A Kingdom of Dreams (3 page)

Jenny's stomach twisted into sick knots at the thought of committing her body, her entire life, into the hands of a man she instinctively recoiled from, but she lifted her head and bravely met her father's gaze. "Aye, father," she said quietly. "Shall I come with you now?"

The look of pride and relief on his face almost made the sacrifice worthwhile. He shook his head. " 'Tis best you stay here with Brenna. We've no horses to spare and we're anxious to reach Merrick and begin preparations for battle. I'll send word to the MacPherson that the marriage is agreed upon, and then send someone here to fetch you to him."

When he turned to remount his horse, Jenny gave into the temptation she'd been fighting all along: Instead of standing aside, she moved into the rows of mounted clansmen who had once been her friends and playmates. Hoping that some of them had perhaps heard her agree to marry the MacPherson and that this might neutralize their contempt of her, she paused beside the horse of a ruddy, red-headed man. "Good day to you, Renald Garvin," she said, smiling hesitantly into his hooded gaze. "How fares your lady wife?"

His jaw hardened, his cold eyes flickering over her. "Well enough, I imagine," he snapped.

Jenny swallowed at the unmistakable rejection from the man who had once taught her to fish and laughed with her when she fell into the stream.

She turned around and looked beseechingly at the man in the column beside Renald. "And you, Michael MacCleod? Has your leg been causing you any pain?"

Cold blue eyes met hers, then looked straight ahead.

She went to the rider behind him whose face was filled with hatred and she held out her hand beseechingly, her voice choked with pleading. "Garrick Carmichael, it has been four years since your Becky drowned. I swear to you now, as I swore to you then, I did not shove her into the river. We were
not
quarreling—'twas a
lie
invented by Alexander to—"

His face as hard as granite, Garrick Carmichael spurred his horse forward, and without ever looking at her, the men began passing her by.

Only old Josh, the clan's armorer, pulled his ancient horse to a halt, letting the others go on ahead. Leaning down, he laid his callused palm atop her bare head. "I know you speak truly, lassie," he said, and his unceasing loyalty
brought the sting of tears to her eyes as she gazed up into his soft brown ones. "Ye have a temper, there's no denyin' it, but even when ye were but a wee thing, ye kept it bridled. Garrick Carmichael and the others might o' been fooled by Alexander's angelic looks, but not ol' Josh. You'll no' see me grievin' o'er the loss o' him! The clan'll be better by far wit' young William leadin' it. Carmichael and the others—" he added reassuringly, "they'll come about in their thinkin' o' you, once they ken yer marrying the MacPherson for their sake as well as your sire's."

"Where are my stepbrothers?" Jenny asked hoarsely, changing the subject lest she burst into tears.

"They're comin' home by a different route. We couldn't be sure the Wolf wouldn't try to attack us while we marched, so we split up after leavin' Cornwall." With another pat on her head, he spurred his horse forward.

As if in a daze, Jenny stood stock-still in the middle of the road, watching her clan ride off and disappear around the bend.

"It grows dark," Brenna said beside her, her gentle voice filled with sympathy. "We should go back to the abbey now."

The abbey. Three short hours ago, Jenny had walked away from the abbey feeling cheery and alive. Now she felt—dead. "Go ahead without me. I—I can't go back there. Not yet. I think I'll walk up the hill and sit for a while."

"The abbess will be annoyed if we aren't back before dusk, and it's near that now," Brenna said apprehensively. It had always been thus between the two girls, with Jenny breaking a rule and Brenna terrified of bending one. Brenna was gentle, biddable, and beautiful, with blond hair, hazel eyes, and a sweet disposition that made her, in Jenny's eyes, the embodiment of womanhood at its best. She was also as meek and timid as Jenny was impulsive and courageous. Without Jenny, she'd not have had a single adventure—nor ever gotten a scolding. Without Brenna to worry about and protect, Jenny would have had many more adventures—and many more scoldings. As a result, the two girls were entirely devoted to each other, and tried to protect one another as much as possible from the inevitable results of each other's shortcomings.

Brenna hesitated and then volunteered with only a tiny tremor in her voice, "I'll stay with you. If you remain alone, you'll forget about time and likely be pounced upon by a—a bear in the darkness."

At the moment, the prospect of being killed by a bear seemed rather inviting to Jenny, whose entire life stretched before her, shrouded in gloom and foreboding. Despite the fact that she truly wanted, needed, to stay outdoors and try to reassemble her thoughts, Jenny shook her head, knowing that if they stayed, Brenna would be drowning in fear at the thought of facing the abbess. "No, we'll go back."

Ignoring Jenny's words, Brenna clasped Jenny's hand and turned to the left, toward the slope of the hill that overlooked the abbey, and for the first time it was Brenna who led and Jenny who followed.

In the woods beside the road, two shadows moved stealthily, staying parallel with the girls' path up the hill.

By the time they were partway up the steep incline, Jenny had already grown impatient with her own self-pity, and she made a Herculean effort to shore up her flagging spirits. "When you think on it," she offered slowly, directing a glance at Brenna,
" 'tis actually a grand and noble thing I've been given the opportunity to do—marrying the MacPherson for the sake of my people."

"You're just like Joan of Arc," Brenna agreed eagerly, "leading her people to victory!"

"Except that I'm marrying Edric MacPherson."

"And," Brenna finished encouragingly, "suffering a worse fate than she did!"

Laughter widened Jenny's eyes at this depressing remark, which her well-meaning sister delivered with such enthusiasm.

Encouraged by the return of Jenny's ability to laugh, Brenna cast about for something else with which to divert and cheer her. As they neared the crest of the hill, which was blocked by thick woods, she said suddenly, "What did Father mean about your having your mother's 'look about you'?"

"I don't know," Jenny began, diverted by a sudden, uneasy feeling that they were being watched in the deepening dusk. Turning and walking backward, she looked down toward the well and saw the villagers had all returned to the warmth of their hearths. Drawing her cloak about her, she shivered in the biting wind, and without much interest, she added, "Mother Abbess said my looks are a trifle
brazen
and that I must guard against the effect I will have on males when I leave the abbey."

"What does all that mean?"

Jenny shrugged without concern. "I don't know." Turning and walking forward again, Jenny remembered the wimple and veil in her fingertips and began to put the wimple back on. "What do I look like to you?" she asked, shooting a puzzled glance at Brenna. "I haven't seen my face in two years, except when I caught a reflection of it in the water. Have I changed much?"

"Oh yes," Brenna laughed. "Even Alexander wouldn't be able to call you scrawny and plain now, or say that your hair is the color of carrots."

"Brenna!" Jenny interrupted, thunderstruck by her own callousness. "Are you much grieved by Alexander's death? He was your brother and—"

"Don't talk of it any more," Brenna pleaded shakily. "I cried when Father told me, but the tears were few and I feel guilty because I didn't love him as I ought. Not then and not now. I couldn't. He was so—mean-spirited. It's wrong to speak ill of the dead, yet I can't think of much
good
to say of him." Her voice trailed off, and she pulled her cloak about her in the damp wind, gazing at Jenny in mute appeal to change the subject.

"Tell me how I look, then," Jenny invited quickly, giving her sister a quick, hard hug.

They stopped walking, their way blocked by the dense woods that covered the rest of the slope. A slow, thoughtful smile spread across Brenna's beautiful face as she studied her stepsister, her hazel eyes roving over Jenny's expressive face, which was dominated by a pair of large eyes as clear as dark blue crystal beneath gracefully winged, auburn brows. "Well, you're—you're quite pretty!"

"Good, but do you see anything
unusual
about me?" Jenny asked, thinking of Mother Ambrose's words as she put her wimple back on and pinned the short woolen veil in place atop it. "Anything at all which might make a male behave oddly?"

"No," Brenna stated, for she saw Jenny through the eyes of a young innocent. "Nothing at all." A man would have answered very differently, for although Jennifer Merrick wasn't pretty in the conventional way, her looks were both striking and provocative. She had a generous mouth that beckoned to be kissed, eyes like liquid sapphires that shocked and invited, hair like lush, red-gold satin, and a slender, voluptuous body that was made for a man's hands.

"Your eyes are blue," Brenna began helpfully, trying to describe her, and Jenny chuckled.

"They were blue two years ago," she said. Brenna opened her mouth to answer, but the words became a scream that was stifled by a man's hand that clapped over her mouth as he began dragging her backward into the dense cover of the woods.

Jenny ducked, instinctively expecting an attack from behind, but she was too late. Kicking and screaming against a gloved male hand, she was plucked from her feet and hauled into the woods. Brenna was tossed over the back of her captor's horse like a sack of flour, her limp limbs attesting to the fact that she'd fainted, but Jenny was not so easily subdued. As her faceless adversary dumped her over the back of his horse, she threw herself to the side, rolling free, landing in the leaves and dirt, crawling on all fours beneath his horse, then scrambling to her feet. He caught her again, and Jenny raked her nails down his face, twisting in his hold. "God's teeth!" he hissed, trying to hold onto her flailing limbs. Jenny let out a blood-chilling scream, at the same moment she kicked as hard as she could, landing a hefty blow on his shin with the sturdy, black boots which were deemed appropriate footware for novice nuns. A grunt of pain escaped the blond man as he let her go for a split second. She bolted forward and might even have gained a few yards if her booted foot hadn't caught under a thick tree root and sent her sprawling onto her face, smacking the side of her head against a rock when she landed.

"Hand me the rope," the Wolf's brother said, a grim smile on his face as he glanced at his companion. Pulling his limp captive's cloak over her head, Stefan Westmoreland yanked it around her body, using it to pin her arms at her sides, then took the rope from his companion and tied it securely around Jenny's middle. Finished, he picked up his human bundle and tossed it ignominiously over his horse, her derrière pointing skyward, then he swung up into the saddle behind her.

R
oyce will scarce believe our good fortune," Stefan called to the rider beside him whose prisoner was also bound and draped across his saddle. "Imagine—Merrick's girls standing beneath that tree as ripe for plucking as apples from a branch. Now there's no reason for us to have a look at Merrick's defenses—he'll surrender without a fight."

Tightly bound in her dark woolen prison, her head pounding and her stomach slamming against the horse's back with each lift of the beast's hooves, the name "Royce" made Jenny's blood freeze. Royce Westmoreland, the earl of Claymore. The Wolf. The horrifying stories she'd heard of him no longer seemed nearly so farfetched. Brenna and she had been seized by men who showed no reverence whatsoever for the habits of the order of St. Albans which the girls wore, habits that indicated their status of novice—aspiring nuns who had not yet taken their vows. What manner of men, Jenny wondered frantically, would lay their hands on nuns, or almost-nuns, without conscience or fear of retribution, human or divine. No man would. Only a devil and his disciples would dare!

"This one's fainted dead away," Thomas said with a lewd laugh. "A pity we haven't more time to sample our loot, although, were it left to me, I'd prefer that tasty morsel ye've wrapped in yer blanket, Stefan."

"Yours is the beauty of the two," Stefan replied coldly, "and you're not sampling anything until Royce decides what he wants to do with these two."

Nearly suffocating with fear inside her blanket, Jenny made a tiny cry of mindless, panicked protest in her throat, but no one heard her. She prayed to God to strike her captors dead on their horses, but God didn't seem to hear her, and the horses trotted endlessly, painfully onward. She prayed to be shown some sort of plan to escape, but her mind was too busy, frantically tormenting her with all the gruesome tales of the deadly Black Wolf:
He keeps no prisoners unless he
means
to torture them. He laughs when his victims scream with pain. He drinks their blood
…"

Bile surged up in Jenny's throat and she began to pray, not for escape, for she knew in her heart there would be no escape. Instead she prayed that death would come quickly and that she would not disgrace her proud family name. Her father's voice came back to her as he stood in the hall at Merrick, instructing her stepbrothers when they were young: "
If it is the Lord's will that you die at the hands of the enemy, then do it bravely. Die fighting like a warrior. Like a Merrick! Die fighting
…

The phrases ranted through her mind, hour after hour, around and around, yet when the horses slowed and she heard distant, unmistakable sounds of a large encampment of men, fury began to overcome her fear. She was much too young to die, she thought, and it wasn't fair! And now gentle Brenna was going to die and that would be Jenny's fault, too. She would have to face the good Lord with that deed on her conscience. And all because a bloodthirsty ogre was roaming the land, devouring everything in his path.

Her thundering heart doubled its beat as the horses came to a jarring stop. All around her, metal clanked against metal as men moved about and then she heard the prisoners' voices—men's voices crying pathetically for mercy, "Have pity, Wolf—Pity, Wolf—" The awful chants were rising to a shout as she was unceremoniously yanked from her horse.

"Royce," her captor called out, "stay there—we've brought you something!"

Completely blinded by the cloak which had been thrown over her head, and her arms still bound by the rope, she was tossed over her captor's shoulder. Beside her, she heard Brenna scream her name as they were carried forward.

"Be brave, Brenna," Jenny cried, but her voice was muffled by the cloak, and she knew her terrified sister couldn't hear her.

Jenny was abruptly lowered to the ground and pushed forward. Her legs were numb and she stumbled, falling heavily to her knees.
Die like a Merrick. Die bravely. Die fighting
, the chant raged through her mind as she tried ineffectually to raise herself. Above her, the Wolf spoke for the first time and she knew the voice was his. The voice was gravelly, fiery—a voice straight from the bowels of hell. "What is this? Something to eat, I hope."

'
Tis said he eats the flesh of those he kills
… Young Thomas's words came back to her while rage blended with the sound of Brenna's scream and the calls for pity from the prisoners. The rope around her arms was suddenly jerked loose. Driven by the twin demons of fear and fury, Jenny surged clumsily to her feet, her arms flailing at the cloak, looking like an enraged ghost trying to fling off its shroud. And the moment it fell away, Jenny doubled up her fist and swung with all her might at the dark, demonic, shadowy giant before her, striking him on the jaw bone.

Brenna fainted.

"
Monster
!" Jenny shouted. "
Barbarian
!" and she swung again, but this time her fist was caught in a painful viselike grip and held high above her head. "
Devil
!" she cried, squirming, and she landed a mighty kick at his shin. "Spawn of Satan! Despoiler of innoc—!"

"What the—!" Royce Westmoreland roared, and reaching out, he caught his assailant at the waist and jerked her off her feet, holding her at arm's length, high in the air. It was a mistake. Her booted foot struck out again, catching Royce squarely in the groin with an impact that nearly doubled him over.

"You little bitch!" he thundered, as surprise, pain, and fury made him drop her, then grasp her by the veil, catching a handful of hair beneath it, and jerking her head back. "
Be still
!" he roared.

Even nature seemed to obey him; prisoners stopped their keening cries, the sounds of clanging metal ceased and an awful, unearthly silence fell over the huge clearing. Her pulse racing and her scalp smarting, Jenny squeezed her eyes closed and waited for the blow from his mighty list that would surely kill her.

But it didn't come.

Half in fear and half in morbid curiosity, she slowly opened her eyes and for the first time, she actually saw His Face. The demonic specter that towered before her nearly made her scream with terror: He was huge. Enormous. His hair was black and his black cloak was billowing out behind him, blowing eerily in the wind as if it had a life of its own. Firelight danced across his swarthy, hawklike features, casting shadows that made him look positively satanic; it blazed in his strange eyes, heating them until they glowed like molten silver coals in his bearded haggard face. His shoulders were massive and broad, his chest incredibly wide, his arms bulging with muscle. One look at him and Jenny knew that he was capable of every vile thing he'd been accused of doing.

Die bravely! Die swiftly!

She turned her head and sank her teeth into his thick wrist.

She saw his blazing eyes widen a split second before his hand raised, then crashed against her cheek with a force that snapped her head sideways and sent her sprawling to her knees. Instinctively, Jenny quickly curled herself into a protective ball, and waited, eyes clenched shut, for the deathblow to befall her, while terror screamed through every pore of her quaking body.

The voice of the giant spoke above her, only this time it was more terrible because it was so tautly controlled that it hissed with muted fury: "What in the
hell
have you done?" Royce raged at his younger brother. "Haven't we problems enough without this! The men are exhausted and hungry, and you bring in two women to further fire their discontent."

Before his brother could speak, Royce turned to issue a sharp command to the other man to leave them, then his gaze slashed to the two prone female figures lying at his feet, one of them in a dead faint, the other curled into a ball, trembling so violently that her body shook as if in the throes of convulsions. For some reason the quaking girl enraged him more than her unconscious counterpart. "Get up!" he snapped at Jenny, nudging her with the toe of his boot. "You were brave enough a minute ago, now
get up
!"

Jenny uncurled slowly and, bracing her hand against the ground beneath her, she staggered awkwardly to her feet, swaying unsteadily while Royce rounded on his brother again. "I'm waiting for an answer, Stefan!"

"And I'll give you one if you'll cease roaring at me. These women are—"

"Nuns!" Royce bit out, his gaze suddenly riveting on the heavy crucifix hanging from a black cord around Jenny's neck, then lifting to the soiled wimple and askew veil. For a moment his discovery left him nearly dumbstruck. "God's teeth, you brought
nuns
here to be used as whores?"

"
Nuns
!" Stefan gasped, astounded.

"
Whores
!" croaked Jenny, outraged. Surely he couldn't be so steeped in godlessness that he'd actually give them to his men to be used as whores.

"I could kill you for this folly, Stefan, so help me—"

"You'll feel differently when I tell you who they are," Stefan said, yanking his horrified gaze from Jenny's gray habit and crucifix. "Standing before you, dear brother," he announced with renewed delight, "is the Lady Jennifer, beloved eldest child of Lord Merrick."

Royce stared at his younger brother, the hands at his sides unclenching as he turned to contemptuously survey Jenny's dirty face. "Either you've been fooled, Stefan, or the land rings with false rumors, for 'tis said Merrick's daughter is the rarest beauty in the land."

"Nay, I wasn't fooled. She is truly his, I heard it from her own lips."

Catching Jenny's trembling chin between his thumb and forefinger, Royce stared hard at her smudged face, studying it by the firelight while his brows drew together and his lips twisted into a mirthless smile. "How could anyone possibly call you a beauty?" he said with deliberate, insulting sarcasm. "The jewel of Scotland?"

He saw the flare of anger his words brought to her face as she jerked it out of his grasp, but instead of being touched by her courage, he was angered by it. Everything about the name Merrick infuriated him, making vengeance boil up inside him, and he grasped her pale, smudged face and jerked it back to his. "Answer me!" he demanded in an awful voice.

In her state of near hysteria, it seemed to Brenna that Jenny was somehow accepting blame that was rightfully Brenna's" and, groping at Jenny's gown, using it for leverage, she hauled herself to an unsteady, standing position, then she molded her body to Jenny's entire right side, like twins fused together at birth.

"They don't call Jenny that!" she croaked when it seemed as if Jenny's continued silence would surely bring terrible retribution from the terrifying giant before them. "They—they call me that."

"Who the hell are
you
?" he demanded furiously.

"She is no one!" Jenny burst out, discarding the eighth commandment in hopes that Brenna might be freed if she were believed to be a nun, rather than a Merrick. "She is merely Sister Brenna of Belkirk Abbey!"

"Is that true?" Royce demanded of Brenna.

"
Yes
!" Jenny cried.

"No," Brenna whispered meekly.

Clenching his hands into fists at his sides, Royce Westmoreland briefly closed his eyes. It was like a nightmare, he thought. An incredible nightmare. After a forced march, he was out of food, out of shelter, and out of patience. And now this.
Now
, he couldn't even manage to get a sensible, honest answer out of two terrified women. He was tired, he realized, exhausted from three days and nights without sleep. He turned his haggard face and blazing eyes on Brenna. "If you have any hope of surviving another hour," he informed her, correctly recognizing her as the most easily intimidated of the pair and, therefore, the least likely one to invent a lie, "you'll answer me now and with the truth." His rapier gaze stabbed into Brenna's fear-widened hazel eyes, imprisoning them. "Are you, or are you not, the daughter of Lord Merrick?"

Brenna swallowed and tried to speak but couldn't push a word past her trembling lips. Drooping with defeat, she bowed her head and meekly nodded. Satisfied, Royce shot a murderous glance at the hellcat in gentle nun's garb, then he turned to issue a curt order to his brother: "Tie them up and put them in a tent. Have Arik stand guard to protect them from the men. I want them both alive tomorrow for questioning."

I want them alive tomorrow for questioning
… the words reverberated in Jenny's tortured mind as she lay in a tent on the ground beside poor Brenna, her wrists and feet bound with leather thongs, looking up at the cloudless, starlit sky through a hole in the top of the tent. What sort of questioning did the Wolf have in mind, she wondered as exhaustion finally overtook her fear. What means of torture would he use to exact answers from them, and what answers could he possibly want? Tomorrow, Jenny was certain, would mark the end of their lives.

"Jenny?" Brenna whispered shakily. "You don't think he means to kill us tomorrow, do you?"

"No," Jenny lied reassuringly.