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Something thin and dark whooshed past Anna and hit the tree with a thunk.
An arrow.
A horse neighed. More arrows flew. Men yelled. Someone yelped and fell off his horse.
“Ambush!” yelled Aulay. “Protect Anna!”
“Goddamn it,” cursed Colum as he rode next to her. His shield was on his right arm, and he put his horse between Anna and the arrows, his eyes darting, looking for the source of the threat.
But arrows came from everywhere, and the archers were impossible to spot in the woods.
Aulay was on her other side, swinging his shield as arrows flew at him and stuck in the wood.
Anna clenched the reins, squeezing the horse’s sides. Everything within her screamed to run, to flee. MacDonald men screamed, wounded and dying. Horses neighed in fear and pain as arrows hit them.
“I canna see them!” yelled Aulay. “Where, God’s arse, are they?”
And then they came. First, the thundering sound of dozens of galloping horses, and then the path behind them darkened as more horsemen than Anna could count charged them.
“Ride, Anna,” Aulay yelled, unsheathing his claymore. “Go!”
She lost all feeling of self, only the vibration of the ground that reverberated in her gut like a tuning fork.
“Go!” Colum yelled and hit her horse’s side.
A force kicked her as her horse launched. The reins in her hands felt spiderweb-thin, her ears were ringing from the noise, and somehow, even with her mind as thick as sheep’s fleece, her thighs knew how to move to keep the horse riding hard.
“Hya!” she heard herself call.
Her own voice was strange, foreign. The green and brown of the woods flashed to her right and to her left, and the cool air scratched her heated cheeks.
Whoever it was, they’d come for her. They must have found out about the secret deal between the Bruce and Mowbray.
No. She wouldn’t let them take her. Not when she almost had what she had always wanted.
A father.
Hooves thundered against the ground behind her and she looked over her shoulder. A dozen of them followed her, warriors in léintean-croich, with chain mail coifs on their heads. They leaned low over their horses, their eyes on her, like a pack of wolves hunting prey.
Their leader was an older man, his receding hairline gray and shaggy. But he was an important man—he rode a big war horse, and he was the only one wearing chain mail over his leine croich.
She kicked her horse’s sides with her heels and whipped the reins, and the horse sped up.
“Come on, lass, come on!” she murmured.
Her thighs burned, and her lungs were tight.
“Hya! Hya!” she kept crying.
But a dark shape slowly advanced to her right, and as she turned, she saw the leader of the pack riding next to her.
“Stop, lass, or I will stop ye,” he yelled.
One hand holding the reins, she reached with the other one to the knife hidden in her pocket and took it out. “Ye try and ye will be sorry.”
He grinned, flashing a row of white teeth, and reached out to her rein. She stabbed his gloved hand but scratched only the leather of the armor. At the same time, another rider came up on her left, and another on her right.
They were faster, and they positioned themselves in front of her horse, forcing it to slow down.
