It was partially true. When Alex arrived at the carts, he explained to his men what he planned to do and told them to be ready when the time came.

If the time came.

Though there were signs that Bruce might be considering doing what he’d avoided for eight years—meeting the English in pitched battle—Alex knew that prudence and caution would be urging the king to take the small victories he’d won today and slip back into the mist, leaving the fight for another day. Alex intended, however, to convince him to stay and fight.

So far Bruce had surprised him, and Alex wondered whether Bruce, too, wanted to fight. Was he looking for a definitive end to the war? Had he grown tired of the cat-and-mouse game they’d been playing?

The fact that Bruce had let the English army march unmolested this far—a complete change of tactics from the previous English invasion—and had stayed in the area to face them today, suggested that he might.

But Alex knew that if he did not act, there was every chance the Scots would leave the forest of the New Park by morning.

He couldn’t let that happen. He knew with every fiber of his being that this was the chance Bruce had to defeat the English and end the war. So he swallowed his pride—knowing he would have to do so many times before the night was over—removed the surcoat that identified him as a knight, and told himself that even if he felt like a dog slinking back with its tail between its legs, he would do whatever it took. In this case, the ends definitely justified the means.

As he slipped through the English perimeter and headed toward the New Park, he entered the eerily quiet buffer of land between the two armies. After stumbling into a pit carefully hidden beneath leaves and branches and nearly becoming impaled on one of the wooden stakes at the bottom, he was more careful about where he stepped. But the honeycomb-like defensive pits dug by Bruce’s men were one more indication that Bruce might want to fight.

Each step Alex took closer to the Scot camp he knew well could be his last. If one of their scouts didn’t put an arrow through him first, he knew Boyd and MacRuairi would be fighting for the honor of doing so with a blade. But if he was going to die, damn it, it wasn’t going to be fighting behind Edward Plantagenet’s banner.

Joan was right; he had to take a chance.

He held his hands up in the universal signal of surrender as he approached, but that didn’t stop the arrow that whizzed right by his ear—too perfectly directed to be a mistake.