Page 5 of The Guardian
Sìleas scrunched herself into a ball on one side of the blanket and tucked her feet under her cloak.
Ian lay down with his back to her and wrapped his plaid around himself. It had been a long day of travel, and he was tired.
Just as he was drifting off to sleep, Sìleas shook his shoulder. “I hear something.”
Ian grabbed his claymore and sat up to listen.
“I think it’s a wild boar,” she whispered. “Or a verra large bear.”
Ian flopped back down with a groan. “ ’Tis only the wind blowing the trees. Have ye not tortured me enough for one day?”
He couldn’t go back to sleep with the wee lass shivering beside him. She had no meat on her bones to keep her warm.
“Sìl, are ye cold?” he asked.
“I am near death with it,” she said in a weak, mournful voice.
With a sigh, he rolled onto his back and spread his plaid over both of them.
Now he was wide awake. After staring at the tree branches whipping in the wind above him for a long while, he whispered, “Sìl, are ye awake?”
“Aye.”
“I’m going to be married soon,” he said, and couldn’t help grinning to himself. “I met her at court in Stirling. I’ve come home to tell my parents.”
He felt Sìleas stiffen beside him.
“I’m as surprised as you,” he said. “I didn’t plan to wed for a few years yet, but when a man meets the right woman… Ah, Sìl, she is everything I want.”
Sìleas was quiet for a long time, then she asked in that funny, hoarse voice of hers, “What makes ye know she is right for ye?”
“Philippa is a rare beauty, I tell ye. She’s got sparkling eyes and silky, fair hair—and curves to make a man forget to breathe.”
“Hmmph. Is there nothing but her looks ye can say about this Philippa?”
“She’s as graceful as a faerie queen,” he said. “And she has a lovely, tinkling laugh.”
“And that is why ye want to marry her?”
Ian chuckled at Sìleas’s skeptical tone. “I shouldn’t tell ye this, little one. But there are women a man can have without marriage, and women he cannot. This one is of the second kind, and I want her verra, verra badly.”
He dropped an arm across Sìleas’s shoulder and drifted toward sleep with a smile on his face.
He must have slept like the dead, for he remembered nothing until he awoke to the sound of horses. In an instant, he threw off his plaid and stood with his claymore in his hands as three horsemen rode into their camp and began circling them. Though Ian recognized them as his clansmen, he did not lower his sword.
He glanced over his shoulder at Sìleas to be sure she was all right. She was sitting up with his plaid pulled over her head and was peering out at them from a peephole she had made in it.
“Could this be our own young Ian, back from fighting on the border?” one of the horsemen said.
“Why, so it is! We hear you had great success fighting the English,” another said, as the three continued circling. “It must be that the English sleep verra late.”
“I hear they wait politely for ye to choose the time and place to fight,” said the third. “For how else could a man sleep so soundly he doesn’t hear horses before they ride through his camp?”
Ian gritted his teeth as the men continued enjoying themselves at his expense.
“The English fight like women, so what can ye expect?” the first one said, as three more riders crowded into their camp.
“Speaking of women, who is the brave wench who is no afraid to share a bed with our fierce warrior?” another man called out.
