“Aye, that is what I thought. Oh, God in Heaven, how could I have been so blind?” Janet crumpled to her knees, stared at Dagda in sheerest horror, great tracks of tears streaming down her cheeks. “I ne’er thought you would harm anyone. Our own kinsmen!”
“I have nary a drop of that tainted strain running in my veins,” Dagda corrected her, using the dirk to urge Amicia onto the litter. “My Niall was the one with ties to Clan Fingon. And a good thing, for I used that blood bond and the tradition of Highland hospitality to secure myself a trusted position in their household after their meddling at sea ruined Niall’s fortunes and drove him to take his own life. His, and my bairns!”
“Your husband brought about his own downfall,” Janet argued, showing her first bit of spine since Amicia had walked into this nightmare.
“’Tis true,” Janet railed, throwing a wild-eyed glance at Amicia. “Dagda and her husband lived on the most barren of isles. After years of trying to eke an existence from the sea, he tried to better their lot by informing the English and their turncoat Scots friends, the Balliols, of any Scottish loyalist activities in Hebridean waters.”
Her teeth chattering, she paused to dash the streaming rain from her forehead. “Their wee isle was little more than rock and sand, but its location gave them firsthand knowledge of any passing war galleys, supply ships, or couriers moving between these isles, England, and the Irish coast. But each time Dagda’s husband arranged a secret meeting with his benefactors, he ran up against Clan Fingon galleys and couldn’t perform his promised duties as an informant. Af—”
“After a while, they stopped coming. And they ne’er paid him a siller for his trouble!” Dagda glared her wrath at Janet. “The MacKinnons and their watchdog presence in the waters hereabouts ruined Niall’s chances of making a fortune and left him seeing no way out but to widow me. Clan Fingon stole my husband and my sweet bairns . . . my life!”
Amicia shuddered on the litter. Saints, did the old woman mean to drag her clear across the moor to the boat strand? When she ordered Janet to bind her feet to the litter as well, it seemed that must be her intent indeed.
Her stomach heaving, Amicia fought an overwhelming urge to retch. Struggling to suppress it, she listened to Dagda’s rantings and prayed Magnus would notice her absence—as well as Janet’s and the seneschal’s—and head out with a patrol to search for them.
And that if he did, he’d find them soon enough.
“Put your hands behind your back, girl.” Dagda snatched the rope from Janet. “I’m going to bind them, but not so tight you won’t be able to help me pull the litter to the boat strand,” she explained, making short work of knotting the strong heather rope around Janet’s wrists.
Apparently satisfied with her handiwork, Dagda lifted a fold of Amicia’s cloak and dragged it across her forehead, using it to momentarily stanch the endless stream of rain coursing down her brow.
To Amicia’s surprise, the old woman knelt beside her in the oozing peat mire, that odd look of regret clouding her dark eyes again.
“Aye, lass, ’tis sorry I am that I require your help in this,” she said, a sad smile twisting her lips. “But the loss of a much-loved wife will speak louder than the burning of a thousand empty chambers and sawed-through latrine seats.”
Shaking her head, she stared down at Amicia, and with each bright burst of lightning, the crazed glint in her eyes grew wilder, more terrifying.
Not that Amicia could see her all too clearly lying prone on the makeshift litter, the lashing rain now pounding unhindered onto her face and blurring her vision. Unable to swipe at the raindrops, they gathered in her eyes, near blinding her.
But not so fully that her heart didn’t freeze with fear when she caught the silvery flash of the dirk blade as Dagda raised it high above her head.
“Because I’m fond of you, I’ll put you out of your misery now,” Dagda said, almost as if she indeed meant to soothe. “Your whiny friend will have to suffer her fate through to the end. You will have the mercy of sleeping through yours.”
“No-o-o-o!” The denial burst from Amicia’s throat as the dagger swooped downward, the roar of her own red terror and a smashing pain of bright-splintering agony, ending what should have been the first day of a new and beautiful life.
Chapter Sixteen
“WHAT DO YOU MEAN she is gone?”
Magnus stood on the threshold to the great hall, staring at Colin. Hot disbelief pounded through him, and his good humor from just moments earlier vanished like a puff of smoke.
“She can’t be . . . gone.” Agitation—and fear—welling inside him, he clenched his hands lest he seize his friend by the neck opening of his mailed hauberk and rattle a better answer from the lout’s lying lips.
But even before his stopped heart could resume beating, Dugan and Hugh came barreling into the hall from behind him, their own blanched-white faces underscoring without words that Colin was speaking the truth.
Bitter-cold dread squeezing the breath from him, Magnus stared at the three men, razor-sharp fear twisting his gut.
Now he knew why his scalp had prickled earlier.
Swallowing against the tightness in his throat, he focused on Hugh. “Tell me this is madness . . . that it is not true.” Saints, just putting his fear to words sliced his heart. “There must be some mistake.”
But Hugh shook his head. “They are nowhere to be found,” he panted, bending forward to brace his hands on his thighs. “We’ve searched every corner and cranny in the castle—even looked behind doors and beneath beds. They—”
“They?” Magnus’s already-hot-burning nape flamed with a fresh rush of scalding heat, even as his blood turned to ice. “Who are they?”
“Your lady wife, wee Janet, and that old she-goat, Dagda.” His da spoke up from where he stood, wringing his hands before the displaced high table. “The three of them have vanished without a trace. No one’s seen ’em since earliest cockcrow.”
“Christ . . . in . . . His . . . heaven!” Magnus roared, blood pounding hot in his ears. “My heart’s treasure . . .” That last was spoken on a thin breath of defeat, and so low he wasn’t even sure if he’d said the words aloud.
He only knew the entirety of his world spun and whirled around him and that he was struggling to draw air through a throat that seemed too tight for even a sliver of a breath to pass through.
“Why didn’t someone fetch me?”
“No one went for you because we did not think aught was amiss until just a short while ago. It was expected they’d be found,” Colin said. “Sakes, you ken they could have been anywhere—minding women’s business or suchlike.”
Magnus’s stomach turned over. His heart plummeted. It was the suchlike that terrified him.
“I told you to be wary,” his da minded him, making it worse. “The Devil crew from the ghost galley’s done and snatched all three of ’em. I can feel it in my bones!”
His bones jellied with horror, Magnus pressed an icy-cold hand against his chest and swept the hall with a furious glare.
His kinsmen, each one looking as stricken as he felt, averted their gazes.
The remnants of their raucous fast-breaking told him why.
The evidence taunted him from the tops of trestle tables in a disorderly welter of overturned ewers, empty ale cups, and trenchers of half-eaten bannocks—puddles of spilled ale speaking the loudest.
That, and the damnable bridal sheet still tacked proudly to the wall behind the high table.
The bastards had been reveling.
The whole merry lot of them, carousing in jest and good cheer, whilst his lady and two other kinswomen had been spirited away right from beneath their fool noses!
And while he, mayhap the greater fool, had been standing watch in the lofty laird’s solar, peering through curtains of rain for nonexistent ships.
“’Tis the curse again, I tell you,” his father insisted. Rocking back on his heels, he stared up at the stone-vaulted ceiling. “I knew we’d
not seen the end of old Reg—”
“A pox on Reginald and his curse if e’er there was one—which I still do not believe!” Magnus jerked, a muscle leaping in his jaw. “Ghost galleys and long-dead ancestors do not abduct innocent, living women.”
The old man’s lower lip jutted. “Then what happened to them?”
“Saints alive!” Magnus exploded. “Think you I’d be standing here like a dimwit if I knew?”
His gut tied in more knots than he cared to imagine, Magnus pulled a hand down over his face and tried to think. There had to be an explanation. Like as not, they were off in some remote corner of the castle, entertaining themselves by watching the storm. Counting lightning bolts to pass the time.
No one of any intelligence would venture out into a tempest of such gale-gusting ferocity . . . and his braw lady wife had more wits about her than most men.
Even Janet and old Dagda, vexing as the seneschal could be, knew better than to tempt fate by hieing themselves into the full fury of a Highland storm once unleashed.
So where were they?
A soul-deep ache, dull-edged and throbbing, beginning to replace his initial hot burst of fury, Magnus paced before the trestle tables, the muscle jerking at his jawline keeping an annoying rhythm with his fast, long strides.
“Think!” he groused at his brothers as he strode past them. “And you!” He shot a look at Colin. “You are e’er trailing after Janet—have you any notion what could have happened to them? Where they could have gone?”
But Colin only shook his dark head, his expression grim. There could be no help there, no spark of sudden and bright inspiration.
Colin Grant, for all his earlier jollity, looked a man suffocated by the crushing weight of his own dread and fears.
And seeing his friend’s e’er-so-carefree face drawn tight and pale only increased Magnus’s own alarm.
Think, he had to think.
He glanced at his brothers again. “Is it certain they are not within the castle walls?”
“We have looked everywhere,” Dugan said, and Magnus’s heart sank.
“Then we must search the whole of the isle—storm or no.” He flickered a glance at the peat fire, noting at once that old Boiny’s favored place before the hearthstone loomed empty.
He stopped his pacing at once, looked around. “Where is Boiny? Is he gone as well?”
“Och, nay, Magnus,” a kinsman standing near the back of the hall called in answer. “That old cur is still about—he’s just casting around for scraps. Been o’er by the door the best part o’ the last hour.”
O’er by the door?
At last, Magnus knew what had been nagging at him. Scarce noticing his kinsmen’s stares, he tore through the hall, running for the great shadowed arch of the keep’s main entrance.
The one that opened into the bailey and the rain-lashed morning beyond.
And sure enough, just as the old dog had done at the closed door to the laird’s solar, Boiny now fretted back and forth in front of the keep’s heavy, iron-studded door. His stumbly, hitching steps and stiff-legged gait lanced Magnus’s heart, but it was the dog’s pathetic whines and the look of terror in his milky brown eyes that curdled his blood.
“They’ve been taken,” he said, his voice deadly calm and all the more dangerous for it.
Never more sure of anything in his life, he whirled to face the men who’d followed him.
“Which one of you searched my bedchamber?” he demanded, curling his fingers around the hilt of his sword.
“’Twas me, sir.” A timid-voiced laundry maid with a shock of bright red hair squeezed her way forward. “Your brothers had some of us searching abovestairs. I be the one who looked round your bedchamber,” she confessed, her face flaming scarlet. “I even peeked beneath the bed, I did.”
Magnus eyed the lass, tried to school his features into a less fierce scowl. “Did you notice if her cloak hung on its peg by the door? You’ll ken . . . the fur-lined one she’s e’er complaining is too cumbersome to wear?”
The girl clapped a hand to her cheek, shook her head. “Nay, my lord. Looking back, I don’t think the mantle was there where she hangs it. Aye, I am certain it was gone.”
Nodding his thanks, Magnus turned to his men. “Those of you not afeared of a bit of rain or bloodshed, buckle on your sword belts and be prepared to overturn every stone and clump of heather on this island until we find my wife and our kinswomen,” he said, already yanking open the hall’s massive oaken door.
A furious welter of wind and rain gusted inside, guttering torches and blowing clouds of choking smoke into the men’s faces as they surged forward to scramble down the rain-slicked outer stairs to the courtyard below.
And the moment the last one hurried past, Magnus made to follow them—but not before he dropped to one knee and gave Boiny a fierce hug.
“I owe you one, old friend,” he said, hooking his fingers into the unhappy beast’s heavy collar until one of the more stout-armed kitchen lasses stepped forward to take hold of him.
Boiny’s heart may have been burning to tear off in search of his two-legged friend, but the dog’s advancing age and his weak legs would ne’er survive the brunt of the storm.
His throat tightening again, Magnus reached to tousle the dog’s rough fur before he turned to race down the stairs. “Never you fear, old boy, I’ll find her,” he said, as much for his own benefit as the fretting dog’s. “And when I do, may God have mercy on whoe’er took her.”
A furious ride and much rain later, Magnus halted his garron atop the high dunes hemming the isle’s crescent-shaped boat strand and . . . frowned at the hellish scene before him.
He drew a sharp breath. Indeed, if he believed in such foolery, he would have sworn some ancient Celtic deity bent on wreaking her wrath on God’s good earth had conjured the morning’s storm.
Ne’er had a worse fury blasted across the Hebrides—not since the raging tempest that had destroyed the MacKinnon fleet some years ago.
And if the wild-winded squalls howling around his ears were any indication, this storm stood a good chance of smashing the score of half-built new galleys lining the golden-sanded beach.
Hoping to find his lady down there somewhere, of her own free choosing or otherwise, he spurred down the dunes, pulling up as close to the tossing surf as his garron would venture.
He flung himself out of the saddle, straining his eyes to see through the sheets of driving rain, the prickling of his scalp and the gooseflesh erupting on the back of his neck a sure sign that she had to be near.
Somewhere.
And close.
He knew it with every inch of his body, each thundering beat of his heart. Sakes, he could feel the connection crackling between them—a living thing, holding them close even when he could not see her.
He just knew, and his heart gave a great bound at the surety of it.
No one else had believed him, the lot of his kinsmen charging off to the high moors, the whole fool band of them declaring the women would seek shelter in one of the many cairns and hollow-walled brochs dotting the isle’s interior.
Certain he knew better, Magnus scanned the rows of unfinished galleys. Sakes, there were more than he’d realized. They littered the beach!
But with each sweeping gaze, he promised himself he’d see her, catch sight of her huddled beneath some upturned hull, shivering with the cold and rain, but safe.
Whole.
He could not, would not, lose her now.
Sweet images of her flooded his mind, crazing him as he raced up and down the empty strand, calling her name even if the wind snatched away his cries almost as quickly as they left his lips.
Not willing to lose heart, he lifted a hand to shield his eyes from the rain and stared out at the two recently completed galleys moored in the deeper water just offshore.
The first two vessels his kinsmen had built—or what remained of them—bobbed on the surf, smashed by nature’s unforgiving fist.
The largest, a fine twenty-six-oared beauty, lay on her side, half-submerged beneath the churning waves, the single mast snapped in two like so much kindling to float impotent and useless in the surf.
The other, equally fine but with only twenty oars, was still afloat, but just barely. Indeed, it appeared to be sinking fast.
But of the three women, naught was to be seen.
Magnus swore, dashed the rain from his eyes for what had to be the hundredth time in mere moments.
By the living God, even without the rain coursing down his forehead, he could scarce see two feet ahead of him much less hope to spot a sooty-haired lass on a morn darker than the crack of the Devil’s own arse!
“Ho, Magnus!” Colin thundered up beside him, his winded garron as uneasy as the howling storm.
“Come, let us be gone from here,” he urged. “Your brothers are off on the moors, searching the heather. I say let us join them. In God’s name, why would the women come here? We are wasting precious time. . . .”
“Nary a moment is wasted if it can be used to find them.” Magnus glared at his friend, but Colin’s own ill ease stood etched in his face, and Magnus remembered too late Colin’s deep affection for Janet.
“Forgive me,” he said for the second time that morning, forgetting his pride. “I know you mean well, and that it is unlikely they are here, but . . . I just had a feeling.”
“A feeling?”
“Aye,” Magnus snapped, his tone daring Colin to deny it. “And so long as that feeling persists, I am not riding off elsewhere.”
Even if he spent the rest of his days stalking up and down the dune-lined strand calling his wife’s name.
“They cannot be here, Magnus,” Colin argued. “Come, see reason. Let us be off to where we may have a better chance of finding them.”
“Nay. They are here, I tell you!”
Scrunching his eyes against the rain, Magnus scanned the beach, the great rollers crashing on the shore, willed them to appear.
Sue-Ellen Welfonder - [MacLean 03] Page 27
