They continued west before the sun rose, stopping in every village they came across. They couldn’t be too far behind. Logan refused to stop for anything but food.
Sometime after midnight, while he and Ealar crouched hidden in a ditch overgrown with scrubs, they discovered where Elspeth was and who she was with.
*
Though she satclose to the campfire, Elspeth shook uncontrollably. She didn’t tremble because she was cold, but because confusion engulfed her, pulled her down to drown.
Sitting across from her was a man she had dreamed about but never expected to see again. Her brother Roderick had returned from the grave.
“But I saw ye in the ashes next to our parents,” she had said after he’d taken her from the house. She had been too stunned, too ecstatic to see him alive to question how he had found her, or how he had gotten into Logan’s house.
She hadn’t wanted to run away with him. He thought he was rescuing her from the Camerons. How could she tell him she was there because she cared for Logan? She couldn’t. She knew, as her brother pulled her away, that she could never return to Logan. Her brother would never approve. She had decided as they left the glen on Roderick’s horse that she would speak to her brother and convince him that—what? The Camerons killed their parents and their little brother. Roderick would want to kill them—just as she had wanted to.
She had been relieved that he hadn’t tried to kill Logan or the Lochiel’s wife in their beds and thankful no one had risen to find them leaving. There surely would have been death.
“What happened, Roddy?” she had asked him last night when they stopped at an inn for a few hours of sleep. “How did ye live? Where have ye been?”
“Someone struck me on the back of my head. They must have believed they killed me.”
“I am so glad they failed, Brother.”
But this morning she began to feel like something was…off with him. She couldn’t be sure what it was. Mayhap the way none of his smiles reached his eyes. It was as if his entire demeanor was false. What had he been through in the last six years?
“Roddy, where have ye been?” she asked again.
“Dumfries, Breadalbane, various places.”
She waited for more, a memory of a year or two, something about his life. But he stopped speaking.
“How did ye find me?” she had asked him.
“Elspeth,” he said, sounding exasperated, “let us speak of this another time when I am not so weary.”
“Of course.”
“Is not the important thing that we are reunited?”
“Aye, of course,” she told him. “By the way, where are we going?”
He let out a frustrated sigh. “Dinna make me regret coming fer ye, Elspeth.”
“What?”
“Ye are beginning to enrage me with yer incessant queries, dear sister.”
“Roddy, what…?”
“Quiet!” he shouted, stopping their horse. He dismounted and reached for her, but she shrank back. “Get down,” he growled and grabbed her wrist to pull her out of the saddle.
She fell to her knees and looked up at him standing over her. What was going on? What had happened to him since their parents died? She wanted to weep for her brother. He was alive but not the same.
“Let us make camp here.”
Elspeth looked up at the twilight sky. Had they been riding all day? She decided not to ask any more questions but obeyed him when he demanded she start the fire. Thankfully she knew how.
She realized, as she collected sticks and kindling, that her brother had not asked her a single question about where she had spent the last half dozen years. It wasn’t like him. He’d always been concerned for her. Wouldn’t all these years not knowing where she was, or what had become of her, have been torture for him?
“I thought I was alone, Roddy,” she finally expressed.
