Rodric’s lip curled. “You are as naive as they come, Seer.” He turned to Thane. “Bring the chemist.”
Myles caught Aini’s arm as her knees gave out.
Thane nodded obediently and left through the arch.
Owen looked to Aini, and she pulled her arm gently from Myles and stood on her own. Owen gave her an almost imperceptible nod and trained his gaze on Rodric again.
“I suggest you lower your weapons before anyone gets themselves hurt,” Rodric said.
None of the Dionadair lowered anything.
Thane returned, gripping a hooded man’s sleeve.
Father.
Aini realized she’d yelled his name. She closed her mouth, feeling all the blood drain from her cheeks. His head was covered in a burlap bag, his hands were bound with twine, and a dirty bandage covered the hand now missing one finger. Rodric took a silver pistol from another man and pressed it against Father’s leg. Aini’s stomach rolled.
“Aini,” Father said. His voice was Christmas morning, oatmeal with honey, warmth and safety and promise. Tears leaked from her eyes, not caring at all that she wanted to appear as a leader and failed.
“If I shoot him here,” Rodric said, his knuckles white as the blink of lightning overhead. “He’ll die slowly.”
Dots floated in front of Aini’s eyes. She jumped in front of Owen and the others, and pushed their rifle barrels down.
“Here,” Rodric aimed at Father’s gut. “Well, let’s just say he won’t like how that one goes. And neither will you, Seer, considering the shade your face has taken on. I did give you a chance to do this a nicer way.”
Vera and her brothers flicked a glance at Aini. She hadn’t told them about the message under her pillow. Only Myles and Neve.
Aini cleared her throat and traded a look with Thane, whose hair curled into the wind and whose eyes matched the rising storm.
Did he have a plan? How many different ways could this go?
He pursed his full lips and tilted his head a little, just a small movement that seemed to say It’s your decision.
She’d known this outcome was a possibility. That if the Edinburgh team couldn’t secure Father, and the Campbells found them here, her father and the rest of them would be at the Campbells’ mercy—a thing no one seemed to think existed. But she couldn’t just give the word to fight and throw Father’s life away. She couldn’t do it. Not like this. Not unless there was no other way to go.
“I don’t even know if the stone is in there.” She pointed to the rectangular square of black in the ground.
Rodric’s eyes narrowed. “Then take a peek, aye?”
His hand shook. He was scared of the stone, wanted nothing to do with it. How could they use that fear?
“Fine. But my father stays whole and alive.”
“Or what?” Rodric laughed again.
She gritted her teeth and Thane closed his eyes, one hand still holding Father’s arm. The big, horrible bully was right. She had nothing to hold over him if the stone was here. He could take it and, as Owen explained, destroy it and ruin Scotland’s chance to find the one meant to rule, the one the curse would protect, the one person who could fight the Campbells and the king and their cruelties.
Strangely, Aini wished she could hear a spirit’s voice, something to encourage her to move forward, a word saying everything would somehow work out. But the only cool wind to blow across her face came from the storm that quickly approached over the hills and sea water.
To keep Father alive, if only for another few minutes, she turned, walked over to the earthen stairs, and descended into the ground.
CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN
AND THE EARTH TREMBLED
AINI’S HEART SLAMMED AGAINST her chest as she made her way down the stairs. Clicking on the flashlight Owen had given her, she breathed in the smell of wet dirt. The side of the chamber was smooth stone and dirt. Someone, presumably Baldred, had rubbed the earth’s body to a level, sloping shape, creating a domed cavern. In the damp air, the light painted the long room the pale shade of bones and the dusky blue of bruises. Shapes and shadows moved in the corners. The stone? Other things Baldred kept here? Ghosts?
“Wait,” a deep voice said from the top of the stairs behind her.
Her pulse surged in her throat. She spun and shone the light upward. Thane stood there, a tattooed hand on the wall as he climbed down, his kilt swinging as his knees moved. A prickling sensation spread across her back, a mix of fear and desire, her blood glowing in her veins.
She took a tentative step. No one stood directly at the entrance behind him.
Thane ran a hand through his hair as he studied her face. “Rodric sent me down here. Doesn’t seem to care much if either one of us dies from whatever horrible thing he thinks will happen. But…he can’t hear us now.”
Aini’s lungs wouldn’t expand. Her throat wanted to scream at Thane. Her arms longed to pull him to her.
He took a step. “Aini, I don’t know how to tell you, how I…I know you hate me and you’ve every right to feel it, I—”
“Don’t explain. Just apologize.” Anger and the pain of betrayal heated her skin and thinned her voice.
“I’m sorry.” His eyelashes shaped black rings around his stormy eyes. Mist dotted the edges of his glasses. A jagged crack marred one lens.
Without realizing what she was doing, Aini touched his face. It was slightly stubbled and warm. His lips parted. “I don’t hate you,” she said, swallowing confusion and wonder and fear. “I should. But I can’t seem to do it. You had better be done with lying.” Tears heated the corners of her eyes.
Sighing, he covered her hand with his much larger one. “I should’ve just told you. I should’ve never obeyed my father as long as I did.” Dropping his hand, he turned toward the stairs and his fingers curled into fists. “I have no excuses.”
“You aren’t back on their side. You’re here…”
“So I could follow them to you. To unhinge their plans. To work from the inside one last time.”
“Why did they take you back? You fought your father, their leader. How did you make them trust you again?”
Thane stared at the wall, beyond Aini’s head. His lips were pale and bloodless. “Nothing. But they think I did something—” He squeezed his eyes shut. “I let them think I did a horrible thing.”
Aini didn’t want to know. She’d had enough of this. If Neve trusted him, if her own heart trusted him now, maybe that was enough. She laid a hand on the drape of soft wool tartan over his jacket, waist to his shoulder, and kept one eye on the cell’s opening. Why did she want so badly to forgive him?
His father was a monster, a murderer and a liar. He was obsessed with power, mad, a man who didn’t care about the people who he was meant to lead and protect. Thane couldn’t possibly respect the man’s decisions, his clan’s decisions. He had to see how wrong Nathair had been for so long. Especially after he’d executed those rebels and sixth-sensers without even the ruse of a trial citizens were supposed to get. It was plain; there was nothing anyone could say to defend his horrifying abuse of power. Why had it taken Thane so long to see it and act against it?
But Nathair was also Thane’s father, the most important man in his life so far, the one who’d been there since he was born, at every milestone, there for every decision. Nathair, head of Clan Campbell, had been there when Thane had learned to walk, talk, to ride a bicycle, maybe, and a horse. Maybe the man had taught him to drive. It was a lifetime of habit and a twisted normalcy.
She assumed Thane had fought hard against the normal drive to stay devoted to one’s father. In some ways, he had gone against Nathair.
It couldn’t have been easy to go against your own father. It would be heart-breaking, frightening, overwhelming.
“Get on with it!” one of the Campbells shouted down.
Aini’s father had sided with the Dionadair and she’d still followed his trail. Granted, she now believed the rebels were the answer for Scotlan
d’s problems. Or, at least, the start of a powerful conversation between the people and those who ruled them. If Father had been on the wrong side of things, how far would Aini have gone along with him? If he thought what he was doing was right, it would still be near to impossible to cut him out of her life. If he was mad like Thane’s father surely was, it would feel even worse. The urge to talk him out of his madness, his wrongdoing, would be hard to turn away from. The desire to do as best she could to smooth the situation would be a powerful thing.
She’d never truly understand what Thane was dealing with, how it felt, but one thing was certain—it had to be truly terrible.
His light eyebrows drew together. The crack in his glasses blinked in the uneven light.
“I forgive you,” she whispered. Her chest ached with the truth and pain of it. “I know you’re with us now.”
He swept her wind-tangled hair from her cheeks and cupped her jaw in his warm, calloused hands. “I am with you. I don’t know what we’re to do now, but I’m with you and Lewis and the foolish Dionadair all the way now.”
Her chest pressed against his as they breathed the same air, warm and getting warmer. They’d been through so much that no matter what was going on, she wanted so much to disappear into the brush of his thumb over her lip, the touch of his mouth, the hard lines and muscle of his body leaning into hers.
“Aini, I’ve been so…” He dipped his head and lightning flashed close, thunder ramming through the space and making them pull apart.
But she had to touch him, to know he was all right. She had to feel those lips on hers.
Lifting onto tiptoe, she tugged him to her, and kissed him hard. He started to draw her into his arms, began to say something, but a strange hum from the back of the cell had her dragging him farther in. The flashlight ghosted over the walls and the shapes toward the back.
“Do you feel that?” Thane asked, rubbing a hand over his arm.
A buzz ran over her skin like electricity. “Yes.”
A wide, wooden chair squatted along the wall. The seat section, mostly disintegrated, had fallen to the earth below support frame. A table with roughly shaped, square legs sat beside it.
The hairs on the back of Aini’s neck stood on end. “Either we’re about to be hit with lightning or that’s…”
And there, in the very back of the saint’s cell, black and covered in carved spirals, was the Coronation Stone.
For a breath, Aini’s heart stopped.
The ancient royal seat was really here. She’d found it. Her pulse stamped against her wrists as her heart started up again, loud in the dirt-walled chamber.
The white-blue of the flashlight illuminated the carved swirls and circles in the stone’s surface. Made of rock dark as the night sky, the stone stood hip-high and looked like a shapeless hand, curved and hollowed to serve as a seat.
“The carvings,” Thane whispered, “the swirls, they remind me of my dream.”
She glanced at him.
“Ever since I was a wean,” he said. “I’ve dreamed of my fingerprint. The pattern grows dark like…like rock. It’s…it’s the stone I’ve been dreaming of.”
Shock held her as she took a step toward the ancient artifact. “Then you’re a Dreamer, Thane.” She felt like she was in a dream now. “You have a sixth sense. All this time, you’ve had one too.”
The stone heated the air. Waves of its buzzing energy filled the cell. The power hummed in Aini’s fingertips and through the blood pulsing in her veins.
They stood beside the Coronation Stone, close enough to touch. Shivers flew up her back.
As a Seer, she wanted nothing to do with touching the thing. She could get lost in the centuries of emotions embedded on the stone. Her hand was wet with the air’s moisture and her own perspiration, and the flashlight tried to slip from her fingers. She gripped it tightly.
A wash of close lightning brightened the entrance to the chamber.
Thane’s whole body leaned forward, toward the stone, his eyes wide. “My God,” he said reverently.
Before he could touch it, he pulled his hands back and exhaled slowly. He studied the bare skin below his rolled up and muddy sleeves. Goosebumps raised the blond hairs on his forearms.
“He—Rodric—he,” Thane said, his voice flat, “he wants you to touch the stone. He wants to know what you see.”
Aini’s shivers rose again and spread so that her skin matched his. “What about the curse? What if it’s more dangerous than we think?”
His eyebrows lifted, but his mouth still turned down at the corners. “It won’t hurt you. The curse will only hurt those who go against the heir. I’ll do it first. Or together. We’ll do it together.”
Thunder growled outside, and rain lashed through the opening.
Someone outside shouted, and Rodric’s order to one of his men echoed into the chamber. Then Rodric himself pounded down the stairs. He pulled his flat cap lower to hide his eyes, then motioned to the stone with a handgun.
“Get on with it.” He stepped toward Aini.
“You’re afraid of the stone, aren’t you?” Aini said quietly, watching his shaking hand and the gun gripped in his meaty fingers.
Thane glared. “Rodric, I—”
“I knew you hadn’t gone back into the fold,” Rodric spat. “You worthless traitor. Rabbie believed you. But me?”
Thane got between Aini and Rodric. “I’ll die before I let you touch her again.”
“Still angry about the fun in the vaults, aye?” He snorted. “Save your hero crap for a girl who’s not good as dead.” He raised the gun.
Realization lit Aini’s memories of the Edinburgh vaults. Rodric had hit her in the vaults. It hadn’t been a mugger. It’d been this older Campbell, who obviously had some further conflict with Thane.
Thane cut him with a string of Gaelic words.
Out of the corner of her eye, she saw Thane reach across the stone. She twined her fingers in his. Lightning poured white and blue into the room.
“For Lewis,” Thane whispered. “He’ll kill him if we don’t do this. We’ll do this, then figure out what to do.”
Aini nodded. “For Father.”
She slammed their linked hands onto the humming stone.
Wind blasted around them. It kicked dirt into the air, knocked the flashlight to the ground, pressed Thane’s kilt against his legs, and turned his jacket collar up. The earth rumbled, shook, and the supernatural storm tossed Aini’s hair around her head.
A sound like a lion’s roar vibrated from the stone and smashed against her eardrums.
The stone chilled Aini’s palms, and a vision wiped the cell’s close quarters from sight.
A whirlwind of colors—orange and green and blue and gold and iron and bronze—spun through the air around the stone, slowing to become pictures. Men in all kinds of patterned clothing—white tunics, plain shirts and dark cloaks—touched the stone, then sat and raised their eyes to their people.
Voices echoed in her mind, a tangle of sounds she didn’t understand. Then, slowly, the words crawled out of the noise, clear as a bell.
The spirits’ mouths moved, calling out their names. Kenneth Mac Alpin. Donald I. Constantine. Malcolm. Dubh and Culen. Macbeth. They were bearded and old, wide eyed and young, muscled, thin. Every one sat tall, straight, and possessed the fire of purpose in their eyes.
They were ghosts. And they were kings.
Aini yanked her and Thane’s hands from the stone. As quickly as the tempest had begun, the chamber quieted. Her hair fell back onto her shoulders, and Thane’s collar settled against his neck. From outside, lightning flashed.
Both of them were in a terrible situation. But one, one of them was directly, inseparably lashed to a political storm to rival any in their country’s history. A tempest of powerful men and women, desperate to curl hands around money, people, farmland, cities, towns, and businesses.
She spoke first, her chin shaking. “You’re the heir. The wind and that noise, it all s
tarted when your hand touched the stone.” She didn’t want it to be true for him, but it had to be true, because she knew it wasn’t her.
“Your hand was on it too,” he said.
Rodric had fallen. He swore, found his feet, and ran up the stairs, shouting orders Aini didn’t hear.
“You’re the Seer,” Thane said. “It only makes sense. You’re the heir, Aini.”
She shook her head so hard it was in danger of falling off. “I’m less than half Scottish.”
“You think any one of the line is fully Scottish by blood? Course not. They’re all married into English, German, French families. What matters is…the stone has called us.”
It did feel that way. Like the kings had set a quest at their feet. Because of Thane’s bloodline—Campbells did hold a tenuous line to the old rulers, as did many clans—but also because of who they were. Seer and Dreamer. Merlin and Arthur. Hearts ready for sacrifice.
Thane pressed a fist against his mouth and studied the stone. The fallen flashlight and the storm’s intermittent waves of white and silver cast a haunting light over both man and throne. It had to be him with his broad shoulders, quick mind, and high cheekbones. His tartan completed the picture. Thane had been through so much. A military upbringing under a madman’s hand. Life-threatening situations when he had to make split second decisions. A moment when he’d had to go against everything he knew—father and clan—to become the man he wanted to be. And he’d grown a good heart and a brave soul throughout his struggles.
The Coronation Stone has chosen well, Aini thought.
Outside the entrance, gunshots blasted through the rush of rain.
Leaving the stone, they ran from the cell to see a fight already in motion. The bulk of the Dionadair—who’d concealed themselves at Rodric’s arrival—worked in pairs, grabbing Campbells from behind and bringing them to their knees. One of the two would hold a gun to the Campbell’s head and the other would grab him by the hair and force a cherry drop down his throat. The Campbells fell one by one, paralyzed with Thane’s concoction.
The Edinburgh Seer: Edinburgh Seer Book One Page 24