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While the work was done, Caitlin sat on a tree stump, hands folded in her lap, face pale, completely withdrawn, as though she were elsewhere, in her mind, somewhere far, far away.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.

“It was a message to her, if nothing else,” Brice growled. “He wanted her to know that he knew she’d been there.”

“You believe so?”

“Why go to such lengths otherwise?”

Rodric couldn’t answer this, because he couldn’t imagine a situation in which going to such lengths would have even crossed his mind. To kill an innocent couple, neither of whom had ever harmed anyone?

“And the man told you nothing?” he asked, as though repeating the question would bring a different answer.

“Nay, though I would very much have rather taken the time to question him on why such a dreadful thing was done. When he lunged forward with the dirk…”

“Of course, you did what anyone would have done,” Rodric assured him. From the way Fergus had told it, Connor’s lookout had fought like a wild animal to escape once he’d been cornered against the boulder behind which he’d been watching the scene below. Evidently, the sight of Caitlin’s grief had distracted him from the sound of approaching horses.

“Not much good it did the poor lass, though.” Brice looked down into the grave, now all but filled with earth. “Nor this lass, here. God rest them both.”

Rodric had never heard his friend so much as speak the name. It seemed the horror they’d witnessed had brought out a depth of feeling unseen before.

“I’ll finish this, if you wish to speak with her,” Brice offered, nodding in Caitlin’s direction.

She hadn’t moved since the last time he’d looked in her direction.

He wasn’t entirely certain he wished to speak with her just then. He didn’t know what to say. What words were there which could possibly soothe her? Nothing could take it back, just as nothing could convince her of her own innocence.

If he’d ever met a truly innocent person in his life, it was Caitlin.

Still, his friend had a point. He needed to check on her, to at least remind her she was safe with them. Let Connor McAllister and any number of his brutes so much as try to lay a hand on her. They’d soon find out how mistaken they were.

When he reached her side, the look of peace on her face was a surprise to him. Not even blank staring would’ve surprised him so. If anything, that was what he’d expected to see, that she had simply stepped away from herself and gone elsewhere, to that land beyond the self into which he’d witnessed so many others retreat when the horrors before them were too much to bear.

She even turned her face toward his, and her brow lined with a concerned frown. “You’re in pain,” she murmured, her voice low and flat.

“Not too much to be borne,” he assured her.

“Do not lie to me, Rodric Anderson,” she warned. “I see it in your eyes. What pains you?”

It was better than discussing what they’d seen, what he had just buried.

“My shoulder,” he admitted, wincing as he moved his arm in a slow circle he couldn’t complete. The arm dropped to his side. “I injured it quite badly at the Battle of Largs, you see, and it never healed properly.”

“I’m sorry to hear that.”

“Eh, it could’ve been much worse.” He wouldn’t tell her how much. She didn’t need to hear how close he’d come to death, not after having witnessed so much death only hours earlier.

“Even so, to live with pain such as that. Every day, to bear up under it. I’m not surprised,” she observed with a slight smile.

“How is that?”

“You were always the type to ignore pain, or at least to pretend it didn’t exist. Do you recall your broken fingers?”

If anyone had told him he’d laugh so soon after performing such a grim task, he’d have thought them the worst sort of ghoul—but there he was. “Aye,” he chuckled. “I was a hardheaded sort, wasn’t I?”

“Aunt Sorcha warned you against jumping from the roof of the barn,” she reminded him. “As did I, though you never would’ve listened to a girl—a younger one, at that.”

“I wanted to prove that I was a man.”

“And you broke two fingers doing so. A wonder you didn’t break your neck.”

“A wonder my father didn’t break it for me when he found out what I’d done.”

“It wasn’t what you did,” she pointed out with a smile. “It was the way you kept it secret from him for three days, until the joints became inflamed and then infected.”

“You needn’t remind me,” he scowled.

“You’ve always been difficult in your fashion,” she murmured, shaking her head. “I suppose you do everything in your power to conceal your pain from others.”

“This is what men do,” he shrugged, wincing again when he did.

“What about admitting you’re in pain and allowing someone to take care of you?”

“It’s a lovely world you live in.” He smirked.

“Yes, I know. That would be too much to ask of you.” Her spirits seemed to sag before she turned her face back toward the Grampian Mountains, out in the distance. They were just as glorious a sight from far off as they’d been when he’d visited the Duncans.

The Duncans.

The seed of an idea began to take root in his mind. Why it hadn’t occurred to him before then, he couldn’t say. Perhaps the need to take immediate action on behalf of Caitlin’s cousin had left him unable to see the clearest solution.

“I know where you can go, where you’ll be absolutely safe,” he said, taking her still-folded hands in his. “You’ll have nothing to fear there.”

Instead of the relief he expected to find in her eyes, he saw nothing but bleak resignation. “I already know where it is I need to go. I’ve thought it through all this time, waiting for you to finish the burial.”

The certainty in her voice was what concerned him the most. The lack of feeling.

“Where do you think you’re going?” he asked, dreading the answer he knew was coming.

The only answer she could have arrived at.

The worst possible answer.

“I’m going home, to your brother. Enough is enough. I won’t see any more people die because of me, either those I love or those in the service of the ones looking for me.”

Her smile was cold. “You see, it isn’t only men who bear up under pain and do what needs to be done, Rodric.”