Her love and all her determination, for she, too, had once spent time with the steely-backed MacLeans.
A quality she hoped the Lady Amicia would make fullest use of in the coming hours.
Chapter Fifteen
“YOU OUGHT BE IN THE GREAT HALL, laddie.”
Donald MacKinnon lowered his scant weight onto a three-legged stool in Coldstone’s bare-walled laird’s solar and tossed his eldest son a belligerent stare.
“You ne’er paid any heed to my claims that the Devil’s own dragonship has been plying these waters of late—why should you believe an ale-taken guardsman?”
Pausing, the old man began to cough. Great, jerky rasps that shook his frail shoulders. But the instant the coughing ceased, he pinned Magnus with another defiant glare. “Aye, you’d best hie yourself down there. Dagda will have waved your bridal sheet beneath the nose of every kinsman in the hall by now, and like as not, she already has the thing tacked to the wall above the high table.”
Magnus frowned.
“Now that is another fool MacKinnon tradition I swear I will have done with when I am laird,” he snapped, and made another long-strided circuit of the wretched chamber, once said to be the grandest in the castle save old Reginald’s bedquarters.
The very room he now shared with his lady wife.
At the thought of her sweetness, how she’d clenched herself around him in her passion, Magnus found some of the sourness had left his mood. He raked a hand through his hair, did his best to wipe the scowl from his face.
But he rankled at the knowledge that every long-nosed buffoon beneath his roof had examined and, with surety, gawked at the evidence of his passion and his wife’s innocence.
Custom or no, it was a fool and barbaric practice.
His father clucked his tongue. “Whether you change time-honored tradition or nay, for the nonce, it is still our custom and you should be belowstairs to accept the accolades of your kinsmen,” he groused, stretching his scrawny legs to the warmth of the peat fire.
“The saints know every man on the isle will be there, expecting you.” The old laird cast a glance at the crooked-hanging window shutters. “With such a black storm brewing, there’ll not be a soul working on the boat strand this morn.”
To Magnus’s surprise, the mention of the men’s daily struggle and toil to rebuild the lost MacKinnon galley fleet didn’t send a hot jab of vexation shooting through him as any referral to his wife’s well-lined coffers usually did.
Nary a wee tweak.
Nay, his ire rose from thinking of the fool bridal sheet being inspected by all and sundry. Then he heard his father’s coughing.
He stretched his arms above his head, cracked his knuckles, and blew out a deliberately gusty breath.
“Never you worry, Da. I will take myself down there so soon as we’ve determined if there is indeed a strange galley in our waters—and if so, whose it is and what their business might be.”
Donald MacKinnon snorted. “So you do believe it?”
Magnus shrugged. He did not know what to believe. But the guardsman, drink-taken or nay, insisted his ears had caught the great beating of a gong and the chanting of oarsmen—before the mysterious vessel had vanished into the mists.
Just as his da e’er claimed.
“Think you yon men cannot spot a galley without your hulking presence looming over their shoulders?” The old man fisted his hands on bony knees, cast a glittery-eyed look toward the solar’s tall, arch-topped windows and the three broad-backed men standing there. “A mercy—they’ve been staring holes in the horizon for hours now.”
Dugan and Hugh, and even Colin, with his almost-healed but still somewhat troublesome leg, stood straight-backed and silent at the windows, peering into sheets of slanting rain and trying to catch a glimpse of the supposedly approaching galley.
A task for fools, since Magnus had serious doubts any such vessel existed.
Demon-crewed or nay.
But there his brothers and his best friend stood, uncomplaining and like as not unblinking, too.
And that, when they could be below with the others. Snoring soundly on pallets before the hearth if they so desired, or joining in the bawdy revelry that had surely erupted the moment Dagda tromped into the hall with the bloodstained bedsheet.
A harmless entertainment they no doubt deserved—whether at the expense of Magnus’s indignation or nay.
“Even old Boiny would rather be belowstairs,” Donald MacKinnon sniffed from his perch before the hearth fire.
Magnus wheeled around, a decided throbbing in his temples beginning to make itself known. “That mongrel hasn’t budged from the warmth of the hearth—” He broke off to stare in disbelief at the dog.
Boiny, his great bulk no longer sprawled like a ratty gray carpet before the hearth fire as was his wont, paced as furiously as Magnus himself—only in front of the closed solar door and not around the chamber.
Stiff-legged and whining, the old dog had already worn a track in the sparse covering of floor rushes.
Magnus eyed him, an odd prickling at his scalp. But he shrugged off his ill ease. The dog was old, his mind surely as fogged as Magnus’s father’s.
“Either the beast scorns our fair company or he has his heart set on casting about beneath the hall’s trestle tables for fallen scraps of last night’s feasting.”
A good-natured chuckle from one of the men at the windows answered him. “Boiny isn’t the only one in this room who could do with some victuals.”
Dugan.
His middle brother—and the one who ate with the most voracious appetite Magnus had e’er seen.
A jab of guilt plunged straight through Magnus’s ribs to land a stinging blow dangerously close to his heart.
Magnus sighed, recognizing defeat.
He had enough experience being on the other side of victorious to be stubborn now.
Drawing a deep breath, he crossed the solar and clapped a hand on Dugan’s shoulder. “Have done with this nonsense, then, and go break your fast.” He nodded at Hugh and Colin to indicate he meant all three of them. “And take Da and Boiny with you—I will stay up here and hold lookout myself.”
“And we are like to pay dearly for stuffing our faces if you miss the ghost ship’s landing and a horde of banshees descend upon our shores!” His father pushed slowly to his feet, puffed his chest.
“Or worse, if you spot a MacDonald galley heading our way with shipbuilding supplies. As I know you, you’d have a score of bonfires set to warn them off before they’d even attempt to unload a single plank of wood!”
Magnus closed his eyes, pressed his temples. Then he let out a long, slow breath.
The time to show his heart had come.
“Should Donall MacLean have arranged for yet another MacDonald supply galley to bring us wood and other necessaries, I . . . I will not naysay the unloading or the good use of whate’er materials we might need to finish the rebuilding of our fleet,” he said, each word tasting like bitter ash on his tongue.
But not nearly so unpleasant as he would have thought they’d be.
Or as difficult.
“Aye, my over-proud son e’er knows what he is at and cannot see how direly we need—” Donald MacKinnon stopped his shuffle across the room in midstride. His rheumy blue eyes nigh popping out of his head, he stared at Magnus.
“What did you say, laddie?” he demanded, his bushy brows rising so high they were nearly indiscernible from his hairline. “Did I hear you aright?”
Dugan and Hugh stared, too. Both of them almost as wide-eyed as their da, slack-jawed and speechless.
Colin Grant burst out laughing.
And laughed all the harder when Magnus glowered at him.
Ignoring Magnus’s black glare, his ingrate friend leaned back against the solar’s lime-washed wall and slapped his good thigh.
“Ho, Laird MacKinnon!” The cheeky lout addressed Magnus’s father. “It would seem the clandestine trips your son has been making t
o the Beldam’s Chair have worked their magic,” he roared, near convulsing in his mirth. “Either that, or a certain comely wench has washed his fool head of his wretched pride.”
The old man blinked. “But what did he say?” He tilted his head and tugged on his earlobe as if he’d have difficulty hearing—or believing—any answer Colin might give him. “I canna think I heard him right. My hearing isn’t what it once was. . . .”
Stepping forward to sling an arm about his father’s shoulders, Hugh answered for Colin. “He said that if a galley is indeed heading our way, he hopes it will be another supply vessel loaded with the wood and other necessaries we need to finish rebuilding our fleet and”—Hugh cast a silent plea to Magnus over their father’s white-tufted head—“that whate’er surplus we do not need for shipbuilding, can be put to good use in refurbishing the castle.”
“Aye, that is what he said,” Colin and Dugan agreed in chorus.
Donald MacKinnon’s eyes grew round.
Round, and suspiciously bright.
Worse, he sniffed . . . and not just once.
“Saints o’ mercy, I ne’er thought I’d see the day . . .” he spluttered, rubbing a knotty-knuckled fist across his cheek.
“And neither did I,” Magnus owned, shooing them from the solar before he began sniffling. “Now hie yourselves belowstairs and take that fool sheet of bloodied linen down from the wall if you’d see me happy.”
Not that he could imagine being any happier than he was at the moment.
Indeed, the moment they’d all trudged out of the chamber, his face broke into a grin.
And he was still grinning when he took his place at the window to peer through the rain for a galley that might or might not be making for his shores.
Truth be told, he might grin all day.
And had Saint Andrew hisself told him, he would ne’er have believed that losing his pride would feel so damned good.
Bitterest wind buffeting her, Amicia huddled ever deeper into the thick folds of her fur-lined cloak and hurried through what had to be the worst tempest to be visited upon the Hebrides in years.
Hurried by foot, because even the stout-hearted garrons she’d tried to saddle in her husband’s stables had balked at any attempt to cajole them from the safe haven of their byre stalls.
Each beast she’d tried to encourage into the morning’s wind and rain had whinnied and protested with such vehemence, she’d had to give up her hopes of a mount lest the commotion alert someone to her departure.
Blinking, she swiped the rain from her brow, silently cursing her lack of skill as a sweet-talker of horses.
And her foolhardiness in agreeing to make this journey.
But now, more than half the way there, she had little choice but to keep setting one foot before the other until she reached the Beldam’s Chair—a tedious undertaking that would be well worth the effort if only Janet could indeed shed light on who was behind the troublous goings-on plaguing Clan Fingon.
That had to be the reason the younger woman had pleaded such a secret meeting.
Even so, with the journey beginning to seem endless, it took all her will not to turn back, not to abandon her wild trek across the boggy, rain-drenched ground.
A fool’s expedition to be sure, with bursts of eerie greenish lightning outlining the dark mass of the hills and illuminating the broad, high moorlands. Each flash driving home not only the folly of it, but the danger.
She shivered, tried not to feel the wind tearing at her cloak or pay heed to how hard the pellets of sideways rain stung her face, striking her cheeks like a peppered onslaught of thousands of tiny needles.
Keeping her head lowered, she strained to see through the fast-moving swirls of thick gray mist—and saw naught. She began mumbling curses, aloud this time, simply because doing so made her feel better. She also drew her cloak’s hood deeper onto her forehead, blessing for once old Devorgilla for gifting her with such a warm, voluminous mantle.
But when at last the burial cairn’s low-mounded pile of bluish-gray stones came into view, her stomach clenched with icy-cold ill ease.
As promised, Janet waited for her. The younger woman sat stiff-backed and rigid in the cairn’s runic-carved Beldam’s Chair, a MacKinnon plaid wrapped around her tiny frame, one tartan fold draped over her head to protect her from the gushing rain.
Only, rather than come forward to greet Amicia or even lift a hand to acknowledge her arrival, Janet stayed where she was, her delicate features contorting into the most bizarre and terrifying expressions Amicia had e’er seen.
Half-afraid Janet had been seized by some strange malady and couldn’t move or speak, Amicia hastened her step—even when a distinct voice deep inside her warned her that she ought to run back to the castle as swiftly as her feet would carry her.
But morbid curiosity and genuine concern drove her forward even though Janet was now rolling her eyes and casting panicky yet somehow pleading stares in the direction Amicia had just come. The way back across the high moors to Coldstone Castle.
Comprehension coming at last, Amicia realized that, for whatever reason, her erstwhile rival was urging her to flee.
The direness of the situation became frighteningly apparent when, not ten paces from the ancient burial cairn, a sinewy arm slid around Amicia’s waist from behind, seizing hold of her in an iron-hard grip, and the cold blade of a deadly-sharp dirk pressed tight against her throat.
“Ach, lassie, to be out a-walking in this black weather, and after such a bliss-filled night.”
Dagda’s voice, the same yet horrifyingly different, identified her assailant.
“You?” Shock ripping through her, Amicia struggled against the older woman’s viselike hold. Her efforts won her a stinging nick in the tender flesh beneath her ear.
Amicia stilled at once, her heart plummeting to the sodden ground, icy dread washing over her in great, sickening waves.
“Aye, ’tis me.” Dagda gave a bloodcurdling chuckle. “I am the force behind the dark deeds and curses stalking Clan Fingon,” she said, her voice mocking. “I’ll be taking your cloak, too, though I regret the need. It will ill-serve you where you are going, but its ermine lining will fund a life for me far from these wretched shores.”
Careful to keep the dirk at Amicia’s throat, the old woman divested her of Devorgilla’s cloak with amazing dexterity, and swirled it around her own shoulders with surprising speed, almost before Amicia could even blink a mute protest.
“She’s mad!” Janet cried, finding her voice at last. Still sitting in the Beldam’s Chair, her water-soaked clothes plastered to her trembling body. “Full mad, and meaning to kill us!”
Her eyes at their widest and her face blanched a deathly white, Janet looked far more deranged than Dagda. Clutching her arms about her middle, she rocked back and forth on the stone seat, wailing and sobbing her misery.
“Ooooh, milady, I am so sorry. . . . I ne’er thought it’d come to this . . . ne’er meant to—”
“Mad, am I?” Dagda cut her off. “And who would not run mad after seeing her beloved young husband put his own self to the cliff, and taking his two innocent bairns with him when he jumped?”
“W-what?” Amicia almost spun around to face the old woman, but self-preservation and rank fear stopped her from even thinking about moving when Dagda pressed the dirk blade harder against the quivering flesh of her neck.
“Och, you thought Niall and my bairns died of a fever?” Dagda stepped around in front of her, an expression of mock confusion on her face. “Tsk, tsk! My sorrow for keeping you so ill-informed,” she said, and Amicia caught the light of madness glinting in her eyes. “But never you fret, lassie. No one kens the truth, so you are not alone in your ignorance.”
With a sad, almost regretful note entering her voice, she added, “My profound sorrow, too, that you must suffer for deeds that were none of your doing. I’ve grown rather fond of you. But it cannot be helped. Your demise will strike a much deeper grief into the heart
of the MacKinnons than aught else combined.”
Prickles of coldest horror tingled along Amicia’s spine and she had the sickening feeling that the earth was sliding away beneath her feet.
“My demise?” she rasped, pushing the two words off a tongue gone dust-dry with fear. “But—”
Dagda snorted. “I will explain the whole of it once we reach the boat strand and you and yon lassie are comfortably secured aboard one of the new galleys—the one I’ve prepared for you.”
“She’s sawed holes in the planking and gouged out the caulking!” Janet wailed. “She means to leave us, tied and bound, aboard the galley so we’ll drown when it sinks in the storm! ’Tis her revenge on the MacKinnons! Magnus will lose you and the old laird will be convinced the curse has descended with a vengeance.”
“And you, you clapper-tongued strumpet, will hold your prattle unless you wish me to bind your mouth.” Dagda’s eyes flashed in irritation. “Now come here and tie the lassie’s wrists. The rope is draped o’er the litter hidden round the other side of the cairn. And dinna think of running away. You won’t get far, and even if you did—what do you think the MacKinnons would do with you once I tell them how you’ve helped me keep old Reginald’s curse alive and thriving?”
“Ooooh, Mother of God, help us. . . . I ne’er meant to do anyone any harm. . . .” Janet moaned, leaping up from the Beldam’s Chair to dash around the corner of the mounded stones.
She reappeared moments later, dragging a makeshift litter behind her, the rope Dagda had requested dangling from one hand and trailing along on the soggy ground.
Tossing a wild-eyed glance full of apology at Amicia, Janet took Amicia’s hands and managed to bind them with surprising speed, considering her fingers trembled so badly Amicia wondered she could even hold the rope.
“I am so sorry.” She turned another pitiful gaze on Amicia. “I only wanted Magnus, see you? I’d thought I loved him. Now I know I ne’er did, but back then—”
“Back then, you hoped that if you helped me destroy Clan Fingon, Magnus would be so grief-stricken and vulnerable, you could step in to comfort him,” Dagda finished for her. “That was the way of it, was it not? Your hope that, by helping me avenge my loved ones, you’d make Magnus dependent on you—so much so he’d marry you out of sheer gratitude.”
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