Page 93 of The Guardian's Bride
“Find a way to stall them if they get too close. They must not catch us until we reach Carlisle. Then we catch them.” Malise turned. “Ah, Lady Rowena. Good news!”
She stared up at him. “News?”
“Your lover is on our tail. Look there.” He pointed behind them on the river.
Aedan?She struggled to sit up and look. The light was fading toward dusk, glinting on the water. Blinking, she saw the shape of a longship well behind them.
She thought it looked like Lauder’s longship, but she could not be sure. “That could be any ship on this river.”
“That one has been behind us steadily since Fife.” He smiled. “I told you I would set a trap for MacDuff. And you are the bait.”
Brian Lauder’s longship,propelled by a full complement of oarsmen and a billowed sail, was fast, but the larger galley had cut powerfully through the water all the way from Fife. The English ship was a misty, distant sight when the angle of sea and coastline allowed, but Aedan had not lost sight of it.
He stood in the bow watching, determined. No matter how much distance the other ship had on them, he had no room in head or heart for defeat. He felt grim, flat, all trace of humor lost. Malise had grabbed his son, who thankfully got away. He had taken his wife—she was that to him now.
Aedan would catch him. He saw no other course but that.
Brian joined Aedan then. “They have pulled into the harbor at Berwick—you saw that. And they are far ahead to catch on water, but we can keep them in sight and follow wherever they take her.”
“Aye, but where the devil is that?”
“To King Edward, most likely. Patrick says he recently heard Edward has gone to Carlisle. A long way for a day’s journey, but it could be where they are headed.”
“Could be.” Aedan thought again of the difficulty Rowena had while traveling on water. The thought brought a new ache of worry and stoked a fire of anger in his blood. He clenched his fists and watched the sea. They had been on the water three hours now, and he had kept a keen eye on the distant form of the English ship.
As the galley turned into the water at Berwick-upon-Tweed, the northernmost port on the English coast, Brian’s longship followed. The crew navigated the curving port and the water flowing around fingers of land as they entered the River Tweed. Soon enough, they saw the galley—docked and empty but for some crewmen and soldiers.
Brian sent men to inquire; they returned to say the English lord from the galley had hired a smaller boat to head down the river as far as Kelso, where they planned to change to horses. The riverman did not know their destination, but he confirmed that a woman was with them.
“She looked ill, we heard,” the crewman reported. “They half-carried her into the smaller vessel. The riverman noticed, finding it odd.”
Aedan turned away, mastered fury, turned back. “We follow,” he told Brian and Patrick. “If they sail, we sail. If they take horses, so do we. I will not give this up.”
“Nor will we,” Patrick said.
“My longship can sail the Tweed for a long way before the waters become too narrow to allow it,” Brian said. “We will catch them.”
The oarsmen bent to the task as the ship skimmed along the river in the gathering twilight, proceeding more slowly than on the open waters of the sea.
Before they left Berwick, Aedan looked up at the castle in the purpling dusk. His niece Isabella was trapped there in a horrible iron cage—he had intended to visit her somehow but fate had intervened. He did not see a cage along the profile on the high parapet as they passed beneath the castle.
At Selkirk, just before he was ambushed and taken to Yester, the guardians of Scotland had word that Isabella was removed daily from the cage to sit in a chamber with a servant woman, then returned to her cruel confinement. He could only pray that Isabella had some small moments of comfort.
Near Kelso, the waterway became a challenge even for their sleek longship. Lashing in at a riverside dock, they heard that a group of Edward’s knights, a monk, and a woman had docked and hired horses and a cart to head west for Carlisle. Hearing that, Patrick hired horses in the town—making sure to charge the cost to the English Crown, as his sheriff’s rank permitted—and they took to the road too.
When Rowena wokeagain, she was in a haycart drawn by a horse, surrounded by Malise, Peter, and guards on horseback.Not certain how she got there, she was glad when they drew into the yard of an inn. The light was leaving the sky. Twilight was late in summer, and though they had been traveling for hours, the lavender light would last until nearly midnight. Tired and hungry, she thanked Sir Peter when he lifted her out of the cart. Without a word, he handed her over to a large woman who came out of the inn.
“Ropes? Is she a criminal?” the woman said.
“Not your business to ask,” Abernethy said.
“Fine. I want no trouble here. But she is a woman and no matter what she has done, she has likely had enough of men for a while. Give her to me.”
Not long after, refreshed a little, Rowena was back in the cart. Riding beside the cart, Malise spoke to Abernethy, and hooted, a pleased sound that startled her.
“Aye, sir, they are still following,” Abernethy said. “Far off. On horses now.”
So Aedan was still on their tail, Rowena thought. Thank the saints he and the others had not lost the route in the change from water to land. He had not given up—and she knew with every fiber of her being that he would never give up looking for her. He was a guardian, a protector to his bones. And he loved her.
