The Falconer's Daughter - Liz Lyles Page 0,17
being killed. “Papa, help Culross. Papa!”
She didn’t know that her father had been killed first.
When Culross’s whimpering had been silenced, and no sound came from the darkness, she walked out into the snow, searching for her father. He lay several yards from the door, his shirt sticky with blood. She tried to drag him inside, pulling at his arms and chest until she had him just inside the door. As she struggled to lift him, she heard voices coming from the trees, their accents strange, so foreign, and leaving her father on the doorstep, she ran back outside, into the open and screamed at them, screaming her terror and fury and frenzied pain.
She knew they had remained outside all night, and she sat over her father until the first of the sun’s rays lightened the horizon. Stars still shone in the violet sky but it was light enough to see, light enough to look for Culross.
Between the cottage and the wood, she found her wolf, the fur matted on his head, a dark spread of blood frozen on the snow. He looked so small now, not like the big Culross who had padded at her heels. She reached over to touch his muzzle. It was frozen. She ran her fingers over his nose and between his eyes, his cold, thick fur hard beneath her hand.
She left the cottage then, without her winter cloak and wearing only her ordinary shoes. She knew of only one place to go. She reached Lochaber as the sun was setting, the winter afternoon so short that she was grateful she had reached the town before nightfall.
She went to the merchant who had threatened her father months earlier, not knowing where else to go.
“My father’s dead,” she said when his wife opened the door. “They killed him. And Culross too.” She didn’t cry. Too cold. Too tired. She hadn’t remembered how hard it was to walk from Ben Nevis to the valley floor. But then, she had never walked in snow before. Her legs were numb all the way to her hips, the drifts two and three feet high in places.
Lochaber’s priest sent word to the Macleods, but there was no one alive in Aberdeen and one week passed before an English noble, an Earl from Derby, arrived in the Highland village to take the girl with him.
“I am your uncle, your mother’s sister’s husband, and you will live with me,” Earl Eton told her, studying Cordaella’s slight shape and wan face. Her hair hadn’t been combed in months. Dark smudges accented the lightness of her gray eyes. “I have children, three of them, two boys and a girl,” he continued as she stared at him, stunned by grief. She didn’t think she would ever be able to speak again. “Is there anything you want—or need—from your croft?” he asked. She shook her head and he handed money to the butcher’s wife who had looked after the girl for the last week and a half. They set off the same day, the Earl, the soldiers, and the child riding in front of one stern-faced guard.
Now the Earl’s retinue snaked through the last of the Derbyshire woods, down the rolling hillside and out of England’s peaks. They had been traveling for nearly five days but finally the pale rectangular tower of Peveril Castle could be seen rising above the Buxton’s trees. The fields in the small valley had the earth smelling fresh and clean, as it always did after a hard rain.
Cordaella buried her face in the coated chest of the soldier, too overwhelmed to look at the landscape, the hillsides above Derbyshire’s fertile soil. Her father was dead, and Culross, too. She didn’t know how to make sense of the pain. It was bigger than her, bigger than anything she had known before.
Within Peveril Castle, all was silent. At two thirty, everyone from children to stable hands was sleeping. The night was crisp and clear, no cloud to obstruct the view of the sky which was a deep inky blue, studded with a thousand faraway stars. This sky was the same sky over London and Aberdeen, Dublin and Edinburgh.
*
THE SHADOW OF the mountain remained with her, dwarfing the past and the present, subduing whatever resistance remained. It seemed that Ben Nevis always huddled over her, its ragged peak piercing her memory, the ridges of the mountain fixed to her spine. She was scrambling over rocks, scrambling over the red thorn bushes, scrambling as the dirt and