“I’ll lead him, the brute,” said the bald man, moving toward Gealag, “and whip him if he balks.”
From atop the mare on which she perched astride, displaying far too much of her stockinged legs, Fiona said, with steel in her voice, “Harm him, and I’ll make you wish you were dead.”
“Ha!” retorted the bald man, snatching at Gealag’s reins, “as if you could, trussed up like a chicken as you are.”
“She’d shoot you in the heart, empty man,” remarked Sheila, then staggered as he stalked past her, cuffing her across her head, hissing, “Quiet, you witch!”
The leader swung up behind Fiona, holding her about the waist with an unnerving tentativeness, and kicked his heels into the mare’s flanks. “Let’s go!” he cried, and the ragtag cavalcade began making its way deeper into the forest. Fiona, nearly gagging from the smell of the man behind her, turned her head to stare at Sheila, first to make sure she wasn’t harmed, and second to try—foolish though it seemed—to communicate an urgent thought.
Go tell the laird, hinny!
Sheila only stared back at her, a grubby finger stuck into her mouth, her face utterly blank, and Fiona felt her heart sink.
Alasdair was very busy when he got back to the castle, organizing his men, sending out messages, looking over all the horses. The last thing on his mind was dinner, but as the hour arrived, he knew he and the men would be awake all the night and would benefit from having had a meal, so with them he quickly made his way to the Great Hall, only to find that his wife wasn’t there. How odd. Perhaps she was caught up in one task or another, or napping somewhere. He dispatched both a servant boy and her maidservant Edme to go find her.
Naturally it had begun to rain, so not only was Fiona tired, hungry, sore from the lack of a saddle, and unhappy, she was soaked to the bone and shivering in the cold. She had whiled away the long hours of this weary journey by eavesdropping, and had learned that the skeletal, bad-smelling leader, behind her, was named Crannog Sutherlainn, and that he’d only recently become the clan’s chieftain. She learned that the balding, bearded man, Faing, was Crannog’s uncle. As she listened to them openly rejoicing about not only stealing several fine, fat cattle but also looking forward to receiving an enormous ransom from Alasdair Penhallow, she refrained from pointing out that her absence at Castle Tadgh would be noticed (sooner rather than later, if Sheila bestirred herself), someone would come after her, and because cattle couldn’t travel particularly fast, the plodding pace of their escape was, frankly, a bit of a problem. For them.
The moon was high in the sky by the time, after a great deal of complaining among the men, their party stopped and made camp for the night in a small clearing filled with concealing underbrush. Fiona was relieved to be lifted down from the poor nag who’d been made to carry two people, and also to see that Gealag—although clearly nervous—was all right. She was pushed down into a wet patch of leaves to sit and given some malodorous venison jerky to eat, with her hands still bound together. Even in the darkness she could see the green patches of mold upon it, and so she turned to Crannog Sutherlainn who was beside her, and held out the jerky. “Here.”
“You don’t want it?” His long, thin face was suspicious.
“No. It’s nasty.”
“It’s the best we’ve got,” he said defensively, accepting it, and as he immediately began gnawing upon it, Fiona looked around the group of men who surrounded her, all of them, she now observed, as thin as their horses and eating their single pieces of jerky with undisguised avidity. Nothing else was produced to eat. She was pondering this, when Faing spoke to her.
“Wouldn’t mind having a bit of you,” he said with a smile that revealed several distinctly unappealing teeth, “before we let you go. You’re a rare beauty, lass. The Penhallow’s a lucky man.”
Fiona took a moment to wonder if a compliment coming from such a one could in any way be viewed as flattering, especially since she knew for a fact he couldn’t possibly be drunk and so it wasn’t just alcohol talking.
“I wouldn’t recommend it,” she responded coolly. “Violating me would only make my husband quite a bit angrier than he’s already certain to be.” My husband. Was this the first time she’d said those two words out loud?
“She’s right, Uncle,” interpolated Crannog Sutherlainn, sounding more than a little anxious. “Come to think of it, maybe we ought to be pushing along right now.”
The men began loudly grumbling, and Faing replied, “No. We’re fatigued,” and Crannog promptly subsided, his eyes darting worriedly about. They came to rest on Fiona. “You’re cold?” he asked, softly, as if hoping the others wouldn’t hear him.