Highland Steel (Guardians of the Stone Book 2) by Tanya Anne Crosby Read Free Book Online

deserved to die?
    He’d failed his cousin.
    “War is no game,” Broc’s voice echoed in his head, a warning Cameron hadn’t yet been prepared to heed… and then he left Cameron alone with his gargantuan pride.
    In truth, Cameron was no stranger to death. His parents both died when he was but a lad. Nor was he an innocent. He’d witnessed bad men doing terrible things to innocent folks. He’d even been a part of it, much to his regret. But he had never seen war up close. And now that he had, he wished he hadn’t. All his boasts and misplaced pride seemed a blasphemy to his own ears.
    “Broc,” he rasped through broken lips, and then collapsed atop Lael’s cantering mare. Every step the animal took felt like daggers through his bones.
    In answer, thunder rolled across the heavens… the sound angry and full of condemnation.
    Blackness awaited.
    Merciful and silent.
    Still, Cameron refused to embrace it, afraid to close his eyes lest he never open them again, but unlike the man he’d once thought himself to be, he was not ashamed when the boy inside began to weep.
     

     
    Five known dead, how many more?
    Whatever the answer, Broc realized he was responsible for every single man lost. He alone had waged this war.
    With eyes that were half swollen from the beating he’d endured after being cut down from the gallows, he surveyed the space where he was being held.
    Judging by the looks of it, his informant spoke the truth. Keppenach’s gaols were rarely used. Damp, dark and full of detritus, the cells were empty, save for the one in which he stood—empty, unless one considered the bloated carcass of a pine marten that had found its way into the adjoining cell.
    Knowing MacLaren’s reputation, it was easy enough to believe the man had hanged any and all offenders rather than hold them here for trial. His steward had been quick enough to follow his example, arranging their execution scant hours after their capture. Sequestered now beneath the donjon, it was all the more torturous knowing that freedom lay not more than one hundred meters through half-forgotten tunnels.
    Although Broc was only a wee child when last he saw this place, he remembered it still from his dreams. This was how old Alma had secreted him away from Keppenach after Donnal MacLaren and his cold-hearted sons took the castle per force. He knew his parents were dead—had spied their butchered bodies lying upon the ground—but he was told little more. Ushered away to live with distant kin, he forsook the images in his head, blocking them away. But it took a single look at Keppenach from a distance, and all his memories came flooding back.
    At one end of the tunnels, unguarded and concealed by years of bracken, lay the outside portal to Keppenach’s tunnels. The wooden trap was surrounded by lichen-painted oaks and knotted elms, whose roots poked insistently at the long-neglected door.
    At the other end, the tunnel led into a cobwebbed chapel, built by his father to appease David’s sire, Malcom mac Dhonnchaidh. Tucked away oddly, the tiny chapel sat at the back of the bailey, very near the well, and it was easily overlooked, save by those who came to fill their daily buckets.
    Purportedly, both of the tunnel entrances had been sealed since the night of Broc’s departure, but the wood was wormy and easily destroyed. Three entire generations of MacLarens had perished in less than two score years, but the treachery always came from within, thus the hidden tunnels remained overlooked. For all these years, they lay unused and ignored. Under Maddog’s provisional leadership, it should have been an easy breach. But someone took the time to unseal the inner door, and then set a new padlock on both the door to the tunnels as well as the door to the chapel. It was a grievous miscalculation, one that roused the attention of the guards during their attempt to break through.
    Now he stood in chains, mired in sludge that smelled like the seepage of waste.