She did have one crazy-mad idea about why her gift was failing her, but she wasn’t quite ready to blurt out that the man on the pallet might not be human.
“He’s hardly conscious,” she said, buying time. “You’re asking me to look through the blackest of fog.”
He frowned but did not contradict her. As his impatience ebbed, she read the root of his worry.
She blurted, “You think the murderer will come looking for him here.”
“Someone tried to kill him for a reason.” He ran his hand down his face. “I wager it wasn’t for his clothing.”
“Surely that happened on some ship at sea—”
“How far off shore could that ship have been, if a half-dead man made it to the strand alive?”
Cairenn pulled on her own fingers, worry filling her up. Da’s doctoring brought many an outsider to their door, and each time was a risk. Da seemed normal enough to those who didn’t spend more than a couple of hours with him. But her family was not like other families, just as Inishmaan was not like other islands. It would not behoove them to have outsiders returning to the mainland telling tales about Ma with her strange eyes that could see the future, or Aileen who could heal a wound with the pass of her hands, or Niall who could cast a spell with his music that would make you do things you shouldn’t.
Fairy-gifts from the Sídh, all of them. But many an outsider might call such doings witchcraft. If her family wasn’t careful about how they dealt with strangers, all the O’Conors of Inishmaan could end up burnt at the stake.
Her father said, “I’ve told the islanders to keep quiet about him, especially to say nothing to strangers.”
“But you can’t imagine that old Domnall won’t blabber about the man found on the beach,” she said, speaking her father’s own concerns, “once he gets some ale in him after his next catch.”
“Which means I’ve got business by the strand, and it cannot wait.” Da pushed away from his trestle table, littered with bowls of herbs, and reached for his cloak. “Stay here and watch the man. I need to know who he is and how he got here. When he opens his eyes, you’ll be able to see his mind more clearly.”
Cairenn dropped her gaze to her clenched hands. Father knew her talents all too well. When she looked straight into a person’s eyes she saw their thoughts and emotions and dreams and memories. Most often, the rush of those thoughts assaulted her, sometimes to the point of pain.
Da had his hand on the door when he paused, sensing her discomfort. “Are you all right, a leanbh?”
“I’m fine, Da.”
She didn’t dare tell him that she had already looked straight into this man’s midnight-blue eyes—and sensed absolutely nothing.
***
Again in his dreams Lachlan remembered the sound of seabirds, tasted the sand in his mouth, and felt a warm body near him. He breathed deeply, wanting to draw closer to the source of the comfort. He lifted himself up and then a searing pain jerked him awake.
Gasping, he saw above him the underside of a thatched roof. In a rush he remembered where he was.
Stabbed. Cast overboard. Found on Inishmaan. Ireland.
He heard a small, muffled sound. He turned his head and saw a woman perched on a chair several yards away, her fair hair glowing in the light pouring in through a small window.
His heart pounded. He didn’t want to blink, lest she disappear as she had all the other times in his dreams. As the seconds slipped by, she remained in his sight, poised as if at any moment gossamer wings might spread from her back.
I’m dead and this is heaven.
She went still, and that’s how he knew he’d spoken aloud. Her bright, wide-set eyes were a shade of green he wanted to see better. Fair hair spilled over her shoulders, so long that the curls brushed the seat of the chair she was perched upon. Her feet were pale, delicate, and bare. He saw the tension in the curve of each arch.
In silence she focused on him with unnerving intensity. Leaning forward, she fixed her gaze as if she were trying to burrow through his skin and bones. Perhaps this was what it was like to be judged. He didn’t think he had that much sin upon his soul, no more than any man who’d had the advantage of spending several formative years unchaperoned under the Roman sun. But still, her gaze was unnerving.
He shifted his weight on the pallet. At the movement, the woman startled off the chair, knocking it over beneath her.
“Don’t go.” His hoarse shout caught her just as she reached the door. “Stay—please.”
She hesitated, one hand flat on the door. The thought came to him that an angel would have flown through the window, or disappeared in the blink of an eye, and yet here this woman stood with her hands splayed against the latch, a latch made of iron, and most otherworldly creatures couldn’t abide the touch of iron.
Human, then.
How far his mind had drifted into delirium that he fancied she was anything but.
“Water,” he said, pitching his voice low so as not to frighten her again. “Will you bring me some, lass?”
She was a slight thing, a wisp of a woman in a tunic the color of blueberries. Her ankles were so slim he thought he might be able to curl his thumb and forefinger around one. She pattered to the table where the doctor kept his things. She sought a clean cup, knocked over a wooden one, before finding a vessel that met her standards. She lifted a pitcher and filled it up, water splashing all over. She held the cup with two hands in front of her as she came around the table.
She hesitated more than an arm’s-length away.
“I’m no threat to you,” he said, keeping his voice low. “I’m hardly able to rise from this pallet.”
The bones of her clavicle rose and fell. She seized a hollow reed left on the bedside table and dropped it into the water. The cup shook as she stretched it out to him.
He winced as he took it, for even that slight movement tweaked his wound. He slipped the reed between his lips and took a good pull. The water was cold and spring-fresh. Strength surged through him with each sip.
She whispered, “Why are you here?”
Her voice was low and husky. As she waited for an answer she grasped her own knuckles.
“It was the tide that brought me here.” He met her gaze. “It was you who found me.”
“You remember.”
“As if I’d dreamed it.” A pretty dream, but nothing compared to the reality standing before him. “I have you to thank for my life.”
“‘Twas nothing but a coincidence that I was there—”
“If you hadn’t been, I’d be dead,” he interrupted. “Buried on the beach or sucked back into the sea. And that would have been the end of Lachlan of—”
Loch Fyfe.
He caught himself before he spoke the words. Best not to say too much about his identity, lest those who’d set out to kill him return to see if they had finished the task.
She said, “You don’t remember where you’re from.” It was a statement, not a question.
“My memory is fever-addled, it’ll return in time. Tell me your name, lass.”
She shook her head once, with vehemence. “I know what you’re after.”
He hadn’t a clue what she was talking about. “What kind of curse do you think I could put upon your name, while I lie here with all the power of a newborn?”
“You’ll steal my name,” she said. “And then you’ll steal my soul.”
Her words gave him pause. He wondered if she were touched in the head. Though the thought of stealing this beauty away, touched or not, certainly had him imagining what pleasures could be had with claiming her.
Yes, clearly, he was feeling better.
“I don’t like the sea,” she said, flexing her elbows like an agitated bird. “I don’t like the darkness beneath, and how cold it is, and the thought of the creatures of the deep.”
Her words were odd, but he played along. “I’m not so fond of the sea myself, after the time I spent bleeding and sputtering and trying to stay alive in
it.”
“Was it a harpoon, then?”
His mind went blank.
“Your wound.” She patted her own shoulder, three swift little pats. “Was it a harpoon that struck you so deep?”
A tattered memory returned of three men on a dark deck, the flash of moonlight off a blade. “A sailor’s knife, I think. Bought and paid for by my enemies, to prevent me from doing what I was bid.”
“Your enemies.” Her brow knit, deeper than before.
“It’s no secret that I have them. Most stabbed men do. But my enemies are unlikely to find me here, if that’s what you’re worried about. To them, I’m good and dead.”
She mimicked the words good and dead, confusion wrinkling her brow.
“But I’m alive,” he said, “and I’d give a king’s ransom just to know your name.”
“I won’t tell you.” She walked in a tight little circle, turning away from him, and then turning back, distress in every movement. “I’ve been thinking of this and thinking of this until I came to only one conclusion that made sense,” she said, “but I still can’t find the proof.”
“Proof?”
“I’ve searched the whole shore where you washed up,” she said. “I’ve been down there twice at low tide to look in the hollows between the boulders, to check every crevice for what you’ve left behind.”
“You shouldn’t have troubled yourself. I had nothing on me but what I wore and the sea stole that.”
“Exactly. I went looking for your skin.”
It was fruitless to parse meaning, so instead he tried to make a joke of it by gesturing to his naked chest. “I’ve got plenty of that, lass.”
“I went searching,” she continued, speaking as if to a stubborn toddler, “because I know you’ll need your skin when you return to the sea.”
“Well,” he laughed, “I wouldn’t want to lose it—”
“Don’t be joking,” she said. “I’m no fisherman’s wife lonely on the strand with her husband six months out to sea.”
Unmarried, then.
He felt a kick of pleasure.
“I know what you are, Lachlan, or whatever your true name is.” She stepped back. “I know that you’re a selkie.”
CHAPTER THREE
To Cairenn, it made perfect sense. When the angels fell, some fell on the land and some on the sea. The angels on land became fairies and those in the sea became selkies.
She knew the fairies were real enough. She knew them by the feel of the little whirlwinds that caught up in her skirts. She knew them by the distant sound of pipe music she heard over the waves. She knew them by the gift of foxglove she found growing around the dolmen stones on the height, a place where nothing green should ever grow.
But she didn’t feel their fairy minds, not like she sensed the minds of every other creature in the world. Her thoughts passed through them as cold as if they were ghosts.
So it made sense to assume this man spit up from the sea was a selkie. It was the only thing that made sense. But the look that passed across Lachlan’s face when she made the accusation was the same maddening, bemused, condescending little smile that everybody bestowed upon simple Seamus.
Then, suddenly, that look was gone.
“I know of selkies,” he said, in a low, lilting voice that spoke of serious contemplation. “My people tell tales of them.”
She thought of his people and imagined sleek dark bodies rolling and gliding under the waters.
“My clan lives close by the water,” he said, “on a river that spills into the North Sea. When I was a child, seals used to come upriver with the first winds of autumn to bask on the rocks off shore. They’d bark all the night long.”
His rumbling voice flowed over her like the warm June sun, and she took that as yet more proof that her suppositions were right. Selkie men were the sirens of the sea, more handsome than any human man, once they shucked their slick skins. And could there exist any man more handsome than this one, with his powerful shoulders, with his dark hair splayed over the pillow, with his long legs outlined against the blanket?
“I have a half-sister,” he continued, turning his head on the pillow so that he was staring far beyond the thatched ceiling. “Elspeth is a mite younger than you. Last time I saw her, she wrapped a chain of foxglove around my wrist. She said it was a fairy-bond, and it meant that I had to come back.”
The timbre of his voice made her feel that he wasn’t lying, but, then again, maybe she was just becoming ensnared. “It must be difficult,” she said, “finding foxglove at the bottom of the sea.”
His lips twitched. “Do I remind you so much of a seal, lass?”
She wouldn’t look down the long, strong length of him, no, she wouldn’t. “Once you shed your skin,” she said, “there’s no knowing.”
“It’s true I have cousins on the Orkney Islands who claim they’re descended from the Finnar. They were magic folk. Every once in a while, a child of that branch of the family is born with webbed feet.” He raised a hand and spread his fingers. “Webbed hands, too.”
She didn’t like the sly lift of his smile. “You’re mocking me.”
“Teasing,” he corrected. “Maybe a little.”
His eyebrows twitched, and a muscle moved in his cheek, and his eyes gleamed, and a strange uncertainty washed over her. She’d never had to look this hard at a person’s face to puzzle out what they were thinking, for she had her gift that could see right through such nonsense. How strange it was to be forced to do as her siblings did—attribute someone’s true intent by the bend of a brow or the flicker of a lash. What a risky, terrible, unreliable way to communicate.
“You’re teasing me,” she said, “just to get me off the subject. Do you deny that you’re a selkie?”
“It’s a fanciful notion, lass, and I think you know it.”
She did, but she wasn’t ready to embrace that truth. To admit he was human was to admit that her inability to read him was a failure of her gift.
“You’re fresh out of your skin,” she argued. In some of Niall’s tales, a selkie who’d shucked his skin sometimes forgot that he belonged in the water. “You think you’re human now, but at the first sight of the sea you’ll remember.”
“Help me up then,” he said. “Selkie or no, I’ve got a powerful urge to see what’s outside that window.”
She hesitated. The window was only a few steps from the pallet, but for him to see the ocean from it, he’d have to be out of bed.
She said, “My father doesn’t want you to stand up yet.”
“Your father,” he said, wincing as he swung his bare legs out from under the blanket, “is not here.”
“Don’t be foolish.” She looked away from the flimsy linen braies that covered his loins. “I don’t have the strength to hold up a man of your size—”
“I’ve been stabbed in the back, not in the legs.” He paused while sitting at the edge of the bed. “Your hand, lass.”
He was already half up off the pallet. In her mind she saw him keeling forward, crashing to the floor, ripping open the stitches under the wound while the linen that bound it turned black with blood.
“Stubborn selkie,” she said, as she reached for him. His hand was warm, firm and so much bigger than her own. She allowed him to draw her close, but once within the circle of his warmth, she shook free of his grip. She slipped her arm behind his back and slid under his good shoulder to brace him. “You don’t listen to what’s good for you.”
“It must be because of all the water in our ears.”
She couldn’t laugh because her cheek was pressed against a powerful chest that smelled of medicine and sleep and sea-salt and man. The closeness addled her in the same way the dolmen stones on the height addled her when she dared to creep closer, stealing her senses and making her feel dizzy and tingly at the same time.
“You’re a wee bit of a thing.” He tucked her under him as he rose to his full height. “I’ll try not to crush you with my fins.”
&nb
sp; “Full of teasing, you are.”
She glanced up to meet his gaze and that was a terrible mistake. The face that looked down upon hers was so very human. His unshaven jaw was rough with bristles. Shadows gathered under his cheekbones and in the divot of his upper lip. A crescent scar pulsed white against the skin on his temple. His nose and cheekbones sported a faint, boyish scattering of freckles. And those otherworldly eyes, those deep, deep, blue eyes fringed by dark lashes…she felt as if she were falling into them, even though she was looking up.
Still, beyond the gleam of those eyes, she sensed nothing, nothing, a darkness like the bottom of the sea.
He whispered, “Don’t be frightened of me, lass.”
She was frightened, for that was exactly what a selkie would say when he came upon shore seeking the lonely girls, longing for love. Niall’s stories teemed with selkie men glimpsing a sore-hearted woman on the strand and feeling the pull of that lonesomeness. And hadn’t she been the solemn one these past years, staring out from atop the cliffs, watching wistfully as ships sailed out of Galway Bay?
She must have been a bright, glaring beacon, standing alone on that strand.
Then the sound of the sea drew his attention away. He took another step toward the window. He put very little weight upon her, but she felt every bit of it, his muscles moving in strange and wondrous ways.
They reached the window and the salt breeze hit them.
Her home of Dun Conor stood at the height of the island. Because of the fierce winds, it wasn’t the best place to build a home, but her da had chosen it the moment he brought his bride to Inishmaan. He’d raised this fortress upon the ruins of some ancient stronghold that had been here for as long as the islanders had memory. The fortress had high walls to cut the wind coming off the Atlantic. This window gave a view of the nearby island of Inishmore as well as the turbulent channel between.
As soon as Lachlan caught sight of the white caps of the churning sea crashing against the rock below, a shock bolted through his body. She felt it as surely as if it shot through herself.
Wild Highland Magic (The Celtic Legends Series Book 3) Page 2