thought struck him. Was there pain after death? No. The pain was real, not something he perceived but a horror he felt in his flesh. He breathed in the stench of blood and death.
But it wasn’t his death.
Iain pushed the pain out of his mind and listened with his ever-so-alive ears. Confusion filled his dim mind at the muffled noises floating around his still form. Sounds of battle so far away, he thought they might be a memory.
He forced his eyes open and compelled the fog from his mind. Where was he? A distant gun fired. All at once, he remembered, and he turned his throbbing head, pulling his side as he did so. He wrapped a hand over the site of new pain and felt sticky dampness covering his side. Examining his fingers, all he could see was black in the dim light. He lifted them to his nose and confirmed it was blood. He stilled. He was still alive, but not knowing how bad the wound was, he wasn’t sure for how long.
He risked raising his aching head a touch to take in the battlefield. Too many bodies to count lay strewn over the moor. In the distance, more gunfire echoed, signaling that the battle wasn’t over yet. Iain peered over the still bodies.
The English army fired at the backs of what was left of the fleeing Jacobite army, shadows in the lessening light, some falling, some outrunning the distance of the guns. He, apparently, had been left for dead.
Weary and feeling lost, Iain let the darkness take him under once more.
He woke again to the feeling of movement. Strange sounds carried to his ears. He opened his eyes and snapped them shut again at the sight above him. Brown hair falling about a beautiful face—a woman? She had her arms wedged in his armpits and was hauling him from the field, all the while grunting with the effort and, Iain was reasonably certain, cursing quietly. She looked down, and her wide blue eyes immediately captured his gaze.
She stopped and dropped him. “Sorry,” she said, sitting down beside his head, “but you startled me. Can you walk by yourself? I hope so, because you’re too heavy for me to carry much further.”
Furrowing his brow at her dialect, Iain looked around. Darkness had enveloped the moor, and he could hear no noise.
She nodded as if in understanding. “I think they’ve all gone. I got you off the field and under a shrub last night but had to leave you there because they came back and cleared the field of the dead and wounded. I snuck back tonight and couldn’t believe you were still there”—she glanced at him—“and still breathing.”
Thankful to be out of the enemy’s clutches, even for a small time, Iain cooed, “Tapadh leibh, caile.”
She sniffed. Drawing her cloak up, she wiped her face and gazed at Iain with sad eyes.
He could only stare as if nothing else mattered at that moment but to keep looking into those stormy blue eyes for all time. Her gaze widened, and she turned her head.
“I don’t understand,” she whispered in English.
Her accent was unfamiliar. Perhaps she was from another part of England Iain wasn’t familiar with. He narrowed his eyes at her. “Sassenach?”
“English? No . . . um, yes, I speak a kind of English.”
He turned his mind to thinking in English. He’d learned it well at Glasgow University but hadn’t had many occasions to use it since then. She said she wasn’t English, but what did she mean by “a kind of English”? Did she even know what she was? Mayhap she had hit her head. “I will speak English, and I said ‘thank ye, lass.’”
She turned her gaze to his face, but he noted she didn’t make eye contact again. With a wry smile, she said, “I’m just glad you’re not dead.”
He raised his eyebrows. His head throbbed, and with every movement, dizziness threatened to overtake him, but he saw the fear in her eyes. She was worried about him. He wondered if he should have known her. Was she one of the peasants he’d befriended in the last village he and his men visited before the battle? Perhaps, but although he was probably the only one who wasn’t completely drunk that night, he still couldn’t remember. He wondered idly if that night was the last night he’d ever be happy again, before turning his thoughts back to the matter at hand.
Regarding her once more, he decided he would have remembered her no matter how drunk he was. She was a bonny lass. Even in the darkness, she shone above all other women he had met in his life, and he couldn’t look away from her round, now blue-gray eyes dominating her smooth-skinned face. He only just stopped himself from reaching out and touching her sun-kissed skin.
Had he died? Was she his angel, the one to take him to the hereafter?
He tore his gaze from her face too quickly, his brain swirling around inside his skull. He pressed his hands over his temples and stared out over the dark moor. The lass had told him he wasn’t dead.
Turning carefully so as not to stir his brain again, he said, “They are all gone, but they will be back again when it is light to make certain none were left behind.”
She glanced at a lone tree between them, and the battlefield then stared at him with blank eyes. Pulling her cloak around her, she stood up and scanned the area as if she were deciding which way to go.
Was she thinking of leaving him there?
Iain gritted his teeth at the pain in his head and tried giving her his most charming smile. “I think the best course for us would be to return to yer village.”
She shook her head, loose strands of brown hair swishing about her ears. “Village? Ah, no, that’s the first place they’ll look.”
She took a step, and thinking she was indeed leaving, he pulled on her cloak. It snapped out of her hands and revealed the strangest attire Iain had ever seen. He gasped, his eyes popping at the tightness of her black trousers on her legs. Her white shirt was so thin, he was certain he could see her flesh through the flimsy material below her neck. The cut of her black coat was as a man’s formal dress but shorter, much shorter.
Irritation washed over her face as she grappled with the sides of her cloak, replacing it over her body.
Iain had never seen the likes of her before. Her immoral clothes and her strange dialect had him backing up against the trunk of a tree. “Who . . . what are ye?”
“Never mind that now. Can you stand up?”
Iain couldn’t move. He just sat staring at the angelic vision, wondering if he was delirious. Mayhap she was a faerie or a witch. Considering the way she was dressed, Iain’s mind turned to a glastig. She was beautiful enough to put a spell on any man. A shiver ran down Iain’s back as he recalled that glastigs, like all sirens, killed the men they enchanted.
Keeping as still as possible, he peered at her. The full moon’s rays inching past the clouds proved her hair to be more red than brown, and he decided she had to be an angel. With stray tendrils loosely falling about her heart-shaped face, she couldn’t possibly be anything else.
She turned to the left, and he could just make out the first curves of a braid.
He glared at her. “Nae human has such perfectly formed brows.”
She looked at him, confusion springing into her eyes, but then she let out a short laugh. “Well, I do, buster.” Those same brows drew together, and she mumbled, “At least for the time being.”
Iain wondered at her speech. The way she said buster sounded like a curse.
She pulled on his good arm before he could ponder for too long. “At least try to get up yourself. I can’t carry you.”
“We should wait to make sure we are alone,” he argued. “If there’s anyone out there, they’ll see us in a heartbeat if we try to move now.”
She looked about again and sighed. “Fine.”
The reluctant surrender in that one word told Iain that she didn’t like relinquishing control one bit. Witch or angel, he would learn soon enough. First, he needed her to help him stay alive.
They waited in the ever-growing silence until he was certain no one was about. He took a moment to study her as stealthily as he could. She appeared to be alone. But why would such a bonny lass be alone on Drumossie Moor?
“Why are ye oot here all alone?”
Her blue eyes sparkled as she thought for a moment before speaking. “I got lost.”
“Why didnae ye stay hidden or run as far away from this place as ye could? Why did ye stay?”
“I didn’t know where to go, and I was hiding; at least, until I saw you move.” Her shoulders slumped as she sighed. “I couldn’t very well leave you there. I didn’t know how badly you were wounded, and once I had the thought that your enemy might come back and finish the job, I had to get you out.”
“Ye could have been killed.”
“Yeah, I thought about that while I was dragging you off the field. Anyway, should we go now?”
Taking her arm and forcing his leg muscles to cooperate, Iain managed to get to his feet. His head still filled with agony every time he moved it, but the pain in his side wasn’t as bad as he would have expected. Mayhap the wound wasn’t severe. He paused in his thoughts. Or mayhap it was so bad his body was masking the pain. He’d heard of people losing limbs and not feeling the injury until much later.
He gazed at the beautiful but scared angel. “There’s a blackhouse not far from here. The Redcoats will have already searched it, as it lies in their wake.”