Page 21 of Midnight Honor (Highland Wolves #3)

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J ohn MacGillivray rubbed the nape of his neck, but the irritating prickle would not go away. If it were summer, he would have suspected an insect had crawled under his collar and was enjoying a feast of warm flesh, but it was the dead of winter and even the lice were too cold to forage.

He drew on his pipe and watched the last of the king's cattle being herded into the narrow chasm. The glen on the far side was a natural bottleneck, with a wide, grassy basin surrounded by sheer stone walls too steep for livestock to climb. Countless herds rustled by countless generations of MacGillivrays and MacBeans had been hidden here along with crates of untaxed cargo and black-market goods brought in by smugglers.

John had made a small fortune over the years, adding on to the tidy fortunes his father and grandfather had made before him. He was likely the first reiver with a sense of humor, however, for he knew these cattle would eventually go to feed the prince's army, and he would be lucky if he earned a smile by way of thanks.

How many fortunes could a man of simple means spend in one lifetime anyway? He had a good horse beneath him, warm clothes on his back, a full belly, and a roof over his head. With that and the right to come and go as he pleased, what more did he need, what more did he want?

Wild Rhuad Annie's face came unbidden into his mind and he clamped his teeth down over the stem of his pipe.

He had vowed not to think about her and, by God, he would not. In fact, he planned to finish up here with the cattle and ride straight on through to Clunas. If his horse did not break its neck in a frozen bog hole, he would be there by morning, and by noon, if luck was with him, Elizabeth's legs would be around his waist and she would be helping him forget he loved another man's wife.

If only. Was that not what Annie had said? If only he had met Elizabeth first, for she was a lively, dark-haired beauty with a quick smile and a body that gave him no end of pleasure. Like him, she had no fondness for games or pretenses, which was why they usually had their clothes off within an hour of being in each other's company. He knew Elizabeth loved him. He had been her first and only lover, and it shamed him that he had waited so long to speak to her father. What had he been waiting for—a miracle?

Elizabeth would make a fine wife, give him fine handsome sons, and he would never give her any reason to doubt she was the most important woman in his life. The only woman in his life. And she would be.

“John! Alloo, John!”

He frowned, looking over his shoulder at the sound of pounding hoofbeats, and recognized Gilles MacBean by the stocky upper body and low silhouette in the saddle.

“Gilles, I told ye to take the men to Moy Hall. What the devil are ye doin' back here?”

“Aye.” Gilles gasped and clutched the knot of reins to his chest as the horse skidded to an icy stop. “'Twas the devil. A devil by the name o' Blakeney. He's taken the whole bluidy garrison out o' Fort bluidy George an' gone tae bluidy well attack Moy Hall. He aims tae take the prince by surprise.”

He gasped out more, but MacGillivray had already dug his heels into his horse's flanks and was tearing hell-for-leather back across the moor. The roar of rage was like thunder in his throat, startling the men who were driving the cattle, causing most of them to stop in their tracks and race after him.

They were half an hour from Dunmaglass, another half an hour from Loch Moy.

MacGillivray roared again and bent his head forward over the stallion's neck, his blond hair streaming back like a second mane.

Colonel Blakeney's men had been nervous from the outset. They had all heard the rumors about the huge Jacobite army descending on Inverness, and not one of them believed a commanding general like Lord George Murray would leave his prince alone, unprotected at a country estate less than ten miles from a sizeable garrison of government troops. Some of them had been with Cope at Prestonpans and knew firsthand the treachery of the Highlanders. They knew if a report said a hundred Scots were on the road, it usually meant a thousand. If it said they were in Edinburgh, they could as likely be knocking on the gates of London. Lord George was a master of deception, a brilliant strategist, and his men would walk through hellfire on his orders. Moreover, they did not fight like proper soldiers. They lurked in trees and crouched behind bushes; they waited in the darkness and the mist, then came screaming out of nowhere, their great bloody broadswords aimed straight for the heart.

Fully half of Blakeney's men were English. They suffered from the cold and the damp; they thought the food loathsome and the townspeople hardly less barbaric than the savages they had been sent to fight. The other half were Scots, a goodly number raised by the chiefs who supported the Hanover monarchy, yet they were not eager to fight their own kinsmen. Names like Cameron and MacDonald held a special terror for them. They knew the swords of these impassioned warriors cut deepest into Highlanders who wore the black cockade, and would show no mercy.

“Why have ye stopped the column now?” demanded Ranald MacLeod. Like his father, he had square, blunt features and found it difficult to keep the mockery out of his voice when he spoke to the English officers. “Are ye seein' bog-men in the bushes?”

Some of the Scots laughed, though the notion of taunting ghosts and spirits did not sit comfortably with them. The moon was not yet up, and it was black as sin despite the crust of snow on the ground. The same sun that had warmed them through the day had melted the caps off the trees so that the forest crowding them on both sides looked like solid black walls—walls behind which things rustled and moved, where twigs snapped and the mist slithered from one branch to the next. The men leading the column carried hooded lanthorns, the glow restricted to a few feet on either side of the winding road; the men in the rear saw nothing but darkness, and had to trust that the men in front were not leading them straight off the edge of a cliff.

“We should be nearing the fork that takes us down toward Loch Moy,” Blakeney said, his voice carrying over the heads of the soldiers. “I suggest we split into two columns and enter the glen on both sides, then converge on Moy Hall in force.”

“Aye.” MacLeod tilted his head, listening to the echo of the colonel's words ripple loudly from one end of the column to the other. “Start the drummers beatin' while ye're at it; there might be some as have not heard us marchin' along the road yet.”

Blakeney ignored the taunt. “Check your powder, gentlemen. Be sure your charges are dry and full.”

The command was an unnecessary waste of noise, for there was not one man among the fifteen hundred who had not checked and rechecked his weapon already. Their palms may have been damp and their tongues stuck from lack of spit, but a soldier's weapon was his life and if he came to battle unprepared, that life was forfeit.

Something—or someone—screamed up ahead. Any faint murmurs of conversation stopped and fifteen hundred pairs of eyes strained to see ahead in the darkness. The scream came again, this time identifiable as a voice.

“Rebels! Rebels up ahead! In the trees, in the bushes!” A forward scout from one of the Highland regiments came stumbling out of the darkness, his bonnet gone, his hair flying wild around his face. “They be everywhere, sar, an' they're formin' up tae attack. 'Tis an ambush! An ambush! They were waitin' on us!”

The news set the men buzzing and cringing tighter together, their muskets pointed into the black wall of trees .

“Hold your positions!” Blakeney screamed. “How many, damn you? An advance guard? A company? A regiment? Speak up, Corporal, what did you see?”

“I dinna ken how many, sar. They were all around us, that much I could tell just by listenin'. They were swarmin' through the trees, thick as bluidy flies in June, but all quiet-like. Settin' up f'ae an ambush. They already killed Jacobs—slit his t'roat like it were a gob o' lard—an' would hae done f'ae me, too, if I'd been a hair slower.”

One hundred yards ahead, and well within hearing distance of his brother's wailed warning to the English troops, Robbie Farquharson took his cue from the distraught “corporal,” and discharged his pistol into the air. The smithy and his two apprentices did likewise, followed by the rest of the handful of men scattered along the verge of bushes. They fired and reloaded as they ran, darting from bush to bush in the hopes of giving the impression of more men, all the while hollering and shouting the names of the clans, giving battle orders, screaming at invisible gunners to ready the artillery.

“Christ a'mighty!” 'Corporal' Jamie Farquharson reached up and clutched the reins of Blakeney's horse. “That's Lochiel himsel'! They were waitin' on us! The bluidy bastards were waitin' on us!”

“They were waitin' on us!” MacLeod echoed the cry, his voice infected by Jamie's fear. He drew his broadsword and cursed in Gaelic. “Waitin' tae take us in our own trap!”

Blakeney's horse reared—no surprise, thanks to the point of the dirk Jamie jabbed in his withers. A musket ball whizzed by the colonel's leg and struck one of the infantrymen in the throat. The man staggered back, spraying his comrades with blood, his scream reduced to a liquid gurgle. The column started to split and men began to shrink back. More shots began to whistle into their midst and they turned like a school of scarlet fish and began running back along the road.

“Fall back!” Blakeney shouted. “Fire at will, and for God's sake, do not let them outflank us!”

“Fall back!” Jamie screamed. “Fall back!" And when the redcoats did indeed start to break and run he added under his breath, "Run, ye bastards! Run all the way back tae Inverness!”

The feigned barrage continued, an army of phantom clansmen created out of the frenzied screams of a dozen brazen men. Their efforts were spurred on by the lunatic Farquharson twins from Monaltrie, who chased after the stampeding Englishmen until they had expended all their shot, emptied all their weapons. It had been an insane idea concocted out of desperation, and they were under no illusions the ruse would work farther than the first bend in the road. There the colonel and his men would draw up, realize there was no army in pursuit, and turn back with a vengeance, but at the least it might have bought Anne the time she needed to spirit the prince away to safety.

Robbie stood in the middle of the road, swaying on his feet. Jamie was beside him, peeling off the scarlet tunic he had taken from the throat-slit forward scout. The unfortunate corporal and the soldier who had been shot were the only two casualties until Jamie hauled back and punched his brother hard enough on the jaw to send him sprawling.

“That could ha' been me ye shot, ye bluidy daft beggar! I felt the damned ball whistle past ma ear!”

Robbie stayed on his knees, where his twin joined him a moment later for an apologetic bear hug, both of them praying to whatever gods were left to watch over them when the English came back.

When Anne rode up the road fifteen minutes later, her cousins were still huddled on the road with the other men, only they were not praying. They were laughing like drunken fools.

“Gone? What do ye mean gone?”

“I swear it, Annie,” Jamie said, gasping for breath. “One o' the lads followed an' said they didna stop runnin' until they were back on the main road. The stupid bastards just turned an' ran! We fired our guns, shouted a few names, an' they ran like a balk o' hungry sin-eaters were chasin' after them.”

Anne stared down the road. There was nothing to see, nothing to hear. The moon was starting to crest over the distant mountain peaks, painting the topmost branches of the trees silver, giving texture and substance to the shadows below. The faintly acrid tang of exploded powder hung suspended in the mist—mist that thickened with her own disbelieving breaths.

“They have gone?” she asked in a disbelieving whisper. "Just...gone?"

No sooner were the words out of her mouth than the muted rumble of approaching hoofbeats sent her swinging sharply around in her saddle. They were not coming from the direction of the Inverness road, but from the moor!

“They have circled around,” she gasped. “They have come up behind us!”

Robbie ordered the men to scatter into the bushes, fearing what was most probable: that Blakeney had split his force in half and these were the reinforcements.

“We've nae more powder or shot,” Jamie said. “If it's the English, we're done for. Come along, Annie. We'd best get intae the woods, out o' sight.”

His prompt came a moment too late. Anne had barely kicked her foot out of the stirrup when the darkness exploded with horses and men. They came from all sides, the road, the trees, easily five score or more, all bristling with muskets, driving the small band of erstwhile defenders out of the bushes in front of them.

But Anne's men were not cringing in fear, they were dancing with joy, and it took a further jolt of astonishment for her to recognize the tarnished brass locks of John MacGillivray as he reined his beast to a rearing halt beside her.

“We heard gunfire,” he said. “We saw the lobsterbacks runnin' down the road an' thought mayhap we'd missed the fight. Did Lord George make it back, then? Is he chasin' after them?”

Anne could barely do more than gape at him, at his men for seeming to have appeared out of nowhere. “No,” she managed. “No, it is just us here...and now you.”

“Where is the prince?”

Anne's relief had barely begun to register when she remembered Douglas Forbes's warning about the young English soldier who had volunteered to escort Charles Stuart up into the hills. Conveying this new crisis to MacGillivray with a minimum of words, she turned The Bruce around and urged the gelding into a full gallop back to Moy Hall. No sooner had they streaked across the glen and organized armed parties to ride up into the mountains than Charles Stuart himself came riding into the torchlit clearing.

He was grayer than death, but unharmed. The same could not be said for Robert Hardy, whose tartan-wrapped body was draped over the saddle of his horse .

“What happened?” Anne asked, the tears building at the back of her throat as she watched the body of the beloved houseman gently lowered to the ground.

“He threw himself in front of a lead ball intended for me,” the prince said, sober and utterly humbled for the first time in many long weeks. “For his bravery and noble sacrifice, be assured that both he and you have the gratitude of an unworthy prince.”

Anne did not know where to look, what to say, and when she glanced over the royal shoulder, her eyes widened at yet another shocking sight. The prince turned to follow her stare and nodded. “Yes, just so. The Lady Catherine was also injured in the exchange, but she lives. The wound is in the arm, and her brother—”

Damien Ashbrooke rode quickly past without deferring to the prince or anyone else in his haste to carry his sister to the house. Catherine rode before him, cradled against his chest, her face waxen in the moonlight, her arm limp and bloody across her lap. For Anne, it was too much.

A wave of nausea swept through her and she had to grip The Bruce's mane tightly to keep from sagging to her knees in the snow. She was thankful for MacGillivray's solid presence by her side, and only dimly paid attention to the prince as he told John and the others how they had reached the safety of the caves up above, only to discover the treacherous spy in their midst. Corporal Johnson had been prepared to kill them all, and likely would have if Hardy had not intervened and if Damien Ashbrooke had not fought him to the death, sending his body over the edge of a steep, rocky promontory.

Anne felt as if she were on the edge of a precipice herself. The nausea and sense of standing on a tilt was getting worse, not better, and now there was a sticky rush of heat between her thighs.

“Are ye alright, lass?”

She tried to focus on John's face, but he would not stand still long enough. He swayed side to side and split in two, then four. And when she was about to shout at him to stop playing the fool, he reached out and punched her hard in the midsection. The blow took all the air out of her lungs and she doubled over with the pain. She heard someone screaming and felt hands reach out to grab her, but it was when she was falling, fighting the dancing spots in front of her eyes, that she saw the bright red stain of blood spreading down from the crotch of her trews.