Alba whispered to her in the shush and draw of the waves. In the breath from the land. In her own heartbeat.
Too much to ask her to remain here while life and death raged just out of sight.
But she must think of the child. Adair’s child.
She pressed both hands to her belly, and for an instant prescience poured into her. As if it came from the land itself, from the sea and sky.
If Adair did not survive this battle, his child must live. It was important. The very future depended upon it.
But och, she could not stand here without knowing. Everything inside her longed to find a weapon of her own, to join that battle she could hear, but not see. To fight at her lover’s side. To fight for him.
He wanted her to live for him, instead.
With her hound at her side, she climbed up the rough headland that fronted the shingle and through the gorse and bracken, to see.
*
Adair ran intothe smoke, the heat, and the horror of the battle. It felt as if he ran somehow back through time to the past, to other battles when strength took hold inside him and he knew no fear.
He could taste the fear now, though. The uncertainty. He remained connected to Bradana and could feel her there behind him. Naught else about the situation was known—who was winning, who losing. Whether he would be required to die.
If he did, at least he would be leaving a part of himself behind.
It was all a man could do.
He had no shield, and the fight swiftly closed around him. Dead lay everywhere on the shore and in the settlement. Some of them wore Mican’s tartan. Far more, it seemed, Rohracht’s colors.
He met his first two opponents before his feet left the shingle. They came in tandem down the rocky slope that led to the settlement. Mican’s men. The fighting here on this stretch of shore was fierce, as if it had tumbled down from the dun.
Adair felt his mind and his emotions flow into a single channel.Kill or be killed.
He felled Mican’s warriors one, two, without conscious thought. He turned and pelted up the slope toward the dun.
Not a great distance. The settlement was not a large one. It might as well have been half the length of Dalriada, for he had to battle for every step. Here the fighting grew fierce indeed, and the smoke mingled with the mist. Alba breathing fire. Just ahead, he saw men he knew—members of Rohracht’s forces with whom he’d grown friendly before he left. No sign of Rohracht.
How could the old man survive this?
At the door of the hall, half of which, though seared by flame yet stood, raged the thickest of the fighting.
There, so Adair knew on a deep and primal level, he needed to be.
He fought his way to it, his sword shedding blood, flesh, and bone, an extension of his arm. His mind directed it without conscious thought. He did not see Rohracht’s men, what remained of them, falling in behind him as if he were the head of the spear.
But he heard their cries—of surprise those must be, at seeing him there. A roar came from up ahead, and peering through smoke that stung his eyes, he saw one man fighting amid a knot of others for admittance to the hall itself.
Mican.
With a single thought for the woman he loved, Adair dove in.
Chapter Fifty-Three
Mican fought likea man possessed, with a snarl on his face. Whether he still battled for revenge or for conquest, or just because he refused to lose this fight, Adair could not tell.
It did not matter. For the man stood at the very door of Rohracht’s hall. He could not be permitted inside.
A mere two defenders kept him out, and one of them sore wounded. Instinct, unfathomable within Adair, weighed the situation. Bone-deep knowledge took him forward.
He had to fight his way in. The attackers gathered close around Mican battled well, and Adair soon found himself in a fight for his life. Snarling faces turned toward him, as did reddened swords. Well enough, for it took the pressure off the defenders.
