Exiles in Time (The After Cilmeri Series) by Sarah Woodbury Page B

he shivered. “I’d be afraid to tell him
though.”
    “ Then tell him this,”
Callum said. “Tell him that he has nothing to fear from King
David.”
     

Chapter Three
     
    Callum
     
    S amuel pushed back his hood and straightened in his saddle. He
used his shield like an umbrella to protect himself from the rain
and turned this way and that, surveying their surroundings. “This
doesn’t feel right.” His gaze went to Callum and then to Liam, who
rode on Callum’s other side.
    Liam nodded his agreement. “It’s too
quiet. Where are the birds and the animals? It’s raining, but it
often rains here. It should affect them little.”
    While much of Scotland had been
denuded of trees, cut down for firewood and prevented from growing
back by free roaming cattle and sheep, this was one place where the
trees enclosed the road. More trees covered the hills that rose up
on either side of the road, marking the border between lowland and
highland Scotland.
    Callum hunched over his horse, tugging
his cloak closer against the rain. The clouds had come in the
moment they’d crossed the border into Scotland. They’d spent last
night in Glasgow and were headed today for Stirling Castle, one of
the ancient royal seats of the Scottish crown, twenty miles away as
the crow flies, though longer as they were taking it. One of the
Guardians, William Fraser, Bishop of St. Andrews, had so far
managed to keep the castle out of the hands of both Balliol and
Bruce, for the good of Scotland. All of Scotland’s Guardians, along
with its Parliament, were to gather there in a few days’
time.
    Stirling Castle sat at the mouth of
the Firth of Forth and was the closest royal castle to the
Highlands, which stretched north from the road they were presently
on, all the way to the North Sea. In the last six months, Callum
had come to understand some of the difficulties involved in ruling
Wales, a small country with many petty princes and lords. Though
England was larger and richer, it was actually less complicated
politically. Scotland, however, was another story entirely. Few
kings had ever managed to rule the entire country. Dozens of clans
held their own lands, ruled them as mini-kingdoms, and fought among
themselves with little interference from the king, as long as the
fighting didn’t overflow into another lord’s domains.
    It was an arrangement similar to that
which the Marcher barons had enjoyed in their lands on the border
of Wales and England—until Wales had gained the upper hand upon the
death of King Edward. Now that David was the King of England, he
was beginning to reel in the Marcher barons even more and diminish
their power in the March. The next Scottish king would want to do
the same for the clans he ruled.
    At this moment, however, with no
ruling king, the balance of power lay between the Bruces and the
Balliols. All the other clans lined up on whichever side they owed
the greatest loyalty, through family ties or precedence.
    A strong breeze caught Callum’s hood
and swept it off his head. He reached back to pull it up again,
half-turning towards Samuel, who was still scanning the hills to
the northwest. Callum shielded his eyes so the rain couldn’t fall
directly into them. “What do you see?” he said.
    “ Nothing,” Samuel said.
“That’s the problem.”
    Callum peered upwards, tracing the
line of the hill that rose up from the road immediately to the
left. It might be May and the sun in the sky for twelve hours a
day, but that didn’t make Scotland any brighter on the days when
clouds covered the sky from horizon to horizon, as they had all
that day. The company had made slow progress through the murk, all
the more so because of Kirby’s carriage.
    By now, every man in the company was
cursing Kirby’s refusal to ride. Ever since Carlisle, they’d had to
stop every hour, or multiple times an hour, to unstick Kirby’s
wheels from the mud. In addition, nobody had told Kirby that most
rivers in Scotland