by Allie Mackay
Whether it was or not, she made good use of it.
Just as she would do justice to her breakfast, even if she wasn’t quite sure what everything was. Determining to find out, she sat at the table, pleased to recognize oatcakes and cheese, while a green-glazed pottery bowl appeared to be filled with mutton stew. Another dish of the same type held what she suspected might be spiced and pickled eels, a delicacy she doubted she’d try. A small crock of honey and a jug of heather-scented ale rounded out the offerings.
Not too shabby, and certainly more edible-looking than some of things her sister Lindsay tried to palm off on her at times, even though just looking at the eels made her feel like gagging.
Her new four-legged friend suffered no such aversion. His scraggly ears perking, and wearing the most hopeful look she’d ever seen on a dog’s face, he pushed to his feet and crossed the room to circle the table, eyeing everything on her breakfast tray as a potential tidbit.
“Okay, Ferlie.” She handed him an oatcake. “You win this battle, but the war’s not over.”
Pasting on a smile for his benefit, she helped herself to one as well, smearing her own with the soft cheese and honey. Unfortunately, despite her best efforts at trying to stay upbeat, waves of ill ease kept sluicing through her, and the odd prickling at the back of her neck increased tenfold just since she’d sat at the table.
Someone really was staring at her.
And she could no longer deny where the sensation was coming from. Not now, sitting so close to the source. Chills running up and down her spine, she stood, her gaze on the tall arched windows.
Whoever—or whatever—was staring at her was out there, beyond the opened shutters.
“Aieeeeeeeeeeeee!” The piercing scream, a woman’s, proved it.
Heart pounding, Kira ran into the window alcove, horror slamming into her when she leaned out the first arched opening to see a woman bobbing in the rough waters beneath Wrath Isle’s deadly perpendicular cliffs.
“Dear God!” She clapped a hand to her throat, disbelief and shock stopping her breath.
The woman thrashed frantically and appeared to have a rope tied around her waist—a rope with dead seabirds dangling from its entire length!
Not trusting her eyes, she leaned farther out the window, but there was no mistake. Even through the scudding mists, she could see that the poor woman was encircled by dozens of seabirds-on-a-rope, their buoyant white bodies keeping her afloat as the swift current swept her out to sea.
“Eachann!” the woman wailed, her voice full of despair. “I canna reach the rocks!”
“Get help! Anyone! Please!” a second voice cut through the morning, louder and deeper. A man’s cry, his terror sounding even greater than the woman’s.
“Hold, lass. I willna let you drown!” he yelled, and Kira saw him then, dashing back and forth along Wrath Isle’s cliff-tops.
Waving his arms and staring her way, he clearly hoped someone at the castle would see or hear and send help. A boat and men to rescue the woman Kira knew instinctively was his wife.
No, she was the man’s life.
His everything, and his anguish seared Kira to the bone.
Waving her own arms, she called to them. “Hang on! Help is on the way!” she shouted, even as she whirled and raced for the door.
She reached to yank it wide, but she needn’t have bothered, for it flew open in her face. Her two guardsmen stood there, hands fisted on their hips and glaring at her.
“Have you lost your wits?” The bigger of the two stared at her as if she’d sprouted horns. “Making a din and ranting like a madwoman. The laird—”
“The laird will have your hide if you allow a poor woman to drown!” Kira gave him an adrenaline-powered shove and streaked down the corridor, shouting as she ran. “Help! Someone get a boat! There’s a woman in the water!”
“Ho! Come back here, you!” The men bounded after her, their pounding footsteps spurring her on. Yanking up her skirts, she careened around a bend in the dimly lit passage, the flapping, oversized cuarans making her clumsy.
“Damn!” she swore when one of them went sailing off her foot. Snatching it, she raced on, but the guardsmen caught up with her, the bigger one grabbing her arm.
“Saints of mercy! That was ill done.” He glowered at her. “Think you we’d no’ aid a drowning woman?”
“If she saw one.” The other man stood panting, fury all over him. “I dinna believe her.”
“Of course, I saw the woman,” Kira insisted, trying to jerk free. “She’ll soon be dead if you don’t stop arguing and go save her!”
The bigger man shot the other a glance. “I’ll no’ stand by and have a woman drown. I say we make haste to look for her.” Hefting Kira off her feet, he tossed her over his shoulder and hurried for the stair tower. “Someone in the hall can keep an eye on this one until we return.”
“She’ll have slipped away by then,” the other scoffed, huffing after them. “No woman within these walls is fool enough to fall off the cliffs.”
“Bah!” the first man disagreed. “She could have slipped on the rocks down at the landing beach. Perhaps one of the laundresses or—”
“No.” Kira twisted in the man’s arms. “She fell from the cliffs of Wrath Isle.”
The man carrying her stopped short. “That canna be,” he said, dropping her to her feet. “No one lives on Wrath Isle. ’Tis a scourged place.”
Kira lifted her chin. “I didn’t see her fall from there, but I know she did. I saw her husband running along the cliff-top. She called him Eachann.”
The big man’s eyes rounded. “Eachann, was it?”
Kira nodded.
The two men exchanged glances. “Would there have been anything else you noted about the woman?” the big one wanted to know. “Something…odd-looking?”
Kira swallowed. She didn’t like the way they were watching her. “The woman had a rope tied to her,” she said anyway. “A rope with dead seabirds attached to it.”
“By the Rood!” The big man jumped back and crossed himself.
The other turned white as a ghost. “I told you there was something no’ right about her!”
“No, please.” Kira looked from one to the other. “You must help the woman. She’ll drown if you don’t.”
“That’s no’ possible.” The big man shook his head. “Eachann MacQueen’s wife already drowned. Her life-rope broke when he lowered her down the cliffs to gather seabirds. Happened nigh onto a hundred years ago. The bards still tell the tale.”
Kira’s blood froze. She should’ve realized she was far-seeing the tragedy. But the woman’s cries had sounded so real, and she’d tasted the man’s terror, alive and coiling around her, squeezing the breath from her.
Somehow, having already gone so far back in the past, she hadn’t expected to catch any glimpses of an even more distant time.
But apparently she’d guessed wrong, and although her two tormentors hadn’t yet said the w-word, their opinion of her was plain to see.
“I am not a witch.” She put up her hands, palms outward. “Please don’t be afraid. I can explain everything.”
The big man crossed himself again and took another step or two backward.
The other snorted. “Aye, and you will, but no’ to the likes of us. ’Tis the laird who’ll want to know how it is you saw something that happened before any of us were even born. Lest you’re indeed a fairy or one of those other creatures we’ve been forbidden to call you.”
“I’m neither,” Kira protested, her eyes flying wide when the man yanked a dirk from beneath his belt and began prodding her down the corridor, away from Aidan’s bedchamber.
“Where are you taking me?” she demanded, scooting along ahead of his jib-jabbing dirk all the same.
Bravado went only so far and hers stopped at a knife edge.
Apparently the two guardsmen’s willingness to speak to her had also ceased. A glance over her shoulder showed them stony-faced and tight-lipped. No
t that she needed any clues as to her destination. They were herding her into a narrow side corridor, a sloping, dank-smelling passage with a small, unpleasant-looking door at its end.
Kira’s heart began to thunder and her mouth went dry.
She’d seen such passageways on her long-ago tour to Scotland and she knew exactly where they always led.
“O-o-oh, please!” Pride forgotten, she dug in her heels and braced her hands against the cold, slime-coated walls. A sharp prick of the dirk to her back got her moving again. “Please don’t take me down there,” she pleaded. “I won’t bother any of you, I promise. Just let me go back to your laird’s room. Please. You won’t even know I’m around.”
One of the men snorted.
The other opened the door and dragged her across its threshold. Mercifully darkness hid the things she knew she didn’t want to see, but the squish-squish beneath her feet was bad enough. Especially since one of them was still bare. As for the scurrying sounds of what could only be rats, she’d just do her best to pretend she hadn’t heard them. Or the drip-drip of what she was sure would be fouled and rancid water.
The smell was blinding.
She shuddered, thinking that now would be a very good time to be zapped out of medieval Scotland.
Instead, she found herself shoved into a pitch-black cell, the heavy-sounding door slamming shut behind her before she could even blink.
“Wait!” She spun around to pound on the door as one of the men slid home the drawbar. “Please listen to me!”
“Och, you’ll be heard soon enough,” one of the men assured her. “As soon as the laird returns from warring.”
“Warring?” The ground dipped beneath Kira’s feet. Medieval warring could take ages. Heaven help her if he didn’t return. “Where did he go? I thought you said he’d be back by evening.”
No answer came.
Panic gripping her, she strained to see through the small hole in the door, but it was impossible. The men were already gone, leaving her alone in Castle Wrath’s dungeon.
So she did what Bedwells were famous for when faced with adversity.
She blew out a breath and began pacing, doing her best not to cry.
Chapter 7
About the same time, Aidan stood in the middle of Ardcraig’s smoke-hazed great hall and struggled to ignore the softly crying women huddled together by the hearthside. Pale-faced and hand-wringing, they posed a trial to his already thin patience. He shot another glance their way, then scowled, dignity alone keeping him from thrusting his fingers in his ears. Truth was, he couldn’t bear to hear any women cry, especially when he bore the brunt of causing their grief.
A weakness Conan Dearg’s womenfolk were using to their fullest advantage.
Sure of it, he paced the length of his cousin’s hall, cursing under his breath. Something was sorely amiss, and if his foe’s teary-eyed females would cease their sniffling and sobbing long enough for him to think clearly, he’d surely figure out what the devil it was.
In any event, it had little to do with despairing women and even less with the sad state of Ardcraig’s dingy, foul-smelling hall. O-o-oh, nay, it was the same niggling sense of not-rightness that had ridden him the last time he and his men had come here, the whole lot of them scouring Conan Dearg’s keep from dungeon to parapets, searching pointlessly and making fools of themselves in the process. An embarrassment he wasn’t going to endure again.
Especially if it meant having to admit failure to Kira.
Flashing a glance at the blackened ceiling rafters, he clenched his fists in frustration. Truth be told, he was also growing mightily weary of the sideways looks his men had been giving him ever since he’d left his chamber to join them that morn. Their silence rode his last nerve, but he’d deal with such annoyances later. After he’d routed his nefarious cousin and tossed him into Castle Wrath’s dungeon.
The blackguard was here somewhere.
Aidan could smell him.
Furious that he hadn’t yet found him, he strode over to the dais end of the hall, where Tavish and a few others guarded those of Conan Dearg’s garrison who’d had the misfortune of sleeping too soundly when Aidan and his men burst into the hall, swords at the ready and flashing.
Surprisingly, though naked and weaponless, not a one amongst them seemed concerned. They certainly didn’t appear sleep-befuddled. If anything, they looked smug. And that was what gave him such an uneasy feeling. Almost as if they’d let themselves be caught unclothed and defenseless, knowing any Highland chieftain with a smidgen of pride would refrain from wielding steel on an unarmed man.
Aidan blew out a breath and slid a glance at them, their bare-bottomed, muscle-bound bulk limned by torchlight and the reddish glow of Conan Dearg’s hall fire.
Nary a one of them could meet his eye, each one glancing aside whenever he wheeled to fix him with a penetrating stare.
He shivered, drawing his plaid against a cold that had little to do with his cousin’s crowded, untidy hall.
The bastard’s men were hiding something.
And he was certain that something would prove to be Conan Dearg. The chill creeping up and down his spine left no room for doubt, even if they had searched everywhere. Half expecting to see the craven come crashing out of some hidden corner, swinging a battle-ax, he scanned the shadows, but saw only emptiness.
Even so, his every nerve ending hummed, his warrior instincts screaming with each indrawn breath. He tightened his grip on his sullied blade, his heart heavy with the need to stain his steel with the blood of kin.
Tavish stepped closer and put a hand on his shoulder. “Kin or no, the deaths couldn’t be helped,” he said, as always seeming to read Aidan’s mind.
“The bastard is here,” Aidan seethed, anger shielding him from the morning’s horrors. “He’s sacrificed his men, hiding behind them as he would a woman’s skirts.”
Tavish shrugged. “They should not have refused us entry.” His gaze flicked to Aidan’s sword, then to his own. Its blade, too, dripped red. Looking back at Aidan, his lip curled. “Better they died nobly than lying silent and feigning sleep.”
Aidan arced a brow. “So you agree something is amiss?”
“To be sure.” Tavish lifted his sword, eyeing its bloodied edge. “I just canna grasp where Conan Dearg is hiding. We’ve upturned every stone and peered into each corner.”
Aidan rubbed the back of his neck, thinking. “We’re missing something, but it will come to me soon.”
Frowning, he glanced again at the captured garrison men. Others were joining them, men brought in by the patrol he and Tavish had sent around Ardcraig’s perimeter. Men now stripped of arms and clothes, just as their brethren from the hall. Their leader was nowhere to be seen. To a man, they stood sullen and defiant, some shifting restlessly, others exchanging glances. All refused to talk, a stubbornness Aidan secretly admired, not that he cared to admit it.
Instead, he shoved his reddened sword into its scabbard and folded his arms. Sooner or later, one of them would let his guard slip, revealing the truth through a gesture or a glance, a word spoken too quickly. Moving to the high table, he settled himself in his cousin’s chair, deigning to wait.
“You will grow cold, standing there naked,” he observed, speaking to the men but pretending to study his knuckles. “Yet stand you shall, for I will have the bollocks cut from the first man who dares sit.”
He leaned back in the chair, watching them. “I am a patient man. It willna cost me the least to while here for days if need be. Indeed, I intend to stay put until one of you tells me where my cousin is keeping himself.”
None of the men said anything, though several tightened their jaws and glared at him.
One spat into the floor rushes.
Another slid a nervous glance at the screens passage and the arched entry to the kitchens.
The kitchens.
At once, the hall tilted and dipped, spinning around Aidan as the answer hit him like a fist in the gut.
“God’s holy truth!” He leapt to his feet, his own words echoing in his head: He’s sacrificed his men, hiding behind them as he would a woman’s skirts.
He wheeled to face Tavish, triumph surging through him, hot and sweet. “I know where he is!” he cried, and slapped his mailed thigh. “The bastard is in his kitchens—disguised as a scullery wench!”
Tavish’s jaw dropped. “By the Rood! The unfortunate creature we saw sitting in a corner, querning corn. The big-boned woman with a head veil and her face turned away from us!”
Aidan nodded. “That’ll be him. I’d bet my life on—”
“Your life is over!” One of Conan Dearg’s men lunged forward, snatching the sword of Aidan’s youngest guardsman. “’Tis you who shall die!”
“I think not.” Aidan whirled with eye-blurring speed, his own sword already drawn as the man rushed him, swinging his blade in a stroke that would have been deadly against any other foe. As it was, steel met steel, the clang of clashing metal and angry snarls filling the air as Aidan parried the man’s every slashing blow, then closed in, his arcing blade cutting a mortal wound in the other’s side. The man folded in a pool of his own blood, his roar of pain echoing in Aidan’s ears.
Jerking his sword free, he swept Conan Dearg’s men with a heated stare.
“Should any others amongst you feel honor-bound to defend my cousin, come forward now or hold your peace,” he challenged them, bile rising in his throat that he’d been forced to cut down yet another kinsman. “I’ll see that you’re given a blade and even a shield to counter my blows, but I’d have it a fair fight. No’ the likes of what just transpired.”
A sea of hostile gazes met his own cold stare, but no one made a move to accept his dare.
