by Suz deMello
Kieran was all that and more.
He turned and, seeing her, came to their bed still holding the strip of linen. He passed it around her neck and used it to draw her close. “Good morrow, wife.”
“Good morning, sir.” She strove for a demure tone. “And how did you sleep?”
“Well enough.” He tugged her closer and kissed her forehead, then her cheek, then her lips.
“Umm.” She kissed back, then rubbed her face against his newly shaven cheek. She’d enjoyed his beard but liked him smooth as well. She pulled away to regard him and stretched her arms over her head, pleased to see Kier’s dark, intent gaze fixed on her breasts as they lifted.
“Ah, ye’re bonnie.” He dropped the linen and cupped them just as Elsbeth entered the room. With a squeak, she darted back into the dressing area.
Lydia giggled as Kier shouted with laughter. “Lassie, lassie.” He hastened to the dressing room. “If ye flee every time my wife and I touch, ye’ll be hidin’ all day long.” Lydia covered her breasts as he came back leading the maid.
Elsbeth looked at the floor, seeming to scrutinize the planks. “Yes, milaird.”
“Ye’ve no reason to be afeared,” he told her, picking up a shirt. “Now help milady dress for breakfast.”
“The green robe a la Française, Elsbeth,” Lydia said. A more comfortable style than the panniered gowns she’d worn in England and Edinburgh, it featured loose back pleats that fell from the neckline but lacked a stomacher. “And a scarf for my neck.”
When she’d been dressed, Kieran handed her a round silver brooch. “Here’s something for ye, wife.”
“Thank you.” Smiling, she examined it closely. A stag’s head surrounded by elaborate filigree, similar to the carvings she’d seen on the Celtic crosses. “’Tis quite handsome. Is this our clan’s badge?”
“Aye, it is.” He used it to fasten the scarf that Elsbeth had brought, then tucked her arm into his.
Lydia had been too tired the night before to observe the fortress’s layout. Now she noted that the Laird’s Tower, in which they resided with some of their servants, was separate from the Garrison Tower that held the kitchen and the eating hall on its lower floor, with the armory and select warriors housed above. “A neat plan,” she told Kieran.
“Aye, it lessens the danger of fire destroying our home and hurting the bairns, when we have them.” His smile was laden with promise.
A tingling expectation shot through her limbs. “Who else lives in our tower?”
“Your maid and just a few other family. Euan and Dugald live above and there are storerooms also.”
She didn’t say so, but was happy that neither Moira nor Grizel lived in their home.
On their way to the Garrison Tower for breakfast, she saw that each of the three towers, including the Dark Tower, were connected by colonnades abutting the courtyard and linked above by battlement-trimmed walkways that functioned as lookouts. Sea-mist shrouded the fortress, softening the castle’s stony edges, and she wondered if she’d ever see the sun again.
Passing by the guards, she entered the Garrison Tower with Kieran holding her elbow. The aromas of baking bread and frying meat overwhelmed her and her belly gave an unladylike rumble. She felt her cheeks redden, but he laughed and took her directly into the tower’s Great Hall, which, with the kitchen, occupied the ground floor.
“’Tis a newish addition, the kitchen,” he said. “P’raps fifty years old or so. More or less.”
“Ah,” she said. “Newish.”
“And the hall has been altered a time or two.”
Long tables lined with stools stretched the hall’s length. A massive open fireplace dominated the center of the longest wall. A steaming cauldron sat on the hearth, with a servant ladling out bowls of oat porridge and handing them to the guards.
One table was placed on a dais a step or two above the rest. The laird’s high table? Her breath stuck in her throat.
Good heavens. It was like being a queen. The weight of her new role struck her and she swayed in Kier’s grasp.
“Steady, now,” he murmured in her ear. “The clansmen are watching ye. They’re always watching to see signs of weakness in us. Our confidence is their strength.”
She straightened her spine and lifted her head. She was a Swann, member of a family whose blood was nobler than that of the Hanoverian royals. She could do this. She paced by Kieran’s side, wondering if a gracious smile was enough or if she ought to attempt a wave. Instead, she imitated what her husband did.
The hall was warm and she unpinned the scarf she’d arranged to hide the marks Kier had left on her throat the night before. He’d been deliciously fierce…
She wasn’t prepared for the gasps and outright finger-pointing.
“Good heavens,” she said to Kieran. “What’s wrong? Is there a smut on my nose, or is my hair sticking up?”
He grinned. “They’re looking at your neck.”
She promptly replaced the scarf. “Have we no privacy?”
“Very little. That’s what being the laird’s consort is about. You belong to the clan, now.” He seated her at the high table, where carved chairs awaited them. “Cannae ye manage it? For ye must, ye know.”
“Of course,” she said, putting on her best regal mien.
He laughed. “Elsbeth, take yourself some provender and sit.” He nodded at a stool near Lydia’s chair.
A servant approached bearing plates. Baked bannocks and fried sausage, hot and aromatic. Lydia ignored the clan’s whispers and dug in with an appetite.
Every meal was a revelation. She’d been given the impression that the Highlands were poor and was surprised at the amount and variety of food available. All manner of fish and whelks from the sea, plus game from the surrounding mountains. Occasional mutton from an elderly sheep. Herbs, fruit and vegetables both cultivated and wild. In midsummer the clan ate well and focused on stockpiling food for the winter. Meat and fish were smoked, vegetables, fruit and herbs dried. In the lee of the castle, silted fishponds were dug out and replenished. Oats and barley were coaxed from the stony earth wherever possible. The additional foodstuffs Kieran had purchased were properly stored.
Most nights Lydia slept like the dead, given that her days were so full. After a breakfast of oat porridge or bannocks with fried sausage, she’d meet with Fenella to learn Gaelic and discuss matters relating to running castle and clan. She rarely saw Kieran during the day because he hunted and, with his men, patrolled the clan borders. During the afternoon she visited crofters’ huts to cement her relationship with the clanspeople and, with Fenella’s help, ensured that they had everything they needed.
She met old Mhairi, mother to several clanswomen and grandmother to Moira and Grizel, who were cousins. Mhairi was the clan’s herbalist, midwife and general healer. Lydia gathered that Mhairi did a good job, for few babies or mothers died in childbed.
“’Tis because our lairds protect us.” Fenella poured an infusion for the three of them.
Mhairi rocked and nodded in her chair. “Aye,” the elderly woman said. “And we eat well, from the land and the sea. The mothers and bairns, all are healthy.”
“Do many become ill in the winter?” Lydia sniffed the steam rising from her mug, and detected rose, lavender, honey and a few other flower scents she couldn’t name.
“Aye, well, we have our share of sniffles and sneezes. But we are careful, except for the fishers.” Mhairi frowned.
“The fishers?” She cautiously tasted the brew. Hot but delicious.
“Niall and his cousins, our little fishing fleet,” Fenella explained. “They insist on going out in all weather.”
“I’ll see about that,” Lydia said. “What are the fishponds for if not to feed us when the sea is too rough?”
“The ocean sprites call them, milady,” Mhairi said. “They cannae be stopped.”
Ocean sprites indeed! Lydia stopped her contemptuous snort and instead looked about. The cozy cottage was clean, lacking
the animal odors that she’d been led to expect by her cousin, who had described the crofters’ dwellings as “middens”. Quilts, patchwork and knitted both, adorned simple wooden chairs. Garlands of herbs and garlic were draped over the whitewashed door frame.
She learned quickly to question everything she’d been previously told about the Scots and Highlanders. The English said that the Highlanders were filthy savages. But here, homes were clean, as were their inhabitants. The Highlands were said to be poor. Though she’d seen impoverished villages on her journey north, Kilborn Castle was comfortable and the clan ate well. Highlanders were supposedly ignorant, but her husband had attended university.
Her days were full of new discoveries. So she generally slept well, but on more nights than she liked she was awakened by a cold blast of air flowing through a slit in the bed hangings, and invariably she’d find that her husband was gone.
When she awoke for the fourth time in a week, it was soon enough to reach out and grab his hand. “What troubles you, husband?” she asked.
“Nothing. I’ll be right back.” His tone was evasive, even dismissive. He’d never spoken to her in that manner before.
“You get up night after night. Something’s wrong.”
He sat down heavily and the bed creaked. “I am sometimes wakeful and go to talk with the guards or walk the wall.” He kissed her forehead, cheek and chin—a bit hastily, she thought—before he left.
She lay back in the cooling bed linen. P’raps he referred to the upper castle walk but she wasn’t sure she believed him. That was new, also. New and unsettling. She hadn’t had any reason ever to doubt Kieran’s word. She didn’t now, not really. She couldn’t accuse him of lying to her.
But she knew something was amiss.
Chapter Nine
The next night she awoke alone, Lydia got up and looked for Kieran, wondering what errand would take him from their bed—an errand that he concealed from her. If she saw him in the courtyard or walking the wall, well and good, she’d go back to bed and rest with an easy mind. If not…
Clad only in a nightgown with a plaid thrown over her shoulders for warmth, she slid her feet into a pair of mules and went down to the lower hall. No Kieran. Outside. no Kieran in the courtyard, which was lit softly by torches nearing the end of their fuel. Guards huddled in a cluster across at the Garrison Tower, playing some sort of dice game while they kept watch, but her husband was not among them.
But above and toward the sea, she heard the faint creak of hinges. She looked up to see Kieran step out of a door in the side of the crumbling old keep. Shoulders slumped, he slouched along the upper walkway in her direction and was joined by the castellan, Euan.
Kier’s gait was utterly different from his usual confident stride. Her curiosity building, she reentered their tower and climbed several flights of stairs, went through a storeroom and emerged on the same walkway, staying in the shadow of a battlement.
She was familiar with the way because she also frequently walked the wall for the view or to watch the birds in the moat. No graceful swans as swam the ponds in Surrey, though. These were raucous seabirds of several breeds she couldn’t identify, fighting over whatever edible bits found their way into the moat.
And she could look for hours at the sea below, crashing with mighty waves against the cliff and the castle’s walls, watch the clan’s fishermen pulling their light craft up onto their cove’s small, rocky beach before unloading their catch, smile at their children paddling in the shallows, collecting whelks and shellfish, listen to the cries of gannets and gulls as they floated above.
But she usually walked during the day, most often in the warm afternoons, when the sun occasionally peeked out to light a glittering blue-gray ocean. Now stars gleamed overhead and a waning moon cast shadows made angular and awkward by the crenellated parapet. The night was still but for a slight breeze off the water, which brought snatches of conversation to her ears.
“Did ye find anything tonight?” Euan asked. Or so she thought. The men were a distance away and spoke in a patois of English and Gaelic.
“Nay, just dust and rats.” Lydia heard frustration in her husband’s voice. “I dinnae know if I want to find him or not, ye ken?”
“Aye, I ken.”
“I worry that one day I will end up the same way, alone but for the rats and mice.”
Her heart ached to hear the pain and uncertainty in her husband’s voice, though she didn’t understand the reason. The same way as what?
“Ye are your own man and in control of your fate.” Euan sounded calm and certain. “But have ye told Lady Lydia? About him, about us?”
Him? Who was “he”? Who was “us”? The clan, the family, or just Euan and Kier?
“Are ye mad?” her husband answered Euan. “She was affrighted enough on the way here.”
“Aye, I heard about it. Ye dinnae think she’s suspicious of a man who ripped off the head of his enemy and drank his blood?”
Kieran laughed bitterly. “At least she doesnae suspect the truth. I doubt she’s ever heard the word ‘vampire’.”
Lydia strained her ears. She thought her husband said something like “vespers”, but didn’t understand what evening prayers had to do with a secret her husband was keeping from her. Was it a Gaelic word she didn’t yet understand?
A secret that others knew—possibly many others. Lydia remembered how crofters from neighboring villages had crossed themselves as they’d passed. Kieran had told her to pay them no mind, that up in the Highlands Sassenachs were few and of unsavory, even unholy, reputation.
But how could the Highlanders know she was English? What if he’d deliberately misled her? What if the peasants were afraid of Laird Kilborn and not of his Sassenach wife?
“Have you taken from her?” Euan asked.
Taken what? Lydia wondered.
“Aye. Like the finest whisky, she is. Sweet, but…oh, how she burns. She fires my soul. Intoxicating.”
Her cheeks flamed.
“Have a care,” Euan said.
“I will, I will. Though ’tis hard. She slakes my thirst like no other.” Kieran groaned. “Och, it’s afraid I am. If I lose control, take too much from her, turn her or worse, kill her—”
“Ye willnae,” Euan said while Lydia’s heart stuttered.
Turn her into what? Kill her? Her husband planned to kill her? But he sounded frustrated, even despondent, not desirous of her death.
His thirst? His thirst for her? For sex? For what?
“We’re born, not made,” Euan continued.
“And what was I born?”
“We willnae ken for a long time. Dinnae worry about it now.”
“I am afraid of what I am and what I may become.” Kier sounded miserable.
Lydia was astounded. She’d thought he was happy and hadn’t had any inkling of some hidden sorrow.
“Dinnae fear the change.” Euan touched Kier’s shoulder. “In this way, we protect the clan.”
“Is it worth the cost?”
What under heaven was going on?
She sensed someone by her side and turned. Moira’s catlike green eyes gleamed in the faint light of the tiny candle-stub she carried.
“Ye must wonder,” Moira said without preamble.
Lydia paused. How much should she say? “Yes, I do.”
“The answers ye seek are in that auld keep.” Moira gestured with the candle, which sat in a small but ornate pewter holder. Her red curls floated on the chilly sea breeze.
Lydia shivered. “Milaird forbade me to enter the Dark Tower.”
“Dinnae ye wonder why?”
The woman was so close to Lydia that she could smell the lavender Moira used to keep her plaidie fresh.
After a brief hesitation, Lydia said, “Of course. I’m but human.”
Something strange edged Moira’s chuckle. “I dinnae doubt it.”
An odd statement. “Why should I trust you? You want my husband. I feel your jealousy.”
�
�’Tis true.” Moira shrugged. “The brothers, Kieran and Ranald both, didnae hesitate to take us when they, and we, pleased. Along with the old laird.”
“Do not use his name.” Lydia’s unaccustomed temper burned white-hot.
Moira ignored the command, instead continuing, “We all know what the Kilborns are.”
“What they are? What do you mean?”
“He hasnae told ye, has he? Ask him what happened to his mam.”
“I know what happened to his mother. She died in childbirth.”
“Did she now?” Moira’s mirthless laugh was high and frenzied. Fortunately, the wind blew from the sea to land and didn’t carry the uncanny sound to Kieran and Euan.
“He bites your neck and drinks from ye. Dinnae ye worry that one day he willnae stop?”
Lydia’s brain froze. No, the thought had never occurred to her. Unwillingly, her memory brought forth the sickening sight of her husband slaking his thirst with the MacReiver’s blood.
“He’s quit yer bed night after night…dinnae ye wonder where he goes?”
“Not to you,” Lydia snapped.
“Aye, ’tis true, that is. He takes from ye so often, ’tis a miracle ye’re still able to stand upright. Besotted with ye, he is.”
Moira’s open hostility unnerved Lydia. Were the Kilborn women as wild as the Kilborn men?
And what did she mean by, “takes from ye so often”? “What do you—”
“He goes to the auld keep.” Moira nodded at the two men, who still stood near the ancient door, conversing in low tones. As she left, she flung a final taunt. “Dinnae ye wonder why?”
* * * * *
The next morn, Kier’s footfalls dragged as though he struggled through a marsh rather than the gentle mist that shrouded the way to the Great Hall. He glanced at Lydia and saw that a slender line, probably invisible to anyone but him, had appeared between his wife’s fine, dark brows. A worry line it was, and he continued to study it throughout their mostly silent repast. Something was on the lassie’s mind, and he hesitated to ask her what it might be. What if she asked again about his nocturnal ramblings? What if she saw him slip inside the keep?
