“I almost drowned once. I was swimming in the Western Isles during a bad storm. I remember struggling against the current and trying to fight my way out of it. But no matter what I did, no matter how hard I swam, I wasn’t going anywhere. I couldn’t feel anything anymore. I was so tired and cold, sapped of all my energy. The water was pulling me under, and I knew I was drowning.”

She looked at him in horror.

“That’s how I felt when I left,” he said. “Like I was swimming against a current that was dragging me under, and I had to get out before I was pulled under.”

From the tortured look on his face she knew there was more. “Why, Alex? Why did you feel like that? What happened?”

“There were things . . .” His voice trailed off. “Things done in the name of war that I did not agree with.”

Joan could guess what he meant. She had to remind herself that no matter what she thought—or that it was necessary to have a chance against a much more powerful foe—the rest of Christendom saw Bruce as fighting an unchivalrous war. To a knight like Alex—a knight who obviously took the code of chivalry very seriously—the “pirate” warfare that Bruce had adopted would have seemed antithetical to everything he’d been taught to believe was “right” and “honorable.” It wasn’t nearly that black and white, of course, but Alex didn’t exactly see a lot of gray, and the new style of warfare must have been hard to accept and a difficult adjustment for him. “You can’t shoulder the conscience of everyone else, Alex, only yourself. Are the English so much better?”

Though she hadn’t said it sarcastically, his mouth quirked as if she had. “Maybe not, but I wasn’t shouldering other people’s consciences, it was mine I was worried about. I came very close to doing something for which I would never have been able to forgive myself.” She could hear the self-disgust and latent bitterness in his voice. “We were raiding Norham. I didn’t want to be there. I was already fed up with all the back-and-forth raids that were destroying the Borders. But Clifford had raided our town so we had to raid his. I was in charge of removing the livestock from the barns and then setting fire to the buildings. It was maybe the second or third building that I’d set my torch to when I looked up at an open loft door and saw a face in the flames. It was a little girl—no more than six or seven.”

Joan gasped in horror and instinctively put her hand on his arm.