by Nicole Locke
‘You need to leave because I was expecting you, Bram, Laird of Colquhoun.’ Lioslath stepped into the light, lifted the dagger, made sure it glinted so he’d know what she intended. ‘But I do not think you were expecting me.’
Chapter Two
Waking in the morning and needing to relieve herself, Lioslath rose from bed, only to collapse as dizziness overcame her. She’d sat up too quickly. The lack of food, the continual hunger, had made her faint the past few days. Was her dizziness worse? If so, she knew who to blame.
Anger giving her strength, she slowly sat up. Anger that had only one direction: towards Bram...who had laughed. Laughed.
She still didn’t understand what had happened the night before.
Dog at her heels, and a knife in her hand, she’d readied to strike. At her most dangerous, Bram laughed as if she told the funniest of tales.
Startled at the sound, she almost dropped the knife. So she hadn’t, couldn’t have, reacted as he shook his head, told her he enjoyed her games and would see her the next day.
She simply stood there incapable of comprehending his actions.
Worse still, Dog, who never let prey escape, who should have attacked, abruptly sat, canted his head and stared as Bram eased himself through the trapdoor.
She didn’t know what was more incredible. Her own inability to attack or Dog’s sudden meekness.
No, she did know. The most incredulous moment was when Bram told her he’d see her today. He expected her to open the gates.
She might not have attacked, but she wasn’t opening the gates today. His grating laughter had ensured that. If she could shut the gates more firmly, or again, and preferably right in his face, she would. At the idea, satisfaction coursed warmly within her.
Desperate now to use the privy, she walked out of the room. Dog only lifted his head as he stared in her direction.
She scowled at him. Bram had laughed, she had almost dropped the knife and Dog had sat.
Since weaning him from a pup, he had been her friend and protector. More wild than tame, no one dared approach Dog. She’d always thought they had an understanding. She slept in the stables when it rained and outside when it didn’t. He’d never lost the wild side to him and she hadn’t either. But at the moment he canted his head, he had been no more than a weak, useless, domesticated dog.
She leaned against the wall as dizziness overcame her. A well-fed dog at least, just like the rest of her clan. She ensured that. Or rather, Bram ensured that.
He had reminded her that it was he who hunted and provided the food. He who discovered the secret tunnel, and her anger at that gave her the strength to stand straight.
The tunnel was hers, maintained through sheer will. She told no one of it. When she was a child, there had been several of them, but time had passed and the residents either didn’t remember them or believed they had collapsed. But she had maintained one, had cleared and buttressed it for years. It was narrow and precarious, and a way of escaping from her punishments, from her family and what had become of them.
Simply knowing the tunnel was there kept her calm. And now, with the siege, it allowed her to steal much-needed food. But she hadn’t been stealing. Bram had been leaving gifts.
She should have known—she had known—but it was a bounty she hadn’t been able to ignore.
In the darkest part of the night before last, she had left the tunnel to steal, only to find venison hanging in the tree closest to the tunnel. And underneath? A sack of cabbages and onions.
Immediately, she had recognised it for the bait it was, but she had no caution as she cut it down. Caution didn’t matter when necessity did. Her clan was starving and, even while she resented it, she took the trap.
So all day she looked over her shoulder, all night she kept herself dressed and pacing in her room. She thought of barricading the tunnel, but a mere day’s effort wouldn’t keep out a determined intruder and she didn’t want to bring attention to the tunnel.
But she had vowed that would be the last time she stole food. Since it was their last stolen meal, she needed to feed the few people still in the keep; she needed to feed her brothers and sister. What she didn’t do was feed herself.
It didn’t matter. She didn’t need her energy for much, since she was trapped inside with no way to roam. Trapped, and she knew who to blame for that as well.
As she left the privy, Dog was waiting for her at the end of the narrow corridor. From there it was a short turn with a few stairs that led to the main Hall.
She wished she could avoid the central room even though the Hall’s permanently rancid smell was weaker now, which was the siege’s only benefit.
They had cleaned the keep when the gates were first barred. Old mouldy rushes, thrown bones and rotting food were swept clear to be thrown at the Colquhoun clansmen surrounding her home.
But even without the old rushes and food, the Hall stank from the rotting wood and stones that hadn’t been scrubbed in years. When she was a child, the Hall had gleamed, the smells had been of home, of a time when her mother and father had been alive and happy. Now it held only mould, stains and regret.
She resented that she was forced to stay in the keep, forced to walk through the Hall that mocked her childhood memories. Patting Dog’s head, she hurried outside to the low building that was the kitchens.
Cook, making a soup from the venison and vegetables, gave a cautious, respectful smile.
Ignored most of her life, Lioslath forced herself to nod a greeting in return. For over a month, her clan had treated her with loyalty, with...respect. Their tentative friendliness continued to startle her.
It was difficult to change a lifetime of avoidance. With the siege, she was no longer left to roam free. She was forced to acknowledge her clan and her family. No. In truth, it was before the siege that she’d been forced to acknowledge her family...but she didn’t want to think about that now.
As soon as Dog grabbed the generous bone from the preparation table, they exited out the back of the kitchens. Again, a change. Usually, this area was rife with rotting carcasses. But since the Colquhouns came, this area, too, had been swept.
She didn’t take any pleasure in it, though. After meeting Bram last night, nothing today would bring her pleasure except his departure. He was all that she hated: conceited, arrogant, jovial.
Regretting not plunging her blade into Bram’s heart when she’d had the chance, Lioslath walked to the platform that allowed her to see over the gates.
The structure was a hastily erected disaster they ripped from her father’s stair extension. Stairs he ordered made, even though there were no walls, floor or ceiling to support them. Another impetuous folly of her father’s, just like his marriage to the Colquhoun’s sister.
She felt the weight of her loss rise and settle in her chest. Her father was dead. It wasn’t the English knight who had killed him who bore the full brunt of her wrath. No, the man she hated above all had better be breaking his camp or she’d throw the first bucket of debris today.
‘You rise late again.’
Lioslath stopped to face Aindreas, the hunter’s son. As usual, Aindreas’s appearance was marred by his thickly tangled brown hair.
‘Does it matter?’ she retorted. But it mattered to her; she had never woken late in her life.
‘You’re rising later and sleeping in the keep. You’re becoming a lady of leisure. Already the men and I cleared the debris into buckets. They are ready to throw on command. I also checked and reinforced the snares in the back, and re-limed the branches to catch the birds.’
She snorted in derision, but she envied him his duties. They had given him a purpose. She felt lost in here. ‘You had to wake up early to do the snares because you’ve never been good at them.’
‘I’ve improved since we were five, and since
you sleep late I’ll be a sight better than you the next time we hunt.’
Hunting. It was what she lived for. In her childhood, Aindreas’s father, Niall, had been the chief hunter for the clan. When Lioslath’s father had remarried, her stepmother had prohibited her from staying and then sleeping in the keep. She’d followed Niall like a shadow until he showed her his skills. Aindreas was only a year older and they had become like siblings.
‘You have been making snares for years. You couldn’t possibly become better than me in only a few weeks,’ she said. ‘You’d have a better chance using a handful of your own tangled hair.’
Aindreas cocked a brow. ‘The lasses have nae trouble with my hair.’
She saw the curve to his lips that displayed the familiar dimple. The one that made all the Fergusson lasses sigh with want.
‘That’s because they didn’t have to listen to your mother lament about you never combing it.’
Those years in childhood at the hunter’s cottage had been the most precious to her. It had been a chance to be around a family, since she didn’t have one of her own.
Except...she did have a family now. Maybe not her father or mother, but her half-brothers and half-sister. They were here.
‘The whelps have already risen,’ Aindreas said, seeming to know her thoughts. If her brothers and sister had risen, she had more pressing concerns.
‘Have they been fed?’ she asked, looking around her.
‘Do you truly care?’
‘Aye, if someone else looks after them, I doona have to.’ She gave him a pointed glare. ‘Your continual calling them puppies won’t make me tend and care for them.’
He shook his head. ‘They think matters are different now.’
She didn’t want to think of her father’s death or what that meant to her younger half-sister, Fyfa, and two half-brothers, Eoin and Gillean. She was still adjusting to being trapped inside the keep with them when, for her entire life, they’d been kept separated. ‘Even if matters are different, what would I do with them? They’re...idle.’
‘They’re not idle. They play.’
‘What would I know of play? Other than it accomplishes nothing.’
‘Just because you weren’t given the chance—’ Aindreas’s eyes softened. ‘You wouldn’t have to do anything with them. Simply be their sister.’
She didn’t know how to play or be a sister because she’d never had a childhood. So how could she understand theirs?
‘You can’t avoid them forever, Lioslath.’
‘I’m not avoiding them.’ It was impossible to. They were always underfoot, playing, laughing. Her clan’s tentative smiles and wary looks continued to startle her. Her siblings’ open smiles and constant chatter terrified her. ‘Will you take them today?’
‘You know I will.’
‘Just keep them away from the platform.’ She didn’t care how he took her words.
‘Caring if they get hurt? You are becoming soft.’
‘Nae,’ she said, wondering if that was why she said it. ‘I doona need the annoyance of tending injuries on top of everything else I have to do today.’
‘What is it you’re doing today?’
Turning away, she said over her shoulder, ‘Saying goodbye to the Colquhouns.’
She heard the camp outside before she reached the steps. Grabbing a bucket, she listened as icy frustration and hot anger coursed in opposing rivulets inside her body. Bram wasn’t breaking camp. Already knowing which unstable steps to avoid, she bounded up the stairs. Before she reached the top, she heard his laughter and gave a feral grin. Bram made such an easy target.
Chapter Three
Bram found Lioslath in the kitchens. It was night and darkness blanketed every crevice of the long spaces surrounding them. Soot covering her hands and face, Lioslath slept curled up near a dying fire with that wolf next to her. Like this, she looked soft, inviting—
The dog suddenly growled and Lioslath woke with a start. Her hand reached out, but there was nothing there. If she were a man, he’d have thought she was reaching for a weapon.
The dog’s ears twitched as if to flatten them and Bram pulled himself back. The dog was only a reminder of their differences, of why he was here.
‘You didn’t open the gates,’ he said, more gently than he meant. Her softness was now gone, but his body hadn’t caught up with his thoughts. How she barred him, denied him again, when she should be grateful he showed up at all.
He had not expected Lioslath to open the gates without a pretence of a fight. After all, it would make no sense if she were to open the gates after denying them access for so long. When she threw the bucket of debris and the others did the same, he thought it all for show.
Which was why he controlled his anger when some of it hit his foot. But the entire day came and went, and he didn’t see her again.
‘Yet, you came anyway,’ she retorted.
Wobbling, she stood. Like this, the fire’s light illuminated what he hadn’t seen before: a black mole, small and just above her upper lip. It was placed as if a mischievous faery kissed such perfection. He knew if he were such a faery, there would be others...
‘What can I do to make you unwelcome?’ she said.
Obstinate. Their encounter last night had been brief, but he thought he’d controlled the situation. After all, Lioslath was a beautiful woman and his flattering words had always been enough in the past, but it didn’t seem enough for her. Maybe flirting wouldn’t work with her. Difficult, when her beauty affected him.
No. More than that. It was her fierceness at the platform, her throwing the debris, her contemplative observing of them. All of it affected him. But if his flattery wouldn’t work, there were other methods of persuasion.
She took his gifts by the tunnel and he saw the state of the clan and their lands. She needed his supplies and manpower, even if she pretended she didn’t.
The current level of desperation should be enough for him to be accepted over the winter.
‘Those gates are barred, but I can get inside,’ he said. ‘This is nae a real siege and it is time to end it.’
‘I never told you to come. I held a dagger to you and told you to leave.’
Her amusing threat of last night. At the time he thought it a jest. Now he was beginning to think she meant it. It was still laughable, but for other reasons.
‘I may be unwelcome,’ he said, ‘but my supplies are not.’
‘You stay because of the gifts?’ she retorted. ‘You could have left them and gone. I doona even know why you’re here.’
‘I sent you a missive. When your father died, I would come with help.’
‘Only because you feel guilty for the crimes you committed here!’
‘I committed nae crimes here. I forged an alliance.’
She pulled herself up, then wavered before she widened her stance to gain her balance. He looked at her feet. There was nothing that tripped her.
‘You bribed this clan, married my father to your sister, who at the first opportunity didn’t honour her vows and ran off!’
‘Careful, Fergusson. There was nae bribe to this clan. I offered a marriage and alliance between your father and my sister Gaira. I offered a total of forty sheep—twenty immediately, and twenty more after one year. It was a profitable and a stable alliance, and one which your father accepted.’
‘Which your sister didn’t honour! With nae possible reason, she ran away.’
He didn’t know how to answer this. Either way, it would not be good. Something about this woman’s father, Busby, frightened Gaira, but his sister had also been hurt when he forced her marriage. ‘It matters not why she ran,’ he said.
‘Of course it matters why she ran. If she hadn’t, my father wouldn’t have pursued her and wouldn’t have bee
n murdered by an English knight.’
This conversation must be avoided. He hadn’t lied in the missive he sent to her, but he’d skirted the truth regarding how her father died and by whose hand. He knew exactly who murdered her father and he wasn’t an ordinary knight. He was also no longer precisely English. No, Robert of Dent, the famed Black Robert and King Edward’s favoured knight, wasn’t dead at all, but married to Gaira, and living in secret on Colquhoun land.
‘My sister ran from him,’ Bram said. ‘I didn’t order him to follow her.’
‘Nae, you merely threatened to take the sheep and bring the force of Clan Colquhoun down on his head if he didn’t find her.’
He hadn’t known how else to keep Gaira, his only surviving sister, safe. When Bram made the alliance with Busby, he had concerns only for his own clan, for his own selfish desire to marry. When he made the alliance, the English massacres at Berwick and Doonhill hadn’t yet occurred. The war against England hadn’t been lost at Dunbar. How was he, how was anyone, to guess that the Scotland of only months ago would be so changed?
If he’d known, he would have kept his family close to him. He would have spent the months preparing and fortifying his keep. He would have closed the gates and locked them all safely inside.
Instead, he forced a temporary marriage between Gaira and Laird Fergusson. Under normal politics it would have been astute. It brought strength for his clan by having someone in the south and Gaira would be nearer to their youngest sister, Irvette.
Irvette, the youngest and sweetest of them all, who married a man she loved. Irvette, who was murdered by the English at Doonhill.
Since April, his family had seen too much danger, suffered too much loss. And worst of all, he could have avoided most of it.
Now he needed to right these wrongs with this clan, but he could not be gentle any longer. Her stubbornness aside, he was laird and knew what was at stake. He wouldn’t fail his clan and family again, and he fully intended for his new plan to work.
‘What happened to those sheep, Lioslath? I didn’t take them and I see scarce livestock on your land.’