Page 59 of Highlander’s Lesser Evil

“We cannae rest,” Gemma argued, but she was swaying on her feet.

“Aye, we can. Ye have pushed yerself too hard, and we doonae want to risk the babe. We may have to keep an eye out for boars...” Even as she spoke, there was a snapping sound behind them.

They were exhausted. Tears pricked Gemma’s eyes, but she adjusted her gripped on her dagger and turned. If they ran, and it was a wild predator, it would mow them down in a heartbeat. If it was one of Thomas’s mercenaries, they would never be able to fight them off.

Three men stepped into a clearing, and for a moment, they all stared at each other. Gemma thought she was hallucinating.

“Gemma!” Theo said hoarsely and raced to her. The dagger fell from her hands as he picked her up and crushed her to him. “Ye are alive!”

Not for much longer if he continued to squeeze her like that, but she buried her face in his shoulder and finally allowed herself to relax.

“I came to rescue ye, and here ye are, having rescued yerself,” he whispered in her hair. “Ye are safe. I will never let anything happen to ye ever again,” he told her. As he set her down, her shoulder moved, and she winced in pain. A fierce scowl crossed his face, and he moved the makeshift bandage. “What in God’s name happened to ye, lass?”

“And where,” Graeme asked coldly, “is Jillian?”

Elizabeth peeked out from around Oliver, who was holding her just as tightly. “She was to run to the village to warn the patrols that the mercenaries were going to attack from within the borders. We doonae know if she made it.”

“Then we go to the village,” Graeme said, “and we find her.”

There were casualties. A few mercenaries survived and were more than willing to tell them how they were hired by Patrick’s men, and that Thomas smuggled them in. Most of them were men who had been exiled by their own clan, and Theo ended up releasing them on the threat of execution should they ever return to MacDougal lands.

Hamish and his men greeted them at the loch by morning. While their warriors weren’t needed, their resources were, and he’d brought Lorna, his healer. After cleaning Gemma’s wound and switching between appalled that she’d deliberately poured the substance into her own wound and impressed that the ruse had worked, she admitted that they would have to wait to see if an infection would set in.

It did.

Gemma lost time. There were moments when it felt like her body was on fire and other times when it felt like she was freezing. She slept, and when she didn’t sleep, she couldn’t decide what was real and what was just her mind playing tricks on her.

Jillian was there. Gemma wanted desperately to believe that she was real for they still hadn’t found her before the sun rose, but Theo was also there, a constant figure, and she feared that was part of her imagination as well.

There were others. Agnes and Lorna rotated keeping an eye on her, and Henry came in to give her the gossip. Sometimes it sounded real, like when he told her that Theo had executed his father; sometimes it was nonsense, like when she thought she heard him say that winged creatures were rising from the loch.

It would make a good tapestry, she thought to herself before the darkness claimed her yet again.

And through it all, she prayed that her child would be all right.

“Ye need to eat!” Agnes snapped as she sat a bowl of stew in front of Theo. He hadn’t left Gemma’s side from the moment he learned that she’d been taken by an infection. It was all he could do not to find a way to bring Thomas and his father back from the dead and kill them all over again.

The execution of Patrick MacDougal was a swift affair. The king would not be happy, but not only did Theo have cause, he had the support of his three neighboring clans. Connor was keeping an eye on his land for him while Hamish took charge of cleaning up the loch.

There was nothing for Theo to do but sit by Gemma’s bed and wait and see if she would survive. He’d never felt so helpless in his life.

“I cannae eat,” he said listlessly.

“Ye can. When she wakes up—and she will wake up—ye will need to be there for her, and ye can barely do that if ye are wasting away from starvation and exhaustion. Eat!” Agnes snapped again. “Or I will hold ye down and pour it down yer throat.”

“This is my fault,” he muttered, but he took the bowl from her. “I thought she would be safe here, and I led her right into his hands.”

Agnes snorted. “I amnae saying ye didnae do a foolish thing by sending yer wife away, but ye didn’t kidnap her and wound her. Ye didnae pour something strange on the wound.”

“No,” Jillian said tiredly as she stepped inside, “that was me.”

The lass who was once a great beauty would never be the same. Unlike Gemma and Elizabeth, she had not escaped the mercenaries. When Graeme found her, she was unconscious in the woods after suffering at the hands of the man who’d caught her.

Unfortunately for that man, he happened to be one of the survivors, and when Jillian came to and identified him, Graeme skewered him and left him to bleed out painfully. An angry wound ran down the side of her left face, and although no one would say it out loud, it would scar horrendously.

“Don’t ye start laying on the guilt,” Agnes sighed. “Ye did what ye had to do to escape.”

“We knew there was a chance of infection.” Tears filled Jillian’s eyes. “I just hoped I could remove it in time. In the end, I failed. I couldnae warn the patrols, and now Gemma is suffering.”