Page 79 of Wanted By the Wicked Highlander

Alasdair pivoted without so much as glancing over, catching the blade meant for his back on the flat of his own, twisting his wrist hard until the attacker’s sword tore free of his grip entirely and spun off into the dark. “I saw him.”

“Ye always say that after I have already shouted at ye.”

“And I am always right regardless of when ye shout.” Alasdair drove his pommel into the man’s temple and moved on without breaking stride, already scanning for the next threat.

Sebastian pushed deeper into the melee, cutting down a second man who lunged at him from behind a plume of smoke, and that was when he saw her.

Alba rode straight through the center of the chaos, dark curls torn loose from whatever had once bound them, streaming wet and wild behind her, sword raised high and catching what little firelight survived the rain.

Water sheeted off her shoulders and hair in the torchlight. She was the very essence of a ballad, the type men would sing decades from now, though nothing about the fury carved into her face looked staged in the slightest.

She looked every bit the warrior woman old stories told, the ones old men had invented. Except, she was staggeringly real, cutting a path through Kerr’s ranks like she’d been born to a saddle and a blade instead of a Lady’s chair by a fire.

A rider charged at her, his blade already swinging toward her unprotected side before she had time to turn her head and look. She leaned low along her horse’s neck, letting the strike whistle through the air where her head had been a heartbeat earlier, before rising back up with her own sword already swinging, striking the man across the ribs hard enough to knock him out of his saddle. He hit the mud in a heap and did not get up again.

“Fergus!” Her voice cut clear across the din, sharp enough to carry over the thunder of steel and rain. “Behind ye, the one in the gray plaid, he’s circlin’ wide around the fire!”

Fergus spun half a step, sword already coming up, and caught the man’s blade an inch shy of his own spine. “Bloody hell, woman, a man likes a bit more warnin’ than that!”

She wheeled her horse hard to the left, driving it straight into the flank of another attacker, close enough that the animal’s shoulder sent the man staggering before her blade finished what the horse had started.

Near the supply carts, one of Fergus’s own men-clearly still green enough to a real battlefield that his hands shook around his sword hilt—stood frozen in place as a Kerr man bore down on him with his blade raised for a killing stroke the boy had not even registered was coming.

“Behind ye!” Alba’s voice tore across the space between them, high and furious, cutting through the din. “Turn, now!”

The young guard reacted purely on instinct a split second before the strike found him, awkwardly catching the blow on his blade and staggering back two full steps under its force. He lacked the skill to finish the fight. Alba was already there, forcing her horse between them, her blade striking the attacker across the shoulder with enough strength to knock him down where he stood.

“Run, save yerself,” she called over her shoulder, already wheeling away toward the next threat before the boy had finished catching his breath, one hand pressed flat to his own chest as if he could hardly believe he still had one.

Elsewhere in the midst of chaos, Hamish waded through a knot of three men at once, his massive frame absorbing blows that would have felled a smaller man, his own sword doing brutal, unhurried work.

“Someone tell the lass she’s meant to be behind the line!” he roared toward no one in particular, ducking a wild swing and answering it with a strike that ended the exchange entirely.

“Try tellin’ her yerself!” Fergus shouted back, not even looking over. “See how far that gets ye!”

Sebastian moved through the mayhem toward her, cutting down anything that stood between them, his whole body focused on the single point that was her. Just as she had been the only fixed point in Kerr’s clearing an hour earlier, kneeling in the mud with her hands bound and her eyes locked on his.

A Kerr man lunged at her from the side, close enough that Sebastian’s heart froze solid in his chest before he had even registered the threat. Alba had already seen him coming, twisting in the saddle with a speed three years of running a Keep and swaying a sword had made her second nature; she drove her blade into the gap beneath his raised arm before he had closed half the distance between them.

Scanning through the uproar for the next threat, for Fergus, for anyone still standing against her, across the fire, the rain and the wreckage of a battlefield her eyes found Sebastian.

Relief swept across her face.

Chapter Twenty-Six

“About bloody time!” she shouted, already turning her horse toward him, threading it through a gap between two struggling bodies without hesitation.

Sebastian let out a sound closer to what might have been his first laugh in weeks, rough and short, and closed the last stretch of ground between them on foot, cutting down a man who lurched into his path without so much as breaking his stride.

She swung down from the saddle before the horse fully stopped, landing hard in the mud with her sword still drawn. Then they were there together, in the middle of everything, close enough that her shoulder instinctively touched his back, and they slowly turned in a circle to face whatever was coming at them next.

Three years of dawn drills with John in the empty east courtyard, learned in secret so the men would stop looking at her like she was made of glass, had not been for nothing after all.

“Ye couldnae have just stayed at Fergus’s,” he said, driving his blade into a man who came at him breaking through the smoke, “like a sensible woman.”

“I have never once been a sensible woman, and ye kent that the day ye took me castle.” She caught a blade aimed at his exposed side, the shock of it running up through her wrist, and shoved the attacker back hard enough for Sebastian to finish him without turning around.

“Fair point.” He grunted the words out between strikes, cutting down another man who came at them from the left, mud and rain making every footing treacherous. “Ye also stole me sleep, me appetite, and me common sense. Seems only fair ye’d steal me battle too.”