Page 112 of Blood of the Thistle

“He’ll be all right,” Etta said beside her.

“Yes,” Anna said softly, swallowing thickly.

Anna went back to work. There was nothing she could do for Bram from inside the hall and nothing she could do for him upon the walls, and so she did the only useful thing left to her, helping the men who were brought through those doors and trying not to imagine the one face she feared seeing among them.

The change came gradually enough that Anna did not recognize it at first. The great eruptions of shouting beyond the walls grew less frequent, the terrible blows against the gate ceased altogether, and the intervals between wounded men being carried into the hall lengthened until nearly a quarter hour had passed without the doors opening at all. Around her, others had begun to notice as well, conversations lifting cautiously from frightened whispers while Mairead repeatedly cautioned everyone to remain where they were until they knew what was happening.

The doors finally opened, admitting the same young messenger who had brought word of the boats earlier. This time he was flushed and breathless but grinning.

“They’re away,” he announced. “Raghnall’s men have broken and are retreating.”

Relief swept through the hall in a great collective exhalation, followed almost immediately by excited voices and questions from every direction. Etta caught Anna’s hand and squeezed it.

“Where’s Bram?” Anna asked the boy.

“Gone after them. The laird took mounted men through the gates nae five minutes ago.”

Anna stared at him, aghast. She had spent hours bracing for the worst, and the moment she had finally let herself unclench, he had decided to abandon the safety of the wall and had ridden out away from it.

Her feet moved before she had consciously decided to go.

“Anastasia!” Mairead called when Anna pushed through the crowd toward the doors. “Stay within until we ken ’tis safe!”

Anna ignored her.

She ran into the bailey and across it toward the wall, scarcely noticing the exhausted men and discarded weapons around her. Someone else called after her as she climbed the steps, but she kept going until she reached the parapet and looked beyond it, searching first toward the village and then the road beyond.

Bram was nowhere to be seen.

The ground beneath the walls was strewn with the wreckage of the assault—shields split or simply dropped, arrows so thick in places they bristled from the earth like dark grass, a ladder snapped at its middle with dead men still tangled in its rungs. Bodies lay where they had fallen, some close enough to the wall that they might have touched it, others presumably had dragged themselves back almost to the cottages before they’d stopped moving. Anna knew Bram could not be among them, knew he had ridden after Raghnall Hay, yet still her gaze moved helplessly from one motionless figure to the next.

She hurried to the seaward wall next, passing Harsain who frowned and stuttered at her presence, needing only to assure herself that the attack there had ended as well. The boats were gone, leaving the narrow beach below strewn with more bodies, several lying among the rocks while others had been caught by the tide. One rolled sluggishly in the shallows as the water drew back and then came forward again.

Anna recoiled from the sight—and then went very still as a strange sensation brushed across her skin.

For several seconds she remained perfectly still, uncertain what had caught her attention. The morning was cool, the sea breeze damp against her face, and nothing she could see had changed. Yet something had.

The air felt different.

Her fingers tightened slowly upon the stone.

“No.”

She knew that feeling. The recognition was not rational and did not require thought. Her body remembered before her mind could begin arguing against it: the peculiar pressure in the air, the sensation of something gathering around her that did not belong to wind or weather, the same feeling she had carried out of York like a splinter still working its way deeper — the moment before the world she knew disappeared.

Anna pushed away from the parapet so abruptly that she nearly collided with a man passing behind her.

“No, no, no.”

***

Bram drove his horse through the gates with three dozen men at his back, the thunder of hooves drowning the last shouts from the walls.

Ahead, Raghnall's retreating force had dissolved into a ragged column of men mostly on foot, their horses spent or abandoned, their armor heavy after the failed assault. Bram could see the gray horse now, could see the banner that still followed it, and something hot and vicious uncoiled in his chest. Months in an English prison. The men dead at Berwick. The betrayal that had made it all possible.

He was close enough to smell them-sweat and fear and the particular stink of men who had fought and lost. Close enough to see individual faces turning, to watch the panic spread as the pursuit they may not have expected came nipping at their heels.

“Laird!” Domnall's voice, somewhere behind him. “Bram!”