A Soldier's Salvation (Highland Heartbeats Book 7)(36)

17





They buried the bodies. It seemed the right thing to do.

Rodric wouldn’t be able to live with knowing they were left just outside the house, the pair of them looking as though they had tried to flee during the blaze. Something had overcome them, perhaps the smoke, and the flames had eventually claimed them.

They had died close together, only inches apart. Perhaps that was what struck his heart most of all, the way their hands rested side-by-side.

Fergus and Quinn then went about the work of hauling buckets of water up from the well to douse the smoldering ruins. They both looked ill by the time they’d finished the job of putting out the outer buildings. “Every horse, every head of cattle, and what looks like a few farm hands,” Brice reported.

All of them had served, had seen carnage and destruction, and yet they were all shaken by what they’d seen and smelled. And what it meant.

Only a truly heartless brute would subject fellow humans to such terrible death.

Which was why the discovery of one of Connor McAllister’s men not far from the sight of the fire came as a relief.

While the work was done, Caitlin sat on a tree stump, hands folded in her lap, face pale, completely withdrawn, as though she were elsewhere, in her mind, somewhere far, far away. She wouldn’t turn back to what was once a house and a thriving, if modest, farm. She’d seen enough. Rodric made certain to watch her at all times, afraid she would take leave of her senses and do something truly foolish.

“How is she?” Brice asked him as the two of them shoveled dirt into the graves. It would’ve been hard work on a temperate day—with the sun blazing down on their backs, it was brutally harsh.

No less so due to the knowledge of who they were burying and why they’d died.

“All I can do is guess,” he muttered, shaking his head. “I haven’t been able to get through to her. After she calmed a bit, she went… away.”

“Aye. We’ve both seen it, haven’t we?” Brice leaned on one of the two shovels they’d found in one of the few unburnt outbuildings, drawing the back of his arm across his forehead and leaving a trail of dirt behind.

“Aye, we have indeed,” Rodric agreed, remembering the many comrades of his who had gone mad in the aftermath of battle. Sometimes there would be screaming at night, unnatural howls that seemed to rise from the very bowels of hell.

Even the screaming wasn’t as terrible as the laughter. High-pitched laughter when nothing humorous was going on. Laughter that seemed to never end, the laughter of a broken mind.

And the staring. Silent staring, so constant and unblinking that the person in question appeared dead. There were times when Rodric believed the poor creatures would’ve been better off if they had, in fact, died in battle. What was the purpose of surviving a fight if survival meant living as a fragile, shrieking shell of a person?

“She’s stronger than that,” he muttered, more in answer to the silent questions running through his head than to anything Brice had suggested.

“I’ve met many strong people in my time,” Brice observed, shoveling a heap of dirt into the gaping hole. The body was covered—a good thing, too, as Rodric cared little for looking on the charred remains.

It wasn’t the charred remains so much as it was the reminder of who those remains used to be.

“And?” Rodric prompted.

“And it came as a surprise every time one of those strong men broke under the weight of something they simply couldn’t bear.”

“What are you trying to say?”

“I don’t know that I’m trying to say anything, not really,” Brice admitted with a shrug, scooping another load of earth and grunting as he threw it into the grave. “I’m only trying to tell you how concerned I am for the lass, I suppose. We all are. She seems a good sort.”

“She is.”

“And you care for her, which is enough for me,” Brice added. There was no jesting in his voice, no twinkle in his eye. He was stating a plain truth.

“I don’t know what to do for her now,” Rodric admitted. “If Connor McAllister is willing to do this, where can she go? Where will she be safe? I’m certain that no matter where it is, she’ll feel as though she’s putting those who shelter her in danger.”

“The poor lass,” Brice muttered in an uncharacteristic flash of pity, shaking his head. “She’s been ill-used, for sure.”

“Evidently. I had no idea McAllister was capable of something this brutal. It brings to mind questions I’d rather not know the answer to.” Such as what the man had done to her, if anything.

From what he remembered of Caitlin’s stepfather, the man was thoughtless, cold, rather idiotic. His fellow clansmen had respected him only due to his position within the clan, not because he was the sort of man who commanded respect. He was nothing like Ross Anderson.

Rodric recalled his father laughing over McAllister more than once, making jest of the man’s stupidity. Like a rutting stag with roughly as much sense, he’d once observed, much to the enjoyment of those in earshot. They’d laughed at him, called him a man with ideas above himself.

That much was true as well. He’d always been ambitious. Leading a modest clan of modest means had never been enough for him, hence the uneasiness which had always touched his dealings with the Andersons. Ross knew, as Rodric did, that the McAllisters were always of a mind to grow—including the expansion of their land holdings. Land which happened to belong to the Andersons.