“Am I to just rush forward and impale myself?”
“’Twould be justice if ye did. Where is your laird? I didnae think ye were able to walk or talk without him.”
“My laird faces Balfour Murray. Since this battle is lost, I saw no gain in standing with him.”
“And so ye slink away like the adder ye are.”
“Beaton was right. ’Tis a shame ye are a lass. Ye would have made him a fine son.”
“I dinnae see that as any great flattery. Now, my brother and I have many things to do, and ye and I dinnae really have anything to say to each other, so, shall we just finish this dance?”
Calum laughed, a soft chilly sound that made Maldie very uneasy. “Are ye that eager to die, lass?”
“Nay, that eager to kill you.”
Even as she prepared to meet his strike, another sword appeared between hers and Calum’s, taking the blow meant for her. Eric grabbed her and pulled her away as Calum turned to meet this new challenge. Maldie looked at the man who had taken her place and decided that she might have been mistaken while she was at Donncoill. At times it could be very nice to see James.
“Ye ken James far better than I do,” she said to Eric, neither of them taking their eyes from the two men fighting in front of them. “Do ye think he can win against Calum?”
“Aye, without e’en sweating,” Eric replied, his voice full of pride.
“Such faith in the mon.”
“’Tis deserved.”
Maldie saw the truth of that a moment later. Both men were bloodied, filthy with the dirt of battle, and Maldie knew James had done as much fighting, if not more than Calum, but it was Calum who wavered first. James smiled faintly when the man faltered, leaving himself open for the death blow James quickly delivered. She stood quietly by as James wiped his sword on the dead man’s padded jupon, then turned to look at her and Eric.
“We had hoped that ye would have the sense to stay in the dungeons where ye would have been safe from all of this,” James said, taking the sword from Maldie’s hand. “Ye should have picked a smaller one, lass.”
“Ah, weel, I lacked the time to choose carefully,” she said.
“’Tis good to see ye, laddie,” James said, giving Eric a brief hug. “Come with me. I will take the two of ye to where the pages and the wounded wait with the horses. Ye will be safe there.” He looked at Maldie as he led her and Eric out through the gates. “And ye will stay there.”
“Where would we go, James?” she said sweetly and smiled when he scowled at her.
“Are ye weel, laddie?” James asked Eric as he slipped an arm around the boy’s shoulders and saw him wince faintly.
“A wee bit bruised, but no more.”
“Beaton beat ye, did he?”
“Some, but the bruises I carry were not all from him. Our escape from the dungeons wasnae as easy as we had hoped for.”
Maldie walked quietly beside them, only partly listening as Eric told James all they had done. The boy revealed a pleasant touch of modesty as he described his part in it all. The way James kept glancing at her made Maldie a little uneasy. It was hard to tell if he was angry or surprised.
James left them with the horses and hurried away to find Nigel. As Maldie sat down on the hillside next to Eric, she wondered what had possessed Nigel to ride to this battle when he was not fully healed from the last one, then sighed and shook her head. Men being the odd creatures that they were, she suspected some twisted ideas of honor and pride had made him come. James was clearly keeping a close watch on the man, and that had to suffice.
“I found it verra hard to accept James’s hearty welcome,” Eric murmured.
“Why?” she asked.
“Because ’tis a lie. I am not the lad he thinks I am.”
She smiled gently and patted his hand where it rested on the grass. “Ye are the same lad who rode by his side ere Beaton had ye taken from Donncoill.”
“Mayhap inside, but I am now a Beaton, not a Murray. James greeted a Murray, one he thinks is one of his clan. I ached to tell him the truth right then.” Eric began to agitatedly yank the grass out of the ground. “He is a good mon and deserves to ken the whole truth.”
“If ye are going to tell him, then ye shall have to tell them all. That should be done when they are all together, so that they hear it together.”
“Oh, aye, and so that they all then spit on me together.”
“I dinnae think they will spit on you,” she said, pained by her inability to ease his fears. “They have cared for ye for thirteen years, Eric. I dinnae think that can change so verra quickly.”
“Mayhap not.” He gave her a crooked smile, a little embarrassed by his own foolishness, then sighed heavily. “It will change though. It has to. They may have cared for me for years, but they have also loathed and fought the Beatons for years as weel. ’Tis hard to explain. ’Tis just that I feel things must change. How can they not?”
“I fear I have no answers to give ye, Eric. I dinnae ken your clan as weel as ye do. James, Balfour, and Nigel all seem to be good, fair men. Aye, and they all possess some wit. It would seem to me that it should make no difference in how they feel toward you. After all, ye havenae lied. Ye also thought ye were a Murray. They told ye that from the day ye were plucked off that hillside and brought to Donncoill.
“There is one thing ye must do, however. Dinnae let this change you. Dinnae let it poison your heart so that ye see hate and mistrust where it doesnae exist. Aye, it can be painful to hope all will be weel, then find out that it will not be. But, if ye make yourself believe that they must dislike and mistrust you, ye will become a different mon, not the one they have known for so long.”
“Ye are saying that if I continue to believe the worst, then the worst may just happen. I will make it so.”
“Aye, something like that. Now, ready yourself, for I see your foolish brother Nigel limping his way up the hillside.”
Eric laughed and eagerly accepted Nigel’s hug. Nigel collapsed on the grass by his side and Eric was soon relating the tale of their escape all over again. Maldie felt someone staring at her and looked up to see that James was standing before her. Her eyes widened a little when she saw how uneasy he looked, as if he was a little embarrassed.
“I said I would stay here,” she said, smiling a little as she tried to ease some of the awkwardness he so clearly felt.
“Aye, I suspect ye will.” James cleared his throat. “I but wished to apologize for my suspicions.”
“Ye dinnae need to,” she replied, wishing she could stop his unnecessary apology. “Ye had a right to suspect me. If naught else, I was the only one ye didnae ken weel, and I arrived at your gates at a verra suspicious moment.”
“That is nay good enough. I had no proof that ye were a Beaton spy. None at all. I should not have let my concerns make me unfair in my judgments.”
“Ye did what ye had to. I feel no ill will.”
He nodded, then frowned slightly. “Ye didnae happen to find out how Beaton discovered who Malcolm was, did ye?”
“Nay, I didnae talk long with Beaton and he wasnae of a mind to confide in me.”
“I think I may be at fault for that,” said Eric.
“Nay, lad. Ye would ne’er betray your own,” Nigel said, patting his young brother on the back.
“Not on purpose, nay. But, I think I may have revealed in some small way that I recognized him. He came down to the dungeons with Beaton the day after I was tossed down there. I was verra surprised to see him standing there at Beaton’s side. That may have shown on my face, and it was all Beaton needed.”
“Nay, he would have needed more than that, I think,” James said.
“Mayhap Malcolm was seen when he came to visit me later, alone,” Eric continued. “I think he hoped to rescue me. ’Tis what he spoke to me about.”
“That would be the mistake that got him killed.”
“Aye,” agreed Nigel. “It would have been. Beaton would have had the dungeons carefu
lly watched. Aye, the wrong glance from you may have stirred a suspicion or two, but they would have died away. Malcolm acting so quickly to try and set ye free would have made that brief glance of recognition far more important than it needed to have been. None of us will e’er ken what Malcolm was thinking, but by showing so much interest in you, he gave himself away. That is what got him murdered.”
Eric shivered and, wrapping his arms around himself, rubbed his hands up and down his arms in a vain attempt to remove the sudden chill that had run through his body. “And it was a slow, brutal murder, too. I dinnae want to see such cruelty e’er again. For that alone Beaton should die a hundred deaths.”
“Ye saw Malcolm murdered?” demanded James, his voice hard and cold.
“Beaton thought it would harden me to see how traitors are treated.” He shook his head. “Malcolm suffered for days, but he ne’er told Beaton a thing, whispered not one secret about the Murrays. He was a verra brave and loyal mon. I dinnae think I could have held firm throughout such agony. Nay, not when it went on for days.”
“No lad should have had to see that.”
“I suspect Beaton saw such cruelty at a young age,” murmured Maldie. “From all Eric told me, the mon seemed to think the lad needed such training, needed the hardening it would bring. Aye, sometimes men like Beaton are born mean, but sometimes such men are made, the evil in them nurtured and strengthened throughout their younger years.”
“Ah, so ye mean to say that since Beaton’s father was a cruel bastard, that made Beaton a cruel bastard, too,” said Nigel, and Maldie nodded. “Sad, but it willnae save him from the killing he deserves.”
“Nay, and I wouldnae suggest that it did. In truth, I think Beaton would welcome death if he wasnae so terrified of the judgment he will face. And I believe Beaton’s father may have been crueler than we can e’er imagine. ’Twould be one understandable reason why Beaton killed him and seems to suffer no guilt for having done so.”
“Beaton killed his own father?” James asked, his voice softened by the horror of such a crime.
“Aye, he told me so himself.”
“He killed my mother as weel,” said Eric, pulling the men’s attention his way.
As Eric explained how he had gained that piece of information, Maldie took the moment to try and gather her courage. Eric would soon be telling his brothers and James the whole truth about himself. That meant she would have to be truthful as well. James’s reaction to the news that Beaton had killed his own father told her that at least some of her truths would not be accepted. It was indeed a grave sin to murder one of your parents, but she had never allowed herself to think about that for long. She had the sick feeling that she would soon see just how unacceptable it was to everyone except men like Beaton.
Beaton’s opinion that she was more like him than she would like to be stuck in her mind and made her inwardly cringe. She did not want that to be true, but she had to wonder on it. If she had been quicker and Beaton and Calum had been slower, she would now have the blood of her own father on her hands. The truly upsetting thing about it all was that Beaton, foul work of a man that he was, probably had far more justification for killing his father than she had for trying to kill hers.
Deep inside of her brewed a hard anger at her mother. The only thing that kept it locked within her heart was that right beside it was a pain she was not sure she could deal with. If her mother had loved her at all, the woman’s bitterness had eaten it all away. No truly loving mother would do to her daughter what Margaret Kirkcaldy had done to hers. Margaret had raised her only child to go and kill a man, and not just any man, but the one whose seed had made her, and she had not once cared what that might do to her child.
Maldie wondered how much else Beaton had said might be true, and feared that a great deal of it had been. Margaret had not wanted Beaton dead because her heart had been broken, or even because she had been left poor and shamed, but because her soaring vanity had been stung. It was a horrible thing to see in one’s own mother, but the more Maldie considered it, the more it tasted like the truth.
Whenever Margaret had spoken of love and broken hearts, the woman had often sounded as if she quoted some minstrel’s lyrics. There had always been a faint ring of falseness to her protestations of love lost, but Maldie had tried to tell herself that it was simply a reticence to speak of such personal things. However, other things her mother had said when speaking of Beaton had clearly concerned her badly stung pride, the insult she felt over being cast aside like some common whore, and they had always sounded sincere. Even when her mother had been dying and demanding that Maldie swear a blood oath to kill Beaton, the woman had spoken of her injured pride, of the outrage she still felt that the man would do such a thing to her. Maldie realized that it was only when she had hesitated that her mother had even mentioned her broken heart. She also realized that not once had her mother spoken of the man’s crime in deserting his child. That had always been her own grievance, and she had just assumed that her mother had shared it.
When Eric nudged her to draw her attention to him, she welcomed the interruption in her thoughts. All the pain and anger she held inside were rising up, choking her, and now was not a good time to face them or any of the other hard truths she had ignored for so long. Eric was like a salve on her sore heart. He cared for her and she had no doubt about that at all. The youth did not have a false bone in his body. She prayed that that would never change.
“Are ye tired, Maldie?” Eric asked.
“Aye, weary to the bone, but I will be fine,” she replied. “This will all be over soon.” She looked toward the village, pleased to see that there was little fighting there. “I hope my dear friend Eleanor got safely away.”
“The old woman ye stayed with?” asked James.
“Aye, how did ye ken that?”
“Douglas told us.”
Maldie briefly gaped at James. “Douglas is a Murray mon?”
“Aye, always has been. When ye tried to kill Beaton and were sentenced to hang for it, he came back to Donncoill. Too much had changed and he was gaining little knowledge. As he said, to act even a little curious about the laird and his doings was enough to get ye killed.”
“It was,” agreed Eric. “Beaton hanged several men simply because he thought they might be guilty of treason against him. From what little I heard they had committed no crime save to ask the wrong question or hear some small thing Beaton felt they shouldnae have. Most people kept their distance from the keep and from Beaton. Few people e’en dared to open their mouths. Douglas was wise to get away while he still could.”
“Ye saw the old woman Eleanor, did ye?” Maldie asked, regaining James’s attention.
“Aye, and she saw us,” replied James. “Ye warned her, didnae ye?”
“I did. I hope she heeded it and did so without harm to your cause.” She smiled crookedly as she looked at the smoke rising from within the walls of Dubhlinn. “’Tis clear she didnae hurt ye at all.”
“Not at all, and I feel sure she got to a safe place. There is nary a doubt in my mind that she had guessed we were not here for the wares of the marketplace.”
“Good. She is a sweet, kindhearted woman and I was afraid for her.”
Despite all of her efforts not to, Maldie realized that she could not stop herself from continually glancing toward the waning battle. She knew she was looking for Balfour, and the hint of amusement in James’s eyes told her that he knew it, too. It made no sense, for anything she might have shared with the man would soon be brutally ended. Yet she was hungry for the sight of him, wanted to see with her own eyes that he had survived the battle and was able to enjoy a well-deserved victory.
“I am going to go and find that fool laird of ours,” James announced, pointedly glancing at Maldie. “I cannae believe there are any Beatons left to fight.”
“Calum said he left his laird facing yours,” Maldie told him.
“Weel, that confrontation should be over by now,” James mutte
red, frowning slightly as he hurried back toward the keep.
“Balfour wouldnae lose to Beaton, would he?” Eric asked Nigel, his voice softened by concern.
“Nay,” Nigel replied without hesitation.
“If Calum spoke the truth, then the fight between Balfour and Beaton has either lasted a verra long time or—”
“There is no or, lad. Balfour will defeat Beaton. Mayhap he plays with the mon. Mayhap Calum lied. Mayhap Balfour and Beaton had a lot to say to each other ere they truly began to fight. The length of time one takes to fight an enemy doesnae determine who wins or loses. Believe me, lad, Beaton doesnae stand a chance against our brother.”
Maldie watched James disappear through the high gates of Dubhlinn and prayed that Nigel was right. Eric’s worry was her own. Beaton should have been defeated by now, and yet there was no sign of Balfour. She felt sure that, after today, she would never see Balfour again, but she did not want that to be because Beaton had killed him.
Chapter Nineteen
“Murray, ye bastard,” yelled a raspy voice, and Balfour tensed.
He easily recognized the voice. It was the same one that had taunted him from the walls of Dubhlinn the last time he had tried to rescue Eric and failed so miserably. Beaton was approaching him from behind and Balfour felt alarm ripple through him.
Balfour quickly turned, his sword at the ready. He was surprised that Beaton had even spoken, had not simply crept up on him and stabbed him in the back. It should have been Beaton’s first thought upon finding him without a man to watch his back, but Beaton was obviously too enraged to think clearly. It was understandable for the man was seeing everything he had built be cut down before his eyes, but it could prove to be fatal.
Beaton stopped but feet from him, ripped off his mail cowl, and Balfour gaped, unable to control his expression of shock. The last time he had seen the man Beaton had been high up on the walls of Dubhlinn, and Balfour had not been able to see the way the man’s disease had ravaged his face and body. Although he could only see Beaton’s face, it looked as if the man was rotting away. Balfour’s first instinct was to back away, to put as much distance as he could between Beaton and himself for fear of catching whatever ailed the man, but he resisted that urge to give into his fear. No one else at Dubhlinn seemed to be suffering the same affliction, even though Beaton had been fighting it for at least three years. That indicated that it was not something one could just catch. He also trusted in Maldie’s knowledge of such things. She had told Douglas that it was just some affliction of the skin, and would have quickly warned the man and everyone else she could if it was one a person could catch. Since she had not issued such a warning, Balfour decided that what Beaton suffered was his own private torment, something that could not be healed or inflicted upon others.
Highland Destiny Page 23