She rolled onto her side and pressed a fist against her mouth. Another slow breath.
In. Out. In.
Then she climbed out of her cot and headed for the door.
Her fingers rubbed together, remembering the feel of Father’s wool suit jacket as he walked with her to the train station. She inhaled, thinking of his soap and shoe polish scent. She bumped a cot as she grabbed the side door’s handle. The tenant shuffled in her sleep and drew her knees up under a thin blanket. Aini opened the door and walked into the pale light of a Scottish summer night.
A guard with wide-set eyes adjusted the black gun at his belt. “Do you need something, Seer?”
“Just…need some air. I’ll be right back.”
She was only going to talk to the Campbell messenger. If they had Father, if she could just see him for a minute… Her boot hit a dark spot in the dirt drive, and she stopped.
Blood.
It was from earlier when they’d moved a man still bleeding, a man who’d missed the truck to the safe hospital. She remembered him from the sleeping quarters in the hillside. His white mohawk hair style had contrasted with his quiet, polite smile.
What was she doing? If they had Father there, they’d only use him against her. To murder her friends and the rest of the Dionadair, the people who risked everything to fight against Nathair’s mad quest for control.
Even if the Campbells did release her father, were he and Aini supposed to go back to their lives with the knowledge that the kingsmen could scoop them up at any minute and put them to death for treason or whatever infraction Nathair cared to invent?
Aini looked up. The stars shimmered, fighting to shine in the fading blue sky. Before Thane, before the slaughter, before meeting the Dionadair and seeing their passion, she could’ve made peace with a life lived in determined ignorance. Safety for safety’s sake. A quick memory of the vision she’d seen in Thane’s necklace poured over her thoughts. The cold edge to his father’s movements, the pain in his mother’s face, the twisted loyalty Thane felt as a child.
Aini couldn’t allow Nathair to win. Not this time. No matter what.
Father wouldn’t want her to fight. He’d left this life to keep her in his life, to try and make amends with her mother.
Dizzy from lack of sleep, and the pull and stretch of fear, she tugged her hair free and let it drop over her shoulders. Taking a shuddering breath, she raised her hands to the sky and crossed her thumbs. Maybe the Campbell messenger would see her and know her decision.
She wanted the Scottish people to be free from Nathair. She wanted her father to be free from Nathair. She wanted Thane to be free from Nathair.
Back at the farmhouse, she nodded once to the guard and went inside.
Owen was waiting beside her cot. “So, you’re finally ready.”
“I am,” she said, her blood hot in her veins.
CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX
IF ONLY FOR A FEW MORE MINUTES
UNDER A FLINT GRAY sky, five Dionadair trucks shed their hiding places on the old woman’s farm.
“If it doesn’t confuse them—though I think it will—it’ll surely keep them busy,” Owen said, helping Aini brush straw from a truck’s hood.
Aini bent her head and climbed inside. Myles and Neve went around and scooted across the seat. Vera and Dodie sat up front with Owen.
The first truck to leave, recently tarped and covered in branches behind the barn, headed to the townhouse to see if any Campbells were stationed there. Another Dionadair vehicle, that had shared the barn with a dozen operatives and five cows, drove south as a mere distraction. Maneuvering out of a struggling orchard, a third truck carried the Dionadair’s finest fighters toward the Campbells’ holding cells beneath the Signet Library in Edinburgh’s Old Town, just down from the townhouse. They were going after Father.
Aini put a hand over her aching heart and said a silent prayer. Let him be okay. Let this all work out. Please. Let me have my only family back again.
That wasn’t quite right though. She had more than her father. Her friends had become family too. Myles and Neve sat beside her in the cabin’s back seat, their faces pinched with worry. Aini laid her cheek on Myles’s shoulder, breathing in his paint and cotton smell. He patted her hand and Neve leaned over. She gave Aini an encouraging smile, her front teeth over her lip.
Their truck, and the one going with them, bumped out of the farmhouse’s dirt drive and aimed at North Berwick.
They were headed for the stone.
“When do you think we’ll hear from the Signet cells team?” Aini took a small bite of another of Myles’s quietly procured apples. A real breakfast wasn’t really happening on a day like this.
Vera sipped an aromatic dark roast from her travel coffee mug and answered for her brother. “We’ll hear from them when there’s any development.”
Myles picked at some paint under his thumbnail. “As in, when they find Lewis?”
“The poor man.” Neve looked out the window.
Aini flicked a glance at Myles and forced another bite of the tart apple down. “Yes, when they find him. If they fail, the Campbells aren’t going to let them give us a ring to chat.”
Neve made a little noise and Myles shut his eyes.
Wishing for a message from Thane, Aini took her phone from the wide, military belt she’d borrowed from Vera. It had a good sized pocket and a place for the Macbeth knife. She felt better with the weapon at her side even though Owen had only given her two, one-hour lessons on the ways to use it yesterday. She’d probably hurt herself more than any attacker. But at least she wasn’t going down without shedding some enemy blood.
Rolling hills, clusters of painted buildings, and roads smaller than the one they were on made up a patchwork of faded green, white, and black beyond the truck’s windows. The landscape had probably changed little since Angus Bethune set this trail of artifacts, guided by Macbeth’s ghost. The roads, of course, were different. The billboards too. But the growing things were most likely much the same and the lay of the land.
“We have a tail,” Vera said, leaning over Owen and looking at the side mirror.
Owen slowed and moved into the next lane on the wide motorway. Myles, Neve, and Aini moved to see. In Owen’s mirror, a black sedan nosed out of the mild traffic and took a place three cars behind the truck of Dionadair traveling with them.
“They’ve been with us since we entered the motorway.” Vera bent and came up with a pistol. She cocked it, and Aini’s heart clicked like it was preparing itself too.
Her hands began to sweat. She hoped it wouldn’t come to a battle. She didn’t want to see more blood. Bile rose in her throat. The metallic smell of broken people still haunted her. Surely they could do this without anyone else getting hurt. Maybe Nathair Campbell would realize what he was doing wasn’t going to win him more power, that the Dionadair would always find a way to protect their loved ones from his ruthless plans.
Passing through the small, cobbled town of North Berwick, they approached the docks. Boats, red and white, bobbed in the choppy water along the rugged coastline.
Myles, Neve, Dodie, and Aini followed Owen, Vera, and ten other Dionadair heavies down the long, wooden dock to a middle-sized fishing boat. A gust of wind blew across the Firth of Forth, a slice of the North Sea, and sprayed Aini lightly with salt water. Eyeing their boat’s tall mast and the netting strung along the side, Myles leaped onto the craft and helped Neve board. Aini grabbed the side of the boat as it dipped in the water. She jumped onto the deck with fairly steady legs, but her mind was still with Thane and wondering whether they’d been followed.
Dodie started the boat’s engine as Vera and Owen untied their lines from the dock. They started into the leaden slab of ocean, Neve’s hair and Aini’s tangling together in the wind. Aini pulled her borrowed, light wool sweater higher at the back of her neck. The red fabric was soft under her fingers and she wondered who had originally owned it. Were they dead now? And how did they die? Or was
this simply a loan from Vera or another Dionadair, maybe one of the operatives who’d volunteered to drive the distraction truck in the opposite direction?
Myles rubbed a hand over Neve’s back and Aini’s. Aini smiled, and he gave her a wink. Half of her wished they weren’t there, but the other half was so glad they were. She’d told them about the Campbells’ offer and filled them in on Thane’s message too. They had a plan for those cherry drops that had put Dodie down for four hours. She didn’t like it, but it was better than having a bloody shoot-out, because every single Campbell could have a gun. The Dionadair only had as many as they could scrounge from the black market. The king was a much better provider.
Promising rain, a blue fog curled around the rocky cliffs of Bass Rock Island as they approached its southern side. White plumed gannets soared above, every so often tucking their ebony-tipped wings and diving from impossible heights into the water like spears thrown from heaven.
As the boat sidled into a small, walled-off harbor, a mother seal hissed like a banshee. Dodie stood with one foot on the prow, ready to throw a rope around a weather-beaten post.
Looking through the salt-crusted windows of the cabin, Owen lifted the lid of a storage trunk and removed three hunting rifles, one hulking shotgun, and a few shovels. He handed them out to Vera and the other Dionadair before they tied up and climbed out of the craft.
A modern staircase made a jagged line up the face of Bass Rock Island. A lighthouse rose like a white mushroom from the blackened decay of a former fort, and a rectangular stone building perched to the left, about halfway up. Plants reached over its moss covered walls and through its missing roof. The empty, round window on the end reminded Aini of the Waymark Wall’s vision.
“That ruined stone building is the chapel.” Neve pointed, then grabbed a tire secured to the side of the boat to steady herself as she disembarked after Myles. “St. Baldred’s. It was built on top of his monastic cell in 1542, if I remember right.”
Anxiety tremored through Aini’s limbs as she gripped the worn edge of the boat and made her way onto the dock. The stone could be right there.
“So,” she said and coughed as they started up the rough stairs, “you agree that this is the place to look.”
Neve nodded. “What you described, the hollowed-out chapel and the earthen walls…it says monk’s cell to me. I’ve studied a great deal of history.”
“As if we could ever be ignorant on that fact,” Myles said, giving her a gentle elbow.
She smiled and pulled her sleeves over her hands.
“I just wish I had your faith,” Aini said, hurrying to catch up with the Dionadair, who’d almost made it to the rectangular chapel ruins.
Dodie held a shotgun over one shoulder and a shovel over the other. Vera sauntered up the stairs with a rifle tucked behind her arm. Holding his own firearm, Owen kept checking on Myles, Neve, and Aini, his glasses reflecting the scant light.
Gannets, yellow-tinged heads tucked against the weather, nested close enough that Aini could’ve touched a chick’s fuzzy white crown if she’d wanted to.
Myles clicked his tongue. “What’ll these crazy Dionadair folks do if the stone roars for one of us?” He ran fingers upward through his hair, making it stand up like grass. His gaze landed on the back of Vera’s head, his eyes worried.
“There’s only one written record mentioning the roaring and the curse,” Aini said. Neve had told her about it.
“What curse?” Myles asked.
“It’s pretty vague.” Her legs ached from the steep stairs. “Neve, didn’t you say the record mentioned that anyone who went up against the true heir to Scotland’s throne—meaning the one who makes it shout or roar—would have some sort of punishment?”
“The history books make no mention of the curse.” Neve kneeled to retie her boot. “But the texts on legends and myth give an archaic, brief description. It’s the power of the old to protect their own, or something of the sort.” She straightened and they continued on.
A cold breeze floated through Aini, raising bumps along her forearms.
Neve crossed herself and said something in Gaelic.
A whisper tickled Aini’s ear, and she heard something that sounded like her name. Her palms tingled. “Did you hear that?”
“No, but I doubt the message was for me, Seer.” Neve frowned at the air around them. “And I think you can add Ghost Talker to your sixth sense resume.”
Myles looked from Aini to Neve, to the Dionadair, then shivered violently.
Yes, Aini’s mind said. Neve was right. She’d heard words in Greyfriars kirkyard. Whispers had followed her when she toured the old battlefield of Culloden with Father as a child.
“But everyone hears ghosts a little bit.”
“Aye, but only Ghost Talkers can hear all of it and understand the meaning.” Neve swallowed and kept her eyes on her feet.
Neve had been fine, excited even, about Aini’s Seer ability, but this… “Why do the spirits make you so uneasy?” she asked Neve.
“It’s like having a multitude of stalkers, isn’t it?” Neve slowed her pace. “You’ll hear them whether you want to or not. They can follow you anywhere.”
Myles grimaced. “They can? Like even into the toilet?”
Neve scowled at him. “You are a piece of work, you know that?”
“A fine piece.” He winked and she rolled her eyes.
Aini’s thoughts swamped their conversation, muffling everything else. She hadn’t had any trouble with ghosts trailing her so far. Would she now that she’d begun to really use her sixth sense? Would it all grow stronger? Become even more problematic?
The path went left and led to a view over the wide waters of the Firth of Forth, back toward Tantallon. Red against the plumes of cloud and mist, the castle ruins where Aini had found the Waymark Wall seemed to hang on the edge of mainland Scotland. Under the Douglas tower, grass lay in patches on the northern side of its rocky seat over the shoreline.
They neared the chapel ruins, and a gannet flew from the space where the roof used to be. Aini leaned back to watch it disappear into the cloudy sky, almost wishing she could escape along with her.
Owen and his band stopped. Some brows were furrowed with curiosity. Vera wore a challenging look, like she wanted Aini to prove her status as the Seer. Dodie twisted his hands around his shovel’s wooden shaft. The scent of green things and the tang of a coming storm cleared Aini’s head.
Lightning blinked, far off, and she headed into the former chapel. Thick grass caught her boot as she moved toward the center of the hollowed out structure. Untangling herself, she said, “We need to get into St. Baldred’s cell.” She pointed down. “It’s here. I...think.”
Everyone with a shovel took up digging into the weeds and earth. Myles shed his shirt on a nearby sapling growing in what used to be the aboveground chapel’s floor. Aini couldn’t seem to stop praying silently.
After an hour of taking turns with the shovels, they found a slab of rock.
“I’ve found it!” Dodie jabbed his shovel underneath the hard surface.
With help, he wedged the slab up. Squirming creatures and musky-scented ground fell away from the edges. Dodie and Owen pulled the slab to the side, and it thudded to the grass near their dirt-caked boots. Owen rolled his sleeves higher, the storm lifting a few of the red curls on his head, and wiped his face on an arm. A square of black yawned where the covering had rested. Aini hugged herself as Dodie directed his flashlight into the hole to show a set of earthen stairs leading into darkness.
“I’ll go first,” she said, nodding thanks as Dodie handed her his flashlight.
The gathering steel clouds argued and sent a blast of thunder over them. A movement at the chapel’s door made Aini pause. Owen said something sharp. All the Dionadair, except Dodie, Vera, and him, disappeared over the walls and into the tangled brush and waving trees surrounding the chapel.
Aini’s skin went cold. “What is it?” She looked from Owen to the
others. Dread climbed onto her back, a heavy, clinging thing.
In the gloom and kicking gusts of wind, Campbells poured through the opening wearing their kingsmen jackets, muddied boots, and bright blue, green, and black Campbell kilts. Next to a beast of a man wearing a flat cap, Bran and Thane appeared.
Aini’s heart hung useless in her chest.
Thane wore the same kilt as the other Campbells. His face was unreadable. Bran’s eyes were slightly closed and the corners of his mouth turned down. Wearing plain trousers, he didn’t seem to belong. What were they doing here? Was there a plan they had in mind or had they simply returned to following Clan Campbell orders?
Lightning washed the clouds and the coming storm boomed, almost covering the sound of guns being cocked and shouts of warning from both sides.
Neve spoke in Aini’s ear. “He’s not with them. Remember that. He has some reason for being here, dressed like that.”
Myles took a step closer. The saint’s cell at Aini’s back breathed ancient air.
“This is not your business, Campbells,” Owen said to Thane and the big man.
The man laughed. “Now that our good earl is at home mending,” his eyes cut to Thane, “everything in Scotland is my business, Dionadair. My name is Rodric Campbell and I’m leading the clan. I speak for Nathair.”
Rodric looked at Aini like she was something dangerous. Probably the same way she’d been looking at him. Like if he stared long enough, he’d glimpse claws at the ends of her fingers or horns coming out of her head. He crossed himself. She glared at his hands. They’d killed people, she was sure of it.
“Seer.” He spat and adjusted his flat cap. “The stone rests somewhere down in that hole, aye?”
“I’m not telling you anything, kidnapper, murderer.”
She felt Thane’s gaze on her. She glanced at him, but his blank face told her nothing. He wore what the rest of them did, a black kingsman jacket and the Campbell kilt, his muscled legs showing above his boots.
The Edinburgh Seer: Edinburgh Seer Book One Page 23