Lady with the Devil's Scar. Sophia JamesЧитать онлайн книгу.

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      For the Chelsea Bay Book Club … my group of warrior women.

       Chapter One

       1346—Fife Ness, Scotland

      Isobel Dalceann saw the shapes from the beach, beyond the waves, turning in the current, dark against silver. Eight or more of them, lost in the grey swell of stormtide as mist swallowed outline.

      ‘There,’ she shouted to the two men beside her. ‘Two hundred yards out.’

      The Heads yielded an odd wreck of a boat sometimes or the carcase of a sea creature long since dead … but this? Dusk spread from the west, burnishing lead with a blushed quiet pink and changing something that was not known into something that was.

      ‘People!’ Ian voiced the knowledge first. Not wood or fish or the trunk of a tree that had slipped into the brine somewhere near Dundee before travelling south in the cold currents, but people. People who would drown unless she helped them; she had always been a strong swimmer.

      Stripping off brogans and tunic, she removed the dirk held by straps against her ankle and ran.

      The water took her breath before she had crossed the first waves, long beaching swells with the chill of the northern climes on their edge; when her hair knotted around her arms, forcing her to tread water, she rebound it tight.

      Ten yards away Ian shouted and Angus responded, the next breaker lifting them all and aiding direction. She could hear the beat of blood in her ears as the wash took her under. Counting the seconds to surface, she kicked her feet hard and broke through just short of one of the survivors.

      An open cut from elbow to shoulder bone wept red into the sea, swirling in the foam before being lost to the great vastness of the German Ocean. He barely registered her presence as she paddled across, noticing for the first time that another lay beside him.

      ‘I will take him while you swim in,’ she shouted above the wind as rain started, each drop forming bowls on the surface, tiny pits in a boiling sea.

      ‘No.’ He held on with the tenacity of one who would not let go, green eyes steeled into resolve; as Isobel looked closer, she saw the man between them was long dead.

      ‘He’s gone. The sea has taken him.’

      Shaking his head, he turned from her, shoulders hunching into grief. The curl of his fingers tightened even as she watched, dimpled white and marred with bruises as he breathed in once and then twice, garnering strength and regrouping will. How often had she done the same herself, the loneliness of everything unbearable?

      ‘Let me help,’ she called, ‘for the shore is far away.’ Her touch against his shoulder roused him from his own private hell as he gazed at her with all the arrogance of one unused to direction.

      Isobel pushed down a stir of unease. Even the few paltry moments that she had been in the ocean had chilled her and she wondered how these people could have survived for so long.

      ‘H-help the others behind me f-first.’ When he shifted his hand to cradle the head of the man he supported, a thick band of wrought-plaited gold lay at his wrist.

      No simple sailor, then, plying the straits between England and Scotland to gain a living. His accent held the softer beat of another more foreign land.

      A shout behind made her turn. Isobel saw that Angus panted with cold, his legs treading water with exaggerated hurry as he tried to keep warm. Fear struck deep. Two hundred yards from safety, with the rolling edge of a sea storm coming in from the east. Behind him two men were trying to rise on his bulk in their fight to gain breath.

      Lord. The sea claimed its victims without recourse to any fair play or just reserve. Swimming over, she clouted the oldest man hard across the head, breaking his grip and pressing against his throat, pleased as his eyes rolled into white. Then she did the same to the youngest.

      ‘Que Dieu nous en garde!’ Marc muttered. The woman with the scar from one side of her face to the other was killing those with him one by one and the chill that held him stiff with cold meant he could do nothing about it.

      Guy was dead. He had known it all of an hour ago and still his fingers could not open to simply let go.

      The water beneath him called, an easy rest and an ending, and the strength that had held him to the task of rescue was suddenly gone. He could not care. It was finished. As his fingers opened and his eyelids rested he felt the warmth that had long