She lifted her chin. “I can take care of myself, Lachlan. I’ve been doing so for six years.” Eight if she counted back to when her mother left.

“I don’t ask you how you discover all this information—”

“Good,” she said, cutting him off. “It’s none of your concern.”

He ignored her warning. “But I’m hearing rumors.”

She stiffened and gave him a hard look. “You better than anyone know better than to listen to gossip.”

The lies that were spread about him were far worse than anything they might say about her.

“Maybe so, but I also know there is usually a little bit of truth to them.”

She pursed her mouth closed, signaling that she wasn’t going to talk about it anymore.

He sighed. “You keep your thoughts hidden better than any warrior I know—your mother used to do the same thing—but don’t think I haven’t noticed how sad you seem lately. I can’t remember the last time I saw you smile.”

“I’m fine,” she assured him. But seeing that she hadn’t convinced him, she added, “I know you are worried, but you don’t need to be. I know what I’m doing.”

Whatever it takes so that no one else ever has to see her mother in a cage.

The damned fools were going to get him killed.

Alex was riding at the head of the long train of English soldiers when they first caught sight of the smoke.

“Scot raiders,” their scout confirmed shortly thereafter, having raced back with the news. “A few furlongs ahead.”

Two years later and the word still made every muscle in his body tense with . . . frustration? Anger? A sense of futility?

Raider, the war name of his former partner in the Highland Guard, Robbie Boyd. The man who’d pushed Alex for seven years until he’d pushed him too far.

You raze me, I’ll raze you more. The retaliatory raids that characterized the war in the Borders had driven Alex to London two years ago, yet here he was back in the north and the first thing that confronted him was fire—or the smoke from it.

“How many?” Pembroke asked. Aymer de Valence, the Earl of Pembroke, was the leader of the two hundred knights and men-at-arms who were making their way north to answer King Edward’s call to muster.

Since he’d left Scotland and the Guard, Alex had been in the south of England able to avoid the fighting and the prospect of meeting his former compatriots across a battlefield. But no longer. King Edward had ordered him to march north with Pembroke ahead of the army to prepare for battle against Bruce. Like many of his Scot countrymen in Edward’s allegiance, Alex served in an English earl’s retinue.