Cain didn’t move, couldn’t move. His da had been a mountain, spewing energy, conviction, and uncontrolled temper all through his life. Now he was suddenly silent and unmoving with the heavy weight of death. The absence of his bellowing war cry seemed to echo louder than the surprise middle-of-night training sessions he would call to keep his sons ready to fight. George Sinclair had seemed invincible. No matter how many times he bled, there was always more blood pumping through his strong heart.

“Da,” Cain said, his hand flat over the man’s frozen heart. He bowed his head, his chest tight. His fingers curled into his father’s blood-soaked shirt. “Aye, ’twas an honorable death, and we will make ye proud.”

Bàs kneeled beside their father, his deep voice rising in a ribbon of prayer, as the discordance of war stormed around them. But there always seemed to be war around them, and they paid it no heed.

The arrows had ceased their rain, and Cain pushed up to stand tall, bow over his back and sword in his bloody hand. His gaze sought his target before the line of pines on the south rise. The woman still stood upright on her horse, her focus toward them. Did she wait to see if the Sinclair chief was dead?

Cain’s fist tightened against his thigh, his thumb wrapping around to crack his knuckle. He met her stare, letting her know, without a doubt, that he saw her. “Ye are mine,” he murmured, his tone like a low growl.

But first… Cain raised his left arm, still encased in his gauntlet, and his falcon, always hovering overhead during battle, swooped down to alight. Cain pulled the one flag he’d never used before, a black and red woven together. Black for death and red for Sinclair blood. “Fly!” Cain yelled, sending the signal to the one brother who didn’t yet know that the day for which their father had prepared them, was here.

The day the four horsemen took over the rule of Clan Sinclair.

…

“He is dead,” Ella Sutherland said, her words hushed as her heart pounded like the deep beats of a kettledrum.

The warlord who had killed her father, the bastard who had spurred the feud with their clan for decades, the grisly, demented man who had whacked more than a hundred Sutherland heads from their shoulders, was gone. “The madman is dead.”

“Are ye certain?” Kenneth Macleod, her father’s old advisor, asked. He cupped hands over his eyes to stare across the battle-trodden meadow. “I cannot see.”

Ella glanced heavenward. “Of course, you cannot see, because you refuse to wear the spectacles I obtained for you.” The man was in his sixty-fifth year and still insisted on riding out to battle, but he wouldn’t use the contraptions to help him see better.

He waved off her comment. “If ye see he is dead, then he is dead.”