Page 31 of For an Exile’s Heart (Ancient Songs #2)

A stretch of good weather followed, soft summer days when Alba showed them a kindly face. Bradana struggled visibly to get her bearings. Adair watched her without comment, not wishing to add anything to the weight she carried.

Something had changed between them during that night back in the round tower, had deepened and strengthened. He had less reason to ask her questions. She did not doubt him. They had thrown their lot in one with the other, wherever the path might lead.

Yet they did struggle. The long trail began to tell even on the ponies, who had fared, in grazing, far better than they. Wen had not the vigor he’d formerly enjoyed. Bradana had become a thin shadow of herself, and Adair felt his own strength ebbing.

Yet they made love more frequently, the both of them sensing that from their joining came their best sustenance. And at night, when they were somewhere secure upon the breast of Alba, Bradana played her harp for him.

She began it one clear evening when they’d shared a woefully inadequate meal, reminding him shyly, “D’ye remember when ye asked me to make a song for ye?”

“I do.” He lay stretched out with the dying embers of their fire on one side of him and the limitless sky above. Bradana was no more than a silhouette with the harp on her knee.

“I did no’ think I could manage it,” she confessed. “How to capture all that ye are in my music? Funny and bright and deep and beautiful—so many things, ye are. But as we have been riding, a tune has been unfolding in my head. I call it ‘Planxty Adair.’”

She put her fingers to the strings. A shower of notes, a moment’s hesitation, and then the music burst forth. A winding, intimate, and quite complicated tune it was, as magical as the night.

The hound’s head came up. Adair stopped breathing, for he had no need for breath.

That—what he heard—could not be him .

Naught about him was so beautiful. Besides, he heard Alba in this music, the broad breadth of the sky, the bold sweep of a hillside, the strength of the land at night when they lay upon it. He heard Bradana too, her grace and capriciousness. Her endurance. And Wen, regal and steadfast. Even the clop of their ponies’ hooves.

Everything they were, and everything they were to each other, lay in the music. He could have listened to it forever.

And a curious thought entered his mind. If he never had anything more than this, a moment of lying here in the night in Bradana’s company and her music in his ears, it would be enough. For a higher state of living could not be reached. A man could ask no more.

When she finished, when her fingers stilled on the strings, a hush fell over the land and upon Adair’s heart. He broke it only to say, “Bradana, alanna , are ye sure that is for me?”

“My gift to ye.” She set the harp aside and came to him, already loosening the ragged blue dress she wore. “And all that I am.”

They made love there on the strong earth, and Adair could still hear her music in his head.

After that, she played for him often. They traveled south and west, leaving the open moorland and any Pictish structures behind and once more entering dense forest. They still followed signs—the glint of light on the hide of a deer, the flight of birds—so Adair could only conclude later that it was Alba who led them astray.

Or perhaps it was the wind, for as they headed down a slope and into an open area, it blew hard from behind them, fooling even the clever hound’s nose.

They never heard or had any whiff of the riders till they saw them, a band of five or six men mounted like themselves. They appeared from the trees on the far side of the clearing as abruptly as if they’d materialized out of the thin air. Indeed, Adair blinked at them even as Bradana, still ahead of him, drew her pony to a sudden halt.

All this time away, in the wilds of Alba, they had encountered no one other than Pictish hunters at a distance. These too must be a hunting band, for they had bows upon their shoulders. Adair’s shocked eyes also noted a boar, loaded onto an extra pony.

And he recognized the foremost of the riders, a man of middle years, his face deeply seamed by what might be grief.

Mican.

Bradana recognized him also. Her back tensed, and if she had shouted aloud to him, Adair could not have picked up more clearly on her rush of alarm.

By all that is holy. Mican. Here.

That the man—that all of the band—was surprised to see them also, there could be no doubt. Mican knew them in that instant. His eyes grew wide, and it took him only an instant to cry out.

“There! It is she, the false bitch who betrayed my son!” His gaze moved to Adair. “And Earrach’s killer.”

Wen gave a growl, and Adair drew his sword from its loop. These men, out hunting on what could only be their own land, had come armed with only knives and sgian-dubhs , the bows and arrows. Not one of them boasted a sword.

“Come,” Bradana said, and pulled her pony around. “Wen, come.”

The hound obeyed her instantly. She moved her pony, clearly intending to flee. Adair weighed their chances, then eased his mount over behind her, still facing Mican and his men.

“Adair, come!”

He could stay and take responsibility for what he had done—indeed, it was his first instinct, what he had meant to do all this while, and perhaps the reason Alba had led him to this. It had been a fair fight, that in which Earrach had died.

But he had no reason to believe Mican would see it that way or would hear him fairly. He believed Adair had possessed no right to come between Earrach and his bride. To make off with her.

And if this went very badly, this fight he stayed to face, Adair did not want Bradana to see what befell him. Indeed, his greatest concern at that moment was for her.

Over his shoulder he told her, “Go.”

She gave him a stare so incredulous that it needed no words, though she spoke anyway. “Leave ye?”

“Get Wen away. Quick as ye can.” Because he knew she would not agree to go without him, even for the hound’s sake, he added, “I will delay them and catch up wi’ ye.” Five men, for he’d now had time to count them. Six horses. Could he take them all? He was, aye, good with a sword, but the odds predicted doom.

The decision was taken out of Bradana’s hands when Mican shouted, “Get them!”

The party rushed Adair in a group, the man who led the pony dropping its traces. He heard Bradana wheel behind him and Wen leaping into the fray, snarling and snapping at the MacGillean horses. The men had drawn their knives—long hunting knives—but Adair went in whirling his sword around his head.

This was no battle pony he rode, but one who’d existed too long on short rations. It balked at moving in close upon its fellows, which probably saved Mican from losing his head. Adair got a good look at the man’s face, twisted with hate and wearing an ugly grimace.

“Bradana, go! Call off Wen!” For Adair had a premonition that the hound was about to die, either beneath the hooves of the ponies or by arrow, as the men had fallen back from Adair’s fury and lifted their bows.

“Wen,” she called. And with stark terror, “Adair!”

One of the young men in the party had pressed forward past Mican and lunged at Adair with his long knife. Adair laid the man’s arm open and glanced over his shoulder at Bradana.

She did not flee. She would not go without him.

He fell back and turned his mount, the poor beast stamping in confusion. He told Wen, “Come.”

They fled into the forest, back the way they had come, and Mican’s hunting party came after. Adair could hear them all too well, shouting and crashing through the undergrowth, Mican yelling at his men, “Shoot fire upon them!” Arrows darted through the trees and Adair veered away from Bradana, off to one side. If the hunters meant to take anyone down, it would be him.

It might have been the trees that saved them. Their mounts were in poor condition and soon spent, but no one could move quickly through such thick cover, and the three of them began to gain ground. Adair could just glimpse Bradana to his right, with Wen, a gray shadow, at her side.

Then came a yelp. From the edge of his vision, Adair saw the hound falter and go down.

“Wen!” Bradana howled.

Och, by all the gods, nay.

Adair drew his pony up and leaped down. Bradana had stopped also, staring at Wen—who lay stretched on the ground—in horror. The shaft of an arrow protruded from the hound’s right rear haunch.

A shout from behind proved their pursuers had seen them. “Down,” Adair told Bradana. “Get down.” His own pony was not near enough, and they had not a moment to waste.

She obeyed, her eyes fixed on her hound, even as Adair stretched his ears behind them. He heaved Wen up in his arms and draped him over the back of Bradana’s pony, which stood like a rock, too tired to do differently.

“Come,” he told her. “Quick.” His own mount even now picked its way to him. He seized the lead and told Bradana again, “Come—there, where the trees are thickest.”

They went at a dead run, Bradana ahead of Adair with one hand on her hound’s hide. She heeded not Adair’s muffled grunt when a second arrow, as well aimed as the one that had found Wen, took him in the back of his shoulder, the pain so hot and strong that for a moment he saw only light. He dared not make another sound and delay Bradana. Because ahead, to their left, Alba offered dense cover that seemed to part ahead of them and close behind, like sheltering arms.

Too late, for the damage was done.

They stopped perforce when Wen began to slide from Bradana’s pony.

Somehow, before he could reach them, Bradana got the hound down, though he must weigh near as much as she. Tears streamed down her face unheeded as she fell to her knees beside the animal. She did no more than glance at Adair.

“My fault,” she was sobbing. “All my—”

“Bradana, it is not.”

“I must have led us too far west. We are too close to the ocean. We are on Mican’s lands.”

“’Tis not a fatal wound.” Though whether the hound would be able to run…

Adair fell to his knees beside Bradana. Sometime during the last part of their flight, the shaft of the arrow in his shoulder had broken off against an overhanging limb. He remembered that pain as bright as the first. When she glanced at him now through her tears, she did not mark the injury.

Yet something in his face must have alerted her, for she stopped weeping abruptly, and her gaze moved to the patch of red spreading across his tunic.

“Adair! By the gods!”

“Hush,” he told her. “Silent as a hare. They are still out there, looking.”

All they could do was hold their breath and hope the danger passed them by.