by Paula Quinn
Temperance was still fuming when Gram scrutinized her through her good eye while they walked together back to the house.
Temperance let go of the cat and watched her run ahead. “Please, Gram,” she argued, though Gram hadn’t said a word, “don’t come at me with how I must start behaving like a lady and stop defending myself.”
“Who said anything about that, gel? Ye’ll never hear me spit such nonsense. But there’s a place fer pouring out yer passions, and ’tis not at yer father’s burial.”
Aye! Aye, Gram was right. This day wasn’t about her and William. It was about her father. She apologized to her grandmother and continued toward home.
“Temperance?” Gram called out behind her, stopping her. “Keeping busy and celebrating his life tonight and in the days to come will heal ye,” she promised.
Temperance nodded and kept going. What if she didn’t heal? The thought frightened her. She wanted to kill, not cook. She’d never killed anyone before and she couldn’t just ride into Lyon’s Ridge Castle and start shooting her arrows at Black Riders and expect to live. No. She had to devise a way to kill the mercenaries and their leader and ensure victory. She’d do it. Her father’s life would cost them theirs.
She reached the house before Gram did, but she didn’t enter. She turned at the sound of the wailing wind sweeping over the frost-covered glen. She pulled her dark woolen mantle tighter around her shoulders and looked up at Murdoch’s castle in the distance, swathed in gossamer fog. She hated it and everyone in it. The people of her hamlet, her friends, weren’t safe anymore. They never had been. If the lord’s mercenaries could kill the leader of Linavar, what was to stop them from killing everyone else? And what about her? The life she’d hoped for was impossible now unless she did something. If she didn’t kill Duncan, she’d never be safe from his desires. She would have to marry William to keep herself and Gram safe.
Something drew her anxious heart—and her cat—away from the castle and into the misty fields.
“TamLin!” she called out.
The cat kept going until she disappeared in the fog. Temperance was about to call her in again when Gram reached her and continued toward the door.
“She’ll come in her own time,” the old woman said.
Temperance nodded and tried to ignore the hair standing straight on her nape. She hurried inside and forgot all about it as she began chopping onions and an assortment of other vegetables for tonight’s celebration.
As was usual for Gram, she turned out to be correct—TamLin did return home. And keeping busy did help Temperance keep her mind off her father and the men who’d killed him. For a little while, at least. She and Gram cooked all day, preparing for the feast. An old cow was slaughtered and fresh meat dishes abounded. The food the villagers had made for the next night’s celebration was brought and shared at the feast as well.
Finally Temperance had to rest. The kitchen was hot and she came outside for fresh, cool air. She thought of last night’s events. The Black Riders moving out of the shadows like demons from hell. Fear overwhelmed her, urgent and crippling. She wouldn’t sleep tonight, just as she hadn’t slept last night. She’d never felt anything like it before. This fear. They weren’t safe.
“Oh, Papa,” she cried, looking toward the pewter sky. “What am I to do now? What will become of us—of me if I don’t marry?”
She heard a sound in the twilight, to the right, toward the barn.
“You’re to let more than a day pass before you decide that all is hopeless,” said a man to her left.
She turned and looked up at William, his dark eyes warm on her, like his smile. Damn it, but she did love him. She’d grown up with him. He, being a few years older, had taken on the role of her protector when she was six and Rodney Menzie had taunted her one too many times. William had knocked two of Rodney’s teeth out and hadn’t denied his guilt when he stood before her father, and he’d been punished for it. After that they’d grown very close and enjoyed the terrible things they did together. Like moving beehives into their neighbors’ cabbage, onion, and pumpkin patches, and letting frogs and other little terrors into people’s houses through their open windows. They got away with most of it and grew up laughing about it. They’d spent every day together, save for the two years he’d spent in Edward Murdoch’s dungeon. How could she not love him? She was still angry with him, though. She’d been so busy that she hadn’t had a chance to speak to him. “Isn’t it, William?”
“Nae. Your father wouldn’t have wanted it to be hopeless.”
“He doesn’t have a say anymore. He’s dead! He’s left us!” It began with the lump in her throat. She should have known right then to calm herself. But she didn’t want to be calm. She wanted to cry and shout oaths she didn’t know how she’d fulfill. She wanted to fall apart for a moment, just a moment, and miss her father.
“He would want you to remain strong, just as I intend to be.” William moved to take her in his arms.
She let him, just because she wanted to be held in a strong embrace. But she kept silent.
Chapter Four
Temperance woke early the next day and left the house with TamLin. She was careful not to wake Gram.
This was her favorite time of day, when the rest of the world was still asleep, save for a river hawk crying intermittently in the steel-gray dawn. She didn’t mind the cold. It helped numb everything, and she loved how spectacular the earth looked drenched in glistening white.
But this morning she didn’t see the beauty.
Her life had changed so much in a pair of days. She had changed. She felt it in her belly: a void gnawing at her, mercilessly eating its way through the rest of her. She felt alarmingly still, as if she had died with her father. She wasn’t hungry and she couldn’t sleep.
Despite all the lack, though, one emotion lingered inside her, making her defiant of the cold dew on her ankles that quickened her pace. She hurried to her father’s grave and spoke to him for a time before being distracted by a giant hare. With TamLin at her ankles, she chased the hare for about a hundred yards, thinking it would feed her and Gram for at least a month.
It hit her, as it had several times since the day her father left her, that it was just she and her grandmother now. How would they live? And poor Anne Gilbert was alone as well, weeping into Temperance’s arisaid until the wool could be wrung out.
She didn’t see the horse in front of her. She didn’t know how, but she completely missed it. Had it even been there a moment ago? Had it just stepped out of the fog? She ran straight into the poor beast, startling it, and herself even more, before she bounced off the horse’s massive shoulder and fell back on her arse.
The rider leaped to the ground after her and helped her to her feet. “Are ye hurt?” he asked, sounding quite concerned.
She rubbed her head. “Where did you come from?”
“I’m… eh… on m’ way to Kenmore.”
A traveler, then? They didn’t get many travelers through Linavar. She tried to have a better look at him, but the morning was still dark and everything above his nose was cast in the shadow of a woolen plaid over his head. A Highlander. She could see his jaw, though, square and classically strong, his chin, set with an alluring dimple that added to the pouty curve of his full lower lip. “’Tis that way.” She swallowed.
“Are ye stable enough that I can let ye go?” His warm breath fell against her face. Deeply smooth, his voice resonated off her bones like the sound of a powerful instrument, tempting her to close her eyes and sigh with delight.
She realized then that he was still holding her hands. No. No, she wasn’t stable enough at all.
“Aye.” She pulled her hands free and held her fingers to her temples. “I cannot believe I ran into yer horse!” She laughed for the first time in two days. “I don’t usually miss such large objects.”
“Good thing.” The slight tilt of his upper lip made her want to lift her fingers and run them over his rough jaw. “Else these mountains
would have doon ye in by now.”
His voice swept over her like wind dancing over the mountains. She liked the sound of it.
“Was that yer kin’s funeral march I saw yesterday?”
“Aye,” she said, quieting down, forgetting his mysterious appearance as her sadness returned, “for my father.”
He bowed his head, casting the rest of his face in shadow. “Please.” He paused, then, “Accept my deepest sympathies. M’ heart aches at yer loss.”
She wasn’t sure if it was the sincerity in his voice or the tenderness in it that burned her throat and made her cry.
She gathered hold of herself quickly and laughed again while she wiped her burning eyes. She reassured him that she wasn’t injured, just daft.
He shook his head in disagreement, but said nothing else.
She wanted to make him smile, but something about the way his mouth was crafted, as if it was fashioned for brooding and melancholy, convinced her that he didn’t give his smiles easily.
William called her name and she turned to look back at the house in the distance. “You should go.” When she turned back to the stranger, he was already in his saddle and turning to leave.
She didn’t see him until two hours later, when she and TamLin found him facedown and unconscious or dead, and bleeding where her cabbages would grow next spring.
She hoped he wasn’t dead.
Warily she bent down and made sure he was still breathing. After determining that he was still alive, she hiked her skirts over her ankles and bolted toward home.
Ten minutes later she returned with William and Gram at her side, and a dozen others behind her, with more coming. She didn’t tell them that she’d spoken to him earlier and what a pleasant man he was. They would get angry that she’d stopped to speak to a stranger. Even if he’d helped her after she’d crashed into his horse.
“He’s been stabbed twice in the back,” Gram informed them, checking him over with her hands and her single eye.
“Who would stab a man in the back?” Temperance asked, and they looked up the braes to Lyon’s Ridge. Duncan Murdoch would. But why this man? How did he know Murdoch?
“He needs our help,” Gram told the small crowd. “Who volunteers to help him back to the house, step forward.”
“What if he’s a Black Rider?” William stepped forward, but hesitated, holding up his palm to stop any other advance. “Do we want to help him?”
Temperance certainly didn’t, but how were they to know who he was until he woke up and told them? In order for him to open his eyes, he needed to recover.
Besides, she didn’t believe he was a Black Rider. He was too kind, his touch too tender.
“What does it matter if we want this or not, William?” Gram asked him, proving she was more forgiving than the rest of them, stepping in front of Temperance to block his gaze. “We do what’s right.”
Aye, they did what was right. That’s what Temperance’s father had taught her. Life taught her different, though. Doing right didn’t save your life.
“What about Marion? Did we do right for her?” he asked Gram boldly. “She’s a member of this village. They took her.”
“We don’t know if the Black Riders are responsible for Marion’s disappearance,” Gram retorted in a calm voice. “And be reminded of Seth’s warning to make decisions with yer logic and not yer heart.”
“How can I deny my heart,” William answered, “when it seeks to keep the people of Linavar safe?”
Aye, Temperance thought, listening to him. They needed him.
“A steady temper and intelligence will see us through, William.”
Dismissing him, Gram ordered the stranger be brought back to the house. Temperance followed and caught the spark in William’s eyes as she passed him. Was he so serious about taking Seth’s place as leader? She hoped so. He was the only one who’d stepped up to the task. Could he do it? Could he keep the people safe from Murdoch and his mercenaries by keeping good relations with the lord? He’d been furious when Marion disappeared a few weeks ago. Some suspected she’d run off with a man from Fortingall or Kenmore, but William seemed so certain Duncan and his men had kidnapped her. Would he take matters into his own hands now that Seth was gone?
“Ye’ll aid me in his recovery,” the elder told her granddaughter, pulling her thoughts back to the present.
“Of course, Gram.”
Gram offered William a smile when he helped carry the stranger back. Would it be fair to marry her friend? She wasn’t in love with him. What did fairness matter? They did what needed to be done. She needed to marry him, and she would. It was, after all, what her father had wanted.
When they finally reached the house, William sent the neighbors back to their homes, promising them a report as soon as he had one. Temperance prepared clean rags, clean water, a bottle of their strongest whisky, a needle, some thread, and her seasoned oak bowl.
They brought him to Temperance’s room since it was the closest to the kitchen and whatever herbs Gram needed.
Temperance didn’t mind sleeping with her grandmother for a sennight or two. Neither one of them wanted to sleep in Seth’s room.
As soon as they set him down in her bed, staining its coverings with his blood, it hit Temperance that he could very well die in that spot. She didn’t want him to. There was nothing she could have done for her father. This stranger offered her a chance to heal at least a small part of herself. She took it.
He’d helped her to her feet. She’d help him live.
“What more do you need from me?” she asked while her grandmother removed his sheathed claymore first, then his plaid and the clothes beneath. After that she covered him from his feet to his waist with Temperance’s blanket. She had him turned onto his belly since he’d been stabbed in the back. Blood covered the expanse of his shoulders, pouring from two deep tears in his flesh.
Temperance recoiled. The blood reminded her of her father. She doubted they could save this man.
“Gram…”
“Fetch me my herbs, dove. Bring me basil, clove, coriander, hyssop, lavender, mint, and sage. I need my mortar and pestle. Are you listening, Temperance?”
“Aye, Gram.” Temperance severed her gaze from his wounds and repeated the list.
“Bring me also some lettuce juice, bryony, henbane, hemlock juice, vinegar, and some wine, in case he wakes up.”
Temperance hurried away, too busy repeating Gram’s lists in her head to think about all the blood. Once she returned to the room, she waited while Gram chose the precise amounts of everything she needed and then had Temperance put the ingredients into her hardwood bowl and cook the poultice over the candle flames. Soon the scent of mint permeated the air and gave the room a cozier feel—the way the holiday season should have felt, but didn’t.
Dear God, how would any of them celebrate Christmas and Hogmanay without her father? This should have been a time for joy and love shared around decorated tables and gifts of spices, new tools, and leather goods. Homes should have been filled with the delicious aromas of Christmas cakes and puddings, mince pies and shortbread, not tears.
Temperance put away her thoughts of merriment and somberly watched Gram work at cleaning the stranger’s wounds, then accept the red-hot iron William handed her. She finally looked away when Gram lowered the iron and the stranger’s flesh crackled in her ears.
“Temperance.” Gram motioned to her when she was done. ”Come here and apply the poultice. My fingers and wrists ache. I’m going to take a quick nap.”
“Me?”
“Aye, or has some malady befallen ye also, that prevents ye from using yer hands?” Without waiting for an answer, Gram shoved the bowl at her. “Come now, ye’re wasting his precious time. Get to the task and keep him from infection. I’ll check in later. Och, and rub some of my oils into his skin and have his drink ready if he wakes up.”
It was no hardship. In fact, Temperance enjoyed touching him. She kept her feelings concealed behind stoic fea
tures while she moved her fingers around his wounds. She stretched down his back slowly, carefully applying the concoction, cursing the soul who’d tried to take his life. Imagine killing this work of art. Goodness, but he was carved as a clay idol would be by the fingers of a skilled master sculptor. Why, when she’d met him she hadn’t been able to help but notice that even his trews fit him to perfection. She looked down at his profile set against her pillow. Unadorned by a wool hood or shadows, his restful face mesmerized her. His full, decadent mouth still pouted, even in his slumber.
Temperance felt sorry for him. He had been stabbed in the back. A coward had done it. The worst coward she knew was Duncan Murdoch. But why would he want this man dead, unless he knew him?
William watched her by the door. She cleared her throat and appeared more diligent in her work. He didn’t like her having to tend the handsome stranger, but he couldn’t stop her from doing it.
“He could be one of them,” he said when they were alone, knowing her well enough to know the right things to say to make her not enjoy her duty. That the stranger was possibly a Black Rider was one of them.
“And he might not be. My father would want me to help him until I’m certain who the stranger is.” If he was one of Murdoch’s mercenaries, she’d kill him.
After she healed him.
“Temp,” her friend said softly. When she looked up, he averted his gaze. “We should talk about our wedding.”
Her heart stopped. Now? He wanted to talk now? Of course she would go along with it for her father’s and Gram’s sakes. But she didn’t want to discuss it now. Oddly enough, he didn’t seem as if he wanted to either.
“Can it wait just a little while longer, Will?”
“Of course, we can do it after Hogmanay.”
She smiled at him. She’d only meant their talk about it, but postponing the wedding was good.
“I need to get back to the smithy,” he said, and then left without another word.