The Saint: A Highland Guard Novel Read online

She knew he was right. But no matter what Magnus had said—or whatever his feelings—she’d been wrong to marry William when she loved another man. She would always love Magnus. Whether he wanted her or not.

  William deserved a wife who would love him. A woman who would come to his bed without thinking of another. She would never be able to give him that.

  She just hoped that some day her family would be able to forgive her.

  Galloway Forest, Two Nights Later

  “Any questions?” Tor MacLeod scanned the blackened faces of the men circled around him in the darkness. The ash—like the dark nasal helms and armor—helped them blend into the night. “I don’t need to tell you how important this is. If you don’t know exactly what you are supposed to do, now is the time to speak up. There isn’t any room for mistakes.”

  “Hell, if there was room for mistakes, I’d think I was in the wrong place,” Erik MacSorley quipped. The brash seafarer could always be counted on to lighten the mood. The more danger, the more jokes. He’d been making jests all night.

  The Highland Guard had been formed for the most dangerous, seemingly impossible missions. The rescue of the king’s brother was going to test those limits. Fifteen hundred English soldiers stood between them and Edward Bruce. With the addition of James Douglas’s men, their forces would number about fifty. Daunting odds for even Scotland’s most elite team of warriors. But they were at their best when the odds were against them. They never considered failure. The belief that they would be victorious under any situation is what made them succeed.

  MacLeod, the leader of the Highland Guard, usually ignored MacSorley. That he didn’t perhaps more than anything underscored the severity of the situation. “Aye, well, try not to abduct any lasses this time, Hawk.”

  MacSorley smiled at the reference to the “mistake” that had led to his absconding with Lady Elyne de Burgh from her home in Ireland last year. “I don’t know, Raider could use a wife. With his surly disposition it might be the only way he finds one.”

  “Sod off, Hawk,” Robbie Boyd replied. “Maybe I’ll just take yours? The poor lass must be tired of you by now. God knows we are.” Boyd’s exaggerated weary sigh elicited quite a few laughs and murmurs of agreement, succeeding in dissipating some of the tension.

  “Be ready, then,” MacLeod said. “We leave in an hour.”

  Dismissed, Magnus started to break away like the others, but MacLeod stopped him. “Saint. Templar. Hold back a minute.” He waited for the rest of the men to leave before he turned to Magnus and Gordon, the steely gaze that missed nothing flickering back and forth between them. “Is there anything I should be worried about?”

  Magnus straightened, not needing to look at Gordon to know he did the same. “Nay, Chief,” he said, Gordon’s voice echoing his.

  Tor MacLeod was lauded as the fiercest warrior in the Highlands, and right now he looked it. He scrutinized the two men with withering intensity. Few men gave Magnus pause, but the leader of the Highland Guard was one of them. They all had a little bit of Viking in them, but MacLeod had more than most. “Discord is poison in an army. Whatever is going on between you two, put it aside.”

  MacLeod walked away, not waiting for them to respond. He didn’t need to; they understood what was at stake.

  From the moment MacRuairi entered the boathouse with word of Edward Bruce’s crisis in Galloway, the only thing that mattered was the mission. He and Gordon were too experienced as warriors to let personal matters interfere with the job Bruce sent them to do. Their lives, and the lives of their Highland Guard brethren, depended on it.

  But the tension was there, lingering under the surface, waiting but not forgotten. The fact that MacLeod had picked up on it shamed them both.

  Gordon looked as grim as Magnus felt. “Come,” he said. “We’d best get something to eat. I’ve a feeling we’re going to need all our strength for the night ahead.”

  “Not to mention a few miracles,” Magnus said dryly.

  Gordon laughed, and for the first time since Magnus arrived at Dunstaffnage for the wedding, the knot of tension twisting in his gut dissipated. He’d already lost Helen; he’d be damned if he lost his friend, too.

  They walked back to camp to join the others, reviewing the details of the daring plan to rescue the king’s proud, headstrong, and at times reckless brother. Edward Bruce was not a favorite among the Highland Guard, but he was the king’s trusted lieutenant in the troublesome south and, significantly, his sole remaining brother. Edward’s death or capture would be a personal blow to a king who’d already suffered too many since the war began: three brothers executed in less than a year; a wife, two sisters, and a daughter imprisoned in England—one of those sisters in a cage.

  If they had to get through fifteen hundred Englishmen to save Edward Bruce’s damnable hide, they would do so. Airson an Leòmhann. For the Lion. The symbol of Scotland’s kingship and the battle cry of the Highland Guard.

  For the past two days, the eleven members of the Highland Guard had worked together with one purpose in mind: reaching Edward in time to avert disaster. They’d sailed as far south as Ayr, then headed east on horseback into the wild and untamed forests and hills of Galloway.

  Although the war in the north had been won, the war in the south waged on. The English controlled the borders, with large garrisons occupying all the major castles, and in Galloway—the ancient Celtic province in the isolated southwest of Scotland—pockets of rebellion flared by those loyal to the exiled King John Balliol and his kinsman, the powerful clan chief Dugald MacDowell.

  Operating from his headquarters in the vast and impenetrable forests, Edward Bruce had spent most of the last six months putting down those rebellions with a vengeance, especially toward the MacDowells, who were responsible for the deaths of two of the Bruce brothers in the disastrous landing at Loch Ryan the year before.

  Young James Douglas, dispossessed by the English of his lands in nearby Douglasdale, had made a name for himself in Edward Bruce’s army, his black hair and fearsome reputation earning him the epitaph of the “Black Douglas.”

  Most of the members of the Highland Guard had spent some time in Galloway over the past six months with Edward Bruce—especially Boyd, Seton, MacLean, and Lamont, who had ties to the area. Magnus himself had left the area only a few days ago to attend the wedding. But this was the first time the entire Guard had been called into Edward’s service.

  The situation warranted it. According to the messenger who’d arrived from Douglas, Edward Bruce had received word that his nemesis Dugald MacDowell had returned to Galloway from exile in England. He’d gone after him with a small force while Douglas was on a raid.

  When Douglas returned and discovered Edward gone, he’d followed him, only to to find fifteen hundred Englishmen blocking his way. Edward had been lured from the forest into a trap and had been forced to take refuge at Threave Castle, which he’d wrested from the English only a few months before.

  The ancient stronghold of the Lords of Galloway, most recently held by Dugald MacDowell, was located on an islet in the middle of the River Dee, connected to the grassy marshland by a rocky causeway. The castle should have been highly defensible. But like William Wallace before him, Bruce’s strategy was to scorch the earth behind him, leaving nothing for his enemy to use, including destroying castles and befouling the wells. That meant Edward Bruce was defending himself from a burned-out shell of rock with no fresh water.

  The English army, according to Arthur Campbell, the Highland Guard’s vaunted scout, was laying siege on the eastern banks of the river. But without fresh water, the siege would not last long. An assault by sea would make it even shorter.

  Two hours before dawn, Magnus and the rest of the Highland Guard gathered with Douglas’s men around MacLeod. “Are you ready?” he asked.

  “Aye,” the men replied.

  MacLeod nodded. “Then let’s give the bards something to sing about.”

  They left the cover of the forest, riding hard