Page 13 of A Highland Healer Captured
“Keep yer eyes on the path,” Zander said quietly from a length to her left, as if he’d read the thought right off her skin. “It bites in daylight same as in dark.”
Skylar did not even deign to give him the slightest inclination that she had heard him. She fixed her gaze on the track, on the pale ribbon of road unspooling toward the west, and counted her breaths until the ruined keep shrank to a tooth against the morning sky.
She would not stop looking for a seam. Not for the rest of the ride — however long it might be.
The morning broke into afternoon as the woods opened to a vast rolling pasture, and Skylar felt her first real ache of difference. These lands were unfamiliar to her. The light looked wrong in the ruts. The birds’ calls wore peculiar notes. Even the sheep stared at her like strangers.
She swallowed it down. She would not give these savages the satisfaction of seeing her cowed.
The men rode in that infuriating dance of competence. They never seemed to speak, but she could feel them talking with their bodies. A lift of a chin sent one out and another in. A twitch of reins tightened the ring around her, and a loosened hand let it breathe. She was a fish in a net she could not even see until she swam against it.
She tested anyway. She slowed a hair until the man behind was forced to draw rein. She pricked Daisy lightly and drifted right, as if following a bend in the track. The outrider there closed the space without looking at her. She drifted left, and Zander’s destrier filled that gap like a wall moving sideways, his grey gaze pretending interest in the sky.
Skylar’s teeth clicked together. “Nae even pretending ye’ll give me a chance?” she asked under her breath.
“Ye’ve had two,” Zander said dryly. “Ye’ll nae enjoy the outcome of third either, I assure ye.”
She wanted to tell him she hoped he choked on his own smugness. Instead she sat tall, soothed Daisy with her knees, and kept her eyes on the silver thread of a river far off that seemed to run in the same direction they did, as if mocking the very idea of escape with its tame, obliging course.
By the time the sun crept past its highest, her shoulders ached from holding them straight. When the land finally lifted ahead in a gentle swell and a dark line of woodland spread like a collar at its base, one of the riders, she hadn’t marked, lifted a fist.
His announcement rang through the wood. “We’re back,” he said, flatly.
She jerked a look at him. The rider had a face she didn’t know well. It was a blunt jaw, rain-dark lashes, the air of a man who saw much and said little. The man touched two fingers to his brow and gave her a look that wasn’t unkind.
Dejection scraped her breastbone like a dull knife. Helplessness flared hard enough she wanted to bite it back like bile. She was Skylar Dunlop, daughter of Laird MacLennan, who never backed down from thunder nor from mothers’ grief nor from men’s arrogance. She would not break because she’d lost once or even twice. But the ache of it sat hot behind her eyes all the same.
“Head up,” came Zander’s voice, low enough only she heard. “If ye intend to vex me for years, start as ye mean to go on.”
She shot him a side glare that should have set his cloak alight and decided not to give him the satisfaction of slumping.
They crested the rise and the world changed. Stone shouldered up from the land like something grown rather than built.
Strathcairn Keep.
A murmur moved along the line of riders, a tightening of posture, a subtle ease as men came within reach of their own hearths again. The closer they rode, the more the world filled with signs of life. A boy with a stick drove geese, a woman drew laundry from a line strung between hawthorns, a dog ran itself mad with the joy of chasing hooves until its owner whistled it back.
The drawbridge rattled as it settled. The portcullis teeth grinned overhead. As they clattered into the shadowed throat of the gatehouse, a different sound met Skylar — the ripple of whispers.
The words blurred in unfamiliar cadences, but their interest was plain. Skylar’s jaw locked.
She’d never felt so obviously apart in her life.
Zander’s men began to spill into patterns of habit. The horses put away, gear accounted for, messages peeled off and sent toward this door or that. Zander himself turned his destrier without effort and put himself at Skylar’s knee.
“Daenae even think —,” she said before he could speak, not sure what she meant by it and meaning everything.
He only tipped his head toward a stair cut into the inner wall. “Come along, then, lass.”
She slid from Daisy, chin high, satchel tight to her side. The gravity of him pulled her forward like the waves pull a ship.
As they crossed the yard, a voice from the shadows tossed a jest in the unfamiliar, rough tongue. It made two men snort as if they’d swallowed their laughter.
Skylar shot Zander a glare. “What did he say?”
“That ye’ve hair like a saint’s painted in a chapel,” Zander lied so smoothly it sounded like truth.
She caught the flicker at the corner of his mouth and knew it was a deflection. He was grateful, she realized abruptly, that she could not understand them.
