The Ghost Read online

  Making war on women and youths was bad enough, but when Alex guessed that Boyd had taken Rosalin to his bed, the dishonor done to her while in their care had seemed the final blow.

  Alex just couldn’t do it anymore. He could no longer be party to such dishonorable acts done in the name of war.

  Not just Boyd’s, but his own as well.

  Alex couldn’t forget how close he’d come to doing something for which he could never forgive himself—that little girl’s face in the flames was never too far from his mind. He’d reached her in time, thank God, and pulled her from the flames of the building to which he’d set fire in that same retaliatory raid in Norham. But that was the moment he knew something had to change. Holding the sobbing child in his arms whom he’d almost accidentally killed, something in him had snapped.

  This wasn’t right—no matter how just the ends—and he couldn’t do it anymore.

  He couldn’t set fire to one more barn, see one more town razed, or one more innocent harmed. There had to be another way than the “eye for an eye,” “you raze me, I’ll raze you more” mentality that had defined the war in the Borders for so long on both sides.

  In that child’s tear-stained, smoke-blackened face, Alex realized it was never going to end. Not like this. It had become a war of attrition that could and would go on for years, with Alex’s people in the Borders—and little girls like this—the ones who suffered.

  He knew he had to do something. Something drastic. Something that might make a difference. Something that actually had a chance of putting an end to the damned war.

  It had become painfully clear that that something wasn’t going to be fighting for Bruce with the Highland Guard. It wasn’t that Alex had never fully embraced the pirate style of warfare, which went against everything he had been taught was honorable as a knight, but it wasn’t getting them anywhere—not anymore. The skirmishes, ambushes, and raids that had given Bruce a foothold were never going to give him the definitive victory he needed to signal God’s judgment in the righteousness of his cause and force the English to accept him as king. Only a pitched battle—army meeting army—would do that, but Bruce vehemently refused to do something so risky. Why should he, when he could go on as he was until the English gave up?

  If Bruce wouldn’t end the war with a battle—and God knows Alex had tried to persuade him—it would have to be done with a truce. And Bruce wasn’t the one who needed to be convinced to parley. It was the English. The only thing Alex could do was to try to end the war from the other side, using reason, negotiation, compromise, and the influence he’d once had as a former English baron to help them see the value in peace and bring them to the bargaining table.

  It would be a difficult task—hell, a Promethean one—but God knew, it would be better than raids, hostages, and burning barns with innocents.

  When Rosalin decided she wanted to return to England, Alex had “rescued” her—as Boyd had just accused him—by escorting her. Alex didn’t know what Boyd had done to win her back, but it must have convinced her that he’d changed. For Rosalin’s sake, Alex hoped so.

  Unlike Rosalin, however, Alex hadn’t gone back.

  He told himself he was still fighting for Bruce’s place on the throne, but he knew his former brethren wouldn’t see it that way. To them he betrayed them—stabbed them in the back—and his reasons for switching sides wouldn’t matter.

  They wouldn’t care that it was the hardest decision he’d ever had to make in his life. That he’d agonized over it for months. That leaving the Guard had been like cutting off his own arm—with the damage he’d done in removing his tattoo he practically had. That it had torn him apart for weeks . . . months . . . hell, it still tore him apart.

  Now here he was facing not God’s judgment in the righteousness of his cause, but his former brethren’s.

  He was a dead man.

  Ignoring Boyd’s jibe about the knife in the back, he said, “Aye, well, I didn’t think you’d see her in time, and I doubt even someone who blackens their armor would let a little girl get run over if he could stop it.”

  He heard a sharp laugh from the man next to Boyd. “He has you there, Raider,” MacSorley said.

  But any thought that Alex might find sympathy from the always jesting and good-humored seafarer was lost when their eyes met. MacSorley’s face was a mask of betrayal every bit as hard and impenetrable as Boyd’s. They all were: MacLeod, MacSorley, Campbell, MacGregor, Boyd, Sutherland, MacKay, Lamont, MacLean, and one face he didn’t recognize beneath the helm.

  His replacement?

  The sting was surprisingly sharp. Alex could never go back. He’d known that, but seeing it staring at him in the face and condemning him was different. For seven years these men had been his brothers, and now they hated him.

  It was hard to take—no matter how good his reasons for leaving.

  MacSorley’s sarcasm was just as heavy as Boyd’s when he added, “Wearing a wyvern on a surcoat doesn’t give someone a lock on chivalry and honor—even if Sir Alex seemed to think so.”

  Wyvern, not a dragon. That hurt. At one time Alex would have liked nothing more than to hear MacSorley refer to the emblem of his arms correctly. As a young knight the jest about the “dragon” on the Seton coat of arms had driven him crazy. But eventually, it had given him his secret war name among the Guard. By calling it a wyvern now, MacSorley couldn’t have made it more clear that Dragon was no longer a part of them.

  “I never thought that,” Alex started to explain, and then stopped. He’d never been a part of them. That had always been part of the problem. Why would they understand him now when they never had before?

  It was too late for explanations. They all knew that. He would not beg for understanding or forgiveness. He’d made his decision; he would have to live with it.

  Or not live, as was the case.

  Jaw locked, he turned to the chief of the Highland Guard, Tor MacLeod. “Do what you must.”

  MacLeod motioned to Boyd. Fitting, Alex supposed, that it would be his former partner to strike him down. They’d never seen eye to eye. About the war. About the way to fight it. About anything. But instead of pulling his sword from his scabbard, Boyd moved his horse a few feet forward and stopped.

  “Was it worth it?” his former partner asked, his mouth a hard line of bitterness and anger.

  The deceptively simple question took Alex aback. He’d never thought about it—perhaps because he didn’t want to know the answer.

  But he considered it now and answered truthfully. “I don’t know yet.” God willing, he could still do something to put an end to this. He’d made some inroads, but as today’s precipitous attack by Pembroke on Carrick proved, he hadn’t made enough. “But at the time I didn’t feel as if I had any other choice.”

  He’d had to do something. He couldn’t go on as he was, and trying to fight from the other side had seemed the best—the only—way of making a difference. If he never had to see another village razed, another family left to starve, another face in the flames, it would have all been worth it. No matter the personal cost.

  Boyd’s mouth clamped into an even harder line. “Because of Rosalin.”

  It wasn’t a question, so Alex didn’t attempt to answer. Rosalin might have been the final blow, but why he’d left was far more complicated than that.

  Was it because his former partner had violated every code of honor and decency by seducing a woman in their care? Because Boyd had been ready to retaliate for a raid he thought was ordered by Rosalin’s brother by burning down the castle she considered her home? Because Alex was tired of jumping out of trees and hiding in the dark, and wanted to fight knight to knight on a battlefield? Or because being a knight and living by certain codes actually meant something to him?

  Was it because he couldn’t stand the sight of one more injustice done in the name of war—by either side—that he was supposed to ignore as the ends justifying the means? Because he was tired of seeing the people in the Borders�