Read Online Thistle and Flame - Her Highland Hero by Anya Karin - Free Book Online

procession, perhaps, or the sound of a
celebration, he wasn’t quite sure. In either case, he thought about the past
two years and then thought about Fort Mary.
    Back there, far away from London, far away from
kings and their squabbles, those had been happier times. The few encounters he
had with little Kenna Moore and her warm smile, and the way she’d opened her
eyes wide when he pressed the thistle into her palm warmed his heart.
    Gavin’s boots scraped over a little pile of bones,
the remains of some small bird. Below him, the pipes were joined by a pair of
drums playing slightly different rhythms. He thought he recognized it, but
couldn’t be sure.
    He imagined the great hump he climbed actually
being Camelot. Over here, a wall and back there, the entrance to the keep,
where Arthur sat, resplendent and decent, surrounded by knights tall and short,
fair and foul. Lancelot of the lake to his left, Guinevere to his right, when
she chose to come, was stealing glances behind his back at her lover. He knew
all the stories. Loved them as a boy, and he kept right on loving them as a man
grown, Gavin did.
    “Loyalty,” his father told him as he closed the
dusty pages of a book so old the cover was gone. He knew it used to say Mallory
though. “Loyalty and honor, boy, that’s what makes a man. Lancelot had both,
then he lost them to his lust and then he got them back. What you lose, is only
lost forever if you let it be. Do you understand?”
    He remembered his father’s huge beard, braided
down either side of his mouth. His da’s mustache was dark brown but the hair on
his chin was the color of rust, so the braids looked like a frame about either
side of his chin.
    In Gavin’s mind, he sat on big Robert Macgregor’s
knee and thought about what words like honor and loyalty meant.
    Without realizing it, Gavin had hopped up to the
rock jutting from the top of the hill, and was staring down over the city below
him. If he turned to his right, he knew Macdonald’s mansion was somewhere off
in the trees, though he couldn’t see where exactly. And he knew that somewhere
along the road snaking off behind that great, greedy house was a carriage
trundling along, filled up with fat Laird Macdonald.
    And then, he thought about the girl who was in the
carriage with him. Taken by some half-forgotten oath spoken before she was
born, and given up, taken away from the only place she’d ever really known.
    Gavin turned south, toward the city. He stared at
Edinburgh castle, and thought about Robert the Bruce, who led an army that was
raised as a simple act of revenge. The Bruce led an army and made his people
free, he remembered his da telling him as he read poem after poem about the
Bruce, and about William Wallace, the fallen martyr who died to make Scotland
free.
    Far below, the pipes swelled. Gavin finally
recognized the slow lilt of a funeral dirge. He wondered if the person who died
had lived a good life, a long life. Something, blown on the gusting wind,
thumped against his foot and he bent to pick it up.
    His fingers closed around a hard, spiky ball
fringed with purple.
    “Thistle,” he said to himself. He wrapped his hand
around it, and made a motion to hurl the flower off into the mists below, but
stopped short. His hand fell to his side.
    “Honor and loyalty, boy. Two things no one can
take from you. No matter whether you’re rich, or poor. Starving or fat. The
lord of a castle, or lying half dead in a gutter, you can have them, or you
can’t. Do you understand what I mean?” The words vibrated in his chest.
    Gavin started down the side of the hill opposite
the one he’d come up. He clenched the thistle in his fist, so that the spines
pressed into his palm.
    “I think I do, Da,” he whispered. “I think I
understand.”
    ––––––––
    A s soon as Gavin pushed open the waist-high door to
where he and John had made their headquarters underneath the Prince John Tavern
on Rose Street, he heard booming