The Highlander’s Promise (The Highlands Warring Scottish Romance) (A Medieval Historical Romance Book) Read online

  the highlander’s promise

  the highlands warring

  scottish romance

  a medieval historical romance book

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  anne

  morrison

  Copyright

  Copyright © 2019 by

  Anne Morrison

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  Table of Contents

  Copyright

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  prologue

  chapter 1

  chapter 2

  chapter 3

  chapter 4

  chapter 5

  chapter 6

  chapter 7

  chapter 8

  chapter 9

  chapter 10

  chapter 11

  chapter 12

  chapter 13

  chapter 14

  chapter 15

  chapter 16

  chapter 17

  chapter 18

  chapter 19

  chapter 20

  chapter 21

  chapter 22

  chapter 23

  chapter 24

  chapter 25

  chapter 26

  chapter 27

  chapter 28

  chapter 29

  chapter 30

  chapter 31

  chapter 32

  chapter 33

  chapter 34

  chapter 35

  chapter 36

  chapter 37

  chapter 38

  chapter 39

  chapter 40

  chapter 41

  chapter 42

  chapter 43

  chapter 44

  chapter 45

  epilogue

  Preview of Next Book

  Order of Book List

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  Publisher Notes

  prologue

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  St. Dunstan's Abbey, Northern England

  April 1303

  Dawn was still at least an hour away, but Nicholas knew that if he wanted to escape the abbey unquestioned, he needed to leave before the monks rose for matins. They were kind, but they wouldn't approve of him leaving. As far as they were concerned, he was still numbered among the wounded, and they would not have approved of his mission in the first place.

  Nicholas rubbed at the healing wound slightly to the left of his collarbone. The flesh had knit together well after an intrepid Scottish girl had dug out the arrow with a pair of medical spoons. The only real sign that he had been wounded at all was that that arm didn't move as far as its mate any longer. It wasn't disastrous, as it wasn't his sword arm, and Nicholas decided to believe he was lucky rather than not.

  Leaving was easy enough, as the gates of the abbey were always kept open to the poor and the sick. After he collected a small amount of food and a waterskin from the stores, he made his way silently through the halls.

  He was just thinking that he had made good his escape when he heard a pointed cough at the gate. Not only did that cough sound disapproving, even worse, it was familiar. A part of Nicholas wanted to ignore the cough and continue until he had gained the main road, but he was better raised than that.

  As a matter of fact, it was Brother Michael who mostly had the raising of him and his sister both. When he turned to face the old man, he couldn't resist feeling a little like a boy who had been caught going after apples in the orchard.

  Brother Michael was short and fat with a thin tonsure that showed his gleaming pate. His face was lined deeply with kindness, and even at his most stern, there was always a soft twinkle in his eyes. When Nicholas and Agatha had been children, whenever they were injured, whenever the world seemed too dark or too unfair, it was Brother Michael who comforted them.

  “Now, where are you off to with that bag, young Sir Nicholas?”

  “I left money for my room and board in my room.”

  “Would the saints ask room and board from the ones they served?”

  “No. Do you think you are a saint now, Brother Michael?”

  The old man's face creased with laughter at Nicholas's teasing, but he pursed his lips sternly.

  “You and I know very well that we are men, Nicholas. And as a man, and as your friend, I am telling you to return to your bed and sleep until you are healed.”

  “I am healed enough,” Nicholas said shortly, “and my business will not wait.”

  “Your business has already waited three years. It can wait longer, or it is already too late.”

  His words like being punched in the gut, shocking and filling him with a deep fury that went all the way down to the bone. Nicholas, who had been turning away, spun around to face the monk. When he was only confronted with the man's placid smile, he drew back.

  Was I really about to strike him?

  The thought of striking a man who had cared for him with such compassion sent a shiver of fear though Nicholas's body. He had always known that the fighting over the last decade had changed him, but he was never sure how much.

  “Nicholas,” Brother Michael said calmly. “It is all right. It is all in the hands of a greater power.”

  Nicholas shook his head.

  “No. I wasn't made to lie in a bed and hope that some higher power would look after my own blood. I am leaving, and there is nothing you can do to stop me.”

  “You are a young man who, even wounded, is stronger than I ever was even as a warrior myself. There was never anything I could do to stop you in the first place. I only wished to ask you to delay your mission. Stop. Give it another week, another month until your wound is truly healed.”

  “It is healed enough. And I cannot wait another month. I may already be too late.”

  There were rumblings of war in the North. King Edward of England had spent the winter chafing at the peace with Scotland. Nicholas didn't think it would hold much longer, if it had not broken already. Soon enough, the borderlands between England and Scotland was going to turn into a battlefield. Nicholas had had enough of the war the last time he had fought in it.

  Brother Michael sighed.

  “If I cannot convince you, I will wish you luck. It is all I can do, that, and keep you in my prayers.”

  Nicholas hesitated. There had not been much room in his life for prayers for a long time.

  “Pray instead for poor Agatha and for Catherine,” he said finally. “Pray that I find Cath
erine safe and soon.”

  An uncommon melancholy stole over the monk's face, and he bowed his head. He had raised Nicholas and his sister Agatha both, and Nicholas remembered how he had loved them.

  “Oh, my boy. I pray for them every night.”

  Nicholas clasped the monk's hand tightly in his, and then he pulled away. There was a town nearby where he could get a horse and some more supplies, and then he could go north.

  Catherine, be safe. I will be there as soon I can.

  He could barely remember the man he had been when he had gotten off the ship from France that past June. That man had been full of hope, assuming he was coming home to his family and his inheritance, free for the first time in four months.

  I still have hope. I need to find my niece. Clinging to that thought, he headed north.

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  chapter 1

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  My whole life, people have been telling me that I have been pushing my luck. Maybe sometime soon, I will start believing them.

  Ava Fitzpatrick’s first mistake was thinking that the dirt road she was on was a shortcut to the coast. Instead, it had turned out to be a deep glen, one with no outlet. There was at least a town, however, a small place where the biggest house served as something like an inn. There was at least a room she could take there while she tried to figure out what route to take next.

  Her second mistake was deciding that she was too filthy to be borne and needed a bath. The hired girl had brought her a tin tub and pitchers of hot water to fill it with, and that was such a luxury that Ava supposed she had gotten careless. She stripped out of the tunic and trews that disguised her so well as a boy and set about the pleasant task of finally getting clean after eight days of hard travel.

  Of course, just as she was feeling really human again, the door had opened, and the girl had come in with a rough cloth, an offer to scrub Ava's back dying on her lips. Ava turned in surprise, and at that point, there was no mistaking that the rather pretty young man that the maid had been flirting with was really a tall and lanky young woman.

  Still pretty enough, I would like to say, but not to her taste at all.

  The girl might have held her tongue, but Ava had decided that there was no need to push her luck. She hastily dressed again and crept out the back. She hadn't spent the night or used the bed, so she felt justified in not leaving any money behind.

  So that wasn't what she would have called a pleasant night, but it wasn't a disaster yet.

  No, it became a disaster when in the last rays of the setting sun, Ava caught sight of a jeweled chalice through the town chapel's open doors. The chalice gleamed like it might be worth some money, and the doors and the empty nave were practically an invitation.

  That was when she made her third mistake and decided that she could make off with the chalice and be gone before anyone was any much the wiser. She sidled into the church, which was empty, and made her way in the shadows to the front. When she hefted the chalice, however, she made a face.

  Up close, the chalice was wood painted over with something that had a cheap gleam, and the stones turned out to be little more than round river pebbles.

  Someone probably stole the real thing ages ago and left this in its place, she thought with disgust. Of course, that was when they found her, a growling, howling mob of townspeople who were all shouting about an abomination in the eyes of Heaven, a woman who masqueraded as a man, taking a man's place in creation.

  At that point, Ava had decided that enough was enough. She drew her sword, and even if they were ready to tear her to pieces, three feet of steel would make almost any farmer or cowherd think twice. She feinted and menaced her way to the door, and for a moment, she thought she might have done it again.

  The bastard girl of Clan Blair lives to raid another day. Then there was a tremendous pain to the top of her head. In a vague and shocked way, Ava wondered if a house had fallen upon her, and then she had known no more.

  She woke up aware of the ache in her head, the hard ground below her, and of the fact that her tunic had been ripped down the front, exposing her breasts to the air. Her face felt hot with humiliation, and despite herself, tears started in her eyes. It wasn't maidenly modesty. Instead it was pure rage, and in that moment, if she could have gotten her hands on any of the people responsible, she would have killed them.

  I hope they got a good look, she thought bitterly. Not that there's that much to look at.

  Her thoughts were interrupted by a hefty kick to her legs, and she looked up to see a man going by with an armload of wood. She followed his progress to a stake that had been erected in the middle of the primitive town square, and to her horror, he dumped a load of wood at the base. She heard the shouts of witch and demon, and she went pale.

  They meant to burn her.

  With a muttered curse, Ava started to work at her hands, which they had bound behind her. She had to get free. She knew there were places in the North, places where a certain kind of mania for witches and the supernatural ran deep, and apparently, she had fallen straight into one. They would burn her in the evening and then eat breakfast the next day as if they had done a good job the night before. Her screams wouldn't trouble them, and neither would her repentance, nor her bribes.

  Ava chanted every curse she could think of under her breath as she worked on her bonds. She could feel her skin chafe and then tear against the coarse rope, and when her blood started to flow, the only thing she could think of was that maybe it would let her tear her hands free.

  She heard a cheer go up, and then she was being pulled upright, hard hands on her arms and jerking her upright. People were hitting her, spitting on her, dragging her forward, telling her that she was going to get what she deserved.

  It struck Ava like a brick that this might really be it, that after so many things she shouldn't have survived, she had finally run into something that was actually going to kill her.

  She swallowed hard against the panic, but as the stake loomed closer, and as the chanting of the crowd took on a gleeful malevolence, her mind seemed to fill with a blank and terrible buzzing. She couldn't make herself move; she couldn't make herself think.

  She was now close enough to the stake to see the pattern of the wood by the torchlight. She could smell the green sap from the wood around the base. She had a wild thought that perhaps it meant that the smoke would kill her before the fire could. She did not want to die of fire. She didn't want to burn; she didn't want the pain.

  Just when Ava was certain she was on the verge of losing her mind with fear, the shouting in the crowd changed. It went from vindicated to terrified, and then people were running. The people holding her up hung on for another moment, and then they let go, running with the rest, and Ava fell to the ground. She struggled to her feet just in time to look up and see a horse and rider bearing down upon her, sword bared.

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  chapter 2

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  Nicholas was lost.

  He wasn't sure he had ever been so utterly lost in his life. In England, the roads were broad and smooth, marked with signs. Some of those signs were wood, and some were chiseled into the very stones at the crossroads, but they were there.

  He guessed that the track he had taken some time ago was nothing of the sort. It had started out clear enough and flat enough, but soon enough it started to wind up the side of the ravine, difficult for a horse and impossible for a cart.

  Then it had started to get dark, and though his horse was a broad old thing that looked as if he could march until kingdom come if he only had enough grass to chew on, Nicholas knew he needed to stop, even if he just found a place to sleep under a convenient tree. That was when he had seen the glint of a light in the distance, and hopeful for a real shelter, even if it was only a barn, he urged his horse forward.

  The light turned out to be a candle from the tiny cottage of a m
an with a long beard and a rather crazed look in his eye. He had been unwilling to allow Nicholas to stay, but he had said that there was a town a short while onward, a place where he could get some food and a place to stay. He had been vague about how far it might have been, only to say that it wasn't far on horseback, and with that, Nicholas set off again.

  Now he was lost, probably wandering around in circles, and he was nearly ready to drop from exhaustion. Just as he was on the verge of dismounting and getting some sleep, he saw lights gleaming through the trees.

  Encouraged, Nicholas got closer, but then something started to prickle at the back of his neck. It was a familiar feeling. He had felt it before battles had gone spectacularly wrong, and he had felt it right before he was taken captive in France. Though he had ignored it, he felt it when he had gotten off the boat in London, too. Why was he feeling it now?

  Something about the village reminded him of the worst nights in France, when the English army was in retreat, when there had been little water and less food. The memories made Nicholas shudder, and though he turned away from them, they would not stop.

  His stomach twisted, and suddenly, it was all too real again, the army in tatters, making their way across the field of the dead. He remembered laughter like that, too, when the French saw their enemies defeated and humiliated, and a cold sweat broke out under his clothes.

  Nicholas knew that the best thing, the smartest thing to do, would be to flee. He could disappear into the dark forest again, and he would not have to see what was unfolding in front of him. Then he came between the houses of the village, saw the stake, and something broke inside him.

  He had seen savagery in the fighting between England and France, enough of it that he feared it had lodged in his mind forever. He remembered a stake and an English captive, people who were sick of war and needed someone to take it out upon.

  Nicholas barely realized what he was doing when he bellowed, jerking his horse's reins back and then digging his heels in. His horse snorted with dismay but broke into a lumbering run. This was no war horse, trained to rear and flail, but it was a large animal, broad enough to knock over grown men, and it thundered into the town square with an angry scream of its own.