Page 27 of For an Exile’s Heart (Ancient Songs #2)

T he hound must have left them and gone hunting during the night, for when Adair and Bradana awakened, he had a dead rabbit laid across his paws and looked immensely proud of himself.

Bradana exclaimed and accepted the gift with much praise for her hound. She moved off to the stream to skin and clean her prize, and Adair sat up. He took stock of himself.

He felt better, though far from what he could call well. The pain in his shoulder was considerable, but to his great relief, the feeling in both his arm and fingers had returned.

He rose. He and Wen followed Bradana to the stream, a rill that tumbled, chuckling, down from the slope above.

“Where are we?”

She glanced up at him, her hair in a tangle escaped from the fancy arrangement it had been given yesterday, and her eyes shadowed. “I ha’ no idea.”

“Are we still on Kendrick’s land?”

“Likely not. We traveled far yesterday.”

He looked at the rabbit and his stomach rumbled. “Do we dare have a fire?” He would much rather eat his food cooked but would take it any way he might.

She glanced around them. They still could not see down into the glen below, for mist had tumbled from the mountain above and filled it.

“I think so.” She looked stricken. “I did no’ bring a flint. I usually carry one, but I am no’ in my regular clothing, only this.” She indicated the blue gown she wore with disdain. Wedding finery.

“Do not fret. I ha’ one in my pocket. My da always said, do not be caught without a flint or a knife.”

“Aye, so.” She looked relieved.

He went off and began gathering deadfall for a fire, feeling better rather than worse for the movement. A few days away, he thought, to give tempers in the settlement time to calm, give Mican a chance to leave as Bradana had said, and they would go back. He would face what he had done. A man had to accept his consequences.

He laid the fire and then found he could not use the flint with only one good hand. He passed it to Bradana when she returned and watched her set the game to roast.

“While that is cooking, let me look again at your shoulder.”

He sat stoic and quiet while she peeled away the bloodied bandages, went to the stream and washed them, cleaned the wound as best she could, and covered it once more. Neither of them spoke, but he could see the worry in her eyes.

“Bradana,” he said at last, “I will be all right. I have taken wounds in the past.”

“So dire as this?”

Mayhap not. The skirmishes in which he’d engaged had resulted in slashes and glancing blows only.

But he did not want her to worry.

He tipped up her chin with a finger and gazed into her eyes. “I will be well, alanna .”

The breath hitched in her throat. “I canna lose ye. I do not know how I could go on.”

“Ye will not lose me. Am I not right here?”

He kissed her because he could do nothing else, and felt some of her fear and tension drain away.

“Do not fret over it,” he told her when the kiss ended. “Am I not already better than I was?” More likely, he thought, to worry about what would become of them out here in the wild.

This land, so unlike the one he loved back home, that wanted to whisper to him.

“Aye,” she sighed. “Ye be young and strong. Nay need to think the worst.”

“Which direction do we head today?”

“East,” she said without hesitation.

That gave him a qualm. “Farther away from the coast?” Into Alba’s dark heart.

“Aye, for we canna go home yet. And northward lie Mican’s lands. We dare not intrude upon him. I thought if we travel inland and circle back toward the south—the chief who holds lands there is neither friendly nor hostile to Kendrick. We might be able to go home that way. But no’ yet.”

He must leave this in her hands. He must trust her even as he trusted these bonds that united them.

They divided their meal into three strictly equal portions and moved out after making sure the fire was covered with dirt. The mist cloaked them as they skirted the bulk of the mountain and crossed the rill. It swallowed them as they picked their way steadily eastward.

A magnificent sight met them when the sun rose and set the mist aflame. They rode into a great, white-gold sea of light. To Adair, it felt like moving through a magical doorway into another realm.

Another world.

Someone should make a song about it, he thought as his pony followed Bradana’s. She should, and play it upon her harp. Though no listener in any hall would believe such a tale of travelers transported from one world to the next, no matter how skilled the bard’s words and fingers.

The mist rose before the sun, trailing streamers upward, revealing a scene of such beauty that it made the breath catch in Adair’s throat. Below them, far below, lay a glen. The green, shaggy shoulders of the mountains stretched away, following the path of a long, silvery loch that seemed to beckon into infinity. A thousand colors of green there were, all light and darkness, and wild to the heart.

Would this foreign land be kind of them? Already it had guided Adair to the greatest gift a man might receive. And a load of trouble.

He let his gaze rest on the hair, honey fair in the new light, of the girl who rode ahead of him. What he felt for her both sustained and terrified him.

Pray, be good to her , he beseeched the wild, eternal land, if not to me .

*

For three days they traveled east and then northward, their way south being blocked by a series of long glens. Wen kept them fed. Sometimes the food proved barely palatable, a mangled bird caught by a wing or a limp-necked rodent. Sometimes they dared not have a fire and Bradana nearly choked on the raw game. She remained grateful for every bite.

Adair had placed his life and safety in her hands. She could not fail him. This, despite the fact that she knew not precisely where they were, nor how far they had gone from home. Nor could she tell if they were being followed, though she doubted it.

Who would come after them? Kendrick? Would he send her brothers?

More likely Mican would pursue them out of a desire for revenge. He had been very angry. Not the sort of man to let the death of a son go unanswered.

She thought much on that as they rode into a land big and wild enough to engulf them. It had been a fair fight, that in which Adair had felled Earrach. Everyone there had seen so.

Would that matter to Mican? Quite likely not. She might eventually be able to argue it to Kendrick when they went back.

Not quite yet.

Meanwhile, she must keep Adair safe and out of danger’s reach. She dared not travel too far inland, for the kingdom of Dalriada, settled by chiefs from Erin, had but a fingerhold on Alba’s west coast, wrenched away from the tribes of blue men who still held the interior.

She could not lead her love from one danger straight into another.

That he was her love, she had no doubt. No mere girlish emotion, this, that made her fingers tingle and caused a flutter in her heart. Though her fingers did tingle with desire when she looked at him, and though everything about him pleased her beyond expression.

This was need, more that aught else. In a curious way, it seemed she’d been looking for Adair MacMurtray all her life without knowing. Missing him without suspecting it.

Was that why she’d never more than given a glance to any other man? Why she had not fought as hard as she should when Kendrick proposed the marriage alliance with Earrach?

She’d wanted no one, had expected she never would. She had not known that she wanted a man she hadn’t yet encountered.

Out here, living upon the face of the land with almost nothing to support them, she suspected that they would stumble over each other’s faults and fall into disagreements. She awaited it day after day. They were short on sleep, worried, and ill fed.

It did not happen. Adair healed steadily, and she could feel his strength return despite the short provisions. He had a deep well of vitality, and when she felt at her worst—most worried and desperate—she need only catch a smile from him to benefit from it.

And then there were the signs. Curious occurrences at moments when she hesitated over their course or direction. A bird might suddenly fly up with a harsh cry, warning them of a steep drop ahead. Several times, stags appeared and seemed to guide them onward.

“Follow him,” Adair told her then.

She could not shake the notion that Alba herself watched over them and also led them, for soon enough Bradana had no hope of guessing where they were.

Or how to get home.