Devil Black (20 page)

“Who?” Dougal asked, even though his plummeting heart proved he already knew. “Who is taken?”

“Isobel! Rab found the guard assigned to patrol the rear wall dead, with an arrow through his back, and there can be no question whoever killed him seized Isobel.”

“Nay!” Dougal protested fruitlessly. “It cannot be! She should have been safe anywhere inside our walls. Have we not been out all this while defending the borders?”
Aye, just to keep her safe.

Meg glared at him impatiently. “Do you really want to argue about it now? Be grateful she is well and warmly dressed in the cloak and fur boots she had when she arrived. Rab and three others have gone after her, as I say, but whoever took her was mounted—”

Dougal’s blood, inside him, turned as icy as the rain. “MacNab—I will kill him!”

“You will need to catch him first. Come!”

Meg turned her mount and started away, quick enough to outrun the wind. Dougal urged his own mount to follow. He had no need to hear more. Heart nearly bursting, he passed and then outdistanced Meg, Lachlan and the rest of the group. He reined up in the forecourt of the keep just as a number of his warriors appeared, Rab among them.

“MacNab has your lady wife,” Rab greeted him. “We followed the tracks that curved round into the woods and then joined up wi’ the long trail that leads across the moor, westward. No sight of them, ahead, but that way leads to MacNab’s keep and no mistake. We ha’ one man dead.”

Lachlan, arriving in time to hear, said, “That skirmish in which we were caught, on the far border—that was just a distraction. This was planned.”

“Of course ’twas planned.” Viciously, Dougal rounded on him. “But how could they know she would be outside?”

“They must ha’ been watching,” Rab said, “from some point high in the hills, waiting for a chance to strike.” He hesitated. “And she did go out ever’ so often. We thought you knew.”

“I did not!” Dougal felt sick. Isobel, snatched against her will, frightened and alone…the last place he could bear her to be.

He glared at his men. “I cannot believe no one saw anything, heard anything.”

“Only Ian,” Rab said laconically, “and he is dead.”

“Is it possible they could have coaxed her away?” Meg suggested.

“Nay,” Dougal denied it, remembering her in his arms last night, clinging to him as if she would never let go.

Meg said emotionlessly, “If they had her father with them and he persuaded her, convinced her she could save you from persecution, and possible death? She might so sacrifice herself.”

Everyone stared at Dougal accusingly. He met Meg’s gaze and saw she knew. Meg knew that Isobel loved him. His wife had never spoken the words, but the truth was reflected from her eyes, it told in her touch. He knew he deserved no such devotion. He was a ruined man with a savage heart, capable of loyalty and nothing more. Poor lass. Would she truly sacrifice herself for such a worthless specimen as he?

“We are wasting time sitting here blathering,” he said viciously. “Come on, show me this trail.”

The falling rain, icy as it was, had nearly obliterated the sea of tracks when they reached it. Dougal’s own men milled about, restless for action, and the light already waned in the west. Dougal set men to search the immediate area again, but knew it to be an exercise in futility.

“What to do?” Lachlan asked uneasily.

“If MacNab wants war, he shall have it.” Dougal felt desperate at the thought of Isobel spending even one night in MacNab’s hands, yet demanding her back, as every impulse bade him, was not the best strategy. That would come, aye, but not yet.

Lachlan offered, “Surely, if her father is with her, she will be protected from the worst of MacNab’s perversions?” Lachy, knowing what had befallen Aisla, knew the demons that haunted Dougal.

Aye, there was that, the faintest glimmer of hope. And if it came to it, Isobel was no timid Aisla, to let herself be used cruelly. She would fight like a wildcat.

Yet even a strong woman could only fight so hard.

“Lachy, I want you to ride and fetch O’Rourke. He will prove valuable to us now—the only proof my marriage is valid. Should he be found and murdered, ’twill be easy for MacNab to wed Isobel to that damned whelp of his, and ’tis a thing to which Isobel’s father might well agree. Can I trust you in this?”

Lachlan nodded. “I promise my best efforts. But, the rest of you?”

“We are going cattle raiding,” Dougal said grimly. An ancient activity from the Highlands to the borders, cattle raiding represented far more than mere thievery. It was a goad, a dare, a taunt, and an act of one-upmanship no clansman could refuse to answer. It had, in the past, started many a feud or war, for cattle represented wealth.

Lachlan departed into the gloom, and Dougal quickly organized his men. They were gathered in the forecourt, ready to leave, when Meg rushed out.

“Are you mounting a rescue?” she demanded, pulling a shawl up over her hair.

“Not yet.”

Meg ignited like dry wood. “You cannot intend to leave her there—”

“I do not!”

Meg ignored him and completed her thought, “the way you left Aisla!”

The forecourt went suddenly silent, all Dougal’s men shooting crosswise looks at him before gazing elsewhere.

Dougal leaned down from his horse to speak directly into his sister’s face. The pain rising inside him made his voice harsh. “Do not ever make such a suggestion again. Do you trust me so little?”

“I did trust you, once,” replied Meg, unintimidated, “and look what came of it.”

“This will no’ end so.”

“’Tis not just the ending that concerns me, but what happens to Isobel before then. I wish to come with you.”

“No.”

“Why—”

“We will be riding hard.”

“You think me incapable of keeping up?”

“I do not wish to have to worry about you, Sister. Get you inside and do what you are best at.”

Meg stiffened. “What is that?”

“Employ that devious mind of yours, bend it to your dark arts. We may yet have need of them.”

He led his troop away before she could protest further. The night, still vicious with wind and rain, at least held gloom enough to lend cover to the activities undertaken in the next hours. In his youth, Dougal might have enjoyed the odd spot of cattle-thieving. Now, distracted by worry and doubt, it became a nightmarish thing of stinging sleet, mud, and naked blades. MacNab, like any careful land manager, kept his cattle spread out. Dougal knew this first raid would go easiest; once Randal knew Dougal’s intentions, he would post a heavy guard. As it was, the fast-moving raiding party encountered only two MacNab clansmen, who were dealt with summarily.

Fine and good, Dougal thought at the end of it, so long as he did not lose any of the stolen cattle, his men, or mounts to a bog, burn, or darkness on the way home. They were frozen through, all, before MacNab’s cattle were stowed safely in his own far pasture, and dawn stained the sky in the east.

Dougal still felt sick with worry about Isobel. Nearly a whole night gone. How did she fare? He could scarcely bear to think of her frightened and alone, yet thinking of her being not alone was worse.

He brought all his raiding party into the great hall to warm by the fire and drink a dram. There he found Lachlan returned with O’Rourke, which lifted his spirits slightly.

The priest, quite obviously drunk, had claimed for himself a place before the fire and held a tankard in his hand. He raised it when he saw Dougal.

“To the Devil!” he cried, and drank.

Dougal looked at Lachlan, who rolled his eyes. Lachy appeared as wet and cold as the rest of them.

“Good work,” said Dougal, crossing to Lachlan’s side. “Where did you find him?”

“In the stinking, dank hidey-hole he calls home,” Lachlan replied distastefully, “and already with a skin full. He had earned himself a jug, earlier, by performing a christening.”

O’Rourke got to his feet and stumbled over. “I thank you, Laird MacRae, for your kind offer of hospitality. ’Tis a vile, wet night to be abroad.”

Dougal eyed Lachlan in question, and Lachlan explained, “I told him he had a bed here for the time, out of the weather.”

“’Tis good of you,” O’Rourke decried and attempted to bow. “And I am sure the things said of you in the district are greatly exaggerated.”

“Aye,” Dougal told him ironically, “and I may need you to return the favor by speaking up for me when the time comes. That marriage you performed for me—you recall?”

For an instant it appeared O’Rourke did not. Then his bleary, pale blue eyes cleared. “The bonny lass with the red hair?”

“My wife, Isobel, aye. She has been stolen away from me.”

“An ab-abomination!”

“It is. And I may need you to swear to the validity of our joining. Accept my hospitality, so, until this business is done.”

O’Rourke thought about it with apparent difficulty. “But—I am needed in the district, to perform various services. What if a babe is born too soon? What if someone should die?”

“Oh, aye,” Dougal murmured. He had determined someone would die, for this. But amidst his ale fumes, the priest truly looked troubled. “If you are needed, Master MacElwain, here, will escort you wherever you need to go. Will you not, Lachlan?”

Lachy looked disgruntled. “Me? I am no priest-minder.”

“More like a bodyguard,” Dougal said. “I need someone I can trust to keep him alive at all costs.”

“Aye, well,” O’Rouke spoke before Lachlan could, “I am all in favor, me lads, of keeping alive.”

Chapter Twenty-Six

“At least I am still alive,” Isobel told herself, in an effort to battle the panic that had overtaken her mind: alive, imprisoned, and far more terrified than she had ever been.

Terror, she knew, made a poor companion, especially in her present circumstances. A weakening emotion, it might render her helpless when the moment to act arrived. She would do better to feel anger, indignation, determination—anything that might empower her.

And yes, she felt all those things: anger at her father, that he had allowed his friend MacNab to snatch her like a bundle of goods, that he did not intervene now to set her free; indignation that Randal MacNab should arrogantly decide he could get away with such a deed; determination to free herself, if no one else would help her.

And longing for her husband... She could scarcely let herself think about Dougal, the pain was so bright. He would be furious over this, she knew—his wife in the hands of his enemies—but why? She feared he would feel anger that MacNab had got one over on him, not distress for her own sake.

Her new prison, and she did not mistake it for anything else, was a well-appointed bedroom twice the size of her chamber at MacRae’s keep. It had a fine curtained bed, a chest for the clothing she did not possess, and an upholstered bench in front of the fireplace. She wondered if Aisla had inhabited this room before her and how much suffering it had seen. It had been Aisla’s former husband, Bertram MacNab, who escorted Isobel here: she had not liked the barely veiled eagerness in his eyes.

Whatever he and his vile father planned for her, she knew to her toes it would be unpleasant. She meant to fight them to her last breath. If she could not escape any other way, she would jump from the window, and if she could find no other weapon she would set fire to the bed. But first she supposed she should attempt to employ reason.

Marshaling her wits and determination, she marched to the door and tried to yank it open. To her surprise it was not locked; the man standing guard—a huge fellow armed with not one but two swords and wearing MacNab tartan—turned to look at her in a reproving manner.

“I wish to see my father,” she told him. She had managed only a glimpse of her sire when Bertram MacNab dragged her in, kicking and struggling. He had been standing beside Randal in the doorway of a chamber off the great hall, and though she called to him he had not responded.

“You are to stay here,” her guard pronounced. “My orders,” he grinned, “until young master comes.”

Isobel liked neither the grin nor the implications. Her stomach clenched, and she struggled to look imperious. “I wish to see my father. I have that right! You can either take me to him or bring him here to speak with me—I do not care which.”

“Get ye back inside and wait,” the man advised. “I take no orders from you.”

Isobel looked him in the eye, stiffened her back and screamed. She had a good set of lungs when she chose to use them, and this was a shriek worthy of an eldritch delivering a curse. It bounced off the stone walls of the corridor and reverberated painfully.

The guard flinched and drew one of his swords. “Stop that! Foolish wench!”

Isobel sucked in a breath and screamed again, louder.

People came running—first two more guards and an ancient servant, a woman who looked like she worked in the kitchen. Isobel wanted to see but one face, her father’s, so she screamed on.

The guard with the sword raised his free hand to strike her. She ducked, wove between two of the other men, and ran for the stairs.

“Catch her!” someone cried, and swore.

Isobel did not hesitate. She reached the top of the stone stairs, knocked the serving woman aside, caught her foot in her skirt, and nearly tumbled all the way down.

She caught herself with the help of the balustrade and charged down with at least five people following her.

“What in hell is this commotion?” Randal MacNab stood once more in the doorway of the chamber off the hallway. Like a small battering ram, Isobel bashed her way past him, her eyes wild.

The room, a chamber similar to the solar at MacRae’s, looked pleasant and comfortable. Two benches flanked the fire, and on one of them her father rested. Bertram MacNab she saw nowhere.

“Father!” Isobel started forward, but Randal MacNab reached out and nabbed her shoulder, his grasp anything but kind.