Free The Firebrand by May McGoldrick

clue as to where she was...or as to the identity of her abductors.
    She and a company of trusted friends and warriors had just left the ancient tower on St. Mary’s Loch, west of Jedburgh. The attack had come out of nowhere, and as the skies rained warriors, Nichola had been snatched from her horse and carried off. Blindfolded and bound, she had heard the sounds of battle being fought in her wake. But they had her now. Whoever they were.
    She didn’t know how long they’d traveled. Passed from hand to hand, she guessed it was days, but she couldn’t be certain. Faint from exhaustion and hunger, the time just blurred into a gray-black haze. She had no idea where they had taken her. North, south, east...she couldn’t tell.
    Even once she had been deposited in the dark hole of some castle, she had not been told anything. In the entire month she had spent as their prisoner, she’d been moved three times. Always the same way. Each time with great secrecy. Each time blindfolded by nameless and faceless men and whisked away in the middle of the night to another windowless hole in some ancient keep.
    No one would talk to her, and not knowing why these men were treating her this way was about to drive her mad.
    Death held no terror for Nichola Percy. After her husband’s murder in the Tower of London, Nichola had been more than prepared for her own fate. Her daughters were safely scattered across the Highlands. Catherine already wed, and Laura and Adrianne hopefully wed soon.
    Marriage. She wondered what her daughters’ marriages would be like. As good as her own had been? Indeed, there were nights when the ache inside of her for her loving Edmund struck her so sharply that she would have welcomed death.
    If the English king wanted her, she would stay where he could find her. She would not venture too far north into her native land. All she had to do was remain alive and free until the good news from Laura and Adrianne reached her, as well. Until she knew that her plans of their future had borne fruit. Then she would follow willingly after her dearest love.
    But there was nothing about these people that told her she had fallen into the hands of Henry Tudor. There had been no attempt on her life. After the initial journey, there had been no real hardship imposed upon her...with the exception of the silence. Her imprisonment seemed so different from Edmund’s swift and brutal end.
    But then, if these men were not in the English king’s service, then who were they?
    No interrogation, no questions of any kind. In the back of her brain, the thought kept nagging at her that perhaps her capture and imprisonment had nothing to do either with Henry’s hatred of the Percys or with the whereabouts of the maps.
    But if she was being held against her will for some other reason, then none of this made any sense.
    A heavy door squeaked on old hinges somewhere beneath where she lay. Last night, Nichola had come through that door herself before climbing the twenty-seven steps to a landing and her chamber. After the iron-banded door had shut behind her, she’d simply been left alone to remove the blindfold herself.
    Quietly, she sat up and placed her feet on the oak floor. She could feel air pushing up through the old timbers. Nichola stared at the door, desperately hoping for someone to come through it. Anyone, she thought.
    After a few endless moments, a bar lifted on the far side, and Nichola stood as it opened just enough for an old woman to enter. The heavy oak door swung shut behind her.
    A dark cloth served as a covering to the woman’s head. What might be visible of her face, Nichola could not see because of the pronounced bend on the woman’s back. She disregarded the tray that was placed on the single table by the wall. Instead, she focused on the frail old creature as she made her way around the room, checking the chamber pot, stacking some peat in the small brazier that burned smokily in the corner, though it did little to take