He went back the way he’d come, to the West Tower, and found Cait on her way down the steps, hurrying with her skirts in her fists. “I told you to stay in your room,” he said, suddenly very tired.
She paused on the steps, and her voice took on an offended edge. “No, you dinnae. You said naught about staying. I saw it all from the battlement. Here, you’re hurt!” She’d brought a kerchief with her, and pressed it to his arm. Together they went to her chamber. He hesitated at the door. She peeled back the kerchief just enough to see that the bleeding hadn’t quite stopped, then pressed it again. “It’ll need sewing,” she announced.
“I know.” He shuddered. Drugs! Oh, how he wished for drugs! Morphine, Lidocain, Demerol, Novocain, anything! Aspirin, acetaminophen, ibuprofen . . .
“In here. I have things for it.” She guided him into the bedroom, where he’d never before ventured. The bed was large and of heavy oak, and an armoire stood beside a stack of trunks. The room was shaped like Malcolm’s, except it had shuttered arrow loops instead of windows. She wasn’t high enough in the tower to rate glass windows, which, in the days of siege warfare, would have been a weakness of the castle on the lower floors. Her hearth was near her door, and he could see his own hearth had been built to share her chimney on the other side of the alcove wall. She gestured that he should take a seat in a wooden chair by the fire, and she rummaged through a trunk at the foot of her bed. From it she produced a box, and from that box a needle and long linen thread that she wet in her mouth, twisted, and poked through the eye.
He coughed and said, “Um, do me a favor? Would you boil that before sticking it in me?”
She almost laughed as she tied a knot at the end of the thread. “Whatever for?”
He shrugged. “Yeah, I know it sounds silly, but would you do that for me?” He resurrected his “cute teacher” smile and hoped she wouldn’t ask too many questions he couldn’t answer.
There was a moment of hesitation, as if she weren’t sure he wasn’t joking, then she took a small three-legged copper pot from the hearth and filled it from the ewer on the table across the room. She then dropped the needle and thread into it and set it back in the hearth, over the fire. “Is this some strange, American religious custom? Have you all gone over to heathen ways, then?” Her voice was teasing but pointed enough that he needed to explain.
He checked on the bleeding, then pressed the kerchief again. “No. It’s just to make it more clean. I don’t want to be poked with a dirty needle any more than . . .” he thought a moment for a comparison, “than, say, you would want to eat dust.” She made a face, and he said, “Exactly. Not healthy.”
“Not tasty.”
He chuckled. “It’s not tasty because it’s not good for you. Neither is a needle with dirt on it, and sometimes dirt is too small to see.”
“Evil. We call it evil hereabouts.”
“And so it is.” Dylan thought the word was not inappropriate in reference to germs and disease. “Boiling things makes them less likely to make us sick. Less . . . evil.” His voice brightened to get off this morbid subject, particularly as it concerned his own arm, “So we’ll just wait for that there water to boil, and hope this bleeding stops in the meantime.” He checked the wound again, found the bleeding had slowed but not quite stopped, and put pressure back on.
She sat on the floor next to his chair with her legs curled under her and put her chin on his knee. “You’ve won, you know,” she said. “He neither killed you, nor did he tell you to leave. He’ll let us marry, as soon as he gets over his anger.”
Dylan hoped she was right.
Once the needle and thread had boiled enough to make him happy, she poured out the water into her washbowl and picked up the suture by the thread. Truly sterilizing it was out of the question, but Dylan hoped the boiling would at least reduce the potential for infection. It took a minute of blowing on it before she could touch the needle, then she reached for his arm.
She wasn’t timid. The stitches went deep, meant to hold. Dylan closed his eyes and focused, concentrating on breathing steadily and not letting his mind drift to anything else, and the pain lessened until he could no longer feel it. It was a long cut, and took thirty stitches or so, all run together like a neat embroidery line along the inside of his left forearm near his elbow. When she was done and leaned in to bite off the thread, he relaxed. The pain came roaring back, and he groaned.
“Let me help you clean up.” She dipped a towel into her washbowl and began wiping blood from his arm and hands. Her touch was now light and painless, and the warm water felt good. He leaned close as she worked, and touched her hair where a shining lock framed her face. She looked up at him, and he kissed her sweet mouth. She would be his wife, and he thought his heart could burst for it.
Artair’s voice at the door was filled with disgust. “At it again, the two of you?” Dylan and Cait separated. Dylan sucked on his lower lip, furious at feeling guilty for a simple kiss. Artair lounged against the door frame like a hoodlum, arms crossed over his chest and head cocked. “Were you to bring yourselves under control and at least feign decorum, the Laird would have an interview with his daughter’s suitor. Alone.” He shoved himself erect and made his exit as quickly as he’d come.
Dylan squeezed his eyes shut and sighed. Here was the moment he’d dreaded for months. The knife fight had been easy compared to this.
Iain Mór kept an office on the first floor of the North Tower, where he conducted business and handled paperwork relating to the management of his lands and tenants. By a single, curt word from the Laird, Dylan was bade to enter, which he did with as calm a bearing as his physical training afforded him. He’d changed out of his torn and bloody sark, and into his good one with the embroidered cuffs. The one Cait had given him. He was unarmed to indicate good will.
Iain, smoldering with anger that made Dylan shudder, sat in a large, red-upholstered chair, hunched over a heavy table stacked with papers and books. He appeared busy with a letter of some sort, and declined to acknowledge Dylan’s presence. Beside the pot of ink into which he dipped his quill was a wooden box filled with quills, some used and stained with ink, some still feathered and clean. Against the stone walls were tall bookcases, filled with leather-bound volumes for reading, and large, bound record books.
A movement in shadow caught Dylan’s eye and he glanced to find Malcolm tucked away inside an arrow loop behind the desk, sitting on the deep stone ledge with his back leaned against the side and one foot propped opposite. Dylan pretended not to notice, choosing to wait and see what would develop. He turned to examine the room while Iain fussed with his papers.
It was the most luxurious room Dylan had yet seen in the castle, appointed to impress those who came on business. Upholstered chairs stood before a cabinet filled with wine. Dylan guessed the wine would be from the continent, French perhaps. His gaze fell on a sword displayed on the wall behind Iain’s desk, and his breath was taken quite away.
It was huge, and glittered of silver hilt and polished steel. At cursory glance he put it at early seventeenth century or late sixteenth, a broadsword with a hilt that preceded the basket-hilt design in that it was more reminiscent of the swept-hilt lines found in rapiers. Very unusual. And very beautiful. The knuckle guard and swirling quillons bore an intricate etched and pierced design, the grip was bound in wire, and the pommel was pierced in an exquisite pattern of whorls that echoed the curves of the quillons. It was the very sort of masterwork he’d always wished to have in his collection, and here it was all shiny and real. He had to force his gaze from it to look at the rest of the room.
One wall was hung with a tapestry of a forest scene that caught his eye for its size. A white unicorn galloped among dark, twisted trees, and a man rode that unicorn. He was large, almost dwarfing his mount, and sported a bright, red beard and flowing red hair, just as Sinann had described Donnchadh Matheson. In one hand he wielded a sword and in the other a white rose. The plaid of his Great Kilt flew behind him like
a Highland flag as he galloped.
But what drew Dylan’s attention, and held it, was the figure hovering over the mounted man, on whom his gaze was turned. It was a faerie, glowing white and shimmering in the darkness. On closer inspection, a shock of recognition hit him. It was Sinann. There was no doubt—the face was hers.
He turned to Iain and indicated the man on the unicorn. “This is your father, Donnchadh Matheson, is it not?”
Iain was unable to hide his surprise, and his eyes went wide before he regained control. “What makes you think that?”
Dylan shrugged, not wanting to give away his connection to Sinann. “I’m guessing. The bard has mentioned him and the white faerie.” It was a lie, but Iain might not know that. “Who made this?”
Iain shrugged. “The tapestry was a gift from faeries. The day my father was buried, this appeared where you see it now. I’ve not dared take it down.”
Dylan gazed at the image of Sinann, and before his eyes the figure turned and winked at him. He shuddered, then struggled to keep his voice steady as he stared at her. “Do you believe in faeries?”
Iain replied, “Of course, I do. They brought the tapestry, did they not?”
Dylan chuckled as the faerie in the tapestry resumed her pose. “Aye, they did, sure enough.”
Iain grunted and set his quill aside. He crossed his arms over his chest, leaned back, and finally got down to business. “So you want to marry my daughter.” To the point. Dylan had come to expect that from the old world Mathesons, a trait lost to his own branch of the family. All the Mathesons back home, as well as Mom’s folks, liked to hem and haw around every issue and never quite say what they meant. They therefore rarely got anything accomplished.
He turned to reply. “Yes.” Equally blunt. When in Rome . . .
“How will you support her?”
“I have money. Enough for a small piece of land.” A very small piece in a high, rocky glen to the south. He was still in negotiation, finagling a deal through Malcolm that, if he didn’t do some fancy footwork, would most likely include five years of labor as payment to a MacLeod Laird. But Iain didn’t need to know all that yet.
Iain’s eyebrows raised. “I see I’ve been paying you entirely too much.”
“I’m careful with my money and have no vices beyond a bucket of hot water of an evening. I know how to use my money so it will increase. Your daughter will never go hungry.”
“She’s accustomed to more than just safety from hunger.”
“She’s also an adult who knows that fortune comes and goes. As part of the clan we will all ride things out together.”
There was a dark pause, then the anger in Iain’s voice took on an uglier edge. He leaned forward on his table. “You fancy yourself a landowner, then, do you? You hold with the English laws that are destroying the clans, where land is owned by few and those who control it have no responsibility to those as work it.”
“You own your land.”
“By English law only. By the law of the clans and my lairdship, I only rule the land for the sake of my people. Even the poorest of my tenants eat of a winter if there is any bread to be had by the clan. That is something as cannae be said by the Lowland scum who would wrest from me ownership and then evict tenants whose families have worked the land since the time of our first king, Kenneth MacAlpine. It is for the sake of profit they do this, to line their embroidered pockets with gold and silver while people starve all around them.”
Dylan nodded that he understood. In a few years hundreds and thousands of those starving people would flee to America and make homes in the mountains of Appalachia. That he knew that was nothing he could tell Iain. So he simply said, “I don’t wish to separate myself from the clan.” Indeed, it would be foolish to live in these mountains without the protection of Cait’s father, for the small farm he had in mind would be vulnerable to raids and one man alone could never hold off neighboring clans.
“Then, as a landowner, you would keep your allegiance to me?”
Dylan opened his mouth to answer in the affirmative, then shut it again. Iain was asking whether he would go to war if called. Knowing Iain was a Jacobite, he couldn’t in honesty promise to fight for the cause that would destroy many families over the next three decades. He said, “My allegiance is to Cait. Her safety is what I will swear to.”
“If you would be under my protection, you would also be beholden.”
There was a pause and Dylan thought hard, but there was no getting around it. In order to marry Cait, he had to pledge himself to military service. He nodded. “Aye. It’s true. As a landowner I will promise myself.”
Iain sat back in his chair, relaxed now, as if securing Dylan’s pledge had been the entire purpose of the meeting. But then he glanced at Malcolm and said, “You’re aware that, as I have nae sons, Coll is heir to the lairdship of my holdings.”
Dylan nodded.
“And, were he to die without male issue, Artair would become heir by order of birthright.”
Again, Dylan nodded and wondered what Iain was getting at.
“Also, you must be aware that, being young and reckless the both of them, and Artair with his unruly tongue, they stand a good chance of neither of them living to make a marriage to give them legitimate heirs.”
This was news to Dylan. Expecting young men to die before marriage just wasn’t part of his cultural background. He shrugged and said, puzzled, “Which means . . . ?”
“Which means, laddie, that, as Roderick’s son, you become the next candidate for the lairdship. It’s been suggested that’s the real reason you made the journey from the colonies.”
Dylan let out a short bark of a laugh as he remembered what Malcolm had said the day after his arrival, about whether he’d expected to find so many male cousins. At the time he’d thought his relationship to Iain had been meaningless in terms of the lairdship because of having been born in America. Only now did it occur to him that his citizenship was considered British. The United States didn’t exist. Virginia was a British colony, and under the Treaty of Union with Scotland signed seven years before there was no legal difference between Scottish and English citizenship. Technically, a British subject was a British subject. Therefore, under English law as well as clan law, he was in line for the lairdship just the same as if he’d been born in Scotland.
Astonished, his jaw dropped open. “I told you. I was brought here against my will. It’s only because of Cait that I want to stay at all.”
“Easy enough said, lad.”
Dylan chewed on the inside corner of his mouth for a moment. This wasn’t anything he’d expected. He wasn’t sure how to respond. Then he rolled up first his left sleeve, revealing the purpling wound with its thirty stitches now pink with blood, then his right, baring his good arm. “Care to have at the other one?” he said.
Anger rose in Iain. “Perhaps I should have killed you.”
Dylan slipped his plaid from his shoulder so it hung in the crook of his arm, and opened the front of his shirt to expose his chest adorned with the black-and-silver crucifix. “Go ahead. Put your dirk right there. If what you want is to get rid of me to make sure your title doesn’t go to an American, get your sword and stick it in me now, because I won’t live without Cait. Screw the land, fuck the title, but I won’t live without Cait.” He paused a moment as he realized something. He let go of his shirt and continued, “You won’t, though, because she’d hate you for it.”
Iain’s brow knotted and he sucked on his lower lip. “She would get over it.”
Dylan went with his faith in Cait. “If you believe that, then go ahead and kill me. But you know her better than that. You know she’s as stubborn as you are and will hate you forever if you put me away.” He stood hipshot, as if he didn’t care what Cait’s father might do. “You know she loves me.”
Iain Mór turned to grab the silver-hilt sword from its wall bracket, and in one motion slipped the scabbard off and laid the edge of the sword aside Dylan’s throat
. The younger man held his ground and only blinked as the sharp edge stung his skin. Iain’s eyes flamed and he spat his words. “You come to me with my daughter’s blood on your prick, I should kill you.” He stopped and stood, panting for a moment, his face reddening. Dylan said nothing, and moved only to breathe. If Iain was bent on killing, then Dylan would die and that would be the end of it. Death would be preferable to living without Cait. It was a long, tense moment as Iain considered his next move.
Finally, the older man withdrew the sword and laid it on the desk before him. He sat back down in his chair, elbows on the desk, and pressed his lips to teepeed fingers. After another long moment he leaned back and looked into Dylan’s face. He said, “If you had the title, and the land, would you care for it as I do?”
Now Dylan was puzzled again. “If I had it?”
“I cannae leave my holdings to Cait. All I can do is provide her with dowry befitting her. The title and the bulk of the clan holdings must go to a male heir. But Coll and Artair are nae my sons. So I can more easily say before my death which male heir should receive the lairdship, and the clan would most likely follow my wishes. Provided my choice is a reasonable one.”
“You can disinherit Coll and Artair?” This was a complete surprise.
Iain shrugged. “If they are both unsuitable, the clan willnae follow either of them, and that is all there will be to that. If Coll inherits but is weak, Artair will try to take the lairdship from him. It could split the Mathesons, and even lead to war within the clan. As Laird, I must consider the future of all my people, not just my daughter. Something you would do well to learn yourself.”
“What about Malcolm? He’s your first cousin as much as I am.” More, were the truth known.
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