A shout of assent rang out, and then another.
“My father settled this duty upon me.” He tightened his fist on the raised rod. “But shouldn’t I, a clansman just like each one of you, have a say in who shall be chieftain of my own people?”
He stopped in front of his half-brother, whose eyes shone bright.
“As heir, it is my choice whether to take the rod,” Lachlan said, holding out the scepter to his half-brother, “or to pass it to the better man.”
A moment of surprised silence hovered over the hill. Fingal bowed his head before him, and then raised his beaming face. A shout of huzzah erupted, followed by more. Soon the crowd added the approval of pounding feet and the rise of joyous laughter. Lachlan embraced Fingal, and then separated from him so that Fingal could hold out his hand. With ceremony, Lachlan placed the rod in his palm. Gripping it, Fingal raised it above his head so that all the gathering could see.
Lachlan drank in the sight of his brother and their exultant clan while his chest swelled with pride.
CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE
Cairenn swam up from sleep. The sunlight beat against her eyelids. Somewhere nearby came the shuffling of feet, the rustling of fabric, and a strange, intermittent, scratching sound. As the intensity of the sunlight increased, she moved her leaden limbs and felt the tickle of the wool against her skin. She became aware of something else, too—a presence in the room, a loving warmth that she instantly recognized as Lachlan.
It came back to her, then, the whole crashing weight of the memory. The jolt of force from the stones. The rush of images and thoughts, the sense that her very life force was being drained from her body even as she experienced the whole world with a clarity she’d never known. She remembered the ease with which she singled out the lady MacGilchrist, who watched them from a shadowy corner, willing Lachlan to drink from the poisoned ale. She remembered the ale splashing against her hand and across the floor just before her the world winked out.
Now she blinked against the brightness seeping through the weave of a canvas tent. She opened her mouth to attempt speech, but her lips were dry. Her throat was sore as well, though she remembered, vaguely, the taste of cool water sometime during the night. Along with that memory came the feel of Lachlan’s hand cradling her head, his soft voice in her ear, and his lips on her forehead.
She turned her head toward the scratching sound. It came from the tip of a feathered quill being drawn across a surface by the man she loved. He sat upon a stool on the other side of the tent, wielding that quill upon a plank across his knees. As she watched, he lifted something pale and limp off the plank—a lambskin, such as her father sometimes used to write his recipes for salves. His cheeks bellowed—cheeks clear of beard—as he blew upon the surface.
Tears came to her eyes to see him sitting there, looking so well and strong and at ease, his strong knees poking out.
She must have made a sound, for he raised his head. Then he was all motion, setting aside the board, grabbing a cup, and slipping his arm under her pillow to lift her up. The cool liquid was a balm upon her throat. The honey-mead swept through her with tingling swiftness.
When she finished, their gazes touched, and locked. Without effort she sank into that bright place they shared until she was surrounded by the pillowy warmth of his love, edged with a dose of concern.
She whispered, “How long have I been…?”
“Two days.” He put the cup aside and pushed her hair off her brow. “You slept most of it, rousing now and again just when I was convinced you were dead.”
A flash of memory came to her, of Lachlan sleeping in her father’s sickroom while she tried to penetrate his impenetrable mind, also convinced he was dead.
“I hope,” she murmured, “that I’ve been a better patient than you ever were.”
His lips tilted in a wry smile. “Surely I was full of patience and virtue in your father’s house.”
She tried to laugh but it was a dry, husky thing. His shadow fell over her as he placed a hungry spark of a kiss upon her lips.
He pulled away before the tingling faded. “I feared I might never hear your laughter again.”
She was about to say nor I yours but she could already see in his midnight-sky eyes that he knew. So she did what she wished she could spend a lifetime doing: She looked at him. With her gaze she traced the fall of his blue-black hair across his brow, the faintest of lines on his forehead, a blood-scarred nick that crossed the line of his beardless jaw, and the way his cheeks swelled as a slow smile stretched the corners of his lips.
“We caught the murderer,” he said, as he trailed his fingers across her brow. “All because of you.”
She lifted her hand to press against his heart and she felt a pleating of thick, fine wool beneath her palm. He wore clothes she’d never seen before, a plaid of many colors, made of wool frieze that was wrapped many times around him. It was held in place below his shoulder with a large, circular brooch. A nobleman’s clothing, rich and fine. She traced the gold scrollwork on the metal as she absorbed the implications.
“Much has changed,” she murmured.
“I have so much to tell you, Cairenn …”
As he told the story, her mind vaulted out to the world so she saw what had happened even as he spoke it. She saw the Lady MacGilchrist brought into the tent, heard her defend her bloody ambitions. Cairenn sensed her now, pacing and unrepentant in one of the castle’s storerooms.
“She paid some of her Campbell cousins to commit murder,” she said, startling Lachlan in the middle of his recounting. “But not even her own husband knew what she was about.”
Lachlan’s gaze rested on her with new intensity. “Your gift is back.”
His words gave her pause. Her gift had responded with such alacrity that she hadn’t really noticed it, just as one wouldn’t notice how one’s legs moved when walking. She started to probe the range of her abilities when she mind-stumbled upon unexpected news.
“You are not chieftain,” she gasped. “You are not The MacEgan.”
His eyes twinkled. “Disappointed?”
“You stood upon the council heights today.” She saw him through the eyes of other men, straight and strong and speaking with authority as he raised the white rod. “You had the white rod in your grasp.”
“My father desired above all things for the clan to be unified under one lineage, so I took the white rod this day, as I knew I must. Then I passed it to Fingal.”
Cairenn tried to read the easy smile that hovered around his lips. His shoulders stretched strong and light, as though the burden of a hundred thousand stones had been shaken off them. “You gave up becoming chieftain of the MacEgans,” she whispered. “Overlord of the entire clan.”
“I handed the white rod off to a half-brother who stood as an example of wise, patient governance in the midst of bloody turmoil. A half-brother eager to lead, if his enthusiasm is any measure.” He raised his brows. “The rod belongs with the true chieftain.”
“But, you sacrificed everything.”
“I sacrificed nothing.” He took her hand and warmed it between his. “And I’ve gained exactly what I’ve always wanted.”
Those words sank deep into her, slipping past walls she didn’t even know she’d put up to guard her wary heart. They glided into her with the same ease that she’d always fallen into other people’s minds, except that she welcomed this openness, this sharing, with a heart that swelled with a hope that she thought she’d long buried.
“But,” she stuttered, “the betrothal to Leana—”
“Broken once again. Callum Ewing will likely have her married to Fingal before the year is out.”
“Poor Fingal,” she said, sensing the sulky impatience of the girl now pacing in an upper room of the castle. “But perhaps,” she added, reading the excitement in Fingal’s mind, “that final betrothal shall bring them both happiness.”
“Is that hope speaking? Or does your gift now roam so far and wide, and with such pr
ecision?”
“My gift is… clearer.”
The fuzziness and pain, the crackling and sizzling, all the force that had caused her so much pain was gone. The collective musing of the throngs camping upon the plain just outside Loch Fyfe came to her as naturally as if she’d just cocked her ear. Within the castle, she sensed the hurried anxiety of the women roasting meat, the single-minded focus of the blacksmith working in the smithy, the bored stable boys kicking hay in the stables, the guards taking their ease upon the ramparts. She discovered that she could mute the thoughts of one or another group by simply turning her mind away from them, as if she were turning her back on a conversation at a meal to focus on the talk of those on her other side.
Her heart did a little trip-dance. Touching the dolmen stones must have done this to her, though she couldn’t imagine why. Whatever the reason, it was as if a great flood had scoured through her head and left her vitally aware, her mind as clean and clear as a newborn babe.
Then she looked into Lachlan’s midnight-sky eyes and felt no resistance between them, no mist to shadow his brightest thoughts, nothing to dim the love that emanated from every corner of his vast and beautiful heart.
“I know your mind,” she said, a laugh rising, “yet I cannot really read your thoughts, not like others.”
“Lass, you’ve always known my heart.”
She did. She did.
“But since I don’t have your gift,” he added, brushing a strand of hair off her brow, “I have to ask you for what I most hope for.” He hesitated and took a breath. “Will you still have me, Cairenn, though now I’m naught but a lowly Scot who knows nothing except how to build bridges?”
With a slow, lazy smile she whispered yes. Lachlan lowered his head and pressed his warm, hungry lips against hers. She tasted honey-mead on his tongue. She combed her fingers through his thick hair and dreamed of the two of them standing upon Inishmaan with the sun on their faces and her hand lost in the wispy blond hair of a little boy who had eyes like the twilight, so full of stars.
And suddenly she knew the answer to a question she’d asked herself since she’d been a girl, about why any young woman would so willfully hand her heart to a man whose mind she could not possibly know. Love builds a bridge between a man and a woman. It’s built out of adoration and respect, and crossed over by trust.
He pulled away with reluctance. “You need to rest, mo chridhe. I would have you strong again.”
She didn’t have to read his thoughts to know he wanted to take her in his arms, run his hands over her skin, and slip his body against hers under the warmth of the blankets. Her heart lightened as if she were one of the birds singing just outside the tent. She felt a billowing joy unlike anything she’d felt since she’d been a child racing across the heights of Inishmaan.
All this thrumming delight felt wonderful, but it also felt oddly new. She gave him a look out of the side of her eyes. “What have you done, Lachlan?”
He grinned like a boy and reached back to pick up the lambskin he’d placed upon the floor. She did not have to see it to know what it was, for suddenly in her mind the mead-hall echoed with shouting men sweating in their braies as they yanked upon a tangle of pulleys and ropes.
She caught her breath. “You’re moving the stones.”
CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR
Once Lachlan announced that they would be returning to Inishmaan, Fingal ordered a banquet to be thrown in Lachlan’s honor.
Cairenn sat near the head of the trestle table, arranged in a different configuration now that the portal stones were already halfway up the slope to the council heights. At first, she felt very much out of place among so many grand people. She sat not far from Callum Ewing and the lion-maned Dermot MacGilchrist, whose newly-humble manner was that of a hound who stayed near his master though he’d been sorely beaten. Summoned from her safe exile with her Stuart cousins, Lachlan’s twelve-year-old half-sister Elspeth sat across from Cairenn, peppering her with questions about Inishmaan. At the head was Fingal, who Cairenn discovered to be a focused, intelligent, and surprisingly sensible young man, when his attention wasn’t drifting to Leana, his soon-to-be bride, who’d been relegated to the next table to avoid the awkwardness of sitting among two men to whom she’d been betrothed.
Lachlan was a steady, loving presence at her side. All through the boisterous banquet, she made sure that her smile told him how much she adored him. The only thing she regretted was that they could not extend this joy through the night, because the minute she had been deemed healthy enough to emerge from Angus’s tent, Angus himself had insisted she be relegated to sleeping in the women’s quarters with the other unmarried maidens. There, the beds were stuffed with feathers rather than hay, but without Lachlan, they were not nearly as warm.
The morning after the banquet, she was roused early by a young servant boy. She tossed her tunic over her head, slipped on her leather slippers, and grabbed her sack before following the child out of the room. Lachlan waited for her in the mead-hall amid heaps of snoring men, his own belongings rolled up tight and slung over his shoulder.
“Are we to sneak out,” she whispered, once they’d stepped into the courtyard, “without even a last good-bye to Fingal and Elspeth?”
“They’ll be down anon, along with Angus.” He tugged on her hand. “But there’s something I want you to see.”
She did not have to guess what he wanted to show her. The creatures had slipped into her dreams last night, and now she heard them barking long before she and Lachlan passed under the raised portcullis to step onto the narrow causeway. Upon the rocks scattered along the shore of Loch Fyfe, hundreds of seals sprawled, raising their heads to the skies.
As she and Lachlan emerged, the seals turned their soft brown eyes toward them. The barking intensified as if the creatures expected them to toss buckets of fish.
She asked, “Do they usually come in such numbers?”
“Never. When I was young, we’d see a family or two in the fall. It was always the same family, so we came to know their markings well. But I’ve never seen so many.”
“But surely,” she said, remembering the seals around Inishmaan who loved to loll upon the rocks, their white pups close, “it’s the season for them to come to a safe cover?”
“It’s not, and the sea’s a good league away.”
“Well, this crowd seems happy to see us.”
“I think they are, lass.”
She slid him a glance. “So you are a selkie then?”
She’d meant it as teasing, but his expression became pensive. “I’ve no yearning to dive into the deep, if that’s what you’re thinking.” He slipped his arm around her and drew her close into his warmth. “Not unless you promise to dive in with me.”
“It’s the high, lonely places I fancy,” she said, “though if you’re there to keep me warm I’ll reconsider.”
They stood for a while, basking in the odd, barking praise of a herd of seals. She knew that Lachlan’s mind spun with questions and confusion. Like any woman who could read a man’s mind, she waited in silence until he was ready to talk.
“All this barking,” he finally confessed. “It’s unearthing a memory that I’d thought was a dream.”
Because he struggled so hard to explain it, she slipped into his thoughts to share in the dream-memory. It was a watery, salt-sea dream. The sharing was so vivid that she found herself rubbing her shoulder where a shadow of soreness throbbed, in the same place where Lachlan now bore his scar. Beyond the pain, the dream-memory was filled with sleek shadows slipping dark through cold waters, and the sense of being bumped toward a bluish light by strong, whiskered snouts.
She said, “You once told me that your mother’s people were from Orkney, said to be descended from the Finnar. The selkies.”
“I’m mad enough to believe it,” he said, “now that I’ve witnessed all that you’ve shown me since you saved me.”
“I don’t know if I have an explanation for that dream,” she
said, “except that it might explain how you washed up on the shores of Inishmaan.”
He blinked in that way he did, whenever she was telling him something too far out of his ability to understand.
“All otherworldly creatures feel the power of the dolmen stones,” she explained. “Perhaps these seals—and maybe a selkie or two among them—felt the desecration upon the council height keenly, and hoped you, with a bit of their blood running through your veins, might be able to put matters back to rights.”
“So they sent me to you,” he murmured, “because I couldn’t do such a task alone.”
She nodded. She was part of this, too. When she’d touched the dolmen stones, her gift had changed profoundly for the better. Perhaps that was the Otherworld’s way of showing gratitude for the risks she’d taken, unknowingly, for their sake.
“So what you’re telling me,” he persisted, as he pressed his lips against her hair, “is that you and I were brought together for some greater purpose.”
“Oh, Lachlan. I’ve no doubt we were.”
His nod was thoughtful. She laid her head upon his shoulder, burrowing into his warmth. For a long time, they stood on the causeway with the wind blowing off the lake, watching the seals frolic as the people in the castle behind them woke to the day.
“So today we begin the journey back to Inishmaan,” he said into the silence, “and yet we never really spoke about it.”
“It will always be that way with us. We know each other’s hearts.”
“Yet you spent years hoping to leave that island.”
“Only because I yearned to find you. Now that I have you, I want nothing more than to live with you among my people.”
He grunted. “Your father may greet me on shore with a swinging sword.”
“My mother will assure him that all is well,” she said, laughing. “And he’ll be overwhelmed that one of his daughters, at least, has come back to Inishmaan for good.”
Wild Highland Magic (The Celtic Legends Series Book 3) Page 20