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Sisters.

She was still finding the news that her parents were not truly her parents or her sisters, blood sisters, difficult to accept. She had avoided thinking about it since it left her feeling troubled. Her sisters and parents would always be just that to her, but she could not help but wonder who she truly was and where she had come from and why had her mother felt the need to give her away. Where was her true home?

Sky glanced at her husband, his eyes intense as he gazed around keeping alert to his surroundings and the troop of warriors that surrounded them. Home was now wherever her husband was, and she so wished that they were back at the lovely cottage in the woods.

He caught her glance and brought his horse beside hers. “Something troubles you?”

“Many things,” she admitted.

“All will go well,” he assured her. “You will have a good, safe home at Clan Ravinsher.”

“People are not very accepting of me,” she reminded, though her heart was touched by how easily he had accepted her affliction. From the first, it was as if he had not noticed it at all.

“They will accept you,” he said as though he declared it an edict.

Her husband might be confident about that, but she was not.

“We are almost home,” he said with a sense of pride and rode off when a warrior shouted out to him.

They entered a narrow path in the forest and Sky watched Slayer turn his horse around and hastily head back toward her. The attack came before he could reach her. Vicious battle roars filled the air as a mixed troop of warriors poured out of the forest.

Sky froze for only a moment, but it was long enough for a man to knock her off her horse. As she scrambled to her feet, she grabbed a sizeable stone ready to throw it at the man, but four ravens had descended upon him stabbing at his head and face with their beaks, keeping him from harming her. She was suddenly grabbed roughly from behind, the foul odor letting her know he was foe not friend, and she swung her hand back smashing the man in the head. He stumbled back and when she turned another raven was already stabbing the man’s head with his beak.

She hurried a glance around and saw Slayer slicing through the barrage of mercenaries to reach her, his face contorted in fury, and her only thought was to get to him as quickly as possible. She dodged and bent past men in combat and jumped over fallen bodies and barely missed hands that reached out to grab her. She was only a short distance away, Slayer having gotten closer in his attempt to reach her, when she was grabbed by the arm, swung around to face a large man who quickly lifted her and swung her over his shoulder and ran into the woods.

Sky battered his back with her fists not that it seemed to do any good, but she kept at it. He was quick for a large man, and she feared he would get too far with her for Slayer to reach her before it was too late. But Slayer would find her. He told her he would always find her, though she would do what she could to make it easier for him.

Her hands stopped their pummeling, and a chill ran through her, hearing a blood-curdling roar. It echoed through the woods like a beast on the prowl and she knew it was her husband. It stopped the man abruptly and she felt him shiver before he continued running. It was only a short time later that he again stopped abruptly.

“REALEASE HER NOW!”

Sky wanted to shout with joy upon hearing her husband’s powerful voice, but how had he gotten in front of the man?

Suddenly Gallowglass warriors descended on them, leaving no room for the man to escape.

“I mean her no harm,” the man called out.

“Then release her,” Slayer demanded.

The man eased Sky off his shoulder but held onto her arm once she was on her feet.

“Let her go,” Slayer warned with an icy anger.

“She must come with me,” the man said.

Slayer walked toward them. “She stays with me.”

Sky knew the forest sounds, what belonged and what didn’t. What sounds were no reason for alarm and what sounds were cause for worry. And she saw in her husband’s eyes that he had caught the sound too. The soft, whirling sound of an arrow. He was on her in a flash, shielding her with his body as he took her to the ground with such force that her arm was ripped from the man’s grasp.

Soon after, she heard the large man fall not far from them and right after that her husband shouted, “Find the archer!”

Slayer braced his hand on the ground to hover above her.

She answered the question she knew was on his tongue. “I am unharmed.”

He stood and helped her to her feet and feeling her a bit unsteady, he braced her against him, keeping his arm firm around her.

“You should not hold me so intimately,” she whispered, reminding him that no one was to suspect that there was anything intimate between them.