He was right. The tide of the battle was turning quickly in their favor. It would be over soon, and they would ride on to conquer the Sutherland Clan’s castle, ending the decades-old war that had started when the Sutherland laird divorced Cain’s aunt, Merida Sinclair, for not producing a living heir for him.

Cain’s muscles contracted with carefully honed strength. He could already taste the sweetness of victory and contentment of conquest. Both were his main responsibilities within their clan, duties given to him by his father when Cain was a boy of nine, the day his fourth brother was born and their angelic mother died.

He hoisted himself onto Seraph’s back, the well-trained horse standing as still as a statue carved of white marble. Mist still floated in patches over the land below where men surged and retreated, spun and died around his father, but a breeze coming from off the sea to the east scattered the building heat. A group of Sutherlands fell under the press of Bàs’s pale horses, and Cain’s white cavalry pushed back a line of enemy on the north side of the field.

Cain inhaled the damp smell of earth mixed with the tang of blood, gathering his reins loosely. Seraph shifted, his eagerness evident as he awaited the press of Cain’s heels to surge forward, but movement among the soaring pines on the edge of the opposite slope made him still.

A black horse stepped out into the wide clearing before the forest. Being black, the horse would belong to Gideon once won, but what caught Cain’s full focus was the woman who stood straight up on the horse’s saddle. Clothed in slim black trousers, the woman balanced while raising a fist into the air. Men emerged from the woods to stand on either side of her.

“What are ye up to?” he asked under his breath. Cain squinted, trying to take in the details of who could only be the daughter of the dead chief of the Sutherland Clan, Arabella Sutherland. He had met her once, a decade ago at a Beltane Festival. She’d been a beauty then, with wide gray eyes, and still too young to do much more than pick wildflowers and dance with the maidens around the maypole. Things had apparently changed, but he wondered if she still favored the prickly Scottish thistles she had carried then. The hood she was said to don in public was missing, leaving her long dark braid free to be seen over her shoulder, but she was wearing a leather half mask to cover the lower part of her face.

“Cain,” Gideon said, his voice hard as the men around Arabella raised their bows, arrows nocked, some of them flaming. “They are aiming to fire upon—”