“Is it treason we’re going to commit, then?” Anson asked. A faint gleam of excitement came into his eyes at the thought.

“Very likely,” Jamie said, and suppressed an inappropriate smile at the thought. He’d had a flash of memory: a contentious conversation between himself and John Grey, on a road in Ireland. Grey, annoyed by Jamie’s refusal to tell him what he knew about Tobias Quinn’s aims, had said, “I suppose it is frivolous to point out that assisting the King’s enemies—even by inaction—is treason.”

To which he had himself replied evenly, “It is not frivolous to point out that I am a convicted traitor. Are there judicial degrees of that crime? Is it additive? Because when they tried me, all they said was ‘treason’ before putting a rope around my neck.”

He was surprised to find that the inappropriate smile had crept onto his face despite the current urgent situation—and the fraught circumstances of the memory. A shout from Gillebride MacMillan made him turn sharply from Anson and kick his horse into the highest pace he could sustain on a slippery blanket of wet pine needles.

Panting with the hurry, they reached Gillebride, who silently pointed the way with his chin.

The soldiers had stopped by a small creek to water the horses; that was luck. He could see Ulysses standing on the near bank, leaning against a bare willow’s trunk, the drooping, leafless branches falling in a sort of cage about him.

Taking that as a good omen, Jamie gathered his men and made his aims known. He let Anson McHugh shout, “One … two … three!” and on that signal, the group split like a dropped egg, Gillebride and the McHughs going for the left flank, as it were, with himself and the Lindsays riding straight into the creek to split the group, and himself meaning to seize upon Ulysses—Kenny Lindsay to back him up, if needed.

“Make sure o’ the horses!” he shouted, leaning toward Kenny. “I dinna ken which one belongs to our man. It’s the saddlebags I want!”

“Aye, Mac Dubh,” Lindsay said, grinning, and Jamie let out a Highland whoop that made Phineas—unused to such a thing—swerve madly, ears laid back.

The black soldiers sprang up at once to defend themselves, but most of them were dismounted, and their horses hadn’t liked the screech any more than Phineas did. Ulysses had started from his willow tree like a water rat flushed by a fox, and dived for his tethered horse.

Jamie pulled his own horse up into a slithering stop amid a shower of wet leaves and flung himself off. He ran through the creek edge, ignoring rocks and the cold water that splashed his legs, and threw himself at Ulysses just as the man was getting his left foot into the stirrup. His blood was up and he dragged Ulysses away from the horse, shoved him, then punched him in the belly.