He stood there still as stone, watching them leave, and that steady, unflinching stare made a shiver run down her spine.
Angus followed her gaze. “That’s Kerr,” he said, a note of disgust in his tone. “One of Comyn’s captains.”
Kerr. Why was that name familiar? They rode on into the dark.
But Isabel could not shake the feeling that the man had been watching them long before they ever left the gate. And he was the same man who’d been staring at her in the great hall. The same man who’d left and must have come back. The name of the man her uncle would need.
The man watched as the party fled, pressing his ringless fingers into the stone.
When he was a lad, he used to put a tiny piece of honeyed bread on the ground, lay on his belly and watch the swarms of ants that would dig their way out of the dirt in order to reach their bounty. Then he’d smash and smash them with a rock.
Lady Isabel was the honeyed bread. The dumb warriors the ants.
Sweet as sin, and if he had his way, she’d be his.
Alas, the little piece of sweet was rushing off with the bumbling brute and his brutish warriors as if they would be able to protect her on the road. Didn’t they realize how close they were to death?
“Keep running, little ants. The sweet shall be mine, and I shall rejoice when ye fall.”
15
The fog had not lifted.
It clung low to the hills, thick as wool and cold as a warning, softening the shape of stone and heather and tree until the whole world seemed made of shadows. Isabel rode slightly ahead of Lachlan, her horse picking its way over damp earth, but she no longer had the uneasy comfort of believing they were merely traveling. That illusion had vanished somewhere between dawn and the first time one of Lachlan’s men disappeared into the trees without a word.
They were not merely escaping to the Isle of Skye but were being hunted along the way.
After tracking the men’s movements through the days of travel, Isabel believed she finally had the routine down. Before she was unsure if it was a linear formation, or more of randomly chosen protected dance. Lachlan’s men didn’t move in a simple line, as her uncle’s household guards had. Two riders slipped ahead, usually James and Angus, vanishing down a curve in the path ahead before returning with curt nods. Another lingered behind, Padraig mostly, turning often in the saddle to study the misted path they’d already taken. At intervals, Hamish and Duncan drifted away from the trail entirely, guiding their horses over craggy rock and the thick foliage of trees.
Isabel was nearly enamored with how very calculated and practiced their moves were. It was clear why Lachlan was respected as a leader. Of course she would never tell him that, but she was impressed. A rare feat for a man to make.
The Lachlan MacLeod of the road seemed a different man from the one who had teased her through his fever, argued with her over poultices, and looked at her with that unsettling combination of irritation and heat. There was no teasing today. He had always watched the road before, but now his assumptions of danger had been cemented, and it was like he had become someone else, something else. A hero of old, a protector of legend. His eyes were like a wolf following the ridge above them. The bare-limbed trees. The dark openings of narrow gullies. Any place a man might crouch with a bow or leap out with a sword. Every place betrayal might wait.
Isabel had been moved like a piece on a board by men who believed her blood mattered more than her mind. She had been followed, watched, had enemies lie in wait to snatch her for some purpose. But for what? And were these the same pieces of rubbish who had tried to use Falkirk as an open wound? Whispers of betrayal and dissent sent to flood the Scottish highland. Left to fester, left to infect. But Lachlan’s protection felt different. She wasn’t an object to be used for bargaining in his eyes. He was not watching her because she was the Bruce’s niece or because some order had been placed upon his shoulders.
There was a softness when he looked at her, in frank opposition when he looked anywhere else. He watched the hills as though the hills themselves had threatened her very existence. And her existence…was something he would move those hills for, even if he had to break every bone in his body trying.
Angus burst from the trees ahead, riding hard enough that his horse’s hooves struck sparks from hidden stone. Every MacLeod warrior shifted at once. Hands went to sword hilts. Horses tightened beneath their riders. Even the air seemed to draw itself thin when Isabel sucked in a startled breath.
“My laird,” Angus said, reining in before Lachlan.
Lachlan straightened sharply in the saddle, and Isabel saw the cost of it. His jaw hardened, one hand pressed briefly to his injured thigh before he dropped it again. “What is it?”
“English riders on the southern road. No’ close enough to see us, but no’ far either.”
The words moved through the group like a blade being drawn.
“How many?”
“At least a dozen.”
Bloody hell. Of course, he and his men would be able to easily overtake a dozen Sassenachs, but it would put more of a wrench into their schedule than if it had been the same four or five of earlier.
Lachlan’s gaze cut to the ridge, then the fogged road ahead, then to Isabel. That last glance lasted no more than a heartbeat, but she felt it all the same. The calculation. The risk. The fact that if the English found them, she would not simply be another traveler caught in dangerous country.
She would be the prize.
“We leave the road,” Lachlan said.
