The Shadow 0f Her Smile (Highlander Heroes Book 3) Read online

  “Lass, how came you to be here at Stonehaven? I thought you dead.”

  She saw it now, that the face was the same as the one she’d barely seen that night down in the dungeon and then in the sparse light of the yard at Dornoch. The piercing eyes, whose color she had not known, and the squareness of the jaw were all that were familiar to her. His hair, which she recalled being rather long, was tied at his nape, while the sun glinted like gold in the blond strands.

  Jamie MacKenna. She had not forgotten his name.

  “You thought me dead?”

  “Aye.”

  “But I am not.” She straightened her back.

  “But how?”

  “Aye,” she said bitterly across the space between them, “you’d not know, because you left me there. And Will. You said you’d take me. Will swore you’d come back for us.”

  The look of horror that washed over him was well done, she decided. Indeed, all color seemed to drain from his face.

  “Will died believing that. He said you’d never leave us behind.”

  “Lass, I....”

  Ada lifted a brow, gave him a derisive glare. “What? You forgot? You’re sorry?”

  Anice came rushing around him then, ignoring Will, who still held Jamie MacKenna at bay, and lumbered toward Ada.

  Ada softened her tone as much as she could, but her words were still laced with fury. “Do not come near me,” she advised.

  Anice was brought up short by such vehemence.

  The Kincaid and Torren and Kinnon were close now as well.

  Ada drew a ragged breath, holding her hands out, palms forward. “You have been very kind to me...and I do not want to seem ungrateful....” She was crying now, couldn’t make the tears stop, or her voice not quaver. “I thank you for...everything.”

  And she turned and walked away again, knowing Will would give her a good head start.

  ANICE TURNED TO JAMIE, her mouth open, waiting for some explanation, but he said nothing, looking as if he’d seen a ghost as he watched Ada disappear around the front of Stonehaven.

  “Kinnon,” Anice said, “take Will up to the stables. Lock him up.” Her gaze remained fixed on Jamie as she explained to those around her, “She won’t leave without Will.”

  Kinnon nodded and patted his leg as he walked past Jamie and then Will, who gave one last snarl at MacKenna before trotting after the lad.

  Jamie ran his hand over his forehead and eyes and let it rest on his jaw for a minute, before finding Anice’s gaze again.

  “Jamie?”

  Dropping his hand, he found Gregor’s eye. “Remember that action down at Happrew last year?”

  Gregor nodded. “Aye. You and Conall getting Wallace away from Segrave’s forces.”

  Torren recalled this as well. “You were caught up by some English.”

  Jamie nodded. Blowing out a heavy sigh, he shook his head and filled in the details he’d not shared with any but Wallace himself, and that had been only this year.

  “Six of us were taken by this devil, Craig. Mean son of a bitch. Locked in the dungeon, save for Andrew’s lad, Henry—they take him up to the tower.” He put his hand to the back of his neck, squeezing, let his hand hold there. “This lass comes down near to midnight, says she’ll set us free if we take her with us.” This was the hard part. “I swore, on my honor, I’d take her with us. We separate, the lass and a few head straight for the gate. Callum and I fetch the boy.” His eyes met the troubled gaze of Anice. “We get out—Callum and Henry and me—and we wait on the Stobo road as planned. They dinna come. We can no go back, we’ve only got two stolen swords.” Another deep breath. “I send Callum and Henry to Conall at Inesfree, said I’d get back to Happrew, see if any MacGregors or MacKennas remained, would charge back at Craig.” Jamie shifted his feet, planted a hand on his hip. “Happrew was wasted, no one ‘round. Conall hadn’t gone straight home. He’d heard de Latimer had us prisoners, went after him. I had to get to Aviemore and back.” A long pause, and then, “Took me five days to return.”

  Jamie only stared at the ground, somehow peripherally aware of Anice covering her mouth with her hand, her sorrow no more than a silent cry.

  “I found Malys and Ned, or parts of them, scattered about,” he continued. “Will was hanging still, had been dead for days.” In his mind, he saw still the ashen bloated face of his friend, crisscrossed with so many slices and cuts. The rope had been nearly embedded into the skin of his neck. “A lass hung near Will, barely alive, but it was no...her. Found out later, after we strung John Craig up exactly where Will had hung, that the lass there was Craig’s own sister. She’d helped—I dinna ken her name was Ada—helped her escape. We chewed up and spit out every inch of ground around Dornoch for weeks. Never found her.”

  “Jesu,” Torren breathed, swiping his hand over his chin and beard. “So her face—that’s what they did to her?”

  Jamie nodded. “I saw her for not more than five minutes total, and in bare light; spoke no more than ten words, maybe. But she was...her face was uncut, her voice was sweet and soft.” There was a huskiness to it now. “Aye, Will’s face had been carved up as well.”

  “There’s...there is more than just her face and neck,” said Anice with a catch in her small voice. “Her chest, her back....” This brought three sets of dark and perturbed eyes to Anice, who nodded sadly. “It’s inhuman, what they did to her.”

  That took the last of the wind out of Jamie’s sail. He sank to the ground, onto his knees, let out a strangled noise.

  “Tell me you made John Craig pay for all that, for everything,” Gregor demanded.

  “He did no go kindly. Or quickly.” But it hadn’t helped then, didn’t help now.

  “But poor, dear Ada,” Anice lamented. “I must go to her.” She picked up her skirts and turned away from them.

  “Nae, lass,” Jamie said. When Anice faced him again, he said, “It’ll no make it better for her. You’ll want to explain that I tried, and she will no want to lose her hate. Might be all she has, or all she thinks she has. Dinna take it away.” He stood again, leaned his hand on the hilt of his sword.

  “Jamie, she needs to know you returned to Dornoch—”

  “It’ll be no but excuses to her ears, lass. Better she hate me than herself.”

  Anice nodded, tears sliding down her cheeks. “But I will check on her.” Anice left the path, followed the route Ada and Kinnon had taken. Torren shook Jamie’s hand with a sorrowful grimace and went off after Anice.

  Jamie said to Gregor, “I will no stay. Only make it worse. Wallace should return within the week. I can head out with him then.”

  Gregor nodded and changed the subject. “He is expecting to be well situated by the end of summer.”

  Jamie tipped his head at Gregor. “You going to be able to leave Anice?”

  His initial expression said that he would not, but he told Jamie, “The babe will be here by then. Wallace will have thousands again if you and I and Conall meet up with him—and, if he can talk Bruce into joining. We need to finish this.”

  Jamie considered this. “That’s a lot of people then knowing his whereabouts. Who’s to say not one of them claims the 300 marks Edward put on his head?”

  With a shrug and a grim look, Gregor said, “Canna hide forever, worrying about it. The nobles are lost, Edward made sure of that. We need Wallace and Bruce together to get this started again.”

  “When’s he to meet with Bruce?”

  Gregor shrugged, then grinned a bit. “Wallace sent a letter to Bruce, told him to come quietly and claim his throne.”

  They walked back to the keep. Gregor continued talking but Jamie only half listened.

  He interrupted whatever Gregor was saying. “You’ll keep her here? Keep her safe?”

  Gregor nodded immediately. “Anice will insist. She’s safe, Jamie.”

  This put him somewhat at ease, to know she would be cared for. However she came to be here, Jamie knew Anice was the perfect person for Ada to have foun
d.

  Her face swam before his eyes, crowded his mind. He hadn’t noticed it that night so long ago, how beautiful she was.

  Or, had been.

  The scar on her right cheek was larger, more grotesque, being curved and jagged, as if the original cut had been made with slow, taunting incisions. It was raised and pink, only the thinnest parts white, but significant enough to be visible from a good distance. On her left cheek, in the same manner, stretching from her ear to the side of her mouth, it seemed to have been made with a quick, solid slice, being smoother and flatter against her cheek. The bastard. And of course, the rope mark around her neck would be with her for a very long time, if not forever.

  “How long has she been here?” He asked Gregor.

  They stopped, at the bottom of the sloped hill that led to the castle gate. Jamie kicked some small rocks off the pathway.

  Gregor grimaced. “I dinna think you were heeding anything I said.”

  Jamie stared at his friend.

  “Few weeks,” Gregor told him. “Torren and the lads found her up in the forest. There’s a rundown cabin up there. She’d been there for some time, Torren reckoned. Anice said she does no give up too much, so we hadn’t any idea about her history.”

  “She named the wolf Will.” Why? To remember him? To torture herself further?

  “Aye.”

  “Jesu.”

  Chapter Five

  “Anice is looking for you, lass.”

  Ada shifted to find the big man, Torren, walking along the battlements. She said nothing to him, returned her eyes to the sky above, and remained slouched against the wall.

  He sat next to her, stretched his long legs out before him, and let out a long sigh.

  “Where is Will?” She’d come to the rooftop to scan the yard and grounds for her wolf, that she might stealthily claim him and be off. But she’d not found him, and then had ducked when the Kincaid and the demon Jamie MacKenna had walked through the tunnel.

  “Kinnon has him below...somewhere.”

  Ada lowered her gaze from the sky to Torren. He did not turn toward her, seemed content to stare at the half wall across from them. “He is mine.”

  “Aye, he is.” And now he turned, gave her a steady black eyed stare. He and Anice were among the few who could look into her eyes, not at her scars. “You dinna want to be running off, lass. Take some time and think about things.”

  “I do not want to be here if... he is.”

  “He dinna ever stay long. And where would you go?”

  Ada felt tears threaten again. “Very discourteous of you to remind me of my pitiful choices.”

  “Now, lass, you ken you’re the only one who believes you haven’t any choices.”

  “What choices do I—”

  “You have the same choices and opportunities as anyone else,” Torren insisted with a fair amount of gruffness. “You ain’t a leper, lass. You ain’t mad or lame or even English. You’ve been here now a few weeks. You see they treat you same as everyone else, no better, no worse, no different.”

  “They stare and—”

  “Shite, lass. They stare at me and I’ve lived here for years. They stare at Kinnon’s dough face. They stare at Anice’s hair. They stare at the hole in Gavin’s head that used to be an eye. Listen, I’m sorry for what happened to you. It’s awful, no matter how you look at it. You going to hide away all the rest of your life?”

  “I was going to try,” this, in a small voice, very close to tears again.

  His voice was softer when he responded, “That ain’t living, lass. You dinna want to do that.”

  “But at the very least, it raises the question: what will I do? What should I do?”

  “Go back to find that answer,” he said. “Before this happened to you, what did you want?”

  Ada shrugged. “Torren, you may not realize this, but for a female, that is rarely a question asked. I didn’t want. I simply did as I was told.”

  “And did that satisfy you?”

  Ada harrumphed, which made Torren chuckle.

  “Of course not.”

  “Well, then there’s the good then, see? Aye, you suffered, but now it’s done. Been done now for a while. So you get on, and now you get to do as you please. No one to answer to.”

  “You make it sound easy, Torren. What—do I just say I want to be this? Or do that? And it becomes so?”

  “Depends on what the this or that is, I ken.”

  They were quiet for a moment, until Ada said, “I’m sounding ungrateful, Torren, and I apologize for that. I’m glad you found me in the forest. At the very least, I’ve learned that my fear of people’s reaction is often greater than people’s actual reactions.”

  “That’s something, then. The thing is, lass, your life will be whatever you decide to make of it. You want to be angry and lonely, that’s what you’ll get. You want friends and company, you can have that, too.”

  Ada nodded, leaned her head back against the stone wall again. “I’ll make my apologies to Anice. I had no cause to be rude to her.”

  ADA FOUND ANICE LATER in the day, when she’d been assured by a passing Kinnon that the Kincaid and MacKenna were outside the keep. Anice was in the solar next to her private chambers, weaving the reeds she regularly collected from the beaches into mats and baskets and sometimes, completely useless items.

  Ada paused just at the threshold, warmed by Anice’s gentle smile. “I sit here for a few hours every day,” she told Ada, “to give Torren a break.” The rolling of her eyes, which accompanied this confession, brought a grin to Ada’s face.

  “I apologize for my earlier behavior, Anice,” Ada said. “I should not have taken out my...dismay on you.”

  Her hands stopped moving, the reeds forgotten in her shortened lap. Anice looked up at Ada and insisted, “There is no cause for any apology. None at all, I assure you. I hadn’t bothered you at all for any details of what happened to you—truly, I thought it would come out when you were ready. But your upset earlier made me force it out of Jamie, I want you to know.” She let this settle before she continued, with a most sympathetic expression, “Ada, what you did was so damnably remarkable and selfless, it makes me feel so wholly unexceptional in comparison.”

  With Torren’s recent lecture still fresh in her mind, Ada did not demur outright, only tucked her head, away from the startling admiration in Anice’s gaze.

  “Jamie has asked that I not speak on his behalf and so I will not,” Anice said. “But, Ada, I think you might want to hear what he has to say.”

  Ada was shaking her head even before Anice had finished her sentence. She disliked immensely disappointing Anice, but could only offer, “It just doesn’t matter.”

  Almost to herself, having resumed her weaving, Anice said, “I do wonder, though, if this is the basis for Jamie’s ever-present sorrow.”

  Still, Ada said nothing. She wouldn’t have suspected Anice of resorting to manipulation, yet these words came across as such, transferring sympathy onto that man. Ada would have none of it.

  Anice bit her lip, clearly wanting to say more on this subject. Mayhap her vow to Jamie MacKenna kept her quiet on this score. Finally, she asked, “Ada, promise me you will not run away. Jamie will only stay for a few days. Everything will be as it was when he goes.”

  Ada inclined her head in agreement to this. Silently, she acknowledged to herself that her acquiescence came with some relief; she hadn’t wanted to leave Stonehaven.

  “Will you at least give him an opportunity to explain?” Anice wondered.

  Ada tightened her lips. It was unfair of Anice to ask this.

  “Very well,” Anice said, reading Ada’s stillness. “But I insist you also promise that you will not disappear while Jamie is here. Knowing the truth—even if you do not want to hear it—means that I cannot have Jamie, as our guest, made to feel uncomfortable.”

  Ada then reluctantly arrived in the hall for supper in the early evening. She took her usual place at the trestle table nea
r the head table, in her usual spot of the past few weeks between Kinnon and the very large soldier, Arik. Across from her sat Tamsin, a friendly soldier of about her age, who suffered much ribbing from his comrades as he thought and spoke slower than most. Next to him was Sim, who was smaller than Ada, with a heavy lidded gaze and serious nature.

  Ada resolutely ignored Jamie MacKenna when he entered the hall and took a seat at the family’s table on the dais, seated with Gregor and Anice Kincaid, and Torren and another lieutenant, Fibh Kincaid, a distant cousin of Gregor’s. Seated as she was, it was almost effortless to pretend he was not there, her back the only thing she presented to him, should he spare her a glance.

  Other tables soon filled with persons who lived within the castle; the stablemaster, Gavin, and the lads under his supervision shared another table with Robert, the smithy, and his wife; across the aisle sat another group of soldiers, those to whom Ada was polite, but not as friendly as those who surrounded her; and yet another table was occupied by the baker and his wife, Wilbur and Nellie, whose work in the bakehouse across the yard usually started before the sun rose and was finished by noon each day; Alastair, the castle’s steward, shared a table with his family and that of the bailiff.

  Several times now, Ada compared the carefree and animated atmosphere of Stonehaven’s suppers to those somber and dreadful meals at Dornoch, happy once again that fate had landed her here. Daily, she found great amusement in the bantering of the men around her. Truly, some of them seemed no more than boys, but when she considered the horrors they must have seen, having engaged in numerous battles she knew, she attributed manhood to them, despite their youthful veneers.

  “But where does she put it all?” Tamsin was asking just now, drawing Ada’s attention.

  “Where does who put what?” Ada asked, wondering what she had missed.

  “The Lady Anice,” Kinnon said around the food in his mouth. “She eats more than Torren, or even Arik here.”