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“Something like that.”
They were quiet a moment. Liam observed, quite unnecessarily, “We’ll hardly beat them to Rardove Keep. They’ve got a fearsome head start.”
Finian gathered up his reins. “I know a shortcut.”
The gate creaked shut behind and they galloped silently out under the storm clouds about to unleash themselves on the land.
Chapter 55
Senna pressed her eyelids shut but could not make the world dark enough to blot out what was happening to her.
By late afternoon the next day Balffe almost had them to Rardove Keep. He’d not let them stop all morning and afternoon long, most of it at a lope, and the tension in Senna’s throat rose to almost throttling proportions as each mile disappeared behind them.
They climbed to the top of a rolling hill. The view lasted for miles, spilling greening hills into valleys and lowlands. Small blue watercourses sparkled in the distance. And all around the lowlands and draped up the hills like multicolored blankets, were armies. Armies mustering to decimate the Irish.
On the distant rise, swimming before her gaze, was the hated castle. Faded red pinions fluttered from the stone ramparts, snapping in the sharp breeze.
She could almost see the gate through which she and Finian had escaped, the moat where he’d tossed her to ensure their safety. Perhaps at this very moment the afternoon sun was hitting the spot where he’d acquiesced to her plea for a kiss, and she’d known everything in her life before Finian had been pale and flat.
She bent her face, her breath catching over and over.
Balffe grunted and stared determinedly ahead. Women’s tears came cheaper than basil, and he was not going to be turned by the threat of them, not even if the fat, wet drops started dripping down her cheeks.
“Who are all those people?” she asked, pointing at the crowds milling on the plain before the castle gates.
But she knew. Villagers, fleeing the armies that were marching to war. Uninvited guests. They would not be asked in, not even when the battle began, nor would they be allowed to pass through the ring of any opposing army encamped outside the castle walls. They would hover in between the warriors, nothing but unwanted mouths. It was a killing zone.
Balffe’s armor creaked as he turned to look at her. It was silent except for the sudden flutter of bird wings somewhere to their left.
Then, from out of nowhere and all around, came a pounding of hooves and rough cries. From behind and on each side galloped a muster of knights on horses, racing toward them with bright swords drawn, arrows fitted. Steel-tipped points whizzed by Balffe’s head and bit into the earth beside them. The slender, graceful shafts of ash belied the death carried at their steel tips.
With a curse, Balffe whipped the horses into a wild gallop and they raced ahead of the armed throng. Senna screamed at the suddenness of the charge, tossed around on her saddle like a sack of wheat.
They sped across the open plain, racing for the castle that emerged from the evening mists. She clutched at the mane of her horse. Her knee smashed into the knobby pommel and her teeth clattered inside her skull, and through the vibrations, she espied her brother.
“William!”
Then she sa
w Finian.
“Oh, please Lord, no,” she whispered, then screamed as a surge of scalding fire exploded across her scalp. Balffe was hauling her toward him with an armored fist, by her hair.
Dragging her back into the saddle, he wrapped the reins of her horse around his palm and hauled her close, until their horses’ red-flared nostrils touched as they galloped like a devil’s tongue across the plain.
Balffe contemplated stopping to do outright battle with O’Melaghlin, went so far as to sit upright in his saddle and rein in his stallion, when a small ax hurtled past his head, close enough to trim the day’s growth off his jaw.
He crashed his nose into the horse’s mane to escape death. An arrow skidded across the equine’s rump and the horse bolted into a wild dash Balffe no longer had the inclination to oppose.
He urged his stallion into a pace violent enough to hurl rocks and small farm animals from under hoof, speeding toward the castle. Lifting himself in the saddle, he spurred the horse in a savage, reckless leap over a heather-strewn hedgerow, dragging Senna’s mount behind.
The keep was close now, the draw only a quarter mile away. Flaring his nostrils like his frenzied mount’s, Balffe pushed the pair of horses with his thighs, his arms, his fury, until they breached the wooden bridge and flew under the outer gates.
Guards stood in stupefied amazement, their jaws agape.
Balffe roared, “Raise the fycking draw!”
Like maggots on a mound of meat, the guards swarmed to their posts. Heaving and grunting and sweating to rival a seaman in a whorehouse, they dragged on the heavy chains, tearing open hardened calluses as they hoisted the bridge.
