A clatter of wood upon stone brought him back to the moment.
“My son,” Angus said, tilting his head toward a small boy of about five playing by the hearth. “He likes to destroy castles, mostly Campbell ones.”
Lachlan stilled with the tankard halfway to his lips. Somehow she’d known that Angus and his father had fought against the Campbells all those years ago.
He shook off the thought as the tow-headed boy kept trotting his wooden horse around the rubble. “Your youngest?”
“Indeed. Does he not look more like Eveline every day?”
Aunt Eva, for whom every St. Stephen’s Day Angus lit candles in St. Columb’s Cathedral.
Lachlan took a gulp of ale. There was an explanation for all of this. Magic didn’t exist, not without the touch of the devil.
“Tell me,” Lachlan said, turning his mind to other things, “have you heard any more news about my father’s murder, or what is happening in my clan?”
“I sent two men to make queries in the alehouses, but there are few Scots in Derry at the moment.” Angus raised bushy brows as he poured himself more wine from a dusty bottle sitting beside the pitcher of ale. “You should prepare yourself for the worst. It has been weeks since your father’s death. I suspect they’ve called council by now to determine the new chieftain.”
“Maybe not.” It had taken three tense months before they’d elected his father. “Even if a council was called, it will be a false council, and my arrival will prove it so.”
“Your father’s decision to change the tradition was never well-received. Many who had nothing to do with your father’s death may still welcome the change—”
“Which means that whoever claims the rod at council must be the man who ordered the assassins.”
Angus shook his great, shaggy head.
“Why else,” Lachlan asked, “would someone murder the head of a clan and his heir, if not to grasp the rod for himself?”
“The men of your clan are not stupid. At council, they, too, will suspect anyone who claims the chieftaincy.”
“As they should—”
“But your enemy is sly. He’ll make it look like he doesn’t want it, as if the responsibility is thrust upon him.”
Lachlan paused. How it galled him to think that his enemy might be smarter than he.
He turned his tankard in his hand and watched the rush lights glance off the surface of the ale. He summoned in his mind the faces of the most powerful men of the clan, those most likely to make a claim to the chieftaincy. The list was long. Dermot MacGilchrist, the head of the MacGilchrist clan, had married a Campbell years ago, a daughter of the sprawling, warlike tribe always trying to expand their influence. Callum Ewing, the head of the Ewing clan, had been beaten out by Lachlan’s own father when the rod passed over a decade ago. The Lamont clan to the east, always reeving cattle and driving their sheep onto MacEgan pastureland, would revel in the discord. Then there was Lachlan’s own stepmother, a Stuart, always casting acid looks his way while she watched over Fingal, her only son.
Fingal, his half-brother, and the next MacEgan in line.
No, not Fingal.
Never Fingal.
“The man who seizes the rod must be the one.” Lachlan repeated the words with confidence, all while he worried his fingers through the scruff of beard he’d not yet gotten used to. “He will be the devil responsible for all of this, I’m sure of it.”
His cousin nodded. “You must leave for Loch Fyfe as soon as possible.”
“I need a day, maybe two to prepare. I have to arrive unnoticed, and that’ll take some doing.”
“You don’t have a day, perhaps not even an hour. I’ve ordered my servants to keep your presence here a secret, but the fact that you arrived carrying a self-proclaimed sorceress complicates matters. Your witch is the talk of Derry. You are the talk of this house. Both of you have to leave before there’s a crowd at my door with torches and pitchforks.”
Lachlan grunted. If a rumor began that he was still alive, it would reach Loch Fyfe in the time it takes for a man to row across the strait.
“I need men. Arms.” He pulled at his borrowed clothes. “A tunic and surcoat of my own.”
“Or perhaps the robes of a cleric,” Angus suggested, shrugging.
“A cleric? Carrying a claymore?”
“Staying hidden does seem the wiser course. A smaller sword would be easier to hide.”
“Angus, I don’t exactly look like I’ve spent a lifetime bent over a scroll out of the glare of the sun.”
“Maybe not,” he said. “But nobody will notice if you’re one cleric among many who just happens to be accompanying a certain Derry merchant on a long-delayed visit to Loch Fyfe.”
Lachlan eyed his cousin as the implications sank in. “I can’t ask you to do that.”
“Sales of wine have dropped off from the north.” He raised his tankard and smiled through wine-stained lips. “I need to remind your kinsmen how much better Spanish wine tastes than your wretched ale.”
Lachlan frowned. Though his father had sent him to Angus to gather men to help in his fight, after so much death Lachlan preferred to act on his own. He didn’t need another death on his conscience.
“I loved your father, too, Lachlan,” Angus said. “Don’t deny me this small sip of your vengeance.” Then, dismissing all further discussion, his cousin raised one finger toward the balcony of the second floor. “What shall we do with our frail but misguided beauty upstairs?”
At the thought of Cairenn, Lachlan lifted his pewter tankard but it was already empty. He stared at the dregs and tried not to think of the way the sea wind played with her hair. He pushed away the remembrance of the way her hips moved when she climbed to the island’s height. He tried to forget what it felt like to burrow against her breasts, to feel her body arch in pleasure under the touch of his hand.
The clatter of another fortress tumbling startled Lachlan back to the great hall, to the cut of the tankard’s handle into his fist, and to Angus’s piercing scrutiny.
“Who is this woman,” his kinsman asked, “who weighs so heavily upon your mind?”
Memories overwhelmed him, of the curve of her neck lit by the sun, the arch of her feet as she crouched, the heavy slide of her braid over her shoulder. Images of her green eyes intent upon him and the intelligence he saw behind them. Her ease with the village boy, the deference of the fishermen, the stories she whispered to her sister to make the young girl burst into laughter.
His tongue felt like lead in his mouth.
Angus said, “Did you make this woman promises?”
“You know I cannot.”
“Love comes upon a man quickly, Lachlan.” Angus’s heavy sigh filled the room. “It flies swift out of the cold, like a sparrow shooting through the mead-hall in winter.”
His kinsman may as well have been speaking in tongues for all the sense Lachlan could make of it.
“I can arrange passage for her back to Galway,” Angus said. “My ships, and my sailors, are under my orders. They’ll do as I say, witch or no.”
A pause lay heavy between them. Lachlan knew he should order it done. Cairenn belonged safe in Inishmaan, among her own people.
Then the rapid click-click of a dog’s claws drew his attention. A ragged-haired lapdog bounded out of a far corridor toward Angus’s son, who shouted in delight.
“Papa, look! It’s Dagdá!”
***
She woke up to the sound of a door closing.
She jolted up from the bed, disoriented in the dimness. Lachlan stood just inside the room, limned by the dying light of the hearth fire. She hadn’t really been sleeping, too tormented by doubts and concerns, but the sight of him made her entire body come prickly back to life.
“You’ve eaten,” he said.
She glanced where he gestured, to a tray with some crusts of bread and gravy leavings. She didn’t remember eating and she certainly hadn’t tasted a thing.
He said, “Fee
ling stronger?”
“I’m always strong when I’m alone,” she ventured. “It’s when there are many strangers around that I weaken.”
No more would she bother with lies or evasions, not after the terrible way he’d looked at her.
“Come by the fire,” he said, striding to the hearth and gesturing to the stool on the other side. “I can’t talk to you while you’re splayed in that bed.”
Her body tingled from scalp to toes. Staring at the great stretch of his shoulders, she became achingly conscious of the thinness of the linen shift she was wearing, and not a stitch of fabric beneath it.
She pulled the blanket off her knees and swung her legs over the side. She padded to the stool and sat. The fire gave off a strange smell, tarry and harsh, not at all like the fragrance of the peat her father shipped over from the mainland.
“How long,” he said, “have you been like this?”
The brush of his gaze made her heart trip and her blood ripple with a sudden heat.
“Since my thirteenth summer.” She wished she’d brought the cup of wine, ruby-red, from the bedside table. “My father used to take us to Galway, one or two children at a time, to give my mother some peace. He’d give us a coin and let us wander through the town. I intended to buy some dyed wool for a new tunic. That’s what was in my mind as we headed toward the wharf in my father’s coracle—until, suddenly, it was like my mind was full of angry bees.”
“Like yesterday,” he said.
A lot worse, to her reckoning, but she nodded anyway. “I was unconscious for nearly a week. None of Da’s medicines worked. When I finally woke up, I heard everyone’s secrets as clear as day. For a long time I thought everyone had gone mad, saying such terrible things out loud.”
Even now, when she cast her mind into the world, she heard secrets. The stable boy was staring up at the rafters and imagining sneaking into the maidservant’s room to slip his member into her from behind. Angus was musing about a widow in town he’d like to swive but not marry. The kitchen cook was growing ever more excited imagining a witch-burning in the square.
She winced at a sudden sharp pain in her hand. She glanced down and saw that she was leaving half-moon impressions in her palm.
“My mother finally guessed what had happened,” she said, rubbing at the angry pink marks. “She taught me how to distinguish between what someone says and what someone thinks. So often the two are not the same.”
“Tell me how it works.”
“I simply hear everything.” She wished he would look at her, instead of watching the fire consume the wood in the hearth. “I can hear the cook in the kitchen right now, kneading the bread for tomorrow. She’s thinking about her sick daughter.” And whether she should bring her to the burning. “I can hear three scullery maids in the mead-hall collecting the dishes and chattering about a fair that’s coming. The nursemaid is bone-tired and Angus’s son Tadgh is being fussy because he didn’t eat enough dinner. I can hear Angus worrying about you.”
And me.
A warmth blossomed on her cheeks, for Angus believed that she and Lachlan were lovers.
“If I stretch my mind,” she said, forging ahead, “I can even hear the people of Derry, every one of them. Most of the time I hear ordinary thoughts—whether they’re hungry or something hurts, or what work they must do before the sun goes down, or whether it’s going to rain and ruin the crops or whether the herring are running yet.” She took her lower lip between her teeth for a moment, debating whether she should tell him more. “Behind that are…other thoughts. I can hear who they are, and who they want to be. I sense their wishes and dreams. I know the things they don’t want anyone to know, the things they try to hide, and all their sins. The deeper I look into a man’s eyes, the more I see.”
Lachlan planted a forearm on the mantel, leaning in. “You say Angus is loyal to me.”
“When Angus and your father were young, they sailed on a ship past the Island of Skye during a storm, and your father saved him from drowning.”
“That’s the past.”
“Yes, but the memory is often at the front of Angus’s mind. He’s very aware that were it not for your father, he’d be long dead.”
The folds of Lachlan’s tunic shifted across his back in fascinating ways. She tried not to stare.
“My father,” he said, “told me that story about Skye just once, the night before I last saw him. He was about to send me to Derry to get men and arms to help fight those who were causing so much trouble. He told me that I needed to understand why he trusted his kinsman Angus though they hadn’t seen each other in years. He told me that he and Angus never spoke of that incident again—and no one else knew the tale.”
Lachlan settled his midnight-sky gaze upon her. A tingle spread through her at the look on his face.
He believes me.
“Cairenn,” he whispered, “tell me how this can be.”
Her chest swelling with hope, it took her a moment to find her voice. “My father told me that one of my ancestors was a Druid priestess in Ulster. This was a long, long time ago, before all memory, when the veils between the worlds were thin. This ancestor loved a man of the Otherworld—a man of Tír na nÓg—and on one Samhain—”
“Stop.” He shook his head once. “No children’s tales.”
His command flummoxed her. Da had told her this story after she’d woken up in the wake of her collapse in Galway. He’d explained everything while making her choke down some foul-tasting tea. His explanation had seemed so logical then—after all, she’d felt the Sídh themselves, rising up between the cracks in the stones whilst she wandered the lonely places on high. But then again, that was Inishmaan, which was different from the rest of the world.
Now, here, sitting in this stone-walled room with this strange-smelling wood, she began to understand why Lachlan might think she was telling him a tale fit for the nursery rather than telling him the truth.
“Children’s tales are full of magic,” she confessed in a small voice, “but this is no tale for the young.”
“Cairenn—”
“Are you to close your ears to the only truth I know?”
His powerful chest expanded with a sigh. She saw a muscle flex in his cheek, then he tightened his jaw and nodded.
“This ancestor of mine,” she continued, “loved a man of the Otherworld. On one Samhain, when the veils between the worlds thinned, they went to the fires and…” Cairenn hesitated. She didn’t know if the Scots had the same traditions as the Irish, celebrating the four turns of the year—Beltane, Imbolc, Lughnasa, and Samhain—with fires and dancing and much more in the night, but she had no choice but to continue. “On that night, they created a link of flesh and spirit, fairy and human, which kept the worlds together even as they threatened to drift apart.”
She hazarded a glance at him, relieved that he was still listening.
“Fairy blood runs strong,” she said. “This is why everyone in my family has a gift. My sister Aileen has the gift of the healing hands, a gift in which my father took such pride. My gift,” she said, shrugging, “is the ability to know people’s minds.”
“You’re not one of the wee folk, Cairenn. Any more than I’m a selkie.”
Her heart dipped a little at the reminder of her foolishness.
“I can see you,” he said. “I have held you in these arms.”
With a frisson she remembered his hand cupping her breast, his fingers doing magic things between her legs. Then, as if he could read her thoughts, he crossed the three steps that separated them and stood over her, looking down at her with undeniable intent.
“You’re human,” he said, grasping her face in his hands as she surged out of her seat. “I feel your heart, I see your pulse beating in your throat.”
“Lachlan—”
“For weeks I watched you on Inishmaan. I’ve broken bread with your family. For all this talk of magic and witchery, everything in my heart tells me you are good.”
She
ran her hands up his arms and felt the hard, flexing sinew under the warmth of his skin. Emotions filled her, making it hard for her to breathe, to speak, to think.
“I made a promise to your father,” he said, his brow furrowing, “that I would not dishonor you.”
She shook her head, for she’d followed him across a sea to get out from under that protection.
“Angus has made arrangements.” His grip tightened. “Take the berth on a ship that he will offer you. Leave me before I do something I shouldn’t.”
She pressed her hands against his chest. “I want you, Lachlan.”
He made a sound deep in his throat. He dragged his hands up through her hair. He was not gentle, not even when his lips fell upon hers.
He nudged her lips open and there was his tongue, probing inside her mouth in a way that made her knees weak. She tasted the ale he’d been drinking. He slung an arm around her back and lifted her against him. Her toes barely scraped the cold floor. Beneath her palms his heart pounded wildly.
She heard him kick something, heard a stool overturn, then the brush of his feet in the rushes. She knew they were moving but could not see where, didn’t care, as long as he didn’t let go.
When she felt the edge of the bed dig into the back of her knees, he sucked her lower lip into his mouth, then her upper lip, then rubbed his lips against her while she tasted them with a hunger she hadn’t had for the bread and the stew.
Dizzy, she pushed him a fraction away in search of the ties of his tunic. He was wearing too many clothes. She wanted to press her cheek against the naked hollow on his chest where his heart lay, slip her tongue across his skin, do all those things that men and women did when passion took hold, so that she could experience that closeness, that joining, and find her way into his mind.
She fumbled with the ties. He took a step back so she could tug at them, watching as she did. He reached between them and yanked off his belt. Impatiently she pushed the surcoat off him, let it puddle to the floor, and shoved his linen tunic off the swell of his muscled shoulder.
Wild Highland Magic (The Celtic Legends Series Book 3) Page 11