Highland Warrior, McCollum, Heather [carter reed .TXT] 📗

give myself to ye. His words from the night before seemed like an oath. Whatever it meant, she knew he had not given it lightly. His mouth moved to her ear where his whisper tickled a path of warmth into her. “I will chase the nightmares away for the rest of your life, lass.”

He pulled back, looking into her eyes, which widened. The rest of her life? She opened her mouth to ask what that meant.

“Time to wrap you two in your shrouds,” another Hillside warrior named Aiden said, ducking into the cottage. He looked to Joshua. “The scout you left watching the palace returned. He says there is activity in the bailey. Robert and Patrick and The Brute are out with their horses.”

Hilda gave Kára a fierce hug and hurried out the door, calling for Geir. Geir had already said his goodbyes, but he ran back inside right into her arms once more. She wrapped her arms around her strong, brave boy. “Whatever happens,” she said, “you will come out of this stronger. Calder and Osk will get you to safety with the Sinclairs.”

“I would rather have you alive than be safe,” he murmured against her, and she squeezed him harder. He did not yet know how hard life could be if they stayed on Orkney under Robert’s brutal rule. She did. She’d been living it for twenty-six years.

“Joshua will keep me alive,” she said and pulled back.

Geir looked from her to Joshua, his young face looking much too hard. “If it comes down to you or her,” Geir said, “save her.”

Joshua nodded, his fisted hand going over his heart. “I swear it.”

It was enough to loosen Geir’s hold on Kára’s hand, and Aiden dragged him out to take Broch on a mad dash with Hilda to Kára’s hideaway den. Kára stared at the empty doorway and blinked back the unbidden tears. Would it be the last time she ever saw her baby boy?

Calder threw one of the woolen wraps at Osk, and they both shook them out. Joshua bent down to brush a kiss across Kára’s lips. “We will be well,” he said.

“Are you certain?” she whispered.

Calder cleared his throat. “We really need to get you up there. Corpses do not walk to their graves.”

Joshua touched his forehead to hers. “We will be better than well on the morrow,” he murmured.

She nodded against him. “We just need to get through this night.”

Chapter Twenty-Four

“Let your plans be dark and impenetrable as the night, and when you move, fall like a thunderbolt.”

Sun Tzu – The Art of War

The wind whipped at the cloaks of those family members standing above them in the churchyard. Joshua stared up at the slip of dark blue sky that peeked past gray clouds. Darkness was descending, but not fast enough. “Do not let them get too close,” he said. “Only enough to see it is us before ye cover us.”

It was the oddest view to have people gathered around, looking down at him as he lay in his grave. Dirt fenced Kára and him in on all sides as they lay together two feet down in the cold earth.

“Amma will warn them back because of the plague as she sprinkles us with fresh herbs,” Kára said, wrinkling her nose over the smell of the decaying seal hidden beneath a ragged blanket under her. They smelled like a combination of low tide and a three-day-old battlefield.

Wrapped in white linen, he and Kára rested next to each other. Under the cover of another blanket, their hands were free, interlaced together as if in eternal slumber as one. It felt natural, as if there would be no other way to lie next to each other. The warmth in her hand was a testament to their continued living even as cold pressed upward from the frozen ground under them.

“Close your eyes,” Osk whispered. “No breathing or twitching.”

“Stop,” Calder called out, his head turned away. “This is a family burial. You are not welcome here.”

“Welcome or not, I am the Earl of Orkney and have come to see the traitor buried,” Robert intoned from not too far off.

“Both of them,” added Patrick.

“Stay back,” Kára’s grandmother warned, and Joshua felt the pelting of dried herbs on his face. Caught on his lip, he held still, stopping himself from blowing it off. “They are both touched with plague,” she called, and Joshua could hear the tears in her voice.

“We must verify they are dead, plague or not.” Bloody hell. Of course John Dishington was with them.

“You have been warned,” Harriett said. “See what horror you have wrought on my granddaughter.”

“You bury them together?” Patrick asked.

There was a pause. “They wed before you killed my sister,” Osk said, a sneer in his voice that Joshua could plainly hear over the sea breeze. Hopefully, Patrick was getting a nose full of the dead seal.

“You mean,” Robert said, “before she and her rebel people marched against me and my family.”

Keep quiet, Osk. Kára’s brother was always smoldering, ready to explode, but right now nothing good could come from it. Mo chreach. Would he have to act like a ghost and break back into the Earl’s Palace the next eve to rescue Kára’s brother?

“Leave us in our grief,” Calder said, and Joshua could hear Kára’s grandmother crying above the wind.

“The grave is shallow,” Dishington said, his voice closer as if he braved the plague or did not believe any of it.

The blanket, linens, and the heavy targe that lay across Joshua hid the slight rise and fall of their chests. He concentrated on not moving by relaxing his facial muscles. Lord, let the darkness hide any signs of life.

“We baked the earth with a mound of burning peat,” Calder said, “but this was as deep as we could dig before hitting ice.”

“Look, Lord Robert,” Dishington said. “A marker for them. And it says nothing of Joshua Sinclair being the Horseman of War. I believe he has much to answer for before God, how he