They found the friars near Rannoch Mill. Their bodies lay scattered across the grassy riverbank, where they’d stopped to water their horses. Fear gripping his entrails, Rory dismounted. He scanned the sprawled, dark lumps in the moonlight, counting frantically.
Four.
None of them, thank God, the Poor Clare.
He drew in a bracing draft of the night air and realized he’d stopped breathing. Christ Almighty, how many corpses had he alone been responsible for in ten years of warfare on land and sea? The sight of dead men had never twisted his guts into a knot before. He looked down at his shaking hands, encased in the fine leather gauntlets, and cursed softly.
Joanna had to be alive and well. He’d find her, and she’d be as impudent and saucy and exasperating as ever.
That’s all that mattered.
“Over here!” Keir called from a patch of bracken fern. “This one’s still alive.” He crouched on the ground and lifted the friar’s head in the crook of his arm.
Rory hurried over and dropped to one knee. Just as he’d expected, the injured man was no tonsured monk, but a Macdonald. “Where’s Lady MacLean?” he demanded, his voice hoarse in his urgency.
The clansman stared at Rory through the glazed, sunken eyes of the mortally wounded. He’d been stabbed several times. Blood soaked the front of the priestly habit he wore and trickled from the corner of his mouth. He’d die eventually. But death wouldn’t be quick, and it wouldn’t be easy. His lids drifted shut as he started to slip into unconsciousness.
Rory grasped a handful of the thick wool at his throat and jerked him up roughly. “Goddammit, you bastard, where’s my wife?”
The dying man’s eyelids flickered, and for a brief second he seemed to recognize Rory. “They took Lady Joanna and Andrew,” he said on a shallow breath, then coughed up more blood.
Rory shook him, refusing to allow the wretch to black out before he’d answered his questions. “Who? Who took them?”
“Brigands,” the Macdonald answered on a gurgle of blood. “Caught us unawares. A dozen, maybe more.”
After rolling the other three bodies over with the toe of his brogue and reaching down to feel for a pulse, Lachlan joined Rory and Keir. He shook his head, indicating the soldier before them was the only one left alive.
Rory released his hold on the robe and rose to his feet. “Put him out of his misery,” he said.
Keir quickly and efficiently slit the fellow’s throat, wiped his dirk on the coarse black wool, and returned it to its sheath.
“She’s alive,” Lachlan assured his older brother, compassion softening his perceptive gaze. “Those bodies are still warm. They can’t be far away.”
Taut with rage, Rory swung up into the saddle. He gathered the reins, calming Fraoch with a steadying pat, as he waited impatiently for Keir and Lachlan to mount.
“We’ll follow the loch,” he said. “Hopefully they’ve camped in the woods, not knowing we’re close on their heels. In the moonlight, we might be able to spot their smoke above the trees.”
The three brothers cantered their steeds across the new May grass, moving westward along the north bank of Loch Leven, with the thick stands of birch and oak on the hillsides to their right.
Still dressed in the brown habit of a Poor Clare, Joanna sat with her back braced against an ancient oak, bound, gagged, and tied to the tree with a fat rope. Similarly trussed, Andrew watched her from across the campfire, his eyes stark with terror above the strip of linen that covered his mouth. He wore the black robe of an Observantine monk. Its hood had fallen back to reveal his shock of thick brown hair, disheveled and falling over his wide forehead.
Thirteen men lay about the campsite sleeping; two more stood guard along its periphery. They were broken men, with no clan of their own. Desperate brigands, who gave their allegiance to none but their fellow outcasts.
When they’d taken Joanna and Andrew prisoner, their leader, a thickset man with the posture and build of a soldier, had assured her they’d not be harmed. The religious disguises hadn’t fooled him. He knew their identity, for he’d called them each by name. She assumed they were to be held until Ewen paid for their release with bags of gold from Kinlochleven’s coffers.
In answer to Joanna’s heartfelt prayers to every saint she could remember, not one of the men tried to molest her. Aside from binding her tightly to prevent her escape, they’d treated her with polite deference.
She leaned her head against the trunk’s rough bark and closed her eyes. Her wrists and ankles ached from the snug cords; her body felt stiff and sore from being anchored to the tree. To make matters worse, the itchy wool robe had raised welts on her shoulders and arms, and the linen wimple chafed her neck and chin.
Tears trickled from beneath her lowered lids. The past two nights should have been the most wonderful nights in her life. The kind of nights every young maiden dreamed of and longed for with such hopeful anticipation. The tales of Tristram and Isolde, of Fraoch and Mai, of Launcelot and Guinevere had entranced her as a child. She’d envisioned a romantic bower, a breathless meeting of two souls destined to love each other for eternity, and nights of courtly, tender passion.
The thought of what had actually happened made her half-sick.
After she’d threatened him with the crossbow, MacLean had stormed from their bedchamber, leaving her to cry herself to sleep in heartbroken misery. Who’d ever heard of a bridegroom leaving his bride alone in their bed on their wedding night?
In all the tales of knights and ladies she’d ever read, all the stories of Celtic heroes and heroines she’d ever been told, Joanna had never heard of such a spiteful, ill-mannered, contemptible thing. God’s truth, she’d never forgive him.
And that very afternoon, he’d nearly succeeded in seducing her in the hayloft like a foolish, pea-brained dairymaid. Even now, her cheeks burned with humiliation.
Tied to the oak for the last three hours, she’d had more than enough time to review the events of the past two days. Her only excuse for accepting the kisses and fondling of that depraved fiend was that she’d suffered from a transient bout of lunacy. How else could she explain her willingness, eagerness even, to have him touch her so intimately? Godsakes, she hated him!
She had to hate him.
He was a MacLean, and she was a Macdonald.
She had no choice but to hate him.
And to seek an annulment.
When the permission came from Rome, she’d follow her clan’s wishes and marry Andrew.
That consoling thought should have fortified Joanna’s resolve. It should have made her eager to escape from the brigands’ clutches. Yet some strange, pathetic voice inside her beleaguered brain reasoned that, during the time she was being held for ransom, neither the annulment of her vows nor the marriage to her handsome cousin could take place. And for some strange, pathetic reason, that fact held more consolation than her inevitable rescue.
A rustle of movement stirred in the trees near Joanna, disrupting her unhappy musings. She opened her eyes, expecting to see some small forest creature skulking about the edge of the encampment.
What she saw brought her thundering heart to a standstill.
Not ten paces away, one of the sentries crumpled slowly and noiselessly to the ground. She caught the flash of a blade in the moonlight as the shadowy figure that lowered the inert body to the grass withdrew his dirk from just below the dead man’s rib cage. She knew the man was dead. Nothing but a corpse would lie that still.
Not a second later, the sentinel on the far side of the camp gave a strangled grunt and fell at Andrew’s feet, his throat slashed by another intruder. Blood spattered across the lad’s dusty brogues and checkered short hose. In the firelight, Andrew’s eyes widened in shock, then turned to seek Joanna’s steadying gaze. There was nothing either of them could do but watch the carnage that followed.
With broadsword in his right hand and dirk in his left, Rory nudged the man sleeping closest to Joanna. The heavy-set brigand scrambled to his feet with a shout of alarm, and Rory buried his sword in the man’s thick chest.
Lachlan scattered the brigands’ horses, sending them galloping through the surrounding woods. Then he joined his two brothers in the fray, slashing at his adversaries with blades in both hands.
Rory caught the next bandit, rushing at him from behind, sword upraised, with a downward thrust of his dirk. Pivoting to meet his third attacker, he sliced across the burly fellow’s solid torso in a vicious upward blow.
Rory glanced around the clearing. Lachlan and Keir had dispatched two brigands each. In less than four minutes, the brothers had killed nine men, including the sentries. Not one of his wife’s abductors would remain alive.
So terrified she could scarcely breathe, Joanna watched her rescuers slay the remaining outlaws—who’d been trapped in the center of the camp—in a merciless display of close-quarter fighting that made her blood run cold.
With an almost casual elegance, Rory, Lachlan, and Keir each brought down two men at a time, one foe with the broadsword, the other with the dirk. In seconds there was no one left to kill. Keir and Lachlan paused, bloodied weapons in their lowered hands, and looked at one another with expressions of exhilaration.
Godsakes, they’d enjoyed it!
“Maybe we should have let one of the bastards live long enough to answer some questions,” Lachlan said jovially, his breathing smooth and regular. His black bonnet, with the two chief’s feathers, hadn’t even been dislodged from his reddish-brown hair.
“What for?” MacLean asked. He wiped both blades on the clothing of one of his victims and then sheathed his sword. Stepping lithely over the littered corpses, he moved in Joanna’s direction.
“We already knew they were guilty,” Keir said with a grin as he methodically cleaned his weapons. “Why waste our time or theirs?”
Her mouth dry with fear, Joanna watched her husband advance, dirk in hand. Unlike his two brothers, MacLean wasn’t smiling. The sharp swing of his plaid as he strode across the bloodstained grass gave clear warning that he wasn’t very pleased with his bride at the moment.
The unmitigated fury blazing in his eyes now made his past anger seem like mere disgruntlement, and the ferocity emanating from his large frame reminded her of all the reasons he’d become known throughout Scotland as the King’s Avenger.
He’d just killed seven men in as many minutes, and from the squared set of his jaw, he looked ready to murder her. He would become an exceedingly wealthy widower if he did, with only his two bloodthirsty siblings as witnesses to the truth. How capable was he of resisting such temptation?
She pressed back against the solid trunk, trying to widen the distance, if only infinitesimally, between her and her furious husband.
“Mmph,” she warned him through her gag.
He didn’t bother to answer. He severed the thick rope that bound her to the tree with his dirk and then cut the bonds at her ankles. Grabbing the cord that tied her wrists, he looped the doubled length of the rope through it and yanked her to her feet.
The Poor Clare habit had belonged to a much taller woman, and Joanna tripped over its sagging hem.
“Tamph omph thh gah,” she pleaded, stumbling awkwardly against him. She clutched the brown wool garment in her tied hands and lifted it scant inches off the ground.
MacLean ignored her. Holding the rope in one hand, he led her like a haltered cow on its way to market toward the three horses that Lachlan had brought into the small clearing. In the meantime, Keir had released Andrew and removed his bonds.
The lad immediately tore the cloth from his mouth. “Th-they came up fr-from be-behind us,” he stuttered, looking wildly from one brother to the other. “W-we didn’t have a ch-chance.”
The trio of grim-faced warriors towered over him. They were liberally splattered with blood—none of which was their own. Next to the tall lairds—all three in their twenties, and all three with magnificent physiques—the spoiled adolescent’s immaturity became painfully apparent, even to himself.
Keir’s scornful gaze skewered the frightened lad, and he shook his head in disgust. “You wouldn’t have had a chance, you jelly-footed gowk, if the Angel Gabriel had blown his trumpet to announce their arrival.”
Joanna tried to bring her hands up to her mouth to pull away the gag, but MacLean refused to allow it. By the simple expedient of holding on to the rope, he kept her arms securely anchored below her waist.
“Lemph mph goph!” she said, trying to jerk free.
He didn’t bother to look around.
“What shall we do with the laddie?” Lachlan asked his older brother in a bored tone. His green-eyed gaze paused for a moment on Joanna, and she could have sworn he was choking back laughter.
“I say we geld him here and now,” Keir suggested with a corsair’s grin. “’Twill be the last time he tries to steal another man’s wife.”
Andrew’s face turned as white as curds. Clearly nauseated by the conversation, he clamped one hand over his mouth. He looked at his cousin beseechingly. “J-Joanna,” he gasped through his cupped fingers. “T-tell th-them it-it wasn’t m-my idea!”
“Doph hmph hiph!” she pleaded.
Her husband’s icy gaze flicked over her, his tacit warning more effective than the gag. She didn’t say another word.
“Take the boy to Mingarry Castle,” MacLean told Lachlan. “Keir can ride back to Kinlochleven and tell his father what’s happened. We’ll leave it to Ewen to talk his son’s way back into the king’s good graces. Maybe he can save the damnfool idiot from hanging for treason.”
Keir held the point of his dirk to Andrew’s smooth cheek. “Why don’t I carve up these fine, fair features a wee bit?” he offered gleefully. “Just enough to keep the lassies from drooling all over him.”
MacLean paused, apparently considering his youngest brother’s suggestion. Andrew bent over, retching in the grass at their feet. Joanna stepped toward him in sympathy, pulling the rope taut in her husband’s strong fingers.
“Take the lad home, Lachlan,” the chief of Clan MacLean said in a cold, clipped voice. “My wife and I are going to spend a little time alone together.”
Lachlan mounted and pulled the miserable sixteen-year-old up behind him. “Come on, laddie,” he said with an encouraging smile. “We’d best be going before my brother changes his mind, and you end up leaving some of your favorite body parts here on the grass.”
Keir swung up on his chestnut. In the firelight, his emerald gaze twinkled as he touched his blue bonnet in a polite salute. “Lady MacLean.”
Joanna realized belatedly that he’d likely been jesting.
Godsakes, ’twas a jolly macabre sense of humor he had!
Without another word, the two brothers rode into the trees, taking her grateful and very relieved cousin with them.
“Wamph!” she called to their backs. “Domph goh!”
Joanna stopped short, suddenly and painfully aware of her circumstances. Alone in the woods with her irate husband, hands tied, mouth gagged, and surrounded by the hacked, mangled corpses of fifteen men, nearly half of whom he’d killed unaided, she felt her body grow clammy beneath the coarse wool habit. The pleated linen wimple felt like a noose around her neck.
Hauling on her bonds, MacLean brought Joanna to him, inch by terrifying inch. His sharp-featured visage, cold and implacable, never seemed so menacing. His contemptuous sea-dragon’s gaze moved over the nun’s garb with insulting deliberation.
Joanna dug in her heels and tried to resist the inevitable.
With a grimace of irritation, he brought her nearer, till she could feel his warm breath floating across her upturned face. Their hostile gazes locked in wordless communion.
She wanted to look away, but couldn’t. Determined not to cringe, even if he raised his hand to her, she braced her shoulders and stiffened her spine.
“I can see you like to play games,” he said, his low baritone vibrant with an unholy humor. “First you impersonate a stable boy, then you’re an archer; this evening you pretended to be Pan, and now you’re masquerading as a nun. What kind of game shall we play next, wife? Captor and captive? We might both find that one entertaining. I know I would.”
“Stomph imph,” she pleaded.
He bent closer still until they were nose to nose. “I have to warn you, though,” he added, almost gently, “I like my sport rough.”
He caught her by the waist, lifted her up, and tossed her over Fraoch’s withers. She landed on her stomach with a muffled scream.
Then MacLean climbed into the saddle, kicked the black stallion’s flanks, and the spirited horse took off at a gallop.