Highland Conquest Read online

  Table of Contents

  Copyright

  Dedication

  Glossary

  Book of Revelations

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Chapter Ten

  Chapter Eleven

  Chapter Twelve

  Chapter Thirteen

  Chapter Fourteen

  Chapter Fifteen

  Chapter Sixteen

  Chapter Seventeen

  Chapter Eighteen

  Chapter Nineteen

  Chapter Twenty

  Chapter Twenty-One

  Chapter Twenty-Two

  Chapter Twenty-Three

  Chapter Twenty-Four

  Chapter Twenty-Five

  Epilogue

  A Bit of History

  Acknowledgments

  About the Author

  The Beast of Beswick, by Amalie Howard

  Highland Isles series, by Heather McCollum

  This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events, locales, or persons, living or dead, is coincidental.

  Copyright © 2020 by Heather McCollum. All rights reserved, including the right to reproduce, distribute, or transmit in any form or by any means. For information regarding subsidiary rights, please contact the Publisher.

  Entangled Publishing, LLC

  10940 S Parker Road

  Suite 327

  Parker, CO 80134

  Visit our website at www.entangledpublishing.com.

  Amara is an imprint of Entangled Publishing, LLC.

  Edited by Alethea Spiridon

  Cover design by LJ Anderson, Mayhem Cover Creations

  Cover art by

  VJ Dunraven/PeriodImages.com,

  kamchatka/depositphotos,

  MRBIG_PHOTOGRAPHY/istockphoto,

  Uros Petrovic/Adobestock

  Interior design by Toni Kerr

  MMP ISBN 978-1-64063-7474

  ebook ISBN 978-1-64063-7481

  Manufactured in the United States of America

  First Edition May 2020

  Also by Heather McCollum

  The Campbells series

  The Scottish Rogue

  The Savage Highlander

  The Wicked Viscount

  The Highland Outlaw

  Highland Isles series

  The Beast of Aros Castle

  The Rogue of Islay Isle

  The Wolf of Kisimul Castle

  The Devil of Dunakin Castle

  Highland Hearts series

  Captured Heart

  Tangled Hearts

  Crimson Heart

  For Braden

  You will always be my Highland hero,

  one who gives every day.

  I love you too.

  Scots Gaelic and Old English Words Used in Highland Conquest

  a cheannsachadh agus a mharbhadh—conquer and kill

  àlainn—lovely

  aon, dha, trì—one, two, three

  blaigeard—bastard

  cac—shite

  daingead—damn it

  Eun—Bird (name of Cain’s falcon)

  falbh—go

  God’s teeth (Old English)—common curse

  leasing-monger (Old English)—a habitual liar

  magairlean—ballocks

  màthair—mother

  sarding (Old English)—foking

  Seraph—Angel (name of Cain’s white horse)

  siubhal air—ride on

  siuthad—go on

  targe—shield, usually made of wood and lined with steel

  thoir an aire—watch out

  tolla-thon—arsehole

  Book of Revelations

  1 I watched as the Lamb opened the first of the seven seals. Then I heard one of the four living creatures say in a voice like thunder, “Come!”

  2 I looked, and there before me was a white horse! Its rider held a bow, and he was given a crown, and he rode out as a conqueror bent on conquest.

  3 When the Lamb opened the second seal, I heard the second living creature say, “Come!”

  4 Then another horse came out, a fiery red one. Its rider was given power to take peace from the earth and to make people kill one another. To him was given a large sword.

  5 When the Lamb opened the third seal, I heard the third living creature say, “Come!” I looked, and there before me was a black horse! Its rider was holding a pair of scales in his hand.

  6 Then I heard what sounded like a voice among the four living creatures, saying, “Two pounds of wheat for a day’s wages, and six pounds of barley for a day’s wages, and do not damage the oil and the wine!”

  7 When the Lamb opened the fourth seal, I heard the voice of the fourth living creature say, “Come!”

  8 I looked, and there before me was a pale horse! Its rider was named Death…

  Northern Scotland

  15 June in the Year of our Lord 1589

  Chapter One

  Cain Sinclair surveyed the mist-shrouded battlefield from atop his white charger, standing on the eastern rise of the moor. The field lay like a giant chessboard, his pieces moving according to his perfect strategy. To the north lay the sea. To the southwest lay his prize, Dunrobin Castle, seat of Clan Sutherland.

  His gaze swept along the lines of Sinclair cavalry flanking north and south, and the warriors charging through their foes in the valley. He could see his father, the chief of the Sinclairs, down in the middle of it all, slashing away at Sutherland warriors on foot.

  Gideon, Cain’s younger brother, sat mounted next to him on his black charger. “Put your bloody crown on before Da sees ye’ve taken it off,” Gideon said. “Half the Sutherlands will piss themselves when ye swoop down there wearing God’s crown, unleashing your arrows from atop a white steed.”

  “Bàs is likely doing that already with his sickle and mask on the eastern ridge,” Cain said, tipping his head toward the far bluff where his youngest brother rode with his army of pale-colored horses. The plants they rubbed into the horses’ gray coats gave Bàs’s herd a distinctive green tint, enough to bring the biblical prophecy of the four horsemen to life.

  Gideon nodded but didn’t break a smile. “Just put the damn crown on, else we must endure Da’s wrath afterward.”

  Cain’s gaze caught enemy movement in the west. He raised two fingers to his mouth, whistling. The shrill call brought his falcon, the loyal raptor flapping her black-and-white-lined wings over his head. Leather jesses dangled from her sharp yellow talons as she alighted on his gloved arm. Yanking an orange-dyed scrap of fabric from the back of his targe, Cain held it to his bird’s curved beak. She snapped it up and crouched, and he lifted her into the air as she sprang upward to soar low over the field of battling men. The orange flag flapping down would alert his father and two other brothers that the enemy was organizing to advance in the west, opposite from their current positions.

  “Let us ride,” Cain said, his voice more like a growl, not because of the battle before him, for he’d been raised on battles, but because Gideon was right about their ferocious father. Cain pressed the steel crown, forged in the smithy at Girnigoe Castle, down upon his head. Its familiar pinch around his temples made him curse low.

  “Ye go,” Gideon said, drawing Cain’s gaze. Third in age and trained to pass judgment as well as battle, Gideon was as lethal as the other Sinclair brothers and never stayed back from helping them smash their opponents.

  “Blast it, Gideon,” Cain said as he spotted blood seeping down from a slash along Gideon’s upper arm. Cain hooked his bow and targe onto the back of his horse, Seraph, and jumped down. “Ye are injured.” He grabbed a leather satchel and yanked the cord open.

  “Just a bit of a slice before I skewered the unlucky bastard.” Gideon dismounted to pull his bloodied shirt away from the gaping flesh. “Merida will sew it up back at Girnigoe.”

  “Aye, but if it gets tainted, Da will have your hide,” Cain said, glancing back out at the battle he yearned to join but not before plastering some of his aunt’s poultice onto his brother’s arm. “We can die in battle with honor, but no horseman from God would die of taint.” It was one of their father’s favorite bellowing lectures as he schooled them in the biblical promise of victory over their enemies. They’d all heard it repeated thousands of times.

  Cain’s falcon returned to glide overhead, dropping the orange signal flag onto the ground at her master’s boots. Looking toward the battlefield, Cain watched his second brother, Joshua, signal his cavalry, seated on bay horses, to ride west to meet the Sutherland challenge while Bàs drove his smaller army forward to keep guard in the east, along with Cain’s white-seated cavalry. Gideon’s men, who rode black horses, remained in the middle of the moor, supporting the mighty Sinclair chief.

  Their father, George Sinclair, fourth Earl of Caithness, slashed away at the oncoming men on foot from his position in the middle of the summer meadow. Even from the rise, Cain could hear his war cry as he let his wild bloodlust rage against his hated enemy. Spinning to slay foe after foe, his blood-slick sword moved like a familiar dance. The man loved battle and always commanded his sons to give him room to slay his enemy on his own, even now in his advancing years. Some thought him insane. Actually, most thought him insane, but they knew enough to hold their tongues, or the wildness of Chief Sinclair could turn against them.

  “Go,” Gideon said, adjusting the poultice around his arm. “It will be over too soon, and ye will miss the victory.”

  He was right. The tide of the battle was turning quickly in their favor. It would be over soon, and they would ride on to conquer the Sutherland Clan’s castle, ending the decades-old war that had started when the Sutherland laird divorced Cain’s aunt, Merida Sinclair, for not producing a living heir for him.

  Cain’s muscles contracted with carefully honed strength. He could already taste the sweetness of victory and contentment of conquest. Both were his main responsibilities within their clan, duties given to him by his father when Cain was a boy of nine, the day his fourth brother was born and their angelic mother died.

  He hoisted himself onto Seraph’s back, the well-trained horse standing as still as a statue carved of white marble. Mist still floated in patches over the land below where men surged and retreated, spun and died around his father, but a breeze coming from off the sea to the east scattered the building heat. A group of Sutherlands fell under the press of Bàs’s pale horses, and Cain’s white cavalry pushed back a line of enemy on the north side of the field.

  Cain inhaled the damp smell of earth mixed with the tang of blood, gathering his reins loosely. Seraph shifted, his eagerness evident as he awaited the press of Cain’s heels to surge forward, but movement among the soaring pines on the edge of the opposite slope made him still.

  A black horse stepped out into the wide clearing before the forest. Being black, the horse would belong to Gideon once won, but what caught Cain’s full focus was the woman who stood straight up on the horse’s saddle. Clothed in slim black trousers, the woman balanced while raising a fist into the air. Men emerged from the woods to stand on either side of her.

  “What are ye up to?” he asked under his breath. Cain squinted, trying to take in the details of who could only be the daughter of the dead chief of the Sutherland Clan, Arabella Sutherland. He had met her once, a decade ago at a Beltane Festival. She’d been a beauty then, with wide gray eyes, and still too young to do much more than pick wildflowers and dance with the maidens around the maypole. Things had apparently changed, but he wondered if she still favored the prickly Scottish thistles she had carried then. The hood she was said to don in public was missing, leaving her long dark braid free to be seen over her shoulder, but she was wearing a leather half mask to cover the lower part of her face.

  “Cain,” Gideon said, his voice hard as the men around Arabella raised their bows, arrows nocked, some of them flaming. “They are aiming to fire upon—”

  “Siubhal air!” Cain yelled. His heels pressed in as he leaned forward over his massive white steed, his targe coming up as they flew like one down the hill toward his father. Hooves churning through the spindly flowers and grass, Seraph leaped over partly hidden gullies and boulders as Cain braced his targe to protect his horse’s head and his own. The rest of the noble warhorse was covered in thick leather armor, similar to his own, although without the metal plates lining it.

  As the ground leveled out, a hundred arrows sliced downward through the air, hitting men too slow to raise their shields against the onslaught of raining death. Fire caught on some of the sun-dried grasses, but the dew still clung, making the flames sizzle and die. Arrow points thudded against Cain’s targe as he raced toward his father.

  His youngest brother, Bàs, had broken off from his army and surged forward from the opposite direction. Bàs yelled, his deep voice rising up as he stood in his stirrups, his black armor and skull helmet giving him the appearance of an angel of death. Men scattered from their paths, both Sutherland and Sinclair, as the brothers roared closer to their patriarch and chief.

  Whack. The first arrow hit his da’s upper chest, followed immediately by three more before he fell, impaling his sword arm, stomach, and lower chest.

  “Nay!” Cain yelled. Fury shot lightning through his blood, and he leaped from the slowing horse, smacking Seraph’s thigh as he dropped into a crouch to cover his father’s prone body. Arrows continued to rain down, piercing the field around him. “Da!”

  A short way off, the meadow was clear of the barrage, the circle of arrow-pocked meadow around only his father. “Bloody hell.” Every foking arrow fired in that last volley had been pointed directly at George Sinclair.

  Cain looked up at the rise and saw her there, still standing on her horse. Aye, every arrow had flown at his father, ordered by the thrust of Arabella Sutherland’s raised fist.

  Bàs slid off his horse, hitting its flank to get it racing with Cain’s horse to safety. The two brothers formed a barrier over their father. Blood soaked up through the laces of his thin battle armor. A thudding horse came from the hill, and Cain lowered his sword to the grass when he saw it was Gideon jumping down. Only Joshua, leading the cavalry of bay horses to the west, was missing. The battle raged, men yelling and steel clanging, but Cain’s sole focus was on the mighty man wetting the grasses and yellow flowers with the scarlet flow of his waning life.

  “Fok,” Gideon swore, his hands trying to dam the welling blood, but it was like holding back an ocean of red.

  “Death has come for him,” Bàs said, and he pulled his great horned helmet from his head and his skull mask from his face. He kneeled, his sweat-matted hair falling about his shoulders.

  Cain yanked off his glove and grabbed his father’s hand, but it didn’t feel like his da’s without the strength that always grabbed back as if trying to prove his superior strength. “Da,” he called. “Da.”

  George Sinclair’s eyes squeezed as if pain momentarily robbed him of his courage, but then he blinked, his lids opening to stare up at his boys. Red spittle sat on his lips as blood bubbled up from his pierced lungs. “Cain, bow to no man. Your duty is to conquer. Sinclairs above all else. Ye are God’s servant, his weapon against all those who are weak,” he said, s taring up at him, and he coughed up more blood. Cain felt a shadow of his da’s strength squeeze his hand. “Joshua will rule all wars,” he continued, a wheeze hissing in his words. “Gideon…”

  “I am here, Da,” Gideon said, ducking his head to hover before their sire.

  “Judge well without mercy. Ye know what is right from wrong. Do not be swayed from your judgment.”

  George’s head lolled to the side, though his eyes remained open as he stared at his youngest son, Bàs. “Ye are named for Death,” he said, each word growing weaker. “Ye will bring death to all ye touch. Execute our enemies.” He coughed, the lines around his lips stained red as blood filled the tiny cracks in his skin.

  Cain yanked off one of the scraps he used for signaling and wiped his father’s lips. The movement revived the man enough for his gaze to connect with Cain. “Ye are chief now.” His heavy eyes slid up to the crown that sat crooked on Cain’s head. “As I have taught ye…the four…sent by God to kill our enemies. Ye are ready to rule together; first my kingdom and then all of Scotland.”

  The redness that always tinted their father’s ruddy cheeks paled until his skin took on the deathly pallor of Bàs’s gray-green horse. The corners of his mouth tipped upward. Had Cain ever seen his father smile before? Not since before his mother died. George Sinclair looked up into Cain’s face. “Merida told me I would die this day. ’Tis a good death, this.” Staring, locked with the gaze of his eldest son, his eyes stilled as his soul flew elsewhere.

  Cain didn’t move, couldn’t move. His da had been a mountain, spewing energy, conviction, and uncontrolled temper all through his life. Now he was suddenly silent and unmoving with the heavy weight of death. The absence of his bellowing war cry seemed to echo louder than the surprise middle-of-night training sessions he would call to keep his sons ready to fight. George Sinclair had seemed invincible. No matter how many times he bled, there was always more blood pumping through his strong heart.

  “Da,” Cain said, his hand flat over the man’s frozen heart. He bowed his head, his chest tight. His fingers curled into his father’s blood-soaked shirt. “Aye, ’twas an honorable death, and we will make ye proud.”