"Aye,” he nodded, “that's what your Da thought too, until he saw the torque that old Ranald had bashed his toe on, aye?"
I nudged him. “And you knew it was here all the time."
He kissed me on the forehead. “Well, I wasn't about to tell you it was here until we knew for sure that you'd be staying."
"Nice,” I replied. “So why all the surveying equipment?” I asked. “You never did tell me why you needed it, if you knew where the loot was all along."
Cayden shrugged. “Thought I'd try to throw wee Muncaster a red herring. I couldn't use surveying equipment if my life depended on it,” he admitted. “But I didn't want him poking around Broch Caidil, aye? If he had figured out all this was stashed in the tower walls under all those fallen stones, he'd have knocked the bloody place down trying to get to it."
"I still don't think it's fair that you knew about it and I didn't,” I pouted.
"Aye, well, I'm a Spalding and you're the Murray, and it's my job to know things."
I tossed the polishing cloth at him. “You're insufferable, you know that? And that argument doesn't even fly, because my father was a Murray and you never told him.” A thought occurred to me. “What about the inscription on his headstone? About following his eternal gaze, and all that?"
Cayden had the decency to blush. “Well, I had that put there. Just in case you ever showed up here to claim your inheritance, aye?"
"You should have told him,” I protested.
He blinked owlishly. “I'm not sure he was supposed to know."
I stared at him. “That's ridiculous."
"Not so much,” he said matter-of-factly. “Hear me out on this. Following Catharine's murder, two centuries passed without the birth of a single female child to the Murray line. And then all of a sudden, you came along, Brynne,” he mused. “Perhaps you were always meant to have Kilgraeme, in her place. Catharine, I mean."
I frowned. It didn't make any sense to me on a practical level, but it seemed like the sort of thing Gil would say. I didn't argue. “You still could have told me,” I pointed out.
"I'm telling you now. Here's your treasure, love,” he said as he grinned.
Suddenly aware of the present, I realized he was talking to me. “What are you thinking?” he asked, as he wrote down the particulars on the little hoofed god.
"Hm?"
"What's on your mind, Brynne?” he murmured, in that low, musical voice that sent shivers of anticipation through me.
"I was thinking about Kilgraeme,” I said slowly. “Do you know what Gil said? He said he thought if I stayed here, I'd be okay."
Cayden pulled me into his arms. “Mm. And you, what do you think?"
I sighed, because finally, I had found peace. “I think he's right."
"Aye, me too."
I drew in my breath, inhaling the gentle woodsmoke scent of him, and looked up at his steel-gray eyes. “You know something? I really do love you, Cayden Spalding."
He laughed, another sound I loved, deep in his throat. “I should hope so. I look at you sometimes, Brynne, and I love you so much it burns. Do you know what I mean?"
I knew exactly.
* * * *
I lay in my bed, next to Cayden. I felt the heat radiating off of him, even in the coolness of the room. He was sleeping lightly, as he always did, like a tightly-coiled spring, ready to leap up and run off to war, sword drawn, at a moment's notice. His hair was spread around him like an auburn cloud, and I wondered about his ancestors, Malcolm and Will, and what they must have been like. I thought about the Spalding blood, how closely it was tied to my own, and how their family had always followed the call of our clan.
Cayden, the spirit of battle.
The moonlight was shining in, and I climbed carefully out from under the covers, trying not to wake him.
As I sat on the window seat, the dark water of Loch Lomond glimmered before me. I thought about my father, sometimes, when I looked at the waves lapping on the rocks, because Jamie Murray's body had never been found. Sometimes I wondered if he was still out there, watching for me.
I went to the cemetery sometimes, and occasionally found a white flower at the base of his grave. Cayden thought it was Mrs. Much who left it there. I thought perhaps it was Catharine, glowing with the bloom of her pregnancy, visiting those who came before her and those who followed. Maybe it was Melissa, looking for absolution. After all, Kilgraeme had plenty of ghosts.
As I looked out at the shore, I saw a man coming up from the shore. Not Cayden, after all, as I had thought the first time, so many months ago when I saw him. It is Will Spalding, and he was running towards the house. She emerged from the shadows, poetry in blue, moving to join him, her hands cupped possessively around the swell that is her child.
"You see them, too?” Cayden said softly in my ear, his arms slipping around my waist.
I nodded. I saw the ghosts of Kilgraeme often. They did not frighten me. On the contrary, they made me feel welcome, as though, for the first time in my life I belonged somewhere.
Kinship. The call of the clan.
They were my family after all, and Cayden's too.
Will and Catharine met in the middle, in the courtyard, and kissed passionately, her nut-brown hair tangling with his red mane. She had loved Will for more than two hundred years, and would love him for two hundred more.
"What they have, Brynne,” he whispered behind me. “It goes beyond time and space and death itself, aye? Do you think it'll be that way for us? In the end?"
I nodded, understanding. Knowing it would be exactly that way for us.
Catharine and Will walked away, her head on his shoulder, and his hand on her rounded stomach, into the shadows once more. They would love each other for all eternity, wholly, completely.
So much that it burned.
* * *
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