Sue-Ellen Welfonder - [MacLean 03]

by Wedding for a Knight

  When they didn’t, he flung an arm toward the unfinished galley hulls. “Go you, if you wish. I am staying here. To search those boats—every last one of them.”

  “’Fore God, but you are a stubborn loon.” Frowning blacker than his beard, Colin swung down from his saddle, strode across the wet sand to grab Magnus by the arms.

  “Those are empty hulls, my friend. The most of them unfinished. Do you not see? The women will not be cowering beneath one of them. Not in this storm. Had they been caught unaware, they would seek more adequate shelter, wouldn’t you say?”

  “And that is the heart of it, you witless dolt!” Magnus shot him an irritated look. “Do you not see? They were not caught unaware. This storm started raging last night and worsened with each passing hour. No sane person would venture out into the teeth of such fury. They had to have been taken by force, and whoe’er would do such a thing is capable of any infamy, would not care whether they were sheltered in the storm or no.”

  The color drained from Colin’s face. “You are right,” he agreed, dashing the wet hair off his forehead. He held a flattened hand over his eyes and stared out across the tossing waves. “Think you they might be aboard one of those foundering galleys?”

  Magnus followed his stare. “I pray not,” he said, praying indeed.

  “Were they on the one already on its side, they’d have been long since swept out to sea.” Colin voiced Magnus’s own dread. “If they are on the second, the one that is fast sinking—”

  “Then we must fetch them!”

  “And how do you mean to get out there?” Colin eyed the wild-foaming surf, the high, pounding waves. “Would you swim? Only to find you’d squandered time when they are not there?”

  That they could drown was left unsaid—not that Magnus cared. At least not for himself.

  To lose Amicia now that he’d finally made her his would be to have the sun and all the stars extinguish. His world would lose all light and purpose—his life . . . an unthinkable grief.

  “Well?” Colin stared at him through the rain.

  “The currachs!” Magnus decided, already running for the nearest of the little skin-and-wicker boats.

  Colin pressed his lips together, his bad leg forgotten. “A wee hide boat—a cockleshell! In those seas?”

  “A currach will hold five people and is seaworthy enough.” His mind set, Magnus snatched up a length of rope from the sand, secured it to his belt. “We have no other choice,” he added, patting the coils of rope.

  Colin heaved a great sigh, looked doubtful.

  But, bless his true heart, he didn’t balk.

  Not entirely.

  “Just do not think I’m hieing myself out there alone,” he stipulated, eyeing the surging waters with more than a shade of trepidation. “I cannot swim, see you. . . .”

  “We will both go,” Magnus assured him, feeling better now that a plan had been made.

  But the instant he curled his fingers around the rim of the little currach, began pulling it across the sand, the prickling sensation along his spine increased a thousandfold.

  A glance at the fast-sinking galley showed him why.

  Janet stood at the galley’s low-slung rail, one hand raised high above her head and waving.

  “By God, there’s Janet!” Relief surging through him, he grabbed Colin. “See? She has spotted us,” he added, his heart making a great bound.

  Where Janet was, his lady and Dagda would be, too.

  But only Janet stood waving from the rail.

  And, bless her sweet self, but she looked as happy as Magnus. Truth be told, she glowed. But despite her beaming smile and the pallor of her skin, surprisingly notable at the distance, the strands of seaweed tangling her hair bespoke of a struggle with the sea at the very least.

  Magnus glanced at Colin, gave the lout’s arm a rough shake. “Ho, man! Your lady is out there, waving at us. . . . Do you not see her?”

  “I see nothing but rain.” Colin cupped both hands to his eyes, leaning forward to see better. After a moment, he shook his head. “Nay, I only see the damned empty galley.”

  Impatient, Magnus thrust out an arm, pointed. “Look! I tell you she is there—” He broke off at once, staring in disbelief, for Janet had vanished.

  Gone, as if she’d never been.

  “She was there, at the rail, waving . . . I swear it,” he vowed, dragging the currach into the surf. “Come you, hurry!” he called to Colin as he hopped into the little boat, grabbed up the oars. “I know they are on that galley. I can feel Amicia’s presence out there so surely as I can see your ugly face!”

  “We shall soon see, my friend,” Colin said, inserting himself into the bobbing craft. “Aye, we shall see—if we do not lose our own lives trying to get out there.” He grimaced. “Sakes, but you made the worst possible choice of boats!”

  Ignoring him, Magnus set his jaw and began paddling toward the galley. He was not about to admit that, in his haste, he had indeed seized a less than fine craft.

  Already water slopped around their ankles—and not from the pouring rain. The little currach’s timber frame was half-rotted. They’d be hard-pressed to reach the galley, much less use the dubious vessel to transport five adults safely back to shore if they did.

  “I am paddling—you bail,” he said grimly, his gaze fixed on the galley, not trusting himself to meet Colin’s eye.

  Not all of his damnable pride had left him.

  “This is madness!” Colin lifted his voice above the wind, cursed blackly when a great wave crashed into the currach, near upturning it.

  “The only madness is if we do not try,” Magnus gritted, straining to hold their course, the oar blades effecting little against the churning seas, Colin’s two-handed water-scooping efforts even less.

  But, at last, the galley loomed before them and, to Magnus’s vast relief, the wee boat withstood the violent crash of impact. Better yet, they’d managed to collide with the galley’s low-slung midsection and not the high bow-platform or raised stern as he’d feared they might.

  Whipping the coiled rope from his belt, he secured the currach to the larger vessel as swiftly as his unsteady hands allowed, then clambered over the side of the galley, Colin close on his heels.

  “Amicia! Janet!” he cried, dropping to the planked deck. He glanced about, near frantic, and seeing . . . nothing.

  Someone might well have upturned a barrel of ice chips over him. He’d been so sure.

  “They are not here,” Colin panted, sinking onto one of the rowing-benches. Rubbing his injured thigh, he cast a dark look down the narrow gangway running between the bench rows, the defeat in his eyes squeezing Magnus’s heart.

  His hope.

  “They have to be here.” He dismissed Colin’s assessment with a wave of his hand. “I saw Janet. She . . . Christ on the Cross, what is that?”

  He stared, starting forward only to have his feet slither on the slippery deck—a deck run wet with the pouring rain, sea spray, and an oddly luminescent green foam.

  “That is your lady’s cloak, I vow!” Colin pushed to his feet again, pointing not at the strange rivers of greenish sea foam streaming over the deck planks, but at the crumpled and ripped mantle tangled up in the galley’s mast cordage.

  Magnus charged forward, dread racking him when he recognized the ruined cloak as Amicia’s indeed. “Nooo!” he cried, his blood chilling, waves of nausea and denial churning inside him.

  He sank to his knees beside the cloak, dragged its heavy folds up against his breast, dug his fingers into the wet fur lining and a mass of hard and soft somethings that felt anything but pleasant beneath his clutching fingers.

  “What devilry is this?” He dropped the cloak at once, stared at it in horror.

  “By the Mass, ne’er have I seen the like.” Colin’s voice came from behind him, the knave seemingly unwilling to come any nearer.

  Not that Magnus could blame him for his own skin crawled with revulsion.

  Revulsion, and f
ear for his lady, for the mantle’s hem had torn, and all manner of oddities spilled from within its folds. Strange objects without description that now littered the deck, washed to and fro by the swishing foam and rain, some tumbling over the side and into the sea.

  The cloak also slid overboard, but the strange objects, some might call them charms, or spelling goods, remained. The objects and a single line of ominously taut rope that disappeared over the rail—its implication mocking every hope he’d clung to throughout the last hours.

  Colin spotted the rope at the same time, and being closer, he reached it first. “’Tis old Dagda!” He pointed when Magnus joined him. “She is dead.”

  Looking down, Magnus saw her, too.

  Or rather what could be seen of her above the churning waves.

  Horror constricting his chest, he stared down at her, disbelief crashing over him. “Jesu God, what a terrible end,” he breathed, crossing himself.

  The old woman must have tripped on the rain-slick deck, tangling herself in a jumble of rope and—perhaps?—the voluminous folds of Amicia’s fur-lined cloak.

  “And my wife? Poor Janet?” Wheeling away from the grisly sight, Magnus grabbed Colin’s arms. He held his friend crushingly tight, as if by sheer force of will and strength, he could undo what seemed the cruelest of ends.

  “What of them? Where are they?” His shouts rose above the wind, reverberating off the heavens that would snatch away all that was so dear. “They cannot have met the same fate.” He dug his fingers into Colin’s mailed sleeves. “I will not allow it! They cannot be dead.”

  “They are not here.” The flatness of his friend’s voice said why he believed them gone.

  Colin believed the two women already at the bottom of the sea.

  “You think they are dead!” Magnus shook him, fury and bottomless, white-hot pain blurring his vision. “Admit it . . . you have no hope of finding them. Not alive.”

  Colin did not answer him.

  But his silence did.

  “Noooo!” Thrusting Colin from him, Magnus spun about, bent double in his pain. “Noooo!” he cried again, clutching his middle, mind-numbing grief eating his innards and spewing fire through him, each hot blast of agony setting another piece of his soul to flame.

  “Merciful saints help me. It cannot be!” He sank to his knees, hot tears scalding his eyes, blinding him. Horrible pain welled and twisted inside him; then Colin’s hand settled on his shoulder and the commiserating squeeze he gave Magnus ripped away his last shred of hope.

  He looked up at his friend, seeing only the tear-blurred outline of him but recognizing the sadness in the slow shaking of Colin’s head, the slumping of his shoulders.

  “I cannot live without her, see you?” The words came out on a ragged gasp. “S-she is not just my wife, Colin. She is my life.”

  Closing his eyes, his pressed the balls of his hands hard against his cheeks. “I love her, see you?” That, barely a whisper, so great was the quaver in his usually strong voice. “I have always loved her. So much. . . .”

  Colin said nothing, his silence everything.

  Amicia was gone.

  Both women were gone, and his life had ended as surely as if he’d left it on the blood-drenched ground at Dupplin Moor.

  And mayhap he’d already died and gone to join his fallen companions-in-arms because their dying moans and anguished, pain-filled cries had risen to join the roar of the surf and the keen of the whistling wind.

  “Mmmmmmpphhhh!” moaned one of those unfortunates, the high-pitched voice a bit too panicky-sounding for a knight in mortal agony. Most warriors, even dying ones, kept their dignity through the bitter end.

  But Dupplin had been that bad, that horrid and damning.

  A defeat smashing enough to turn some men into women.

  At once, comprehension washed over Magnus, hitting him as fiercely as the waves crashing against the sides of the lurching galley.

  “Dear God in Heaven!” Magnus shot to his feet, almost toppling Colin to his. “Did you hear? Those thumping noises . . . that moan?” He threw back his head and whooped. “By the Rood! Colin! They are here. Somewhere. I hear them calling us!”

  He glanced around, his heart soaring with hope . . . exultation.

  New tears blurred his vision, but happy ones this time. That one wee moan had come from Amicia’s lips. He’d know the sound of her voice anywhere. Amongst a thousand women, across every sea, and through every light and darkness.

  He grinned at Colin. “I heard them, I tell you.”

  Colin looked at him as if he’d run mad. “I heard nothing,” he said, not smiling at all. But he did blink. And so furiously that the glimmer in his eyes revealed that it wasn’t just rain plaguing his vision. “I neither saw my Janet earlier, nor do I hear anything now.”

  “Then you are blind and deaf!” Magnus clapped the other’s back, his own certainty making him jubilant. “Come, let us tear this galley apart plank by blessed plank until we find them!”

  “Magnus?”

  The cry, faint but too real to be any warrior knight’s ghost, came from the far end of the galley and split Magnus’s heart wide open.

  This time, she’d called his name.

  And Colin had heard, too.

  Then at last he saw her, streaming wet and shivering, bruised and bound by rope to Janet. The two of them were wedged into a storage recess beneath a bench row, both women staring at him from wide, tear-filled eyes—the most beautiful sight he’d e’er seen in his life.

  They lived and were hale.

  The sun had returned to shine on him—and the Fiend could take him before he’d ever let it go out again.

  Chapter Seventeen

  HALF-LAUGHING, half-sobbing, Magnus ran forward, dropped to his knees before the two women. “Praise the saints!” he cried, throwing his arms around both of them, putting the whole of his gladness in that one crushing hug. “We thought you were dead. Like poor Dagda—”

  “Magnus, my dearest Magnus, is it truly you? I’d been praying you would come,” Amicia breathed, her voice quavering. “But please—do not speak of Dagda, not yet, I beg you.”

  She shook her head, tears spilling down her cheeks—tears that, for once, she did not attempt to check. “Not until I have savored this moment, unmarred.”

  Squeezing back his own tears, Magnus made short work of her bindings, lifted her from the smallish recess, then stepped back so Colin could do the same for Janet.

  “Hush you, sweeting.” Magnus sought to comfort his bride. He drew her closer, smoothed his fingers over a large bluish swelling on her forehead.

  Saints, just seeing the ugly knot and her pain-glazed eyes filled him with a fury such as he’d never known.

  “You are hurt.” He rocked her, rained kisses on her brow, her cheeks, and even her nose. “I will find whoe’er did this and make him wish he’d ne’er glimpsed the light of day. Praise God, Janet signaled to us—” he broke off, wheeled to face Colin and Janet.

  “I saw you at the rail, waving to us.” He stared hard at his shivering cousin, not missing how she quaked all the more beneath that stare.

  He also noticed that her hair was plaited and not loose and trailing seaweed. He noted, too, that the odd green-glowing sea foam had vanished from the deck. Along with the strange flotsam of curiosities that had spilled from his lady’s cloak.

  All of it had vanished—or been claimed by the sea and rain. Almost as if, now that he had found her, such charms, or whate’er they’d been, were no longer needed.

  A chilling mix of confusion and comprehension washing over him, he narrowed his eyes at Janet. “I saw you, I swear it—yet you were bound and tied to the oar bench. How—”

  “Not now, my heart. There are things in this world we may ne’er understand, but they can be good things . . . so good,” his love silenced him. She pressed cold fingers to his lips, looked at him as if he were the whole of the world for her.

  And he was her world. The entirety of it—all her
light and gladness. “Now, this moment, I just want to look at you,” she declared, her voice breaking. “I so feared I would ne’er see you again.”

  That after aching for you forever, we’d been damned to have but one night of heaven.

  But then she’d heard him calling to her, reaching for her through the mists that had claimed her, and she’d somehow managed to climb up out of its swirling dark and answer him, half-afraid her heart had conjured his beloved voice.

  Shuddering, a great sob escaped her and she clung to him, her body trembling, rivers of tears coursing down her cheeks. The warmth and safety of his arms around her was a sweet bliss so stunning it took her breath.

  “Shush, lass, I am here now,” he said, wrapping a fold of his plaid around her, enveloping her in the tightest of hugs. “As are you, sweeting. Naught else matters.”

  But it did.

  He’d lost the only two galleys his men had finished, and from what she’d seen of the storm damage to the half-built ones on the strand, many of those ships would never see completion. Not with his pride keeping him from dipping into her coffers to pay for more supplies.

  She looked aside, sniffed. “You err, my love,” she got out on a wobbly breath. “So much matters. . . . Your fleet has been ruined again and—and even if you wish the rebuilding of it had not yet begun, there are some who have needed . . . otherwise. Your da. Your brothers. Many others.”

  Pulling a bit away from him, she pressed her hand to his chest, stroking, as if her touch, there where his heart beat, could persuade him. “Will you not reconsider using my dowry coins to order more supplies?” she urged, prepared to beg if necessary. “Can you . . . can you not push past your pride just this once? For your da? For me?”

  He angled his head at her. “Pride, you say? Sweet lass, what is pride to a heart that loves?”

  “It would mean so much to your da, in especial. He—” Amicia’s heart stopped, brilliant light and joy bursting through her darkest cares and worries. She stared at him, so afraid she’d imagined the words. “What did you say?”

  Magnus drew a long breath, sating himself on the beauty of her shining eyes, the sweet quiver of her lower lip, before he answered her—savoring yet again how damned good it felt to be free of his fool pride.