But mayhap was too weak a possibility to ensure her son’s safety.
I will not harm the MacKeltar, she’d promised Nevin, and she was a woman of her word. If a son couldn’t trust his mother’s word, what could he rely upon?
She’d carefully planned the enchantment so that not one hair on the laird’s head would be harmed. But now all her cautious plans were going awry. She had no choice but to try another option to save her son. If she could not remove Drustan MacKeltar before he wed his lady—well, she’d made no promises about that lady. And that lady was currently forgotten as the battle raged around her bound body.
Lying on the ground, she may or may not get trampled by the horses. May or may not get struck by a stray arrow.
Besseta was quite finished taking chances. If Drustan survived the battle, Besseta had to make certain there was no woman for him to wed.
She narrowed her eyes, watching the lass struggle with her bonds, and inched nearer the wagon.
With trembling hands, she plucked up a tightly strung crossbow and, summoning every ounce of her strength, leveled it at the lass.
Nevin’s eyes widened in horror. His mother, his own mother would do murder! She was truly lost in her madness! Thou shalt not kill!
“Nay!” he roared, plunging from the brush.
Besseta heard him and started. Her hand slipped on the cord.
“Nay! Mother!” Running, he catapulted himself through the air to shield the bound lass, and stumbled, landing sideways atop her. “Naaaa—”
His cry terminated abruptly as the arrow slammed into his chest.
Besseta froze. Her world grew eerily still. The tumult in the clearing receded and grew hazy, as if she stood in a dreamy tunnel, she at one end, her dying son at the other. Choking on a horrified sob, her knees buckled and she collapsed.
Her vision swept over her again, this time in full, and she finally saw the fourth person’s face. The person she’d thought had meant naught since she’d been unable to see it clearly.
She’d not been able to see the fourth person because it had been herself.
She was the woman who would kill her son. It had never been the lass. Och, indirectly, in a way, for had the lass not come, Besseta would not have planned to abduct the laird, and had she not set such plans into motion, she would never have shot her beloved son.
God’s will will be, Nevin had said a thousand times if once.
But, trusting her visions more than God, she’d tried to change what she thought she’d seen and had brought about the very event she’d tried so desperately to avoid.
She fancied she could hear her son’s ragged, dying breaths over the din of battle.
Oblivious to the warfare all around her, the arrows flying, the swords swinging, she crawled to her son’s side and tugged him onto her lap. “Och, my wee laddie,” she crooned, smoothing his hair, stroking his face. “Nevin, my baby, my boy.”
Gwen struggled to sit up the moment she was no longer pinned by the man’s body. A sob escaped her when she spied the arrow protruding from his bloody chest.
She’d never seen anyone shot before. It was horrible, worse than the movies made it seem. She tried to inch away, but her wrists were bound behind her, her ankles tightly tied. Scooting awkwardly on her behind was painstakingly slow going. When a horse screamed and reared behind her, when she heard the chilling swish of a blade slicing through the air, she went utterly still, and decided moving might not be the wisest course of action.
Drustan had been gone only a few minutes when the gypsies had slipped into the chamber and taken her captive. They’d subdued her with humiliating ease.
She hadn’t seen it coming, but somehow, by preventing Dageus’s death, they’d changed things. Plans had been accelerated, and rather than a message bidding Drustan to come if he wished to know the name of the man who’d killed his brother, she’d been used as the lure.
She stared at the weeping old woman, whose frantic, gnarled hands fluttered above the man’s cheeks and brow. As Gwen watched, his chest rose and fell, then did not rise again.
“ ‘Twas me all along,” Besseta wailed. “ ‘Twas my vision that did this. I should ne’er have bargained with the gypsies!”
“You arranged to enchant Drustan?” Gwen gasped. This gray-haired old woman with arthritic hands and rheumy eyes was their unknown enemy? “You’re the one behind everything?” But the old woman didn’t reply, merely stared at Gwen with loathing and madness in her gaze.
“Gwen!” Drustan roared. “Get away from Besseta!”
Gwen’s head snapped back, and she saw him running toward her, a horrified expression on his face.