Beyond the Highland Mist

by Karen Marie Moning

  Adrienne just drifted in and out of consciousness, as the mind does when grief runs too deep to handle. Eventually she came back to herself, but she went the long way around.

  On the glistening silica sands of Morar, Adam Black sauntered with arrogant grace to his Queen’s side.

  “Where have you been wandering, minstrel-mine?” Queen Aoibheal asked silkily. “What new tales and entertainments have you collected for me?”

  “Oh, the finest of tales! An epic, grand adventure,” Adam bragged, drawing the elegant courtiers near.

  The Fae loved a good tale, the thicker the subterfuge, the more intense the passions, the more aroused the court. They’d long since tired of happy endings; immune to suffering themselves, they were enamored with mortal struggles and casualties. The Queen herself was most especially partial to a tragicomedy of errors, and this new tale did suit that genre well.

  “Tell us, jester, sing and play for us!” the court of the Tuatha De Danaan cried.

  Adam’s smile gleamed brightly. He met his Queen’s eye and held it long. “Once upon a time there was a mortal man. A man so fair even the Fae Queen herself had noticed him …”

  The Queen’s eyes glittered brightly as she listened, at first in amusement, after a time with obvious agitation, and finally with a sensation that vaguely resembled remorse.

  CHAPTER 32

  LYDIA SIGHED AS SHE PICKED THROUGH HER SEEDS. THE NEW Year had inched past them as if it traveled on the humped back of a snail. She didn’t even want to recall the grim scene Christmas had been. Winter had descended upon Dalkeith in force—icicles twisted obscenely from the shutters, and the dratted door to the front steps had been frozen shut this morning, effectively sealing her in her own home.

  Lydia could remember a time when she’d loved the winter. When she’d reveled in each season and the unique pleasures it brought. Christmas had once been her favorite holiday. But now … she missed Adrian and Ilysse. Come home, children. I need you, she prayed silently.

  The sound of splintering wood suddenly rent the air, causing her to jerk her head up in an involuntary gesture that sent her precious seeds flying.

  Damned inconsiderate of them to split firewood right outside the window.

  Lydia pushed irritably at her hair and began to reorganize the scattered seeds. She dreamed of the flowers she would plant—if spring ever came again.

  Another resounding crash shuddered through the Great-hall. She stifled a very unladylike oath and laid her seeds aside. “Keep it down out there! A body’s trying to do a bit of thinking!” she yelled.

  Still the deafening crashes continued. “We aren’t all that short of firewood, lads!” Lydia roared at the frozen door.

  Her words were met with a terrible screeching noise.

  “That’s it. That’s it!” She leapt up from her chair and seethed. That last one had seemed to come from … upstairs?

  She cocked her head at an angle.

  Someone had either decided it was too cold to split firewood outside or was quite busily turning the furniture into kindling instead.

  The crash was followed by the shattering of glass. “Holy shit!” Lydia muttered, as her lovely daughter-in-law would have offered quite perkily. She spun on her heel, grabbed up her skirts, and raced the stairs like a lass of twenty. Hand on her heart she flew down the corridor, skidding past gawking maids and tense soldiers. How many people had stood about listening to this insane destruction while she’d been sitting downstairs?

  Not the nursery, she prayed, anything but that.

  Her son would never destroy that room of dreams. Granted, he’d been a bit out of sorts, but still … No. He definitely would not do something so terrible. Not her son.

  By all that’s holy, oh yes he would. And he was.

  Her breath came in burning gasps as she stared, dumbfounded. Her son stood in the nursery surrounded by a twisted heap of horrid broken wooden limbs. He’d been literally ripping apart the lovingly crafted furnishings. He was clad in only a kilt, his upper body glistening with sweat. The veins in his arms were swollen and his hands were raw and bloody. His raven hair was loose but for the two war braids at either temple. By the sweet saints, just paint his face blue and I wouldn’t even know him for my son! Lydia thought.

  The Hawk stood silently, wild-eyed. There was a smudge of blood on his face where he’d wiped at sweat. Lydia watched, frozen in horror, as he tilted an oil bowl, drizzling its contents over the splinters of furniture, the toys and books, the magnificent dollhouse that had been squashed flat in his gargantuan rage.

  When he dropped the candle, a soft scream wrenched her mouth wide.

  The flames leapt up, greedily devouring the pile of Hawk’s and Lydia’s shattered dreams. Shaking with hurt and fury, Lydia pressed a hand to her mouth and swallowed a sob. She turned away before the animal that used to be her son could see her tears.

  “We have to do something,” Lydia murmured woodenly, staring blankly at the kitchen hearth.

  Tavis stepped close behind her, his hands suspended in the air just above her waist. He dropped his head forward and inhaled deeply of her scent. “I’ll speak with him, Lydia—”

  “He won’t listen,” she choked as she spun around. “I’ve tried. Dear God, we’ve all tried. He’s like some rabid dog, snarling and foaming and oh, Tavis! My nursery! My grandbabies!”

  “I haven’t tried yet,” Tavis said calmly, dropping his hands to grip her waist.

  Lydia cocked her head, marveling at the implicit authority in his words. He’d managed to surprise her once again, this gentle man who’d stood patiently by her side for so long.

  “You’ll speak with him?” she echoed hopefully, her eyes glimmering with unshed tears.

  “Aye,” he assured her.

  Strength and ability laced his reply. How could it have taken her so long to begin to see this man clearly?

  Some of her astonishment must have been evident in her gaze, because he gave her that patient smile and said tenderly, “I knew one day you’d finally open your eyes, Lydia. I also knew it would be worth every minute of the wait,” he added quietly.

  Lydia swallowed hard as a fission of heat and hope and heady, tumultuous love spread through her in a wave. Love. How long had she been in love with this man? she wondered dumbly.

  Tavis brushed her lips with his, a light friction that promised so much more. “Doona worry. I care for him like my own, Lydia. And, as if he were my own, ’tis time we had a good thorough father-son kind of talk.”

  “But what if he refuses to listen?” she fretted.

  Tavis smiled. “He’ll listen. You can take Tavis MacTarvitt’s word on that, I’ll say.”

  The Hawk brooded into the fire, watching ghosts dance whitely in the spaces between the flames. They were memory-born and hell-bound, as he surely was. But purgatory—if not heaven—was within his reach, tidily captured in a bottle, and so he toasted the ghosts as he raced them to oblivion.

  He picked up another bottle of whisky and turned it in his hand, studying its rich amber color with drunken appreciation. He raised the bottle to his lips, his hand fisted about the neck, and bit out the stopper. Briefly he remembered biting out the stopper of a Gypsy potion. Remembered covering his wife’s body with his own and tasting, touching, kissing … He’d been fool enough then to believe in love.

  Bah! Adam! It had always been him. From the first day he’d seen her. She’d been standing pressed against a tree trunk watching the blasted smithy with hunger in her eyes. He tossed back a swallow of whisky and considered going back to court. Back to King James.

  A crooked, bitter smile curved his lip. Even as he pictured himself prowling the boudoirs of Edinburgh again, another part of his mind recalled the roiling thick steam rising from a scented bath, the sheen of oil upon her skin as she’d tossed her head back, baring the lovely column of her throat to his teeth. Baring everything to him, or so he’d thought.

  Adrienne … Treacherous, traitorous, lying unfaithful bitc
h.

  “Lay me into the dead earth now and be done with it,” he muttered to the fire. He didn’t even react when the door to the study was flung open so hard that it hit the wall. “Close the door, man. A bit of a draft chilling my bones, there is,” the Hawk slurred unsteadily without even bothering to see who had invaded the drunken squalor of his private hell. He again tilted the bottle to his mouth and took a long swallow.

  Tavis crossed the room in three purposeful strides and smashed the bottle out of Hawk’s hand with such force that it shattered in a splash of glass and whisky on the smooth stones of the hearth. He gazed at Tavis a befuddled moment, then reached, undeterred, for a second bottle.

  Tavis stepped between the Hawk and the crated liquor.

  “Get out of my way, old man,” Hawk growled, tensing to rise. He had barely gained his feet when Tavis’s fist connected solidly with his jaw, spilling him back into the chair.

  Hawk wiped the back of his hand across his mouth and glared up at Tavis. “Why’d you go and do that for, Tavis MacTarvitt?” he grumbled, making no move to defend himself.

  “I don’t give a bloody hell what you do to yourself, laird,” Tavis sneered. “Just get the hell out of this castle and don’t do it in front of your mother.”

  “Who the hell d’you think you are?”

  “I know who I am! I’m the man who watched you grow from wee lad to braw laird. I’m the man who burst with pride while he watched you make some hard choices.” Tavis’s voice dropped a harsh notch, “Aye, I’m just the man who has loved you since the day you drew your first hungry breath in this world. And now I’m the man who’s going to thrash you within an inch of your worthless life if you don’t get a grip on yourself.”

  Hawk gaped, then swiped irritably at Tavis. “Go ‘way.” He closed his eyes wearily.

  “Oh, I’m not done yet, my boy,” Tavis said through gritted teeth. “You are not fit to be laird of a dunghill. ’Tis obvious you have no intention of pulling yourself together, so until you do you can just get the bleeding hell out of Lydia’s castle. Now! I’ll send word to Adrian and bring him home. He’ll make a fine laird—”

  The Hawk’s eyes flew open. “Over my dead body,” he snarled.

  “Fine. So be it,” Tavis spit back. “You’re no use to anyone as you are now anyway. You may as well fall on your own claymore for all the good you’re doing your people!”

  “I am laird here!” Hawk slurred, his eyes flashing furiously. “And you … you, old man, oh hell, you’re fired.” Although he had intended—when he’d still had his wife—to relinquish his place to Adrian, it was currently damned cold outside and he wasn’t going anywhere just yet. Maybe in the spring, if he hadn’t drowned himself in whisky yet.

  Tavis yanked Hawk to his feet in a swift motion, surprising the drunken laird. “Pretty strong for an old man,” Hawk muttered. Tavis pulled the stumbling Hawk to the doors of the study.

  “Get off me!” the Hawk bellowed.

  “I expected more from you, lad. A fool I must be, but I thought you were the kind of man who fought for what he wanted. But no, you just fell apart in the face of a wee bit of adversity—”

  “Och, and my wife leavin’ me for another man is only a wee bit of adversity? That’s what you call it?” Hawk slurred thickly, his burr deepening with his anger.

  “Regardless of how you perceive what happened, you still have a family here, and a clan who needs its laird. If you can’t do the job, then step aside for someone who can!”

  “Who the hell put you in charge of me?” Hawk roared.

  Tavis’s own burr thickened as his temper mounted. “Your mother, you bletherin’ idiot! And even if she hadna asked me, I would have come after you myself! You may be killing yourself, lad, but I’ll no’ be having you torturing Lydia while you’re doing it!”

  “All I’m doing, old man, is having a wee bit of a drink,” Hawk protested.

  “You’ve been having a ‘wee bit of a drink’ for over a month now. I, for one, am tired of watching you guzzle yourself to death. If you canna put down the bottle, then just get the hell out. Go piss the night away in a snowdrift where the people who love you are no’ forced to watch.”

  Tavis kicked open the doors and tossed the stumbling Hawk face-first into the snow.

  “And doona be coming back in until you can be nice to your mother! When you’re ready to be laird again, and you’ve given up the bottle, you can return. But not until then!” Tavis roared as the Hawk struggled to pull his head out of a drift.

  When Hawk finally managed to struggle upright, he snorted disbelievingly when he saw the man he’d thought of as a mild-mannered tanner send the Hawk’s own guards to stand wide-legged in front of the door, crossed arms clearly barring him entrance into his own castle.

  “Just stay out!” Tavis bellowed with such volume that Hawk heard him through the castle’s heavy wooden doors.

  Adrienne hadn’t realized how thoroughly she hated winter.

  The pale face of the clock above the mantel chimed once, twice, then lapsed into silence. Two o’clock in the morning; a time when being awake could make a person feel like the only living creature left in the world. And Adrienne did feel that way, until Marie silently entered the library. Adrienne glanced up and opened her mouth to say good night, but instead a deluge of words flooded out despite the dam she’d so painstakingly erected.

  Marie tucked herself into an armchair and smoothed an afghan across her lap.

  Adrienne poked at the fire and opened a bottle of sweet port while she told Marie a story she’d never told anyone. The story of the orphan girl who thought she’d fallen in love with a prince, only to discover that Eberhard Darrow Garrett had been a prince of organized crime and that he’d been sending her on vacations to get drugs across the border in her luggage, her car, sewn into her clothing. And how, since she had always been packed and unpacked by his attendants, she hadn’t known. She’d simply enjoyed wearing his incredible ten-carat diamond engagement ring, riding in his limos, and thumbing her nose at the Franciscan nuns in the old orphanage on First Street. How she hadn’t known that the FBI had been drawing its net around him ever tighter. She’d seen that a wealthy, undeniably attractive man was showering her with love, or so she’d thought at the time. She’d had no idea she was a last-ditch effort to get a series of shipments out of the country. She’d never suspected that she was less than nothing to him—a beautiful, innocent young woman no one would ever suspect. His perfect pigeon.

  Until the day she’d overheard a terrible conversation she’d never been meant to hear.

  She told Marie in a hushed voice how she’d turned state’s evidence and bought her own freedom. And then how Eberhard, whom the FBI had managed to miss after all, had come after her in earnest.

  Marie sipped her port and listened.

  She told Marie how when she’d finally been trapped by him in an old abandoned warehouse, sick of running and hiding and being afraid, she’d done the only thing she could do when he’d raised his gun.

  She’d killed him before he could kill her.

  At that point Marie waved an impatient hand. “Eees not real story. Why you tell me this?” she asked, accusingly.

  Adrienne blinked. She’d just told the woman what she’d been afraid to tell anyone. That she’d killed a man. She’d done it in self-defense, granted, but she’d killed a man. She told Marie things she’d never trusted to anyone before, and the woman waved it away. Pretty much accused her of wasting her time. “What do you mean, Marie? It was real,” she said defensively. “It happened. I was there.”

  Marie rummaged through her small reticule of English to find the right words. “Yes yes, señorita. May be ees real, but ees not important. Ees over and forgotten. And ees not why you weep like world ees ending. Tell me real story. Who cares where you come from, or I? Today matters. Yesterday ees skin on a snake, to be shed many times.”

  Adrienne sat very still for a long moment as a chill worked its way down her spine and
into her belly. The hall clock chimed the quarter hour and Adrienne gazed at Marie with new appreciation.

  Drawing a deep breath, Adrienne told her of Dalkeith-Upon-the-Sea. Of Lydia. And of Sidheach. Marie’s brown eyes lit with a sparkle, and Adrienne was treated to a rare sight she’d bet few people had ever seen. The tiny olive-skinned woman laughed and clapped her small hands to hear of her love and of her time with the Hawk. She latched on to details, oohing over the nursery, glaring at her for saying Adam’s name too many times, ahhing over their time together in Uster, sighing over the wedding that should have been.

  “Ah … finally … this ees real story.” Marie nodded.

  In 1514, the Hawk was trying desperately to sleep. He’d heard a man could freeze to death if he fell asleep in the snow. But either it was too damned cold in that drift or he wasn’t quite drunk enough. He could remedy that. Shivering, he pulled his tartan closer against the bitter, howling wind. Stumbling to his feet, he teetered unevenly up the exterior stairs to the rooftop, knowing the guards often kept a few bottles up there to keep them warm while they stood watch.

  No such luck. No bottles and no guards. How could he have forgotten? The guards were all inside, where it was warm. He was the only one outside. He kicked aimlessly at the snow on the roof, then stiffened when a shadow shifted, black against the gleaming snow. He squinted and peered through the wet swirling flakes. “What the hell are you doing up here, Grimm?”

  Grimm reluctantly abandoned his persistent survey of the falling dusk. He was about to explain when he saw the Hawk’s face and kept his silence instead.

  “I said, what are you doing up here, Grimm? They tell me you practically live on my roof now.”

  Suddenly furious, Grimm retorted, “Well, they tell me you practically live in a bottle of whisky now!”

  Hawk stiffened and rubbed his unshaven jaw. “Don’t yell at me, you son of a bitch! You’re the one who lied to me about my—” He couldn’t say the word. Couldn’t even think it. His wife, about whom Grimm had been right. His wife, who had left him for Adam.