But Fergus didn't waste another second explaining. He hauled on the reins, turning his stallion sharply toward the dark south gate. Every piece of armor he had spent twenty years buildinghad completely vanished, leaving him entirely exposed to the dark. He had driven her out into the path of the flames with his own brutal tongue.
"I'll bring her back," he said, his dark eyes locking onto Isobel for one final, desperate second.
Then, he drove his steel heels hard into the horse's sides. The stallion reared slightly before plunging forward into a dead run, carrying Fergus out through the gates and straight into the smoke-choked night.
* * *
Fergus rode as though the devil himself chased him through the craggy Highland hills.
Gorse and birch branches whipped across his face hard enough to cut the skin and draw blood, but he felt none of it. Stones scattered like hail beneath his stallion's iron hooves as they tore down the rugged southern path at a reckless, suicidal speed.
The smoke thickened with each passing moment, rolling low across the heather in dark, choking waves that completely obscured the cold stars overhead.
Too slow. He was still too damn slow.
His horse strained beneath him, its muscles bunching and stretching fiercely, thick foam gathering along its neck as itslungs labored from the brutal climb and steep descent across uneven ground. Fergus pushed the beast harder anyway, leaning low over its neck, his fingers white where they gripped the leather.
The dragon's tail lay just ahead. And Margaret was somewhere inside it.
The terrifying thought pounded through his skull with every rhythmic thunder of the hooves against the dirt.
Find her. Find her.
The wind shifted sharply across the rocky ridge, howling like a wounded animal. Fergus snapped his head up.
And saw it. Fire.
The flames moved through the dry, summer-parched brush with a terrifying, predatory speed, racing along the narrow pass between the sheer cliff walls like a living, breathing beast. Billowing black smoke climbed upward in thick columns while red sparks scattered violently through the air, carried hundreds of yards ahead of the roaring fire front.
The dragon's tail. A narrow, rocky death trap once the wind turned the canyon into a chimney.
Fergus swore fiercely under his breath, a raw Gaelic curse, and urged his horse faster into the darkness. Every instinct in hissoul had sharpened into a single, brutal clarity. Nothing else mattered on God's earth but reaching her before the wall of flames cut off the way completely. Not the Mackenzie land. Not the structural safety of his keep. Not the survival of his crops.
Only Margaret.
The realization should have unsettled him. It should have panicked the soldier who had spent twenty years prioritizing the mission over the individual. Instead, it felt horribly, devastatingly simple. His chest ached from the sheer, expanding force of it.
The smoke thickened abruptly into a wall of gray as he rounded the lower bend of the canyon. Then, through the haze, he saw her.
Relief struck his chest so violently it nearly unseated him, knocking the breath from his lungs.
Margaret's dark mare reared near the narrowest, most dangerous part of the pass, its eyes rolling white with wild terror as the creeping smoke and flying sparks surrounded them. The frantic animal pulled hard on the leather reins, even dragging its hooves sideways toward the steep cliff edge, while Margaret desperately tried to control the beast amid the blinding chaos.
Her heavy wool cloak whipped violently in the howling gale. Her copper-gold curls had come loose completely from their pins, blowing across her face in a wild halo. And even through therising wall of smoke, Fergus could see the raw panic beginning to crack her proud composure.
"Margaret!"
His voice tore raw and desperate through the roaring, heated air.
Her head snapped toward the sound. For one fleeting, terrible second, a flash of pure relief opened across her soot-stained face.
Then the mare screamed.
The high-pitched, terrifying sound cut through the roar of the fire like a honed blade. A massive, burning pine branch crashed down from the ridge above, collapsing directly onto the path nearby in a shower of brilliant orange sparks. The mare bolted in a panic, jerking violently sideways.
Margaret lost her grip on the wet leather reins.
Fergus watched it unfold in horrifying, agonizing slow motion. Her balance shifting in the saddle. The horse twisting beneath her. The thick gray smoke swallowing the path.
