Highland Warrior by Heather McCollum (the rosie project TXT) 📗

startled her. Soil, cold and grainy, filled the narrow space between the pot and the blanket covering her body. Chills raced up and down Kára, and she fought to keep calm. She squeezed Joshua’s hand. Once, just once, although she nearly panicked and squeezed many times rapidly.

Summer breezes. Beams of sun sparkling on the white caps in the ocean. She remembered Geir’s smile and how it made him look years younger, almost like her unbreeched lad again. Joshua… Joshua… The sparkle in his light blue eyes when he teased her. His luscious mouth that gave so generously. How he taught Geir to throw a dagger and slowly won the respect of Osk and even Amma. How he was sacrificing his honor to…save her people? No. Amma was right. He could have helped her people and traveled on, saving his clan by staying away from his brother. To go through this play, this horrible farce, that made him look like the failure that The Brute pronounced over their grave, Joshua was doing more than saving her people and his clan— He was creating a way that he could go home and be with her there.

He squeezed her hand again, and she returned the pressure. At the same time her heart squeezed with the realization that he was willing to be buried alive with her so they could be together in his home. Together. Joshua. I love you.

She sucked in air, probably too much, and swallowed past the lump in her throat. More tears leaked out of her closed eyes, sliding down like a river to her temples. I love you. Why hadn’t she told him before this? What if something went wrong, and they died without her telling him? I need to tell him.

The dirt stopped falling, and the weight of the inches over them held her firmly stuck in the ground. Planted in darkness, encased in cold. The need to stretch and move pulsed through her. How much longer? How much longer before she could feel the breeze once more and look into Joshua’s face and tell him what she’d discovered? Long minutes continued as she concentrated on even breaths. When would it be safe enough for Osk and Calder to start uncovering them?

A voice above, a deep rumble, and the earth above her pressed down harder. She sucked in the air under the jug as she felt a crushing weight. Next to her, Joshua squeezed her hand. Once. Twice. Thrice.

…

Dishington was above him. Joshua knew it, his instincts fully alert. They’d been buried for a slow count of nine hundred, which should be about fifteen minutes. Their air would run out soon, but that was not the current threat.

After giving Kára the signal that they’d be coming out, he pulled his hand through the heavy soil. He would not be able to press the targe up with all that weight on him, not from a supine position. He had calculated that it would weigh about three hundred pounds, and he could not get his legs under him. Nay, he must punch up through the soil first.

A yell came from above. Pressure thrust down across his chest as his targe radiated a strike against it, making him inhale. The tip of a blade pricked the skin of his chest under the layers of wool wrappings. Dishington meant to stab him in his grave.

It was time for the dead to rise!

He moved his hand that lay between Kára and him, but it was his right hand that he’d kept bent, his fist ready as Osk and Calder had finished their burying, leaving only several inches of soil over his fist.

For a second, he felt a tug across his chest, a lessening of pressure, as Dishington fought to yank his sword free of the targe and what he likely hoped was Joshua’s bleeding body. With the next tug, Joshua punched his fist up through the soil. The movement of wind touched his knuckles. With all his strength, he moved upward, all his muscles struggling to lift. He shifted his knees up and down, dislodging the soil. His other hand reached the jug at his face and punched up through the crumbly loose earth.

“Bloody foking hell!” Dishington’s voice penetrated the thinning soil as he tried again to yank the tip of his sword free of Joshua’s targe and the soil over it. It became a race. The liberation of his sword against Joshua’s rising, with deadly force, from the grave. It was a game of survival for both him and Kára, and Joshua would use every weapon he had to win.

Joshua whipped off the broken pottery from his face, using all his abdominal muscles to lift his torso up through the soil that Osk and Calder had left as loose as they could. Where were they?

He sucked in refreshingly cold air. Kára was rising, too, beside him, but Dishington was focused on Joshua. In the flickering glow of a lantern set several grave markers over, Joshua could see the widening of Dishington’s eyes as the dirt fell away from him. Dishington yanked once more, and his sword slid free. He stumbled backward.

Ignoring the grime caking his mouth, Joshua’s voice rang out with the power of the legend upon which he’d been raised. “Then another horse came out,” he said, moving his legs to loosen the earth still entrapping him. “A fiery red one. Its rider was given power to take peace from the earth and to make people kill each other.”

“Shite!” Dishington yelled. “Hold your foking tongue!”

Lowering his fist back into the dirt, Joshua grabbed the hilt of his sword, sliding it up and out of the earth. “To him was given a large sword,” he bellowed and lifted the sword up into the air as if it, too, rose from the grave by God’s hand.

Dishington’s eyes opened even wider, and he raised his own sword.

“And with this large sword,” Joshua continued, using all his might to break free of the loosened dirt,