Sue-Ellen Welfonder - [MacLean 01]

by Knight in My Bed

  “Excuse us while we tend a matter most grievously overdue, then see our lady chieftain to her bed, where she may dwell upon her transgressions.” He paused, waited as if he thought some would defy him.

  But no one spoke.

  The MacArthur warriors eyed the feast goods streaming in from the kitchens, the hunger in their bellies winning out over their desire to serve their liege’s vengeance.

  Isolde’s own kinsmen either looked at the floor or skulked off into the shadows.

  “So be it then.” Struan’s voice rang loud. “Good men, have full pleasure of the feast goods until my return.” Without further demur or hesitation, he hustled Isolde through the throng, his fingers still digging painfully into her arm. Niels and Rory followed glumly in their wake.

  They weren’t there.

  Donall washed down his disappointment with a deep, hearty draw of the cool rain-scented air. A damp chill lay over the high barren ground spread before him.

  A damp chill and, sadly, not much else.

  Gavin burst through the tunnel’s narrow opening a scant moment after Donall’s emergence, and he, too, breathed in an audible gulp of lung-filling air. Lugh’s tunnel had led them to freedom, but the journey had been arduous.

  They’d covered the last quarter of it on their knees.

  And that in pitch-blackness with naught to sustain them but a foul, earthy-smelling cloyness.

  “They are not here,” Gavin said beside him, wheezing. Hands braced on his knees, he slid an astonished look at Donall. “Our horses are not here. There’s naught to be seen but drizzle and mist.”

  Donall leaned back against the cold rocks that formed the mouth of the tunnel and scowled at his friend. “Think you I do not have eyes?”

  Gavin stared up at the moon. It still rode the grayish sky, a near-full disk, pale and ghostly white, appearing to drift in and out the clouds, as elusive as the full panoply of MacLean men-at-arms they’d both hoped to discover waiting for them.

  “I thought they’d be here,” Gavin said, his voice still hoarse with the exertion the journey through the tunnel had cost him. “Saints, what are we to do now?”

  Pushing away from the support of the rocks, Donall stretched his arms over his head and flexed his fingers. He stared across the wide expanse of moorland. A gray and black land at this young hour, awash with odd-shaped patches of shadow, the rolling hogbacks and bramble-covered ridges broken only by a few scattered copses of wind-stunted trees.

  The whole of it stretching clear across the eerie silence all the way to Baldoon.

  His mind set, Donall tossed back his hair and turned to face his friend. “We walk,” he said. “If God has any mercy, we shall reach home in a day and a half rather than two.”

  “And then”—he balled his fists—“and then, we ride back and claim my bride.”

  “They are not there.” Rory peered into the gloom-ridden interior of Donall and Gavin’s cell. The leaping flames of the resin torch he held showed his high astonishment. “They’re gone.”

  “They cannot be gone, the door was barred.” Niels snatched the torch from Rory’s hand and strode into the cell, Rory close on his heels.

  “What . . . what foolery is this?” came Niels’s stunned voice from the murkiness.

  The two men stared out the window, an opening far too small for any man over eight years to wriggle through. They kicked at the empty pallets, dislodging naught but dust and dried bits of straw. Niels gave over first, spinning around to stare at Isolde and Struan.

  Both still hovered outside the half-opened door.

  Torchlight and shadows did frightful things to Niels’s honest, open face, but the bewilderment in his eyes set Isolde’s soul free.

  It was true, then. Donall and his friend had escaped, were safe.

  “Praise God!” the words burst from her lips even as hot tears spilled down her cheeks.

  “Be silent!” Struan gave her arm a rough jerk. “They are gone?” he called into the cell, great waves of black fury rolling off him.

  Shaking his head in disbelief, Niels started forward, a dark-faced Rory right behind him. “I know not how, but they’ve esc—”

  The slamming of the door cut off Niels’s astonishment. “An accomplishment you traitorous poltroons will not enjoy!” Struan sneered, and dropped the drawbar in place.

  Isolde gasped, pure horror washing over her, her elation of a heartbeat before . . . dead.

  Her flare of hope extinguished. Flat and brittle in her breast. “What have you done?” She stared at her uncle, stricken by the wild light in his eyes.

  A crazed light that had naught to do with the flickering glow thrown by the wall torches.

  He stared back at her, his hawkish features so familiar, but wholly strange. E’er stern and domineering, he’d never been her favorite, but she’d respected him.

  Till of late.

  Aye, she’d been losing her esteem for him, but ne’er had she feared him.

  Until now.

  “What are you doing?” The words sounded clumsy, slurred by the fear swelling her tongue.

  “What am I doing?” He gave her an incredulous look as he dragged her away from the cell, pulled her along in the direction opposite from the hall and the safety of numbers. “Ridding myself of you, is what I am doing,” he said, and increased the pressure on her arm.

  Streaks of terror, black and cold, tore through Isolde, and she dragged her feet, hoping to slow his progress, hoping someone would come, would see them, but no one came, no one saw. She opened her mouth to scream, but fear had closed her throat so soundly, naught came forth but a rasped choke.

  He gripped her arm in an iron grasp, his strength rendering her struggles useless, and swept her along with him toward a barred door half-hidden in shadow at the end of the passage.

  The door to the sea dungeon and every bit of nastiness Dunmuir had e’er possessed. Or excreted, for the ancient stairs behind the door ended in a ruinous passage that served as a receptacle for Dunmuir’s latrine chutes.

  Alarm welled inside her when he kicked open the door and they began the slippery descent into the stinking morass at the base of the stairs. At the bottom, Struan’s fierce hold on her was all that kept her from falling into the muck.

  Stark fear seemed to have plucked the very bones from her limbs, wholly annihilating any last remnants of steel she might have drawn strength from.

  Struan slogged through the foulness, dragging her behind him, his biting grip on her arm staying her feet but affording no comfort. At last, he paused before a narrow gap in the wall of the vaulted passageway, and Isolde found her voice at last, sheer terror retrieving it for her.

  “T-the oubliette is in there,” she gasped, her throat thick with fright. “Y-you cannot mean to plunge me into it?”

  “Aye, I do,” he said, snatching a torch from its wall bracket. “Into the chamber of little ease, or from your bedchamber’s window,” he admitted. “I’ve not yet decided. Either way, your passing will be accepted as having come from your own hand . . . the tragic result of your having given your affections so unwisely.”

  Isolde’s heart stopped.

  Slammed against her ribs and froze for horror.

  Struan shoved her roughly through the narrow crevice in the wall. She slipped, fell to her knees, and quickly pressed the flats of her hands against the cold, damp floor, felt all around her before she dared push to her feet and inch toward the wall.

  One false move would send her tumbling through the jagged gap yawning across the stone floor of the cavelike cell.

  The opening into the oubliette, a cramped, bottle-shaped chamber cut deep into the bowls of the earth, a space so small that, once there, a soul could neither sit nor stand, simply wait, hunched over, until death gave its dubious release.

  Struan stepped in then and thrust the torchlight into an iron holder on the wall. He positioned himself in front of the opening to the passage, soundly blocking her means of escape . . . did she possess the nerve
s to attempt one: as clan ceann cath, her uncle wore more metal than most mounted English knights.

  His face twisted with a look of grim satisfaction. Mayhap because of the way she cowered against the far wall. “Be pleased you were able to know a man before you die,” he said, the crudeness of his words foreign on his usually pious, self-righteous tongue. “Your sister knew love as well, or so it would seem from the hue and cry her husband let loose after he found her.” Isolde’s blood ran cold. “W-what are you saying? Iain MacLean did not kill Lileas?” She pushed the words past the hot constriction in her throat, had to voice them even though a grim suspicion already assured her Donall the Bold had spoken true: his brother had not murdered his wife.

  Iain MacLean had loved Lileas.

  Struan was the murderer.

  She saw it in the madness glittering in his eyes.

  “W-why?”

  Terror knifed through her, cold and laming. Numbing her mind, while pain and anguish squeezed the very breath from her lungs.

  “Why?” Her uncle’s lips curled. “To meet an end,” he said. “Sacrificing her to the Lady Rock stirred up the old enmity and gave me the best means to lead Donall MacLean into a trap. I knew Lileas’s besotted husband would ne’er stomach bringing his beloved wife home to Dunmuir, knew he’d let his brother perform the sad deed.”

  Iain MacLean’s brother.

  Donall the Bold.

  Her love.

  Her true soul mate . . . the truth of what her heart had refused to believe for so long pounded through her conscience, smote her for doubting him.

  For doubting her heart.

  Oh, love, please come for me. Come, and I shall plead forgiveness for not trusting you, will ne’er doubt your word again.

  Tears burned her eyes, but she refused to let them fall. What she needed was time. Holding fast to the tiny flicker of hope that he would come, would find her, Isolde feigned a calm she did not feel.

  “Why would you want to take the MacLean?” she asked, seeking to stall whatever fate he meant to submit her to.

  She held his gaze. “After Da purveyed the marriage between Lileas and Iain, all thought the old feud o’er the Lady Rock had been assuaged, consigned to the distant past where the sad tale belongs,” she said, purposely rambling. “We enjoyed a fair truce. Why would you seek to harm the alliance Da strove so hard to achieve?”

  The odd light glinted in his eyes again. “Because I never wanted an alliance. I wanted, I want, Doon.” He spread his hands. “All of it. But even I know I could ne’er seize it from one as able and stout-armed as Donall MacLean. With him gone, and his grieving brother stepping in as laird, it would only have been a matter of time before Iain MacLean’s hot temper undid all of Baldoon.”

  Isolde frowned, a new thought raising its ugly countenance before her. “And left the gates wide for you to take it . . . with Balloch’s aid. That is the true reason you sought to wed me to him.”

  “You have a wiser head on your shoulders than your sister and my sniveling peace-seeking brother had between them,” he said grudgingly.

  “Neither one of them suspected aught.” “Neither one of . . .” Isolde couldn’t finish the sentence.

  A gloating sneer curled her uncle’s lip again. “Aye, I eased your father’s way to the heavens, too, though his death was not planned.”

  He spat into the dark crevice of the oubliette, then shrugged. “When he became so ill with that last fever he’d caught, I couldn’t resist taking a pillow and putting him out of his misery.” He spat into the gap again, a swifter, more angry spit this time. “ ’Twas a debt long overdue.”

  Isolde could feel the blood draining from her face, from her heart. “How could you?” Her voice sounded hollow, distant. “ ’Tis mad you are, uncle. Full mad.”

  The strangest look yet crossed his hard-set features. “Aye, and so I am,” he acceded, staring at her but seeing something, someone else. “I have been mad since the day our parents and your lady mother’s decreed she should wed Archibald and not me. ’Tis me she loved, not your father.”

  His hands balled to fists and he began pacing the dark cell. “Me, me, me!” he railed, shooting her a glare that went straight through her.

  Straight through her and into the past.

  Of that, Isolde was certain.

  “We were lovers!” He whirled to face her, his bearded jaw thrust forward. “She pleaded, cried, and came to me on her knees, beseeching me to intercede, to stop the marriage. But none would have any of it. She was to wed your father, the future laird, and naught else would do.”

  “You err.” Isolde defended her parents’ love. Something she couldn’t, would not doubt. “Mother loved Da. All speak of their great passion. She waits for him still, every day, in her chair by the fire.”

  He rounded on her again, his face nigh purple. “Aye, she loved him, and loves him still!” he roared, the veins in his neck bulging. “My brother stole her heart, turned her against me. But she was mine first, and ’tis me she looks to for comfort now,” he added, somewhat calmer. “Now she’s lost her senses and remembers naught of the past.”

  Isolde pressed herself against the cold rock wall behind her. The odd light in his eyes had turned even more crazed. Each time he paused to glare at her, she feared he’d grab hold of her and send her hurtling through the crevice in the floor.

  “But I remember.” He thumped a fist against his breast. “I remember, and I shall have her. Her, Dunmuir, this whole isle.”

  Pausing, he shoved back his wild mane of rust-colored hair. “Aye, I shall have it all. Everything Archibald stole from me and more.”

  He came to stand before her. So close she could see how glazed his eyes were, smell the ale on his breath, taste his madness.

  “My plans would have worked, too, had you not ruined them with your meddlesome dalliances with him.” He grabbed a fistful of her hair, yanked her head backward. “They still will, too. With you gone.”

  Her eyes watered with pain, but she forced herself to bear it, to shake her head in denial. “Nay, they will not. Donall will come for me,” she said, a spark of anger beginning to reheat the cold clump of steel lying dormant in her belly. “He’ll bring his men, the full might of Baldoon.”

  “The dead cannot be rescued.” He let go of her hair and peered at her. Once again seeing her and not the past. “Your foolish twit of a sister wasn’t rescued by a MacLean husband, what makes you think a MacLean lover can save you?”

  “Because he will,” she said, lifting her chin, finding her steel again. “Because he will.”

  My heart knows it.

  Chapter Twenty

  THE NOISE WASN’T more than a vibration. A low tremor in the cool morning air, but enough to make Donall lay his hand on Gavin’s arm, enough to make his breath hitch as he tilted his dark head to the side to better listen.

  “By the Holy Mother, they come!” Gavin jerked away from Donall’s grasp and pointed to their right.

  Donall’s gaze followed the direction of Gavin’s outstretched arm. His heart slammed against his ribs, the breath he’d been holding bursting from his lungs in one great triumphant shout. And though he’d ne’er admit it, the whole of his body began to shake with joy.

  A dark mass, denser than the gray-cast shadows and much faster-moving, swung around a distant hillock. An ever-increasing swell of pure, mounted might moving swiftly across the broad stretch of open moorland.

  The very earth beneath Donall’s feet trembled with the force of many pairs of pounding hooves, while the low rumble that had barely shaken the air moments before now erupted into the deafening, joyous drumming of powerful steeds tearing up the ground as they and the warriors atop them flew toward Donall and Gavin.

  ’Twas Iain.

  Even at the great distance, Donall spotted his brother leading the van. Tall, furious, and broad-shouldered in his saddle as he thundered across the high moor, a small dark form clutched firmly before him.

  Lugh.

  He’
d made it.

  The strange lad had fetched Iain.

  Iain and what appeared to be the entire MacLean army.

  The MacLean garrison and . . . more.

  A slight figure, far too scrawny to be mistaken for one of the powerfully built warriors, rode at the far edge of the left flank. The man’s unhelmed white-tufted head a stark contrast against the gray sky.

  Gerbert.

  And the old goat led two horses!

  “By the saints, Gavin, they’ve even fetched our steeds!” Donall whacked his friend on the shoulder.

  A hard whack.

  One he hoped was mighty enough to jar the hot moisture from his eyes and loosen the womanish lump burning in his throat.

  “They come, Gavin!” he cried, his heart filling with such elation, he feared it’d soon burst. “ ’Tis over! They come, and ne’er have I been happier to see that hothead’s scowling countenance!

  “To see all of them, by God!” Donall threw back his head, stared up at the cloud-streaked sky. “Every last one of them, bless their souls.”

  “All of them?” Gavin’s voice sounded strange. “That I doubt, my friend.”

  Astounded by the tone, Donall glanced sharply at Gavin only to find him staring, slack-jawed, at the approaching riders. Donall looked, too, and immediately spotted the reason for Gavin’s astonishment.

  Amazed and dumbfounded, Donall stared at the tight phalanx of standard bearers riding close to Iain and the boy. The folds of the banners flying so proudly in the brisk wind bore not only the MacLean crest, but the MacKinnon insignia as well.

  “What the devil?” Donall shot another quick glance at Gavin. “He has MacKinnons with him.”

  But before he could puzzle further, or Gavin could voice a reply, the riders were upon them, drawing rein all ’round them in a rowdy chaos of trampling hooves, horses’ snorts, and jubilant men’s voices raised in greeting.

  Iain pulled up before Donall, his dark eyes alight with a rare twinkle. He held up his hand and the clamor ceased at once. “Do not ask,” he said, jerking his head toward the MacKinnon warriors. For once, Iain’s handsome face, so like Donall’s own, wore a broad smile rather than a frown. “They come in peace and are friends.”