Aidan Read Free Page A

now and they can still go te the fair in a few days time.”
    “I had a dream,” said Aidan anxiously. “I’m no’ sure what it means, but I saw the English comin’ inte this cottage.”
    “No’ another o’ yer dreams,” grumbled Storm, not believing in anything supernatural. “Last time ye had a dream, ye had all the lassies bathin’ e’eryday becooz ye were sure if they didna, they were goin’ te get the pox.”
    “Aye, but I enjoyed thet,” said Ian with a smile.
    “Nay, this is different,” Aidan tried to explain. “This was so real. And I’m no’ sure what the English were doin’ here.”
    “Mayhap t hey were hunting bonnie lassies . . . with furry tails,” said Ian, causing another fit of laughter between him and Onyx.
    “Aye,” said Onyx, trying to catch his breath. “Mayhap Aidan should stay on watch so he can bite them all in the tails when they arrive.”
    “Haud yer wheesht,” snapped Aidan, pushing past them out the door with his squirrel on his shoulder. They could make a jest of his dream, but somehow he knew that it was one of those visions like Jacob had so many years ago. And though he had no idea what the dream meant, he felt that his Scottish angel was in trouble and somehow needed his help.

    Chapter 2
     
    Liddel Castle, Scottish Border
     
    Effie MacDuff opened her eyes, hoping to hell that she’d only been having a bad dream. But when her vision focused on the bars in front of her small confinement, she realized the nightmare was real.
    “ Coira?” she cried out, looking around for her younger sister. The floor swayed underneath her, and to her horror, she realized she was hanging in an iron basket from the side of a castle. She rubbed the bump on her head, still feeling like her skull had been split open by the English soldier when he knocked her senseless after she’d tried to defend their gypsy camp.
    “Effie?” she heard her sister’s small voice , and turned to see that she, too, was hanging like a bird in a cage. “I’m scared.”
    Effie jumped to her feet, nearly hitting her head atop the grates of her confinement. She w asn’t tall by any standards, and their cages were barbaric, crude and small. She looked down to see the English soldiers looking up and them and laughing. She and her sister were on display for all to see, and the thought of this sickened her as well as made her very angry.
    “Let us out o’ here!” Taking hold of the bars, she tried to shake herself free. She glanced down to her bedraggled clothes, now torn and dirty from her scuffle when the men attacked their camp. She was relieved to see that the soldiers hadn’t stolen the MacDuff brooch of her grandmother that held closed her arisaidh, the long cloth wrapped around her and fastened at her shoulder. The metal, round brooch was engraved with a lion embedded with an amethyst eye, holding up its paw with a sword. Around its head was the clan’s motto, Deus Juvat, or God Assists. It was all she had left to remember her family by, since the death of her mother years ago. By the grace of God, her descendants had passed down to her the MacDuff brooch. So now all she had left was this, and Coira, her younger sister.
    “You’ll stay put until we get word to King Edward that we’ve caught the descendant of that traitorous bitch, Isabel MacDuff,” sneered one of the guards.
    “Effie, what are they talkin’ aboot?” asked her sister from the iron cage beside her.
    For her entire life of twenty years, Effie had lived the life of a gypsy, keeping the secret her dying mother had told her the day she lost her life birthing Coira. Effie had only been six years old at the time, but she knew her life was never going to be the same after what her mother confessed to her that day. She missed her mother dearly, and only wished she were here right now.
    “Dinna worry aboot it,” she told her sister. “I’ll get us out o’ here, I swear.”
    “But they took yer dagger as well as yer bow and