“I…” Harry’s voice caught.
“We left the beach after the moon came up, and went back to the house to sleep,” Dougal said.
Harry reluctantly met her gaze. “We went to the kitchen, to warm our hands at the hearth. The…the fire in the hall had gone out.”
“Did you leave the bag there?” Conall asked, though he already knew the answer. “By the kitchen hearth?”
Mairi’s eyes blazed brighter than the fire. “Well, did ye?”
Harry looked at Dougal, then at her, and shrugged stupidly. “I…I dunno. I canna remember.”
Both scouts fixed their eyes on the body of their kinsman, John, who lay charred and broken on the rock below them. Gerald the piper knelt beside the body and covered it reverently with a plaid. All three wept.
“This is your fault,” Mairi said to Conall between gritted teeth. “Ye allow youths barely off their mother’s teat to swill ale the whole night long while ye’re out debauching women. Is it a wonder to ye, Conall Mackintosh, what happened?”
He stared lamely at John’s draped body. She was right, and her words, backed by the rueful sounds of his men weeping, seared him like a hot brand.
He should have been here. He was responsible.
Not Harry, not Dougal. Him.
Water hissed on burning timbers, raising a waft of steam skyward, choking the acrid air with a damp closeness that made him want to retch. He felt a hand light firmly on his shoulder, and turned to see Rob’s sweat-drenched face looking up at him.
“The fire’s nearly out,” Rob said. “There’s just one wee bit we’ve yet to quench. Alwin Dunbar’s chamber at the back o’ the house, the one ye sleep in now.”
“Let it burn,” Mairi said, and turned her back on them.
A living, swirling mist rolled across the surface of the loch, imparting a ghostly pall to the chill dawn. Mairi stood before the smoking ruins of what had been her father’s kitchen and breathed in a heady draft of damp air tinged with sulfur and wood smoke.
Against her wishes, Conall and his men had saved the house, and in the light of day the damage did not appear nearly as bad as it had last night. The kitchen was destroyed, as was her father’s old chamber, but the great hall stood intact. Part of the roof would need replacing, and there was smoke damage everywhere.
She skirted the smoldering pile of timbers and thatch, and made her way around to the back of the house. Nearly all of the east wall was gone. No matter. No one had lived here for months, save the Chattan, and after they’d gone no one would likely live here again.
She glanced down the hill toward the camp. All was quiet. The Chattan warriors slept. He slept. And all would wake with the sun—all but one. The one they called John. She could see his body, draped in plaids, lying stiff near the center of the camp.
It could have been Kip, or any of her kinsmen.
It could have been Conall.
She gritted her teeth against the bitter taste soiling her mouth. When first she saw the house ablaze, from the lake house window, she’d thought not of Kip, or of any of her own.
She’d thought of him. How could she?
She kicked at a live coal with her bare foot and swore silently under her breath.
Idiots, all of them, to have left the fireworks on the hearth. Who in their right mind…but they weren’t in their right minds. They were drunk, the lot of them.
She glanced briefly at her father’s grave in the garden. Men were all alike. Useless. Irresponsible. She fisted her hands and looked for something to hit.
Then it struck her.
Harry had not been drunk. Nor had Dougal. Aye, Rob had been soused as the traveling priest on feast days, but not the two scouts. She’d seen enough drinking in her day—she glanced again at Alwin’s grave—to know when a man was in his cups.
Her toes dug into the damp, cool earth. What’s this? Hoofprints?
Hoofprints at the back of the house. She knelt and ran a finger along the impression. She knew little of horses, but knew a fresh hoofprint when she saw it. Her gaze was drawn along the cinder pile that had been the rear wall of the house.
All the mounts were tethered in the camp below them. No one had reason to ride along the back of the house. The hill was steep here—aye, nearly a cliff. Her father had designed it that way on purpose, to discourage surprise visits.
She followed the trail of hoofprints until they stopped at the place where there had once been a window, the window of her father’s chamber.
And then she saw it. A footprint. Plain as day.
Something about it troubled her. She knelt for a closer look. ’Twas odd. It couldn’t have been made by any of her clan. They all went barefoot till winter set in, and this was not the print of a barefoot man. The Chattan warriors favored boots, and they were big men, all but Rob. Nay, this was not a boot print. ’Twas more like—
“A slipper!”
Her stomach tightened into a hard ball. She knew what this was—it had to be. Her eyes darted up the craggy hillside, following what she thought would be the most likely path. Rocks, downed limbs, a chute of earth and loose leaves. Higher, higher still, until—
Her breath caught. A lone rider sat motionless at the top of the ridge, wisps of morning mist swirling about him like a sorcerer’s spent magic.
He looked right through her.
“Tang,” she mouthed, and sucked in the lingering fetor of sulfur.
Chapter Ten
The ceremony was mercifully brief.
Conall stood shoulder to shoulder with his kinsmen in a silent circle around John’s draped body. Mist coiled at their feet and swirled and eddied over the warrior’s corpse like a living, breathing shroud. The last bittersweet notes of Gerald’s tribute warbled from the ridge above the camp.
They wept to a man, all save Conall.
He longed to, but held himself in check. His eyes burned dry with a throbbing rawness. He watched as Harry and Dougal and two others lifted John’s body and carried it toward the drummer’s waiting mount.
“’Tis time,” Rob said, and nudged Conall forward.
He wasn’t good at this, not like his brothers were. For the first time, men’s lives depended on the decisions he would make, on decisions he’d already made.
He closed his eyes and a blaze of color seared his lids. Last night he’d ne’er forget. The star-flecked sky, rough timbers grazing bare legs, chill air raked with the stench of burning sulfur, Mairi’s soft and yielding lips. Why in God’s name had he allowed the fireworks?
“They’re ready,” Rob said, and Conall opened his eyes to the flat and somber light of midmorning.
Harry was already mounted. Gerald appeared out of the mist, stowed his pipes in a saddlebag and pulled himself onto his horse.
“Two more shall ride with you,” Conall said to them, “as far as the forest camp. After that, ’tis but a day and a night to Monadhliath. ’Tis Chattan land. You’ll be safe enough. Tell Gilchrist what has happened.”
Harry nodded silently. Gerald’s eyes, glassed from weeping, fixed on the body of his friend. Conall slapped the piper’s mount and the gelding shot forward.
“Godspeed,” he called after them, as the mist sucked them into its cold gray camouflage.
“Come,” Rob said. “We’ve work to do.”
They peered up through the trees at what remained of Dunbar’s house. “Aye,” he said, and followed Rob up the hill. ’Twould be good to break a sweat, busy his hands and his mind.
Together they began to clear away the rubble where the kitchen once stood. One by one, the rest of the Chattan joined them, as did the Dunbars. All but Mairi.
“’Tis no’ your fault, ye know,” Rob said as they hefted a charred timber and half dragged it down onto the beach. “’Twas an accident, plain and simple.”
“One I might have prevented, had I been thinking clearly.”
They heaved the timber onto a pile of rubble from the fire, which would be burned to ash later, on the safety of the beac
h.
“Aye, well I was no’ thinkin’ too clearly myself.”
Conall didn’t want to talk about it. They jogged back up the hill to the house in silence, and he threw himself into the work at hand.
Kip directed a group of children who were busy sweeping piles of ash and small debris into buckets. He’d be grown in no time, Conall thought, as he watched him teach one of the younger lads how to use a broom.
He should have kept an eye on Kip last night. Damn it! He’d purposefully avoided him, and had tried of late to put distance between them so their parting in under a fortnight would be less difficult.
Difficult for whom? He’d miss the lad more than he wanted to admit.
If only he’d joined the celebration sooner, perhaps he might have circumvented Kip’s journey into the wood and the chance meeting with the Chinese. Had there been no fireworks, there would have been no accident and John would still be alive.
“No accident,” he breathed, and hefted another timber onto his shoulder.
Tang had just happened upon Kip on the forest path? Perhaps. Perhaps not. Conall dropped the timber, nearly on Rob’s foot, and ducked under a charred beam into what remained of his sleeping chamber.
“Kip,” he said. “Where exactly did you meet Tang in the wood last night?”
The boy looked up from his work, sifting through ashes for usable items. “At my hunting spot, just south and east o’ the forest camp.”
“Hunting spot?” Kip had never mentioned such a place to him before.
“Aye, where I set my rabbit snares.” He wiped a streak of soot across his brow and grinned. “I check them each evening.”
“Ah, I see.”
Kip’s eyes widened. “But dinna tell Mairi. She’ll skin me alive. She doesna take to me venturing so far on my own.”
“Aye, I suspect she doesn’t.” It seemed innocuous enough. Still, something about the incident did not ring true to him. “This Tang,” he said. “Does he know where you set your snares?”
“Oh, aye.”
“And that you go there each eve?”
Kip nodded.
“Symon,” Rob said from behind him.
Conall glanced back at his friend. “Perhaps.” He wanted to believe it, more than anything. That it was no accident, that Geoffrey Symon was responsible.
Nay. He was responsible, and blaming another for his negligence was a coward’s way out. And yet…
“Kip, where’s Mairi?”
The boy shrugged. “Sleeping, methinks.”
“Sleeping? At this hour?” He narrowed his eyes toward the light in the east, but the sun was too obscured by fog to tell exactly what part of the morning it was. They had all overslept after last night’s disaster.
“I saw her this morning, early,” Kip said. “She told me to stay put, here in the village, and that she was likely to sleep all day since she’d got nary a wink last night.”
“I must speak with her.” Conall stepped over a heap of charred rubble and started down the hill.
“Where are ye goin’?” Rob called after him.
“To the lake house.”
He hurried down the hill into the village and met Dora coming up the path from the beach. She met his gaze but didn’t speak.
“Have you seen Mairi today?” he asked her.
Dora frowned. “Come to think of it, nay.” They both looked out across the water to the lake house, which floated in a sea of thinning mist. “’Tis no’ like her to sleep the day away.”
The skin on the back of his neck pricked. “Aye,” he breathed. “’Tis not.”
In a half-dozen strides he was on the beach. The sun burned a ragged hole through the fog, drenching him in an eerie white light. He hit the pier at a full run, and the floating timbers rolled under his weight.
’Twas no accident.
Symon was behind it. He felt it, knew it, and so did Mairi. He flung wide the door and stepped inside. The crannog was empty, Mairi’s bed unmade. He ran his hand over the fur bedcover—cold as ice.
“Damn her!”
Footfalls sounded on the pier behind him. He whirled toward the sound as Dora skidded to a stop, breathless and rosy-cheeked, in the doorway.
“Her boat’s gone,” she said.
Mairi stepped into the shallows and beached the rowboat next to the standing stone marking the path to the hunter’s camp. If the weather held, she’d be back here by late afternoon and home by supper.
She’d been lucky. The thick ground fog had masked her departure, and now fingers of sunlight burned the morning’s mist from the steely surface of the loch.
She ran a hand over a cool, mossy crevice in the ancient standing stone. Conall had kissed her here, and she recalled the warm taste of him, his passion and his strength.
Better to recall the humiliation she had felt in his arms last night on the pier. Not to mention his derelict and careless behavior. One man was dead, and others injured, though she knew in her heart someone else was to blame.
Geoffrey.
She was certain of it, and took off on foot northwest toward Falmar Castle. The wood was thick here, and what little light penetrated the dark canopy of trees did naught to quell the shroud of fog blanketing the damp ground.
She kept to the path as best she could, watching for odd trees and rock formations, and other landmarks she recognized. She’d made the trip from Loch Drurie to Falmar countless times, since she’d been old enough to walk, and had no fear of losing her way.
Geoffrey would be surprised to see her. Aye, and he’d best have a good explanation for what Tang was doing in the wood last night and this morn.
The path split, one fork heading north toward Chat-tan land, the other west toward Falmar. She lifted her skirts and quickened her pace. Her feet were cold, so damp was the ground. ’Twas time to dig out her winter slippers. Soon the snows would come, as would the trade boats. And then she would be free. Free of Geoffrey, and of Conall. ’Twas as much his fault as Geoffrey’s. He’d provoked him, and Geoffrey was not a man to back down.
Geoffrey wanted the land, and her, and he wanted Conall dead. She’d seen it in his eyes that day in the wood when he’d caught them kissing.
Conall was certain Geoffrey and his men had been watching them, watching the village and the construction. Things had gone missing, and now someone was dead.
That someone could have been Conall.
She stopped in her tracks. “Of course! Why didn’t I see it before?”
It should have been Conall. He slept in her father’s chamber with his men scattered about the rest of the house. If Geoffrey had been watching them, he’d have known that. He also knew that none of the Dunbars, save Walter, frequented the house.
She gripped her skirts tighter and picked up the pace. This was too much. If Geoffrey wanted Conall dead, let him wait and do it somewhere else. ’Twould suit her just fine. Let the both of them kill each other. But for him to have put her clan in danger was unforgivable.
Her blood pumped faster, more from anger than the ridge she now scaled overlooking the Symon demesne. The trees thinned, and with them the mist. She broke out onto a barren, windswept crag and stopped to catch her breath.
Falmar Castle lay in the red-gold valley below, nestled between the bare slate arms of a bluff. The setting afforded the Symons protection on three sides, and a view that stretched for leagues on the fourth.
She started down the hill and knew they’d see her coming long before she arrived.
Dora would have a fit if she knew Mairi had come alone. Dora didn’t trust Geoffrey, perhaps with good reason. Nonetheless, Mairi would see him alone and settle this once and for all. The last thing she needed was someone else’s meddling.
The Symons and the Dunbars had lived in a fragile sort of peace since long before her birth, and regardless of what had happened last night, she was loath to disrupt that. Her clan was in no position to defend itself against enemies. She would not make one now of Geoffrey, yet she could not allo
w this incident to pass undenounced.
By the time she reached the valley floor, a half-dozen mounted warriors thundered toward her down the path leading from the castle. She expected no less, and slowed her pace. In minutes they reached her. She smiled at the men she knew, and nodded politely to the others.
“Mairi Dunbar! What brings ye alone to Falmar?”
“Good morrow,” she said to the young warrior who leaned down to help her mount behind him.
“Are ye hurt? Is something amiss?”
She settled onto the gelding’s back and wrapped her arms around the warrior. “Nay, I’m well, thank ye. But I would see your laird on some business.”
He turned in the saddle and grinned at her. “Ah, business is it? I had hoped ye were here on more gentle matters.”
He was not the only Symon who favored a match between her and Geoffrey. In fact, she was well liked by all the Symons. She respected them and liked them as well. They’d always treated her as one of their own.
It only made her situation more difficult. She wanted Geoffrey as an ally, a friend, but she’d not wed him. Neither would she tolerate his threats or his attacks.
She was in a precarious position, and even as they trotted across the land bridge to the stone-and-timber keep, she wondered what exactly she would say to him.
He’d been her father’s ally, and his only friend at the end of his short life. Though how a friend could sit by and encourage her father to drink himself to death, she could not comprehend.
She recalled Conall’s outwardly jovial demeanor at the celebration last night. Rob had been in his cups, but not nearly as drunk as she’d seen her father on numerous occasions. Conall had kept an eye on Rob’s consumption, and that of the others, as well, and she recalled that she’d not seen him take a drink for himself.
“Mairi, lass!” an old woman called out to her from one of the cottages flanking the keep.
Mairi smiled and waved. The woman had been a friend of her mother’s when Gladys Dunbar was alive.
The warrior guided their mount across the bailey, which teemed with activity, and around to the side of the keep.
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