Echoing his thought she added, “The fact that you are still standing here without any apparent dagger wounds after coming into contact with my stepfather should tell you something. It tells me something. He would never have let you go after what you told him if he didn’t still trust you on some level.”

Frankly, he was just as surprised as she was that Lachlan had let him go without a fight. Was she right?

“Come back, Alex. They need you. Bruce needs you. It’s where you belong.”

Her voice was like a siren’s call, lulling him, beguiling him, fooling him. Making him think about things he didn’t want to remember. “Nay,” he said angrily. “I can never go back. I made my choice. What you want is impossible.”

“Is it? Or is it your knightly pride speaking? Is it that you don’t want to admit you might have been wrong? That war isn’t black or white, it’s gray—no matter what side you fight on?”

He hadn’t been wrong, damn it. He’d done what he had to do to see this war end. To see the suffering of his people stop. To be able to keep looking at himself in the mirror. He thought she’d understood that. But could someone like her ever understand? Whatever it takes . . . Christ, not again—never again. That was exactly the mind-set he’d wanted to avoid when he’d left, and he’d fallen in love with someone who was just as bad as Boyd. She wanted him to go back to that? To a war without limits?

His jaw clenched. “I don’t want to talk about this, Joan. I’ve told you my decision. I’m not going to go back for you or anyone else. Do not think my feelings for you can bend me to your will.”

She looked genuinely offended. “That is not what I’m trying to do. I’m trying to make you see that you can’t straddle the fence anymore. You came here, I know with good intentions, but it didn’t work. You tried to stop it, but war is coming anyway. Now you have to pick a side. You can’t be both an English knight and a Scot patriot. You have to choose.”

Perhaps unknowingly, she’d pricked old wounds. He’d heard the same damned refrain from Raider for seven bloody years. “I made my choice two years ago.”

Her eyes met his with disbelief. “So you will fight against Bruce and your former brethren?”

He thought of that little girl, and the thousands of innocents like her who hadn’t been so lucky. “If I have to, but you and I both know it won’t come to that. Bruce won’t take the field.”

And the war would go on.