Page 9 of Highlander Redeemed (Guardians of the Targe #3)

S COTIA SKIDDED TO a stop as she cleared the forest. Only auld Peigi was there, huddled near the cookfire as if ’twas the middle of winter rather than early summer.

“Where is everyone?” Duncan asked as he passed Scotia.

“Och, there ye be,” Peigi said, pushing herself to her feet. “Ceit’s wee lassie has wandered away. She thought the bairn was napping in the cave, but when she went to take a keek, the child was nowhere to be found. Everyone is out looking for her.”

“Maisie?” As Scotia said the child’s name she suddenly knew where the tow-headed toddler was, as if someone had placed the knowledge in her brain without her awareness.

“Come with me,” she said, grabbing Duncan’s hand and pulling him after her.

She kept saying the name over and over in her head, as if it were a lodestone drawing her toward the child.

“Where are we going?” Duncan asked, pulling free of her hold before her touch distracted him from their search. “Slow down, Scotia, we need to look for sign if we are to be of any help finding the child.”

“I ken where she is, Duncan.” She did not slow down, nor look back at him. She just kept climbing straight up the steep side of the ben, though her breath was already growing ragged.

“How do you ken?” he asked, right on her heels.

“That I do not understand, but when I said her name, I knew she was above the caves. She is caught in some brambles. ”

They hurried up the steep benside as fast as they could. Duncan called out the toddler’s name every now and then, but they heard nothing.

“If you are wrong about this, Scotia, then we are wasting valuable daylight when we could be looking for her in a more methodical, less ... strange ... way.”

“I am not wrong. She is—” She stopped then, closed her eyes, and said the name again in her mind.

“She is ...” She turned a little to her left and looked into a bramble patch, and there, just at the base of a large stone she must have fallen from, far enough into the prickly dense arching stems to be hard to see, slept the child, her thumb in her cherub mouth.

Her gown was caught on the thorns, and her face and chubby little arms were scratched in many places, as if she’d tried to extricate herself from the brambles.

Duncan slipped his dirk free of its sheath and began cutting away the bramble canes just as the child’s eyes opened wide. She let out a piercing wail and reached for Scotia, then the cry changed to one of pain and she recoiled from the thorns, once more plugging her thumb into her mouth.

Scotia knelt down, and reached in as far as she could, though the thorns dug into her arm and pulled at her gown, to let Maisie grip her finger with her free hand.

Her eyes were big and blue, and the tracks of dried tears stained her fat cheeks.

“’Twill be all right with you, soon, Maisie.

You ken braw Duncan, aye?” She saw the girl’s gaze shift from Scotia’s face to Duncan’s then back again.

“He has come to free you, and I will be right here until he does.”

“Just a few more,” Duncan said as he cut another long cane, only to find it was tangled in Maisie’s gown.

“Hold still, sweetling,” Scotia said, cooing at the child to keep the increasingly fretful wean calm as Duncan freed the last of the thorns from her ripped clothing.

“Ah, there now,” she said as Duncan lifted the toddler out of her nest of brambles, and handed her out to Scotia.

Settled on Scotia’s hip, Maisie looked up at her, shoved her thumb back in her mouth, then burst into loud, heart-rending wails.

Fat tears streamed down her face, and no matter how much Scotia swayed and patted her back, the child would not calm.

“Maisie? Maisie!” A woman’s frantic voice came from below them.

“’Tis her mother, Ceit,” Scotia said.

“We have her,” Duncan called. “She is safe. Stay there and we will bring her to you!” He took the child from Scotia and began the tricky descent down the crumbly rock face of the ben, stopping here and there to hold a hand out to Scotia to help her down.

Normally Scotia would not have accepted such help, for she feared it would make her look weak, but after their morning of training followed by the fast ascent up the ben and the effort to get the girl free of the brambles, she was beginning to stumble over things she shouldn’t, and really didn’t want to lose her footing and descend the ben face first in the scree.

But each time she took his help, her awareness grew of him, of his strength, of the way the child hugged his neck with both arms—not entirely calm yet but enough so that she hiccupped instead of screamed—creating an unfamiliar heaviness in her gut that rivaled the strange tightness in her chest.

As they slid down a particularly steep bit on their bums, Ceit came into sight not much further down the ben.

She cried out, and called the child’s name, which only served to rouse the girl enough to take up her ear-splitting howls of fear and pain again.

They hurried down the next tricky bit of the path and had barely stopped before the mother pulled her child out of Duncan’s arms and hugged her tight.

“I was so worried, mo ghaol . You are a naughty lass to wander away like that.” The child hiccupped and gave her mother a sweet open-mouth baby kiss, and Scotia could not help but smile. Not yet two summers old, and already Maisie knew how to make her mother forgive her naughtiness .

“I cannot thank you enough, Duncan,” Ceit said, as she hugged her child tight. “I thought she was gone for good.” She gave Duncan a quick kiss on his cheek. “I thank you with all my heart.”

“You should thank Scotia, she—” But before he could get the words out Ceit threw a doubting look at Scotia, then quickly looked away, once more shunning Scotia as Ceit rejoined her friends who stood down the slope a little way, and hurried back toward the caves.

As Duncan said her name, Scotia had felt a blush of pride start. He was trying to give credit to her, but the look on Ceit’s face quelled any pride she might deign to feel and replaced it with anger.

“Of all the ungrateful—” She stopped, not sure what to call the woman.

“I am sure she wants to get Maisie to Jeanette to make sure there is nothing more than scratches and a bump on her head to worry over.” He looked back at Scotia. “I shall make sure they ken ’twas you who found the wee thing, not me.”

“Nay.” She felt her nails bite into her palms and was oddly happy for the physical pain to distract her from the less visible hurt the woman had dealt her. “They will not believe I found her, not even coming from you. We found the scamp—”

“ You found her,” he said, stepping close enough to take her shoulders in his big hands. Scotia was so startled by the comforting weight of his hands, she did not shrug them off. “And now there is time for me to ask how you knew where we would find her.”

“How?” His question startled her out of both her pique and the distraction of his touch. “I—” How did she ken where to find the child? “I just knew. I said her name, and I knew.”

Duncan let his hands slide down her arms, leaving a trail of pleasant tingles in their wake. “You just knew?”

“Aye.” She looked up at him, as she mulled over the sequence of events. “I just knew. It was suddenly there, in my head, almost like someone whispered it to me, but I did not hear a voice,” she added quickly, not wanting him to think she was going daft. “I just knew .”

His brow furrowed, and she searched his deep brown eyes for any trace of doubt. But there was none, only that look of complete concentration that came over him when he was pondering something he did not understand. He and Jeanette shared that expression.

“Has it happened before, this knowing?”

“Aye. Do you not ken things in this way?”

“Nay. What other things have you known ?”

“I knew we were needed back at the caves. ’Tis also how I knew ...”

She looked down, damning the man for making her forget that she wanted no one to know her greatest shame, and berating herself for telling him anything about the strange knowings.

She let anger wrap around her, obliterating any softness Duncan’s nearness had created.

She felt his finger under her chin as he urged her to look back up at him.

“What, lass?” His voice was soft. He did not move his finger from her chin, forcing her to look deeply into his eyes. “You can tell me. Whatever it is ’twill go no further.”

But she couldn’t. She could not bear to even speak the words. She wrenched free of his touch and fled.

D UNCAN STARED AFTER the rapidly disappearing Scotia, dumbfounded. The lass always, always stood her ground, fighting with cutting words and looks sharp enough to cut the strongest warrior to his knees, fighting with every bit of passion and skill she brought to her training with stick and targe.

But this time she didn’t. This time she fled .

He drummed his fingers against his thighs, trying to figure out what had happened.

What had he said? She was opening up to him, telling him of this amazing skill she had kept secret even from him.

She had been about to tell him of another knowing .

.. but instead she had run from him, or from whatever she had been about to say.

Scotia never ran.

Duncan scrambled down the steep ben as quickly as he dared, worry tangling his guts.

If Scotia ran, she wasn’t thinking, just reacting, and that was never good for anyone, but especially not for Scotia.

There was no telling what the lass might do if she let her emotions get the best of her.

And ’twas Duncan’s task to keep her safe, even from herself.

As soon as he hit the relatively flat trail, he checked to see which direction she had taken—away from the caves—and took off after her. It was only another minute or two before he caught up with her, grabbing her arm and spinning her to a stop.

“Release me!” She struggled to get free of his grip, but he was ready for her this time.

“Nay, not until you tell me what is wrong.”

She swung at him, and relief swept through him.

This was the Scotia he knew. He blocked her hand, locking his around her wrist and pulling her against his chest. She kicked him in the shin, and he switched his hold, wrapping both arms around her, one around her shoulders, the other around her waist, so she could not get far enough away to kick him again.

“Nothing. Is. Wrong.” Each word was emphasized by a wiggling attempt to free herself. She narrowed her eyes and glared up at him. “Let me go, you—”

Now it was Duncan who didn’t think. He silenced her with his lips.