But I’d spilled enough blood for one night without going overboard. Telling Sara didn’t fill me with excitement as horrible as he was, she made me promise not to kill him. Once I’d checked his bindings and replaced his hood, I went inside and gently awakened her. She opened her eyes and smiled up at me, and I broke the bad news.
“We need to go. Now.”
“What?” She asked, sleepily and confused. “Why?”
The attack changed everything. Clan Johnston wouldn’t give up that easily. There would be more men and if they didn’t succeed there would be battle.
“Because you’re in danger. You are not safe here.”
She got to her feet, half wrapped in a blanket. “But where will we go? To your friend in Gowerton?”
“No, Sara. War is coming and you’re going to be caught in the middle of it. There’s only one way to avoid that.”
“I don’t understand. How can we stop a war?”
“By taking you to your father. I have to take you to the king.”
“No. No, Bors, he’ll take me from you. I only want you.”
I put my hand to her cheek, brushing my thumb over the flesh. “Sara, what did I promise you?”
She met my eyes, then drew a deep breath. “That we would be together.”
“And I meant it. Now get dressed. We have to go.”
“But what about Angelica? We can’t just leave her in prison. She needs our help, Bors.”
I gathered up my riding tack and pulled on a shirt. “We can’t risk it right now. We’ll send someone back for her, I promise.”
Together we hustled out of the house. I did my best to protect her from the pile of bodies, but there was no way I could hide the other part of the bad news I hadn’t yet delivered. Her father might be hooded, but he was so scrawny that he was hard to mistake for anybody else. Sara spotted him and gasped, but I hoisted him up by his bindings and slung him over my exhausted stallion’s back like a sack of grain. There was no way I’d let the poor beast carry more weight than that right after such an arduous journey.
“Please don’t tell me that’s who I think it is.”
“Unfortunately it is,” I said. “He told them where to find us.”
I lifted her up onto Angelica’s bay mare, mounted behind her in the saddle, and then grabbed the reins of my stallion as we took off into the night.
Sara
My body ached as we made slow progress under cover of darkness. Though we stuck to the road as far as it went, we soon found ourselves cutting across the moorland, picking our way by lamplight around boulders and dips that threatened to unmount us.
I was unaccustomed to riding for such long hours, and I was sore from lovemaking with Bors. We rode two-in-the-saddle together on Angelica’s mare, and I felt each step the horse took deep into the center of my being.
My heart ached, too. Despite Bors’ words, I knew things had changed.
In a few short days I’d gone from being the unloved daughter of a small highland family, to the beloved fiancée of a clan warrior, to the princess of the kingdom. And now I was on my way to meet my birth father for the first time since I was a tiny baby, and who knew what would come next?
Me? A princess?
Even now I wondered if we’d made a mistake. If we’d get to the castle only to be laughed at and sent on our way. But what was clear was that Bors believed it, and those soldiers of Clan Johnston believed it.
And if my father, the man who raised me, had led them to us, surely he must believe it too?
That thought was almost the worst of it. If he believed it, it meant he knew I wasn’t his. Or suspected at least. He was the linchpin in this whole affair, the thing that connected my birth in the capital and my existence in Weschail.
The morning light was just tipping over the horizon when we entered a quiet village of smoky chimneys and dirt paths. Bors halted the horses outside a traveler’s inn, where the groom emerged rubbing the sleep from his eyes, tucking in his shirt and trying to comb his messy hair with his fingers.
Bors extended a hand to greet him. “Morning, Finan.”
The young man lit up. “Bors! I mean, morning, sir.”
“Get these two watered, will you? And once you’ve done that, I’ve got a favor to ask.”
Like a stupid, naïve girl, my mind went to all sorts of possibilities about the favor—a rented room, a featherbed. But Bors remained focused on the problems at hand, and he paid the groom a small sum to be a runner and take word to Weschail.
“There’s a woman named Angelica, being held by the sheriff. Tell him it’s safe for her to return home now, but that I’ve borrowed her horse for a ride. Tell him I told you to come. Don’t mention that I had anyone with me.”