Midnight Honor

parties to ride up into the mountains than Charles Stuart himself came riding into the torchlit clearing.
    He was grayer than death, but unharmed. The same could not be said for Robert Hardy, whose tartan-wrapped body was draped over the saddle of his horse.
    “What happened?” Anne asked, the tears building at the back of her throat as she watched the body of the beloved valet gently lowered to the ground.
    “He threw himself in front of a lead ball intended for me,” the prince said, sober and utterly humbled for the first time in many long weeks. “For his bravery and noble sacrifice, be assured that both he and you have the gratitude of an unworthy prince.”
    Anne did not know where to look, what to say, and when she glanced over the royal shoulder, her eyes widened at yet another shocking sight. The prince turned to follow her stare and nodded. “Yes, just so. The Lady Catherine was also injured in the exchange, but she lives. The wound is in the arm, and her brother—”
    Damien Ashbrooke rode quickly past without deferring to the prince or anyone else in his haste to carry his sister to the house. Catherine rode before him, cradled against his chest, her face pale in the moonlight, her arm limp and bloody across her lap. For Anne, it was too much.
    A wave of nausea swept through her and she had to grip The Bruce's reins tightly to keep from sagging to her knees in the snow. She was thankful for MacGillivray's solid presence by her side, and only dimly paid attention to the prince as he told John and the others how they had reached the safety of the caves up above, only to discover the treacherous spy in their midst. Corporal Peters had been prepared to kill him, and likely would have if Hardy had not intervened and if Damien Ashbrooke had not fought him to the death, sending his body over the edge of a steep, rocky promontory.
    Anne felt as if she were on the edge of a precipice herself. The nausea and sense of standing on a tilt was getting worse, not better, and now there was a sticky rush of heat between her thighs.
    “Are you all right, lass?”
    She tried to focus on John's face, but he would not stand still long enough. He swayed side to side and split in two, then four. And just when she was about to shout at him to stop playing the fool, he reached out and punched her hard in the midsection. The blow took all the air out of her lungs and shedoubled over with the pain. She heard someone screaming and felt hands reach out to grab her, but it was when she was falling, fighting the dancing spots in front of her eyes, that she saw the bright red stain of blood spreading down from the crotch of her trews.

Chapter Twenty-One
    M oy Hall quickly took on the aspect of an armed fortress, with lights blazing in every window, torches sputtering every ten feet outside. Patrols of MacGillivray's men crisscrossed the glen, the roads, the tree-lined slopes. Fires were lit to give the appearance of a fully occupied camp, and every man not dispatched elsewhere was placed in a position to give an alarm should a mouse stray within a mile of Loch Moy.
    It was not mice but men who arrived with the dawn light: Lord George Murray rode in with the vanguard of his army. Hearing of the astonishing rout of fifteen hundred government troops by a handful of clansmen and servants, he brooked no arguments from the prince, who for once did not offer any, but whisked him away to the abandoned and more easily defendable Culloden House, there to be surrounded by three thousand of his own men.
    When they took their leave of Moy Hall, there was no rider sitting tall in the saddle of her gray gelding to wave and cheer them on. There was only the hollow echo of the wind and the bleakness of a gray sky to mark the passing of the long day into night.
    Anne heard whispers in the background. One of the voices belonged to her maid, Drena, and she was weeping. The otherwas not instantly recognizable, but a vaguely familiar Irish lilt brought a small frown to her brow.
    “I think she's waking.”
    That voice she knew, and it inspired her to struggle against the pressure of the iron weights that were holding her eyelids shut.
    “Aye, she's back with us,” MacGillivray said, leaning forward in his chair. “Stop that caterwaulin', lassie, an' fetch the doctor.”
    Doctor? Who needed a doctor?
    “J-John?”
    “Aye, lass. Aye, it's me. I'm right here.”
    He looked dreadful. His hair was stuck straight up in yellow spikes, there was