by Lucy Monroe
“I know.” And deep inside, where truth resided, she did. “You will be an amazing wolf.”
He pulled back, checking her face as if testing the veracity of her words.
“I’m telling the truth. Can’t you smell it?” she managed to tease.
He nodded, his expression going from uncertain to a full-blown smile. “You aren’t a wolf. Neither is Marjory, but that’s okay. We’ll protect you, Da, Thomas and me.”
She could not look at the adult men without screaming, so she kept her focus entirely on her son. “Thank you, but until you are bigger, I will continue to protect you. All right?”
“I’ll be bigger soon.”
“Yes, I’m sure you will.”
“Shona.” That was Audrey’s voice, pleading and worried.
Shona could not deal with the other woman’s treachery, or what it implied right now.
“Shall we go back to the keep and see what Lady Sinclair has provided to break our fast?” Shona asked her children with a smile as bright as she could make it.
“I’m hungry,” Marjory announced plaintively.
“Then we’ll see you fed.” Caelis leaned down to swoop the child into his arms. “Lady Sinclair’s cooks make delicious, heavy brown bread.”
“Do they have butter?” Marjory asked, patting Caelis’s cheek. “I likes butter.”
“Oh, aye.”
“The laird provides well for his people,” Thomas said, his voice falsely relaxed, tension ringing through his attempts to disguise it.
“He does. Surprisingly so. The Balmoral is the same.”
Testimony to the goodness of the Balmoral laird did not give Shona the comfort it would have yesterday.
“And your clan?” Thomas asked.
“The current laird is more interested in building an army than feeding his people,” Caelis said, disdain in his tone.
“Things have gotten worse then?” Shona asked, thinking it would do her no harm to dwell on something besides these new betrayals in her life.
Because make no mistake, if her father knew of the Chrechte, so had Shona’s mother.
“Aye. It is much worse than when your family made MacLeod land their home. Few humans remain in the clan. Those who do struggle to keep the farms going, but Uven expects much for nothing.”
“He always did.”
“I did not see it.”
“Just as you refused to see the way he treated his daughter. Does she still live?” There had been times Shona thought the other girl would not survive her father’s foul temper.
“She does. She escaped and came here seeking refuge.”
“Was she granted it?”
“Aye.”
“Of course. She is Chrechte, is she not?”
“Nay. Uven’s first wife, his true mate, was human.”
“So am I.”
“When a human and a Chrechte mate, the children of their union have as much chance of being born fully human as Chrechte.”
“Regardless, if you knew this about Uven’s first wife, how could you believe him that I was not your true mate?”
“I didn’t know until later.”
Did she believe him? Shona did not know. Too many lies had been spread over her like the honey of truth, leaving her exposed to the beasts drawn to their sweetness.
Shona took Eadan’s hand and began the walk back to the keep. “I am glad Mairi found refuge. Perhaps she will even find joy here.”
“She is mated, to a Chrechte healer. They are on Balmoral Island at present. She is training with an old seer of the clan.”
“She has the sight?” Shona had always believed such gifts myths.
Now she knew some myths had more truth than what she had always taking as verity.
“She does,” Caelis confirmed.
“As does Ciara,” Thomas added with atypical timidity. “The Sinclair laird’s daughter. You met her last night.”
“I remember.” Maintaining her civility with Thomas was no easy task.
“She believes Eadan has it as well.”
Shona gripped her son’s hand tightly, not willing to exhibit lack of belief in his dreams as she had in the past. “Then perhaps she will help him learn to use his gifts.”
Eadan smiled brilliantly up at Shona, making her attempt at understanding worth the effort. “She told me the dreams are strongest when they are about something important.”
“Like your true father.”
“My lord would not have accepted my wolf,” Eadan said with wisdom beyond his five years.
“I am sure you are right.”
“Hiding your true nature from your parent is a painful thing,” Thomas said in a subdued tone.
Shona cast him a sidelong glance. His shoulders were stooped in dejection.
She could no more help the words that came out of her mouth than the love she felt for friends who had found her as unworthy of truth as her parents. “I told your sister not thirty minutes past, your father is a stupid, vain man, not worthy of either of you.”
Thomas jerked his head in acknowledgment but said nothing.
“We don’t know what it means to be Chrechte other than to keep our wolves the most closely of guarded secrets,” Audrey offered in a voice broken with emotion.
“Then it is a good thing you came to the Highlands where, apparently, others like you are abundant.” Shona’s tone sounded flat, even to her own ears.
With another oddly concerned glance at Shona, Caelis shrugged. “Not abundant, but there are packs in several of the clans.”
“Uven’s favored are many.”
“The MacLeod clan is an exception. The lairds of that clan have been focused on increasing the Faol population for generations, since the first pack joined the clan. Uven has taken that dedication even more seriously than his predecessors.”
“Why?” she asked, only vaguely interested in the reply.
They had reached the keep and the noise of the great hall prevented her hearing the reply, if indeed Caelis made one.
And Shona could not make herself care. Too many thoughts and emotions warred for supremacy inside her head and heart, the cacophony so great inside her, the bustling great hall seemed peaceful by comparison.
Looking around at banquet tables filled with soldiers and other clan members breaking their fast, Shona had no hope of distinguishing which were Chrechte, and which like her, were human. She hadn’t even known her son was one.
Was not even sure it mattered to her if any of the many seated here were humans who were something more. The ones who had mattered, the ones she might have expected to reveal this strange new world to her, had held back their knowledge.
Even her own son had known, through his dreams, what he was. He, at least, she understood fully holding back the knowledge. Shona had already unknowingly revealed her lack of belief in his dreams. And unlike his father, Eadan did not yet have the ability to prove the fantastical claims.
Part of her, that spark of mother love that never went out, was amazed by her son’s belief not only in the dreams, but in himself. Eadan had faith the likes of which Shona had lost the day Caelis repudiated her.
She hadn’t stopped believing in the goodness of others that day, but she’d stopped believing in herself. Shona could not trust her own judgment, nor could she be absolutely sure of her own value.
She wanted to believe she’d been worth more than to be used and discarded, but her own parents had made it clear she’d lessened herself in their eyes. And the one person she’d loved and trusted above all others had betrayed her completely.
Perhaps if theirs had been a new love affair, Shona would not have questioned her own worth so strongly. But she and Caelis had grown together in the same clan.
She’d fallen in love with him at such a young age, she could barely remember a time when just the sight of him did not make her heart take on a faster beat.
But he’d hidden this amazing side to himself from her that whole time. And her father, who had kn
own of the Chrechte, had as well.
To discover the two people she had let into her heart, who were not her own children, in the last six years had also hidden this secret from her hurt so deeply, the wound resided in her soul.
All the people in her life she would have thought would consider her worth the confidence had judged her lacking.
Except her son. Shona would never fault her son for hiding from her the nature that despite his dreams would have been more mystery than comprehensible to the five-year-old boy.
But her friends were adults, her parents had had the wisdom of age and Caelis had been her beloved. Young yes, but not a child.
Not even as young as Thomas was now.
All three of them—Caelis, Audrey and Thomas—kept casting her sidelong glances. Looking for what, she did not know. She had naught to give them.
No words of wisdom, or even condemnation. Surely they were not seeking some kind of absolution?
They’d all proven beyond doubt that her regard meant less to them than their other concerns, whatever those particular concerns might be.
Ignoring the glances and even first Audrey’s and then Caelis’s attempt to take her hand, Shona walked through the great hall in a fog of pain that dulled everything around her.
There were places saved for all of them at the laird’s table and Caelis led them there through the noisy and boisterous soldiers.
“Is that the English lady?” someone called out. “She’s too pretty to be Sassenach.”
“Put her in clan colors and she’ll be pretty enough,” another said.
Normally such comments would cause her to blush hotly and mayhap even laugh. Today, they swirled around her with no more substance than the mist.
Laughter followed, until it was abruptly cut off and she looked to where Caelis stood, a low growl rumbling in his chest, his countenance like thunder. “Shona is mine,” he snarled.
One soldier, close enough to Shona to touch—only because they had paused near the bench where he sat—paled and jumped back, nearly falling off the bench to put distance between himself and her.
“You’re making a spectacle of yourself,” she hissed. “Stop.”
And suddenly that embarrassment she’d thought she was too preoccupied by emotional hurt to feel? It was right there, climbing up Shona’s cheeks and making her eyes sting, it was so acute.
“I am making the truth known.”
Did she truly need to spell it out for him? “You are embarrassing me.”
“It shames you to be acknowledged as my mate?” he demanded, sounding thoroughly offended.
She wanted to shout at him, to demand by what right did he have to be offended, even if that had been the case. Which it was not.
But the only thing she could imagine making the current situation even more untenable would be to allow this exchange to degenerate into a public row.
“I’m embarrassed to be the center of attention.” If that was not a good enough explanation for him, she feared she did not have the wherewithal to maintain civility. And ’twould not be Caelis bothered by that fact, she was sure.
She’d spent a little over five years as a baroness, having it drilled into her by her husband and parents that she must comport herself with decorum at all times.
The Scottish lass who grew up in the southernmost part of the Highlands would have laughed at the strictures she’d not only endured but embraced in the last five years. That lass had hidden deep in Shona’s heart when shame was cast upon her by her well-loved parents at the realization that Shona carried Caelis’s child.
Caelis glared at the soldiers closest to her and then turned that frown on Shona, though his features softened somewhat when his arresting blue eyes fell on her. “You are my mate.”
“I have never once denied it.” Which was more than he could say.
“Caelis!” the Sinclair laird bellowed. “Get you and yours over here. I’m hungry and Abigail has said I will wait to eat until my guests are seated.”
Lady Sinclair frowned. “I did not know how much bellowing I missed when I was deaf. It almost makes me wish for the days gone by.”
“You don’t mean it.” The laird lifted a now crying infant from her mother’s arms and cuddled the wee babe close. “There now, sweet girl. All is well. Your father’s voice isn’t sufficient reason for all this fuss, now is it?”
“It is when he uses it at such volume,” Lady Sinclair said with asperity.
But the infant quieted, gurgling up at her father.
Shona did not understand why Caelis did not sit immediately when they reached the head table, but then she noted the arrested expression on her former beloved’s face.
He watched the laird and the babe with such a look of naked longing, Shona’s heart was touched even through her fog of pain.
Whatever she might believe of the words he’d shared the night before, she could not doubt that Caelis would always treasure Eadan.
Shona allowed Caelis to tuck her into a seat across the table from Lady Sinclair and did not duck away when he leaned close. She felt sure whatever he meant to say, she did not want the others overhearing.
Sure enough, he whispered in an emotion laden voice, “I missed Eadan’s and Marjory’s babyhoods, but I will be there for the next one.”
Chapter 10
Rejoice the gifts given through the sacred stones as blessings, not birthrights.
—CAHIR TRADITION
He took his own seat on the bench beside her, putting Eadan to his right and leaving the spot to her left open for Audrey and Marjory. Thomas rounded the table and took a seat across from Eadan beside the laird’s sons.
In no mental condition to deal with Caelis’s certainty that they would be a family, Shona simply ignored him. “Good morning, Lady Sinclair. Your daughter is beautiful.”
“Thank you.” The Sinclair lady looked fondly at the babe in her husband’s arms and then let that gaze move to encompass all her children, including Ciara, who was seated to her left. “I am a very blessed woman.”
“You are indeed.”
Lady Sinclair’s smile was near blinding in its happy intensity. “Did you sleep well, Lady Heronshire?”
Discovering a bit of that Scottish lass still dwelling in her deepest heart, Shona felt the stiffness of the address and didn’t like it besides. “Please, call me Shona.”
“And you must call me Abigail. To be honest, one of the things I miss least about England is the stuffy habit of lord-and lady-ing everyone.”
“Your clan calls you lady.”
“It sounds different coming from them.”
Shona was shocked that in her current state she could find the mundane amusing, but she heard herself laughing softly if briefly at Abigail’s claim. It was all too easy to understand.
She used to compare life in England to Scotland all the time and in most cases, had drawn a similar conclusion: things done the same way did not carry the same impact. No matter how hard she had worked to change herself so that she had a place there, for the sake of her children and parents, Shona had never felt as if she belonged in that oh-so-civilized country to the south.
She had not been happy, though she’d found a measure of joy in motherhood. She had done her best to be content with her lot in life, even if her heart cried nightly for what it could not have.
But ultimately, Shona had never felt safe, or at home in England as she had returning to her homeland, even on the run from her former husband’s evil son. “I do not think I will miss anything about England.”
“You did not want to leave Scotland?”
Shona shrugged. “My desires had naught to do with my father’s choices.”
“I understand.” The expression in Abigail’s eyes said the other woman truly did, too.
“Becoming a mother made it more difficult, not easier to understand my father’s lack of love toward me,” Shona admitted.
Caelis made a sound of disagreement as did Shona’s friends, but she disrega
rded them all.
Abigail’s brown eyes glowed with saddened understanding. “It was the same for me.”
“I doubt most sincerely you did something so grievous as to shatter your parents’ illusions of your worth,” Shona felt compelled to say.
“You are wrong. My mother and stepfather held me in no value at all because I could not hear.”
“What do you mean? You hear just fine.” At least it seemed so to Shona.
“I do now. I didn’t then. I had a fever when I was a child. It took my hearing and with it my parents’ regard.”
“But that was not your fault!”
Abigail smiled, showing that the old pain might eventually let go of Shona as well. “No, it was not, but they were ashamed of me all the same.”
“I am sorry.” In that moment, Shona felt a kinship to Abigail that went deeper than place of birth or life circumstance.
“It brought me to Talorc and the family I share with him, so I cannot regret my past.”
“You are a strong woman.”
“She is at that,” Talorc said with great pride in his tone.
Shona found herself smiling at him.
He returned the gesture, his grin growing when Caelis shifted beside her.
She looked up to her right and saw that the MacLeod soldier had a fierce frown on his face. She could not imagine what had him upset this time.
So, again, she opted to simply ignore him. She pointed out the obvious, but what still confused her. “You are no longer deaf.”
“A miracle.”
“Saints be praised.”
“The One who made them, to be sure.”
Shona nodded, satisfied at least that her own pain had not made her entirely oblivious to the feelings of others. “I am very glad you found your happiness.”
“I am more suited to life here, though I never would have believed it before I was sent to marry a stranger.”
Shona, who had some experience with that, shuddered. “Not all matrimony arranged by one’s parents turns out congenial.”
“A congenial marriage is a blessing all in its own right, no matter what led to it, love or politics.”
