The Chieftain's Curse

by Frances Housden

  Morag pretended not to notice Nhaimeth slowly reach out to Astrid and swiftly draw his hand back without the touch he obviously craved. Tears ran down his fat cheeks. “Is she cold?”

  “Not too much. Don’t be frightened Nhaimeth. She can’t hurt you. She can’t hurt anyone.”

  “I’ve known her longer than anyone living on this God’s earth. She never hurt me, never dreamt of it. Perhaps my tears are for myself, for now she is dead, I’m entirely alone.”

  “Ah, I understand. It can be lonely even in the midst of all the people inhabiting the castle. However, though I’m a stranger to Cragenlaw myself, should you need a friend, I will stand by you. Never fear.”

  “You sound very like my Lady. That is what she did—made me her Fool against her father’s wishes, but that’s a tale for another day. The McArthur will be here soon, and I must leave.” And leave he did while Morag got on with the task of making Astrid look lovely.

  Finished, she straightened her back, rubbing it with the heel of her hand as she bent over the body and began to fold the shroud Astrid would wear. At first, she thought she was dreaming as a haunting wail drifted in through the narrow slits in the walls of the keep. Then she realised a lone piper had begun playing the pibroch high above the castle. From the roof of the keep the keening twist of sound swirled into the Chieftain’s chamber as the piper played a lament for the dead. Morag clasped her hands to her breast, dropping to her knees on the floor. Her emotions stirred by the music, she began to weep.

  To mourn the father she’d never said a proper farewell to before running from the Moor whose hand guided Doughall’s. And she grieved for the father’s love she’d lost far too soon, eleven years before he died or, as she was positive, was murdered.

  She had wondered time and time again how her life had gone so awry. There was but one answer.

  Lust.

  A sin, so she’d been told while her father poured heated recriminations on her head. The same call to nature might be said to have taken the lives of Euan’s wife and baby.

  Others might argue the point, but she was in no doubt.

  She might just as well have handed Euan a knife. Let him kill Morag, daughter to Baron Farquhar of Wolfsdale, since there was no avoiding the truth of the matter. The McArthur had ruined her life. Although it had taken her brother Doughall to drive her away from the home she’d loved.

  After her father’s death, she had known there would be no stopping her brother. Before then, Doughall didn’t have that much daring.

  It was fear, not courage that had sent her scurrying to the farthest boundary of Wolfsdale lands. After hearing from Rob what the Moor had attempted, persuading him to desert the only home they had known had been simple. Fleeing, with little more than the clothes they stood up in hadn’t been easy, but it had been imperative.

  She was thankful for the foresight that had cautioned her to put by every piece of coinage she could lay hands on—copper as well as silver.

  The coins had kept them alive on their travels, for she had little to barter. There were but a few left to jingle at the bottom of her purse. No matter what happened, Cragenlaw was the end of her road.

  Her tears ceased flowing, though the notes of the lament still pulled at her heartstrings. She rubbed the flat of her hands over her wet cheeks, drying her palms on the front of her tunic before she noticed Euan looming over her.

  She lifted her gaze, but it was as if she didn’t exist, he had eyes only for Astrid.

  Weariness roughened his voice as his glance flickered downward. “My thanks to you, Morag of Roslyn. She looks beautiful, at peace. If there is a heaven, as she believes, Astrid will surely be one of the angels.”

  As a statement, it needed no answer, yet the throat-clearing that came from behind Euan barked like a reprimand. She got up off her knees to peer around Euan’s bulk and saw the priest cross himself—a scold if ever she recognised one.

  Euan would have none of it. “Do your job now, priest,” he growled, his accent flattened with suppressed anger, “Give them absolution.”

  “How can I? My lady can no longer confess her sins, and the baby has yet to be baptised,” the priest clutched at the religious regalia, bright atop his black robes, as if he expected Euan might rip them from him. Stammering, he snivelled as he stuttered his excuse. “I-i-it is beyond my p-power.”

  “I do not care! In Cragenlaw, mine is the power that matters” Euan’s thick eyebrows shaded the fire that flared behind his eyes. “The lack is in you, little man.”

  By the priest’s horrified expression, the flames he glimpsed were hellfire, and his jaw dropped as, in contrast, Euan’s voice iced over. “You should have been here for her.”

  The priest backed away. “Childbirth is no place for a man of my calling.”

  The McArthur’s lip curled. “My wife believed in your God and, as his envoy, you let her down.” He reached out and pulled the priest’s hand from the vestment it clutched tight. In a show of strength, Euan uncurled the priest’s smooth fingers, and stretched his own over them making a comparison. “Look, do ye see? My hands were too big, yours might have saved her.”

  Morag watched the priest shudder.

  “But as your wife, my lady was cursed. After what happened to the others, it was inevitable.”

  “All the more reason—” she chimed in, forgetting her place, and then bit her lip. It was hard to keep quiet, to act like a servant and forget her upbringing when she witnessed an example of man’s selfishness.

  “This lass has the right of it. The least you could have done was waited nearby for my call. Instead, what did you do? You cowered in that room behind the chapel that you call a cell. Astrid’s father will not be amused. He had you accompany her to tend to her immortal soul, and you failed. This is your chance. Remedy your mistake or face both Erik the Bear’s wrath and mine.”

  It became obvious to Morag that the priest was not completely foolish. Book in hand, the priest began obeying Euan’s orders without delay, taking even less time over the baby than he had its mother. Morag found she didn’t care. She was happy to see the priest duck out of the door.

  Soon, it would be morning, and she had no doubt that if it wasn’t for the tree barricading the way out, he’d be running past the gatehouse and down the causeway as fast as his little legs would take him, before Euan had a chance for second thoughts.

  When she turned, Euan held his son in his arms, looking down into the face that appeared to be slumbering, as all good babies should. He lifted his eyes and caught her staring. She couldn’t drag her gaze away from the pain she saw.

  She needn’t have worried, Euan’s sole interest centred on his son, not the unknown maid who had trudged out of the storm. He murmured low, his voice soft and caring as he touched the little face. “He looks just like his brothers.”

  The words pierced Morag with shock as her gaze encompassed the baby in his arms, and knew he spoke nothing less than the truth.

  Euan looked straight at her, and this time he held her gaze. Her heart pounded against her breastbone, but eased when it became apparent his thoughts weren’t of her. He let loose a sigh of pain that sounded as if dragged from his soul.

  She found an echo of the sigh trembling inside her own being.

  Then, in a sudden revelation, he spoke of beliefs as old as Cragenlaw, from the days when it had been settled by the Picts. “It’s as if the Green Lady will keep having him born until I get it right. In truth, I’m not certain I can face it again.”

  He gave a slight shudder, swiftly shrugged off, as if the weight of his future balanced on his shoulders.

  Immediately, he pulled himself up, shedding the misconception he had ever appeared vulnerable. His chin jutted, hardened as, without realising, he stated her own predicament. “However, some of us aren’t given a choice. My clansmen depend on me not to leave them at the mercy of the likes of Erik the Bear, my son’s grandfather.”

  He put the baby in its mother’s arms with a pat on its he
ad and said, “Wrap them tight with the linen bindings, so they won’t come loose. I’ll be but a moment.”

  By the time she was done, with Mhairi hovering and offering advice, Euan was back with a large hide under one arm, which startled Morag. When he rolled it out on the floor, she realised it was lined with grey wolfskins. Her father, the Baron, would have gone into the earth in a simple linen shroud, but Euan cautiously wrapped his family in furs and deer hide then placed them back on the bed. It was then she became aware that this was his way of showing them the last bit of care and respect—and, yes, love—that they would find in this earthly world. He did it quietly and with dignity and made Morag rethink her opinion of him.

  As dawn broke over the sea, Euan left his apartments with Mhairi at his heels while Morag bundled up the bloody bed covers and placed them in a sack to be burned.

  Had it only been a day since she and Rob crossed the causeway with the storm on their heels and lightning cutting the clouds like Neptune’s trident. With all that had happened since then, it felt like two lifetimes.

  She hadn’t placed the afterbirth with the covers to be disposed of, though Mhairi had been disapproving when she lifted it into an empty pail and hid it from sight with a cloth. She would put it somewhere out of sight and, when the time came, she would see to that part of the ceremony herself. Rob would surely be willing to add a little muscle to help her bury the afterbirth under a tree.

  Before she could put thought to deed, a small, plump. childlike hand reach out to take the pail from her and she heard Nhaimeth say, “I’m the one should help you with that. Barring Euan, there are few has more right.”

  She couldn’t hide her surprise. Her mind juggled a hundred reasons searching for an explanation, but before she gave her curiosity sway, Nhaimeth said, “Don’t ask, and I won’t have to lie. Just believe me.”

  His wide mouth split in the travesty of a smile that didn’t match the tears coursing down his face. “There are those that would kill me should I reveal my story, and since Euan’s likely driven off the priest, you surely wouldn’t want me to meet my maker un-shriven.” Morag understood the need to keep secrets and simply replied, “I’ll take your word for it.”

  That afternoon, Morag looked out the deep slit in the tower wall. From that height she could see men at the end of the spit, Euan among them, chopping the fallen yew tree. She shuddered at the thought that it had almost crushed her and Rob as they raced through the wind and rain to the gatehouse.

  As the yew was reduced in size, shorn of branches and greenery, she espied in the distance a glitter of pale watery sunshine reflecting off armour.

  Her first reaction was to hide, certain Doughall had found her, then huffed a sigh of relief on recognising the colours flying overhead weren’t her family’s.

  No, Erik the Bear and his men had arrived.

  Chapter 5

  As if to mock Euan, the flooding had taken but a day to disperse under a blazing sky. Dragging warm air in a long stream up his nose and deep into his lungs, he grimaced, teeth clenched in a fierce snarl. The effort flattened his lips, turning them down at the corners. In his hands, the huge axe arced through the air, blazing a trail of reflected fire from a sun that shone bright and hot.

  Had the weather behaved this well the day Astrid’s pains began, the enormous tree would have stood proud, instead of dragging up its roots and smashing its weight into the road at the end of the causeway. Nor would the normally placid burns have flooded their banks as if on a spiteful whim, their aim to thwart the midwife’s passage to Cragenlaw. Against all logic, he argued with himself that on another day Astrid would not have died, yet in the distance he heard the gods laugh.

  With his strength behind it, the blade took a bite from the tree with a vicious thunk, no less satisfying than if wielded in battle against flesh and bone. A fitting punishment had the target been the hag at fault for tumbling his world arse over tip, so much so, that he had it in his mind to blame her for his father’s death as well.

  Iain McArthur had died too soon, still young enough to have fathered another son or two if he had been able to get over the loss of Euan’s mother, but then he’d already had a son.

  Euan visualised the hag’s lined face, saw it showing the passage of years since the day she cursed him. The image shimmered between him and the rough axe-bitten bark. He swung once more, this time aimed at the image of a self-righteous priest. A rogue, Euan decided, a scoundrel without a skerrick of humanity who, nonetheless, pretended to represent God. A man easy to condemn but, because of his calling, impossible to touch.

  Euan’s battleaxe swung again. His forearm glistened darkly with sweat swiped from his brow. It coated the crisp hair as he attempted to avert the stinging flow blinding him.

  Minutes later he wished he had been blinded. He looked up and over the damage he and his men had done to the trunk and recognised the banner of Astrid’s father.

  Cragenlaw had visitors—usually not an unwelcome event, yet one he now dreaded.

  Euan had already travelled this road twice in his lifetime, a journey with which he was far too familiar and had hoped never to take again. Though he abhorred courtesy duty forced upon him, it made no odds. He was the McArthur. It was hardly fitting to let an underling convey the bad news to Erik. In all the years Euan had known Comlyn, the man never changed. His weathered face, all grey-brown beard and whiskers blended into a bearskin fashioned as a cloak that added width to already broad shoulders.

  They said he had killed the bear himself, squeezed it to death with the thick muscles that banded the length of his arms. It was also said he had the scars to prove it.

  Euan would never dare ask, having no desire to see his own skin draped around Erik the Bear’s shoulders, since Comlyn had always been known as a man of uncertain temper.

  He was the one chieftain Euan never quite knew how to take. Would his rough nature shrug off the death of his daughter, or had Astrid really been his favourite, as he had claimed.

  It would do Euan no favours to make excuses, to remind the laird that Astrid had fallen victim to the very curse that Erik the Bear had laughed off as nonsense. Astrid had been an innocent victim, joined to Euan the Cursed in holy wedlock.

  Keeping his jaw locked, Euan dug his axe deep into the trunk where it held, providing a step to assist him to the top. Arms akimbo, he stood astride the trunk and waited while the assemblage of horsemen approached. Erik never travelled without a coterie of mounted housecarls. Knights, the English liked to call them, but it wasn’t his entourage that made the Laird of Comlyn feared. You were either for Erik or agin him.

  Or, like Euan, of equal or higher strength and consequence.

  The wind moulded the kilted plaid to his thighs, cooling his skin. Held only by the silver clan pin that had belonged to his father, and his father before him, the end of his plaid blew in a stream behind him.

  A loud cheery “Hooroo” leapt the distance between Euan and Erik as, teeth bared in a grin, the laird of Comlyn hailed him, circling his mace above his head.

  A mood that was certain to change.

  Erik reined in the dun-coloured destrier he rode, a mere arm-span from the place where Euan now hovered on the trunk’s rough bark. Their eyes met and held—Erik, one hand on the bridle to steady the head of the big dun, the other stretched out to the McArthur, his son-in-law.

  Comlyn was a bulky silhouette against the sun, made larger by the bear skin, clawed feet hanging either side of the carved gold torque around his neck.

  Euan grasped his forearm below the elbow, as did Erik in return, his smile gone. The pressure in the McArthur’s hand increased, driven by emotion few men dared show. “The news is bad.”

  “Astrid, my bonnie daughter?”

  “Dead.”

  “And the baby?”

  “Him an all, a braw big lad, one we would have been proud of.”

  Erik looked over his shoulder, his thoughts hidden by whiskers and beard, but clawed feet quivered either side of
the gold torque which had lost some of its shine. “I want this tree out of my way, make shift and help McArthur’s men.”

  When he turned back to Euan there was a flare to his nostrils that looked as if something bad had crept over his moustaches. His eyes were hard as he growled, “You and I have to talk, McArthur.”

  “That’s as it should be. I’ll make sure preparations are made fitting for a visit from Erik, Laird of Comlyn; and being that the occasion is one like to stir high emotions, I’ll ask your men to leave their weapons at the gatehouse. However, I wouldn’t insult Astrid’s father by including him in that ban.”

  Euan turned, leapt to the foot of the spit, and strode up the narrow causeway, leaving Erik spluttering, “Christ’s wine, McArthur, we have an alliance.”

  He and the Laird of Comlyn had had an alliance, but that ended with Astrid’s death.

  “Murderer!” The curse sounded all the more deadly for its seeming lack of maturity. Nhaimeth scrabbled up to his perch, wedging his short body into a crenel on the west tower. From there he could watch Erik. For as long as he could remember—as long as he could remember living—he had hated the man.

  At what age did a child become cognisant of the injustices done him? Today, if anything, he hated him more. An emotion he hadn’t thought possible.

  Comlyn sat astride his mount, issuing commands to his housecarls. The gaily bedecked horsemen flaunting their consequence in gold and silver had dismounted. In the company of more plebeian warriors, they added their weight to ropes looped through the roots. Hand over hand they tugged the trunk, now split asunder, back into place, because Erik said so. God protect him who dared let loose the sigh that sent it tumbling back into the road.

  Although, he couldn’t hear, Nhaimeth knew Comlyn of auld, knew the black oaths that spilled easily from Erik the Bear’s mouth, salting the air with every livid breath.

  On the other hand, Graeme went about his business more pragmatically, bent harvesting yew wood for his bowyer. Such was his reputation as a man to be reckoned with, he need only issue a quiet order and the men in his command hurried to do his bidding.