A Soldier's Salvation (Highland Heartbeats Book 7)
Aileen Adams
1
Come on, lads. Put your backs into it.” Rodric Anderson chuckled to himself, albeit quietly, so as to avoid arousing the ire of his friends. They were not the sort of men one wished to rouse to anger—as they’d proven more times than he could count.
Brice MacDougal let out a growl which cut off suddenly as he smashed a large hand against the side of his neck to kill a bug which had lighted there. “Perhaps the work would go better if ye’d quit supervising and lend us a hand.”
“Aye, and perhaps ye wouldn’t come off as such a prig if ye did,” his brother Fergus agreed through gritted teeth as he attempted to lift the wagon’s wheel out of the thick mud in which it had become hopelessly mired.
Quinn Murray groaned in frustration, sweat rolling down his neck and under his tunic, where it spread in a growing patch of dark wetness. “We’ll never manage it, lads. I swear to all the gods, this mud is cursed.”
Rodric could see how his old friend would believe this, as it seemed no matter how hard they fought against the deep, sucking mess, the wagon’s wheels only sank further into the muck. The three of them had grown up in villages, however, not in the Highlands. No matter how much of their adult lives had been spent out of doors, they were still unaccustomed to navigating through what could quickly become treacherous ground.
Or, as in their current situation, ground impossible to travel across.
They’d been at it for nearly an hour, losing precious time as the sun sank lower with each passing minute.
“I give up.” Fergus left the muddy patch, covered up to his knees in the stuff, and flopped down with his back against the trunk of a birch. “I mean it. I give up.”
“Come on, now,” Rodric urged. This was no longer a laughing matter. “I’m fresher than ye, so I’ll lift the wheel while you and Brice push the wagon from behind. Quinn, you lead the horses forward on my count of three.”
“Och, the laird is deigning to dirty himself,” Quinn chuckled.
Rodric barely avoided the impulse to cuff the man about the ears as they crossed paths.
“I was daft, thinking the three of you lot could handle a task as simple as this without my muscle,” Rodric muttered as he pushed the sleeves of his tunic up past his elbows.
He didn’t dare make a comment about them needing his reasoning skills, as that would merely anger them even further. Everyone was tired, dirty, hungry, and more than ready to arrive on Duncan land and unload the supplies they’d been tasked with bringing back to Jake Duncan and his family.
Brice, always the thinker of the group, frowned as Rodric walked past. “Are ye certain this is a task you ought to be undertaking?” he asked in a quiet voice.
Rodric shrugged off his friend’s concern. “I’ll be fine. You just worry yourself with pushing this wagon.”
When Quinn took the reins and gave a signal that he was prepared, Rodric crouched in the mud with his feet planted at shoulder width, wedging his shoulder beneath the inside of the wheel’s rim. A glance over his shoulder told him the MacDougals were in place.
“On three,” he ordered. “One… two… three!”
They worked as one, with him lifting with the others did as he instructed. He grunted with the effort, grinding his teeth together and finally letting out a roar as the wagon began to roll forward. He slid from beneath the wheel and rotated the spokes with both hands to help with the motion.
“For the love of all that’s holy,” Fergus huffed, bending at the waist with his hands on his knees as Quinn led the wagon and horses to a dry patch of ground.
“Amen to that,” Rodric agreed, having fallen to his knees in the mud once the wagon began moving. After a spell of rainy weather, this had been their fate for much of the journey from Inverness. What would’ve taken two days, perhaps three at the most in good weather and on horseback alone had turned into nearly a week’s worth of slow going.
Rodric knew without asking that none of them would’ve done it for anyone else but Jake Duncan. A shipment of goods had come which none of the men of the Duncan clan were currently in a position to retrieve. A more-than-fair price was offered to Rodric and his friends, the sort of sum none of them could afford to say no to.
But, again, the fact that it was Jake who’d made the request meant more than the silver he was willing to part with. He’d been like a brother to all of them while they fought, side-by-side, at the Battle of Largs. Rodric remembered all too well the wound his friend Jake had suffered—they’d all earned wounds and scars of their own, but his had been enough to send him home for care.
From what they’d heard months later, the second-born Duncan son had nearly died, no thanks to the callous creature who’d been charged with healing him. A scorned lover, as it had turned out, and she’d set her sights on killing Jake for jilting her.
Yet another reason why Rodric had always felt it best to remain unattached whenever possible.
The disloyal wretch of a healer was long-since dead and no longer a threat to the clan. Rodric had been glad to hear of it—had someone not put the creature out of her misery, he would’ve gladly done it himself. He owed Jake no less than his life.
He reminded himself of this as he removed his soiled clothing beside the stream they’d been traveling alongside, dunking them in and beating them against a nearby rock in the hopes of rinsing out the mud. A little discomfort was nothing to begrudge a man who’d withstood a wound which would’ve likely killed Rodric had he taken the brunt of it.