Choosing the Highlander (3 page)

“Forgive my rudeness for not inquiring earlier.” Ruthven interrupted his thoughts. “How fares your mother’s health?”

Wilhelm snorted before he could stop himself. Ruthven cared about Gormlaith Murray’s health only so far as he hoped to predict when the agreement struck between him and Wilhelm’s father might come to an end.

Twenty seven years ago, Ruthven had imprisoned Wilhelm’s mother, then a peasant maiden, on false charges. Refusing to win her freedom by marrying the corrupt lord, she had been slated for execution. Upon hearing of this injustice by way of Ruthven’s boasting, Wilhelm’s father had negotiated for her release.

“‘Have your way, an’ ye earn naught but a moment’s vengeance,’ I told the oily bastard.”
His father never missed an opportunity to relate the tale.
“‘But give her to me an’ I’ll levy to you a tenth share of all I take in from my tenants for the span of her life. Each year she outlives your executioner’s blade, you’ll profit.’ The greedy blight agreed, and to this day, I gladly send the silver. My lady is worth every pound.”
 

Three days after securing Gormlaith’s release, Wilhelm’s father took her as his bride. Nine months later, Wilhelm had been born.

“She is hale,” Wilhelm said distractedly; he had just spotted Lord Turstan leaving the keep, leaning heavily on his cane.

“That is splendid to hear.” Ruthven bared his teeth in an approximation of a smile. “Give her my regard when you return home, will you?”

“If you’ll excuse me—” Wilhelm said and took his leave of Ruthven, his eye on Lord Turstan.

Terran appeared at his side as he made his way through the gathering.

“Where have you been?” Wilhelm asked as they picked their way through the growing crowd to the east end of the bailey.

Terran’s mouth quirked. “Found a way to pass the time in a private nook off the kitchens. Auld Rat-bum might be a blighter, but he employs his share of bonny maids.”

Wilhelm ground his teeth. “You shame our clan by carrying on wi’ unwed lasses.” Would his cousin never settle down with one woman?

“They arena all unwed.” His cousin winked, but sobered at Wilhelm’s glare. “
Och,
dinna fash. Tonight was merely a bit of fun. No thinking man would risk bringing a bairn into the home of such a foul fellow.”

Wilhelm grunted.

The milling guests parted before them the way the earth makes way for the blades of a plow. Wilhelm might be among the lower ranking nobles present, the mere
tainistear
and
heir to a rural barony, but he and Terran stood a full head above the other guests and carried themselves like the warriors they were. Most of the other men gave them a wide berth.

The wary respect of the other nobles was a double-edged sword. It served him well on the battlefield but proved a challenge when his aim was cultivating political alliances. Some seemed to question whether he could carry a non-violent thought in his head.

A few paces shy of Lord Turstan, Terran gripped his arm. “Look, cousin.” He pointed at the front of the chapel.

Wilhelm followed Terran’s gaze. A stake had been erected and slabs of dry wood layered round about. Ruthven’s men raced to pile tinder around a second stake.

His feet fused to the ground.
This
was the entertainment Ruthven had planned? Despicable!

“They mean to burn someone tonight,” Terran said.

“Two someones.”

“Enemies of the church, do you suppose, or enemies of Ruthven?”

Anger was a smoldering flint in his gut as he remembered the fate his mother had nearly suffered. “It doesna matter. If Ruthven’s doing the burning, there is sure to be injustice afoot.” He met Terran’s eyes.

His cousin looked grim. For all his womanizing, he had a thirst for justice as strong as Wilhelm’s. “Christ never called for a sinner to be burned alive,” Terran said.

“No. He didna.” His disciples had once, but Christ hadn’t allowed them to do it.

“We must object.”

He wished they could. “Nay. I promised my father I wouldna cause trouble.”

If they interfered, they would lose more than the support they had gathered on this journey. Ruthven was a favorite of John Ramsay, one of the most influential lords in King James III’s court. If Wilhelm angered Ruthven, he could expect to find his act stricken from the next parliament proceedings altogether. Unthinkable.

If Scotia was to survive and thrive alongside England, she needed judicial reform. If Scotia must fight England, she needed warriors who were strong and hale, not disfigured and demoralized by brutal punishments that far exceeded the severity of their crimes. Too many lairds misunderstood the law. That could be helped by passing each noble-born child through school. His act would see that done.

“We must nay offend Ruthven,” Wilhelm said with regret. “But I doona wish to witness this spectacle. I havena spoken with Turstan, but an execution is nay the time to do so. Let us take our leave. We shall search for him in the village on the morrow.” At worst, they would simply stop in Inverness on their journey home and wait for Turstan to arrive home.

Before they could extract themselves from the gathering, Ruthven mounted the steps of the chapel. He greeted his guests and then locked gazes with Wilhelm. “There are those among us who in their naivety extol the virtues of mercy over just punishment.” He puffed his chest, drawing attention to his jewels and gold chains. Fog puffed before his mouth as he broadened his attention to the crowd at large. “’Tis a quaint notion. But one that has no place in modern, thinking society.”

“Oily shite,” Terran muttered.

Wilhelm agreed. “Come.” He shouldered aside a man who had squeezed up front with a well-dressed lady on his arm, no doubt for a better view.

The crowd had grown thick. People grumbled at the disturbance of Wilhelm and Terran pushing their way to the stables, where they could find their horses and depart.

“As God fearing citizens,” Ruthven went on, his voice an assault on Wilhelm’s ears, “Crown honoring citizens, the vast majority of us understand that we who rule shall be held accountable by God for our failures to enact His justice on the Earth. Who but us will protect the common man from the greed of the thief? Who but us will guard our daughters from the rapist? Who but us will shield our impressionable young from the wiles of witches?”

As if Ruthven wasn’t himself a thief and a rapist. Wilhelm kent for a fact he was. And if the man made deals with the devil for all the influence he wielded in Edinburgh, Wilhelm would not be surprised.

They were nearly to the stables when the sound of the chapel’s oaken doors swinging open made Wilhelm turn around despite his reluctance to lay eyes on Ruthven’s victims.

A robed clergyman and four guards escorted two prisoners to the pyres.

The first prisoner was streaked with dirt and had long, tangled hair falling over his face. He was nude and terribly thin. An urchin, mayhap? He appeared hardly to require one guard let alone one holding each spindly arm. Poor child. ’Twas doubtful at his tender age he’d done aught to earn a death sentence, let alone one so gruesome. If Wilhelm had hated his host before, his hatred doubled now.

His gaze jumped to the second prisoner and his chest clamped with horror. Hair that gleamed like autumn-gilt leaves framed an oval face with blazing eyes. The prisoner struggled against two guards who worked much harder than the first two. The struggling resulted in brief glimpses of bare breasts and shapely legs between the bodies of the guards.

Beside him, Terran sucked in a breath. “Christ, Will. They’re women.”

The guards began binding the prisoners to the pyres. Someone had knotted a gag around the mouth of the auburn-haired lass. The cloth cut across cheeks the color of a rosy sunset and had worked its way between lips that refused to be tamed.

Her protests rose on the air, no less scathing for being muffled. If the situation hadn’t been so dire, he would have grinned at the lass’s spirit.

 In contrast, the one Wilhelm had thought an urchin hung unresponsive, with face downturned and hair dangling over small breasts. Now that the guards weren’t obscuring his view, he noticed the prisoner’s swollen belly.
Och,
a woman with child. She was terribly undernourished. How long had Ruthven kept her locked away?

Ruthven spoke again, but Wilhelm heard naught save the pounding of rage in his ears like war drums and a fierce wind.

It comes upon me again.
 

Some ca mayhap, like his lled it bloodlust, but ’twas nothing so simple as a mindless urge to maim and kill. His mother called it berserker rage. She claimed it came from the fey blood in her family line.

Wilhelm did not doubt the origin lay outside the usual order of things, but he tended to credit his gift to God. He believed himself called as a warrior for justice. Even as a lad, he had devoted himself to protecting the weak and cutting down evil. ’Twas in his blood every bit as deeply as his urge to one day rule his father’s barony.

When the holy rage came, strength welled inside him until he felt he could tear down castle walls barehanded. That strength filled him now. He could no more ignore its summons to act than he could cut off his own arm.

He looked to Terran. “They are innocent.” He knew this, because his rage wouldn’t have come if the women deserved what was about to happen.

“Aye.” Terran nodded, resolute. His eyes glowed with rage equal to Wilhelm’s. The pair of them had been called the twin blades of Dornoch since they’d matured enough to do battle. They always went together into skirmishes, and they always emerged the other side.

They both kent they were about to destroy any chance Wilhelm ever had of wielding influence in parliament.

“Create a diversion,” he told Terran. “I’ll stall Ruthven.”

For better or worse, they went their separate ways, Terran into the stables and Wilhelm toward the pyres.

Chapter 3

Connie was living a nightmare. Not dreaming. Living.

An hour ago, she had been anticipating a hearty Scottish breakfast with Leslie. Now, she had been stripped, gagged and bound, and four smelly men were manhandling her onto a stage in a torch-lit courtyard. Despite her ineffective attempts to break free, they were tying her to a stake, of all things, and in front of an apparent audience.

It reminded her of the historic accounts she’d read of the witch-trials in Salem, Massachusetts when her sister had first embraced Wicca. Connie had a sinking feeling these people wanted to burn her at the stake, a prospect as ridiculous as it was terrifying.

How can this be happening? Where am I?
When
am I?
 

Despite oceans of improbability, she seemed to have been transported into the past. By roughly five-hundred years, if her minimal cache of historical knowledge could be trusted. She’d come to this conclusion from her uncomfortable but blessedly warm position across the rump of a horse, where the two men whom she had first encountered had tied her like a sack of supplies. Not only had she overheard them arguing about a James in the context of the crown, but they had also mentioned a Queen Maggie, which must be a nickname for Queen Margaret.

 Connie had briefly studied European history while deciding whether to declare her major in Engineering or Theater. Not having a head for dates, the exact years of the Stuart rulers eluded her, but she recalled that two Queen Margarets had been married to two King Jameses in the late fifteenth century. The only reason she remembered was that she’d gotten the question wrong on an exam.

All other possible explanations for what was happening to her had fallen away one by one as the evidence pointed to a single, reality-altering fact: the world around her wasn’t the anomaly—she was.

Leslie, what have you done?
 

This had to be the result of her sister’s wish. Somehow, Connie had been thrust back in time. Whether the cause had been the summer solstice, Druid’s Temple, the necklace, her sister’s good intentions or some combination thereof, she couldn’t deny she’d been touched by magic.

It was too crazy to be believed. Yet here she was, fighting for her life in pre-renaissance Europe.

“Let me go!” she yelled through her gag for the hundredth time. For the hundredth time, she was completely ignored, even by the extravagantly dressed older man who had addressed the crowd in a brogue so thick she could barely make out what he’d said.

She’d tried offering her original captors a bribe since she’d had some Scots currency in her backpack, but they’d merely stolen her bag and handed her over to a robed man in a stone building they called a kirk. She’d tried threatening action by the U.S. Embassy. This earned her a slap by the robed man, who told her she could take her threats with her to the fiery pit of hell. She had tried to fight the men dragging her to the stake, but the only fruits of her labor were a gag and chafed wrists.

She couldn’t think of anything more to do, but she couldn’t just give up. It wasn’t only her life at stake but another woman’s too, one who looked to be in much worse shape than she.

The other woman seemed young, maybe still in her teens, and she was dangerously underweight and very pregnant. Connie wished she’d been able to speak with her, but there had been no opportunity before the men had gagged her.

When a robed and hooded man came toward her with a lit torch, the temptation to lose hope made her stomach shrivel. She shook her head. “No, please don’t,” she said through her gag. “I’ve done nothing wrong.”

The crowd murmured.

The older man who seemed to be in charge nodded at the hooded man.

Oh, God. He was lowering the flame to the tinder at her feet.

She ramped up her struggling. What she wouldn’t give for that knight in shining armor she’d always told Leslie didn’t exist.

“Halt!” A clear voice rang through the silence as a tall man with impossibly broad shoulders leapt onto the platform.

The hooded man froze. Flames swirled around the tip of his torch inches from the wood. It was so close, she could smell the burning tar and feel its heat on her shins.