Shana Abe Read Online Free Page B

the horse’s hooves in the dirt as she guided him south toward the English border.
    For a while it was soothing just listening to the rhythm of the stallion’s steps. She drifted in and out of awareness, letting the animal set the pace and the direction. He knew the land better than she did, anyway. She was fortunate to have him. They didn’t have to give her anything. They owed her nothing, while she owed them more than she could ever repay.
    The stallion took her to a loosely knotted forest of pine and birch. There were boulders and streams, but no real place to hide. Kyla patted the horse down as best she could and then lay down on the cold ground, using the saddlebags as pillows.
    She didn’t care if Lord Strathmore and his soldiers found her. She didn’t care if they came and killed her in her sleep. There was even a part of her that wanted that, wanted an ending to this brutal life she had inherited.
    She had deliberately left the stallion untied, free to roam if he wished. If the soldiers came, he could run away. He would survive.
    That thought gave her some comfort as she sank into slumber.
    But the soldiers did not come, no one came, and when she awoke the next morning the stallion was standing patiently nearby, grazing on a patch of wild grass.
    Her cloak was still damp with dew from the ground, but at least it wasn’t raining.
    “What ho, my friend,” she called to the horse softly, sitting up and stretching her sore neck. “Have you not the wits to abandon a lost cause?”
    The stallion rolled his eyes in her direction but did not stop chewing. The crunching sound from his teeth seemed unnaturally loud in the forest. It made her realize abruptly that she had not eaten in over a day—years, it seemed—and so she opened the cloth sack Colin had given her and ate an oatcake in somber contemplation of the fallen log across from her.
    Slowly, horribly, the feeling of numbness that had taken her over since the field of Glencarson was beginning to fade against the bright light of this new day. Reality was coming back, no matter what she did to let it know it was not welcome.
    She was a gentlewoman, born of nobility, now utterly alone in the world, and utterly without recourse. Despite Lorna’s words, Kyla knew that her father’s people could not take her in, because her father had no people left. Malcolm had been their last slender thread of hope, and he had proven to be a false one.
    The oatcake was gone too quickly but she was loath to eat another despite the rumbling in her stomach. She didn’t know what else she was going to do for food. There was a stream nearby, she could hear the treble gurgling of it from here, and so that might mean fish. She knew how to fish. Her father had shown her that much.
    It had been at her own insistence. When it had become clear to her that Conner was not going to be shaken from the coils of grief that held him, it was she who had acted to save them. With the money she had taken with them she bought the necessary supplies for their journey. When the money ran out, she gamely tried to teach herself the survival skills needed. She nearly caught consumption from the dousing in the Highland waters she received while trying to catch fish with the blunt spear she had fashioned.
    That had roused Conner—if only briefly. He had taken the spear and broken it over his knee in the first spark of anger she had seen in him since their mother’s death.
    He had caught the fish that night. But she had watched, and learned.
    It didn’t seem odd to Kyla that she had understood the import of what was happening those first ghastly days after the murder and her father had not. From the instant they had heard the news, he became as dead to the world as they had learned her mother was.
    In truth, Kyla couldn’t recall how she had managed to behave so normally. She just knew if she didn’t, no one would, and then they would all be lost.
    It was she who had held the household together for as