“What do you mean?” Her voice started tight and small but grew to a shout. “What can you tell me about my father?” She hadn’t meant to walk away from Neve, Myles, and Thane, but suddenly she wasn’t ten feet from Owen, Vera, and Dodie.
The crowd stayed utterly still, hands on knees, eyes blinking quietly, arms crossed, fingers linked.
A grin flashed over Owen’s mouth. “He is a good man, your father.” He spoke loud enough that all could hear.
The knife’s cool sheath pressed into Aini’s hands. “How do you know him? Even if he knew one of you once, he’s not a...traitor like you.”
“Aini,” Neve hissed from behind.
The gathering murmured. Vera put a hand on her generous hip and snorted.
“Vera had to remind me who he was,” Owen said. “She’s our historian here. Lewis MacGregor used to work for the cause, for the Dionadair.”
It was as if someone had poured a bucket of ice water down Aini’s back. Her body quaked in the aftermath. This was exactly what she’d been afraid of. That Father truly did have a dangerous past. That this whole thing wasn’t simply a mistake and easily solvable. Her own dear, sweet, genius father was a traitor to the crown. And being that, he was also an enemy to the most powerful clan in Scotland, the increasingly vicious Campbells.
“Your father and mine were good friends,” Owen said.
Neve was whispering feverishly to Myles, who looked like he’d downed a sour cup of milk.
Aini swallowed, her throat on fire. “Who is your father?”
Owen, Vera, and Dodie traded a look, all downcast eyes and burdened shoulders. The people on the benches and sitting in the chairs around the tables set their mouths and straightened their own shoulders, protecting their leaders like a seawall shields a bay.
Owen quickly licked his lips. “Our father was a Bethune, as are we.”
“The line of the first Dionadair!” a man called out. Another beside him patted his back and smiled grimly.
Owen gave his supporter a nod. “Yes, thank you.” He looked at Aini. “And together, your father and mine had developed an invisible tracking powder.”
Aini’s hands shook as she gathered the knife closer, holding it, squeezing it, wishing it had some inherent power to help her out of this situation. She breathed once, slow and determined, through her nose. The air here smelled foreign. More metallic. Electric. And also like deeply churned earth.
“The powder worked well,” Owen said. “But one of the ingredients had a traceable source in Isle of Man. The Campbells knew my father had contacts there. They came for him soon thereafter.”
Vera trembled like a ghost had walked through her. “They sentenced our father to death.”
“No.” Aini’s lips were cold and she touched them briefly, her fingers shaking. “My father is a sweets scientist. Not some wild insurgent. He can barely handle the tax men. He doesn’t have it in him to rebel.”
Owen raised his eyebrows. “From the stories, Lewis was a different man before he lost his closest friend, my father. The last of his rebellious streak was subdued when your mother left him.”
She couldn’t breathe. Her mother. That’s why she’d divorced him. Because she found out he was a traitor. Her collar choked her. She tugged at it with icy fingers. “So, the Campbells do have my father.”
“Yes. We’re not certain what Nathair has planned for Lewis, what with the statements the man has made of late. It was easier when we had one enemy, the king, and knew what his motivations were. Now…Nathair may have more than a criminal trial in mind for your father.”
“They tried to persuade him to craft weaponized candies.”
Owen nodded. “But for who.” It wasn’t a question. He’d said it like he wanted Aini to think it out.
“To hurt you,” she said, “the Dionadair?”
The red-bearded man slowly shook his head. “By now, they’ve guessed about his past work with my father. The Campbells know we’re aware of the possibility of weaponized candy. They know we’d be wary. Of course that doesn’t mean they wouldn’t try it. But…”
Thane stepped closer, his arm brushing Aini’s.
Owen’s gaze went to him, then returned to her. “We believe the Campbells want to use weaponized candies on the Scottish people.”
“What?” Thane and Aini spoke together.
“After we realized who you are, Aini, and who your father is, we put out some…feelers. The Campbells are interested in a fear campaign.”
“But why?”
“To persuade the people to rise against the king and back Nathair as an independent leader in Scotland.” Owen pushed his wireframe glasses higher on his nose.
Thane made a grumbling noise. “What a load of cack. No matter what…interesting tactics he’s using, Nathair can’t possibly believe he can win against the king.”
Vera laughed, and Aini fought the urge to cover her ears. “Is that not what we’re doing here, Handsome?” Vera said. “The king can be beat and he will!”
The crowd shouted. It sounded like a blend of Ha! and Muah! Probably Gaelic, Aini thought.
Thane stepped back. “Yeah, well,” he whispered to Aini, “Nathair is not as daft as this bunch. Mad, yes. Daft, no.”
Owen’s head jerked up and his hands fell to his sides. He’d heard Thane.
“My father won’t help the Campbells use weaponized sweets against innocent people. He wouldn’t even do it against not-so-innocent people. Like you.”
Owen nodded. “Aye. Vera found one of our own father’s diary entries that said as much about your father. Very against the whole idea, Lewis MacGregor was.”
“Is,” Aini corrected.
Vera glanced at her with pity pouring out of mascara-heavy eyes.
A fusion of frustration and anger buzzed through Aini. “He is alive. I’d know it if they’d killed him.”
Owen stepped in and took her arm. Thane’s nostrils flared and he looked at Aini like Is this okay? She shrugged and let Owen hold her elbow lightly, like an old man would.
“We do believe he is still alive,” Owen said. “We have a plan. But first, we need information to shape that plan.” He leaned closer, his voice a stage whisper, loud and soft at the same time. “Tell me, what did you see when you touched the Bethune brooch?”
Aini’s heart solidified.
She should’ve been prepared for this moment. After all, she’d found the knife the brooch’s vision showed. But still. Admitting her ability aloud, discussing it in front of three hundred or so strangers who may or may not—probably not—have her best interests at heart? One could even be a Campbell spy. A breath shuddered out of her. She could never really prepare for something as big as this.
“I don’t know what you’re talking about.” Her words trickled out of her mouth when they should’ve marched, strong and defensive.
Vera’s purple dress stood out in the crowd of brown, blue, and white. “Oh yes, you do. You know very well what we’re speaking about. You wouldn’t have the brooch if you were not meant to.”
“Meant to?” Aini asked.
“It’s the prophecy,” Vera said.
Dodie came forward and grabbed Vera’s arm in his meaty hand. “She might’ve just found the thing.” His curly, black hair fell over his heavy eyebrows. “She might not be the one.”
Owen detached Dodie’s grip on their sister. “She is. Enough of this, Dodie.”
“What prophecy?” Aini leaned forward.
Neve and Myles gathered around Thane and Aini.
“Macbeth’s Seer.” Vera pointed at the knife, and cold perspiration slicked over Aini’s face. “That’s the old king’s knife. Macbeth’s knife. And I’d bet you saw the stone in your vision from the antiquarian’s brooch.”
Thane’s eyes went wide and he staggered back a step. “My God. She’s right.”
“What’s right?” Aini looked to Neve and Myles, who seemed as lost as she.
A ripple of whispers rolled through the crowd.
<
br /> Owen held his hands wide, inviting the whole room to listen. “In the eleventh century, Macbeth, MacBheatha mac Fhionnlaigh—the real man, not the Scottish play—ruled Scotland. When threatened by a Scots leader who worked for the English—much like the Campbells do today—Macbeth hid a very special stone. Concealed it in the earth, deep, where no one would find it. That stone was the royal seat for the ancient Dal Riata Gaels. Every ruler from Loarn mac Eirc to Macbeth had been crowned upon it. It was called the Coronation Stone.”
Neve gasped.
Aini wrapped her arms around herself. “A one-thousand-year-old legend doesn’t have anything to do with me.”
Owen stepped forward, his gait slow and regal, his hair copper in the overhead lanterns’ light. “In 1819, my ancestor Angus Bethune and his spineless, betraying bossman, Donan Campbell,” he paused to spit on the ground, “found the stone. They were antiquarians, relic-hunters. Angus Bethune hid it before that sleekit Campbell could give it to the English king and ruin Scotland’s chance to free herself from tyranny.
“Donan Campbell killed Angus Bethune—knifed him in the back—when he found out, but not before Angus planted a trail, aided by Macbeth’s ghost. Yes, he was a Ghost Talker and a Dreamer, seems like. In a dream, the ancient King Macbeth told Angus a Seer would rise. He said Angus must set a trail of visions embedded in artifacts, beginning with the brooch, that would lead the Seer to the resting place of the Coronation Stone, the rock that, when the true heir to Scotland’s throne touches it, will cry out and both its promise and its curse will free us from the English king and all in league with him.”
As one, the Dionadair stood. They reached high and crossed their thumbs over their heads, faces solemn as gravestones. Every eye turned to Aini. These people, their hope, it burned with ferocity, a surety she’d never seen. Goosebumps rippled down her arms.
Neve made a sound like she’d breathed her last breath. Myles shook his head, and Thane paled, his glasses very black against his honey hair and fair cheeks.
The room spun. “Wait.” Aini held up her shaking hands. “It can’t be true.”
She heard the unbelieving tone in her own voice. Felt it. On the surface, anyway. But the wild story rang through her bones like music she’d never heard before but somehow loved.
“Just give me a minute.” She pinched the bridge of her nose, her heartbeat in her ears.
“Of course,” Owen said quietly.
“Aini…” Neve edged closer, but Aini stepped away for space to think.
The whole thing came together in events, feelings, and visions, with the Dionadair as the good side in all of it. But they were rebels. Outlaws. People who threw rules back in the king’s face. They were as dangerous as people could be.
But the king was worse.
He treated Scots like lesser beings than the English, prohibiting marriages without permission and laying out prejudiced taxes. The king had long ago abolished Parliament and taken away any chance they once had for a say in government. He was a tyrant. If he had his way, everyone like Aini, every sixth-senser, would be dead.
“It’s because of this prophecy, isn’t it?” she whispered. “This is why the king sees us—sixth-sensers—as abominations. He is afraid of me, of the stone, of the true heir, the person who is meant to rule Scotland, the one the people would rise up and support.”
Owen smiled sadly. “Of course it is, Seer. You understand it now, don’t you?”
She put a hand to her churning stomach. Their theory, the story they’d told, drummed persistent and unrelenting through her flesh and bone. If she accepted this idea as truth, she’d forever be known as a sixth-senser, an abomination to the king, a person destined to die sooner rather than later.
Vera began to chant.
‘Macbeth’s Seer rises nigh, a stone reflected in his light eye, and he bumped the man upon the chair, ripped him up by the hair.’
Stepping back and holding his hands wide, Owen nodded. “Aini MacGregor, you are fated to free not just your father, but all of Scotland. You are fated to find our true heir. You are the Seer.”
Her blood halted in her veins, then sang and burned and made her want to scream. The Seer. It was crazy.
It is true, her blood whispered.
She sucked a breath as the crowd surged and cheered, a moving tangle of smiles and bodies and hands lifted over heads. Thane stayed back from the rest, his fist on his mouth, thinking, overwhelmed, and she didn’t blame him. She felt the same. The celebrating crowd crushed Neve and Myles into Aini’s sides, their faces shocked, but joyful.
Neve squeezed Aini’s hands tightly. Now Aini was not only a sixth-senser. She was not only an unintentional rebel. She had become the figurehead, the guide of the Dionadair.
The Campbells’ greatest enemy.
CHAPTER SEVENTEEN
SEER
THE EXCITED VOICES, THE chanting of the old song—all the sounds echoed off the barn walls and reverberated inside Thane’s skull like alarm bells.
Aini was the Seer. Not just a Seer. The Seer.
She was the one the old stories said would find the Coronation Stone. Why had he never truly believed the legend? Rodric did. Nathair certainly did. He’d railed on about it at a clan gathering last autumn, his scarred face red in the bonfire’s scattered light.
It really was more than a dream formed of whisky and Nathair’s growing lust for power.
Head ringing, Thane raked hands through his tangled hair. If there was one thing he could report to forgive all his recent shortcomings with his clan, this was it. If he was the Campbell to locate the Seer and destroy the fabled stone, he’d rule the clan. They’d flock to him like disciples. He shivered. What a thought. Rodric looking to Thane with respect? He shook his head. If Rodric respected an act, that act could simply, easily, quickly be categorized as pure evil.
As Thane shook his head to clear it, the Dionadair started ringing contacts on beat-up phones, heading through back doors with paperwork in hands, talking in groups. Two big men doffed boxing gloves in the cage to train. They were preparing for war.
Reporting this nest wouldn’t be evil, would it? Even if it did please people like Nathair and Rodric. It was Thane’s duty to his clan. To the good people in Clan Campbell.
But reporting Aini?
There she stood, so slight in her dress and open-front sweater. The woven piece of clothing swallowed her arms and hung below her knees. With that red ribbon in her ebony hair, she looked younger than she was. The skin on the back of her neck was smooth and he knew exactly how sweet that spot would be to kiss. To think of her taken by his clan…
Something stuck in his throat and he coughed. He rubbed his lip, the small scar on his thumb rough and familiar. He remembered getting that scar. He’d beat the sense out of a man who’d spoken against the king. It’d been up at his family’s home. In Argyll. He’d been ten years old. In Thane’s memory, his father was quiet, slick, and sure. Everything ten-year-old him was not, in his too-long arms and legs and squeaking voice.
“Hit him again, young Thane,” his father had said then. “He’s a traitor and you’re doing the king’s work.”
After Thane had hit the man twice—the second sloppy punch hit the man’s mouth and the traitor’s tooth had cut Thane’s thumb—Rodric and the others had hauled the man off to prison.
Eels swam in Thane’s belly at the memory.
He blinked, pushed his glasses into his hair, and rubbed his face to clear the image away.
Now only Owen, Vera, Neve, and Myles made a loose sort of circle around Aini.
“I did not see that coming.” Myles looked like he’d been hit in the back of the head, stunned and wondering how much pain was headed his way once his body caught up with the blow. “Of course, I’m not a Seer so...”
“Oh, Aini!” Neve grabbed Aini by the arms. “I can hardly believe it. It’s amazing.”
Aini stood motionless, until she turned and looked at Thane with coffee-black eyes. She needed support
now, going through this madness. But all she had was him, the enemy, the wolf hiding in the trees. Thane grabbed his sweater at the chest and gripped it tightly, the loose weave distorting the curves of his fingerprints.
Vera snorted and swaggered up to Aini. “Think you can handle it, Seer?”
Aini’s mouth worked, but nothing came of it.
Owen pulled Vera and Dodie aside. They spoke, heads together. Vera and Dodie joined a group at one of the many rickety wooden tables across the barn. The climbing wall stood behind them, covered in ropes like vines.
Owen waved Thane, Aini, Neve, and Myles toward the back of the barn. The wall there didn’t sit quite flush with the rest of the wood. It was an exit. Or an entrance to another area. Thane didn’t know where it led, but it was no place he wished to go. Not being a Campbell.
“What did you see when you touched the brooch?” Owen asked Aini. “Don’t be afraid. We have several sixth-sensers here. Threaders. Ghost Talkers. No dreamers, yet… Sixth-senser skills are valuable to the cause. Yours, of course, especially so.”
Raising her chin, Aini looked at Owen. “I touched the brooch and saw a stone. It looked like…like a seat. Someone had carved swirling shapes and circles in it. It’s the Coronation Stone? The one that will announce the heir when that person touches it?”
“Aye. It is.” Owen rubbed his hands together. “It’s mind-blowing. You’ve seen the stone in your visions.” Throwing his head back, he laughed. “My siblings treated you terribly at the club.”
Myles raised a finger. “Yeah, I expect a seriously beautiful I’m sorry for punching your face card from that thug you call a brother.”
Owen pressed a hand to his chest. “Apologies, Myles.”
Myles’s head jerked back and he looked from Owen to Neve and back again. “How do you know my name?”
Owen raised his eyebrows. “As I mentioned earlier, when I guessed who this young lady might be, I released a few operatives into your part of Edinburgh. They told me you were Myles Smith, son of a successful plantation owner in the southern American colonies.”
Myles’s scowl could’ve melted the altered tablet candy hiding in Thane’s secret bag. “Let’s get back to this vision,” he said quietly.
The Edinburgh Seer: Edinburgh Seer Book One Page 15