IN DANGER
Camden blinked and woke. His head ached. His body ached. Every part of him, in fact, ached. He coughed and spat bile. Someone laughed.
He smelled of damp, woodlands, and cold. Memory returned.
“I can't believe it.”
How was it possible that, not two hundred yards from the castle, he had been captured. It wasn't possible. Yet it must be.
Voices flowed round him. Camden shut his eyes and tried to discern some of them. Why was he so ill-educated? He wanted to scream at his father. How was he supposed to face English enemies when he couldn't understand them?
Squinting, he dredged his mind for Lowland Scots words and found them. Those would help – there were some similarities. All the same, the words were largely meaningless to him.
“Stop,” he said in Lowland Scots.
The group paused. He frowned. Maybe it was the same word. He shouted it again.
“Stop!”
Someone laughed. Something hard hit him on the head from behind and his world turned black and flowing. He shook his head. He was not going to become unconscious.
“You are English?” he yelled.
“Hit him,” someone said. They spoke Lowland Scots. Camden wanted to laugh. The only words he understood so far were useless ones. Someone did in fact hit him and the world went dark.
Next time he woke, he was in a forest clearing. He could see sky. Smell smoke. It was evening.
“...reckon we kill him.”
“No. Not yet.”
Camden sighed. The similarities between the two languages let him understand just enough to let him know they discussed his fate. He wanted to laugh.
“I agree,” he shouted.
Someone chuckled.
“What was that?”
“He said not to kill him,” the man who spoke Scots explained. He said something else that Camden didn't understand. Then the other man laughed. Said something.
Camden found himself face-to-face with a cold-eyed, lean-faced man. He shuddered. Those slate colored eyes ate his warmth, draining him from within. He felt a wrongness about them.
Why do I feel like I know that man?
He blinked. That made no sense. The man was English. Why would he know him? His addled mind tickled, seeming to want to bring some new information to his notice. However, it hovered on the edge of his awareness and didn't quite reach him.
“Ask him something,” someone suggested.
Camden felt someone take his shoulder and haul him round. He found himself looking into a broad, high face. The man had pale hair and wide, blue eyes and a humorless expression.
“Who are you?” he asked.
“I'm the king of England,” Camden said. The man spat.
“Hit him, Ulric.”
“Fine,” the man said defiantly.
“No, wait,” another voice said. “Bring him here.”
The blue-eyed man – Camden knew now his name was Ulric, and that he was the Scots speaker of the group – took his shoulder. Hauled him round.
“Hey, Jack,” he said. “Have a look at him, then.”
Camden blinked, trying to see past the sudden dazzle of the firelight. He was looking at the face he'd seen before. The one he thought he recognized.
“Well?” his Scots-speaker asked. “Know him?”
Narrow-face spat expressively. “Not really.”
Camden could see that the man was thinking – his pale eyes were slit in appraisal – and he had the sense that the man, too, knew him from somewhere.
“Ask him something else.”
“Fine.” Ulric pulled him round to face himself again.
Camden wanted to laugh. He had been hit on the head, hard, three times in the last few hours. The first two blows had rendered him unconscious. At the present juncture, it was enough for him to know his own name and that he was in the forest. That he had been riding alone earlier. He remembered precious else.
Ulric was speaking to him. He squinted, seeing the squarish face blur and re-focus, over and over.
“Huh?”
He sighed. “I said where did you come from?”
Camden laughed. “No idea.”
Ulric looked at him. “You're lying, wretch,” he spat.
Camden laughed. This time he noticed someone cross themselves furtively and realized that he was probably being very convincing as a madman. Not a bad idea, that.
“It's winter!” he yelled, and struggled in the grip of the man who held him. “We'll all freeze! Get in, get in! Before you freeze. Run inside now.”
He tried to stand and felt Ulric's grip tighten.
“You're not mad,” he said. “So don't try.”
Camden let out a long sigh. “Fine,” he said wearily. “Ask me things. How do you think I'm going to remember anything? You hit me on the head!”
Ulric grinned. He translated for his companions. Camden heard them laugh.
“I think you remember,” Ulric said vehemently. “I don't know, though. Best thing to do is ask Jack.”
“Jack.”
“Yes. He has a bad feeling about you,” Ulric confided.
Camden laughed. “I have a bad feeling about him.”
Ulric snorted. “Not the same bad feeling. You're scared. He thinks he remembers you from something.”
Camden wanted to laugh, but it was too serious. Too peculiar as well. “I think I know Jack too,” he said.
Ulric snorted eloquently again. This time the sound conveyed arrant disbelief. “How would you?”
“I don't know,” Camden mused. “I don't remember.”
Ulric squinted at him. He seemed to decide Camden was truthful, because he shouted something to the other men. Camden felt his shoulder released and then, abruptly, a rope bound his arms.
“Oh, for...” he rolled his eyes.
Ulric glared at him. “You think we're born yesterday? Hey? Well, I tell you. We're English and we're here to show you something. You'll wish you never had been born, after it.”
Some of the other men seemed to get the general idea of the words exchanged, because they chuckled. Camden heard them. He didn't care. One word among all the others stood out absolutely in his mind.
English.
These were, as he had suspected, some English scouts.
English scouts. In the woods. Watching the paths.
Suddenly, he was back in the woods, fighting a man, then leading other men to an encampment. There was a woman. A man. Dogs too.
His heart clenched and he felt a cold sweat on his brow. Jack. He had been there. He wasn't the man who had hurt Rubina, but he'd been with him. He was part of the same group.
And he knows I killed their headman. At least, I set the dogs on him and did not set them off.
He swallowed hard. If the man recalled his face even slightly, there was a chance he would know him fully. If he knew him fully, there was no way Camden was getting out of here alive.
It wasn't so much the death that bothered him – though he doubted that these men would be particularly kind in their manner of it. It was also the thought that the woman in the vision – the woman with the clouds of red hair and the pale skin and the big brown eyes – was more important to him than anything. That she was his heart and that, if he died, his chief regret would be that he would not see her again.
He shook his head to clear it. Memories of her were memories of sadness and of hope. He knew he couldn't remember much – who she was, where he knew her, what her name was – but he did know one thing absolutely.
He knew he loved her.
He knew he had to see her again.
Of all the things in his world, there was little else that mattered quite that much.
The men who had captured him settled slowly down around the fire. He heard someone laugh, someone relax, the sound of leaf-litter crackling under his weight as he shifted about, getting comfortable against the tree behind. Heard someone open a pack and take out cooking pots.
It seemed they had decided to let him live. Even, Camden thought, as they handed him a little bread and broth, that they had decided he was useful with his wits intact. Why though?
At that moment, weary, confused and hungered, he didn't particularly care.
Only two things mattered. Surviving, and seeing her again. The world was very simple after a blow to the head had made it so. He loved her. He always had. It was so ridiculous that he should come to know it now, in the middle of a forest, when he didn't recall her name.