Highlander Betrayed (Guardians of the Targe) (26 page)

“Exactly. So the question is: Why did it choose me? I am not of Elspet’s bloodline. I have no training. And until this very day I had no idea I had a gift—” The feeling of pulling that odd flowing sensation through her and throwing Archie off with it made her breath hitch.

She could see the moment Jeanette switched from hurt to curious. Her eyes narrowed and her attention focused completely on
Rowan. Her right cheek no longer jumped in anger, but she chewed on the opposite side of her bottom lip.

“You have a gift? That explains some of this mystery. What is it?”

“That I cannot say. I know I can use it to repel dangerous things, but I know not what to call it or even exactly what I can do with it.”

“ ‘Repel dangerous things’? You had need of this today?”

“Aye.”

“Nicholas?”

“Nay! The other one, Archie. He grabbed me. I felt something flowing into me so I pulled at it, then pushed it out from me. I threw him off.” She thought back to that moment. “I threw him quite a ways into the loch.” She smiled, pleased with herself.

Jeanette sat on the end of her bed and Rowan sat beside her.

“But that still does not explain why I was chosen,” Rowan said. “ ’Twas supposed to be you.”

“Never in any of the lore Mum has taught me has the Targe ever chosen a Guardian without some form of unusual gift. Some see visions, some have an attraction to water, scrying the future in it. Some are able to focus emotions and use them to protect the glen and the clan. Some, like Mum, have an affinity for growing things and a knack for keeping them healthy and safe.” Jeanette sighed. “It seems each Guardian’s gift was needed in her time. Which means your ability to repel danger… well, it seems likely ’twill be needed to keep the English out of our glen and out of the Highlands, aye?”

“The Highlands? I thought that was but a tale. I denied such a possibility when Nicholas mentioned it.”

“It is part of the lore, but the stories of the Targe are steeped in history and it would seem that this may be what you are called upon to do.”

Rowan considered the ramifications of what Jeanette said. It was a heavy burden, one she did not want. She squeezed her suddenly trembling hands together, ashamed of her fear. She was the Guardian. There was no choice. She would do whatever she must to protect her family, her clan, and very likely this route into the Highlands.

“You will help me?” she asked Jeanette.

“I will. Of course I will. You must learn how to focus your gift with the Targe stone in order to protect us from the troubles Nicholas and the other spy have brought into our glen. I am the only one now who can teach you that, as well as all the other things required of the Guardian.”

Jeanette hiked one leg up on the bed and turned to face Rowan. Curiosity warred with sadness in her cousin’s eyes.

“This day you were in peril when you called upon your gift, and this was before the Targe chose you.”

“True.”

“Are you certain this was the first time you accessed this ability?”

“I felt the flowing sensation during the blessing.”

Jeanette pursed her lips. “That would make sense. When Mum called upon the power of the Targe, it found you. Other than that?”

Rowan rubbed her forehead and searched her memory. “Headaches.”

“What?”

“Headaches. I had one start as Elspet began the blessing. That is what I felt just before the curtain wall fell. And after”—she dropped her hand from her forehead—“ ’twas gone, as if the pressure had been released.” Rowan closed her eyes and tried to remember the details of the wall falling. “Do you think I made the curtain wall fall, Jeanette? Is that possible?” She rubbed a sudden chill from her arms.

“You were arguing, right?”

“Aye. Scotia had snuck off to meet Conall instead of spending time with your mum. I was angry, frustrated, and so was she.”

“And she was making it worse, right? Making you angrier?”

“Aye, but there is no way my anger made the wall fall—is there?”

Jeanette paced away to the far side of the room and back before she spoke again. “Rowan,” she said as she knelt in front of her cousin and took Rowan’s hands in her own. “There was another time a wall fell—can you remember, the day your parents died?”

Rowan trembled. It was the memory Elspet had tried to get her to recall. The memory that Rowan had not been able to grasp, but
that filled her with panic and grief. Even now, at merely the suggestion she remember, her heart hammered and her palms grew sweaty.

“Rowan, look at me. Your parents’ cottage—Da said it looked as if it had been blown apart from within. Your parents were inside. You, he found wandering in the forest not far away, without a scratch upon you. ’Twas not so different from what happened with the curtain wall, save this time it was Scotia and Nicholas who emerged without so much as a scratch or a bruise.”

Rowan pushed at the dark place in her memory, trying to imagine what Jeanette described, and suddenly it was all there, so fresh it might have happened yesterday. Her parents inside the cottage, shouting at each other, growing louder and louder and louder until young Rowan had left her post by the door and retreated to the burn that burbled at the edge of the clearing where the cottage was set, deep in the forest, far away from any other families or homes. She had stood in the middle of the icy water, wishing the sound of the water spilling over rocks and tree roots would drown out the angry voices. She’d crouched, almost sitting in the water, covering her ears but staring at the cottage, wishing they would stop, that the arguing would end. She had whispered, “Make it stop, make it stop, make it stop,” over and over again, until her voice was almost as loud as those in the cottage, when suddenly, her mother had screamed and the walls of the cottage had exploded. Stones sailed out in every direction. Rowan had ducked her head to her knees and thrown her hands out in front of her as if her scrawny arms would keep her safe from the large stones and splintered wood that flew toward her.

After long moments of stones thudding, wood splintering, and Rowan’s own shrieks of fear, there was silence, but she dared not look… not yet. At length a jay landed near her, slicing through the quiet with its raspy cry and Rowan decided the bird wouldn’t be there if it wasn’t safe.

It was no wonder she had not wanted to remember what she saw that day. The house looked as if some great force had blown it apart from the inside, pushing all the walls away and sending bits of the roof out in every direction… except for where Rowan crouched.

It was as if Rowan had forced all the materials flying toward her to fly back to the cottage. A great void in the debris sat between her and the remains of her home.

And then she’d remembered her parents had been inside.

“Mum!” she’d screamed as she ran to the cottage. “Da!”

It had not taken long for her to find their mangled bodies, pinned beneath the large stones that should have flown away from them.

“What did you remember, Ro?”

The strength of Jeanette’s grip pulled her back from the memories.

“Saints and angels.” Rowan swallowed hard, the images of her parents, pinned and broken by the stones that had once been their home, still falling through her mind. “Jeanette”—she looked up at her beloved cousin then—“I turned the stones away from me, back upon them. I killed my parents with this… this…” She could not call it a gift. “I must have made the curtain wall fall.”

“You just said you turned the stones away from you when you were little. Do you think you caused them to fly toward you first?”

Rowan looked inward to the devastation that was now so vivid in her memory. She remembered the pattern of stones, as if the house had thrown itself in every direction so that the stones and thatch and broken bits of wood had spread out from the cottage evenly… except for that odd void between Rowan and her home. If she had made it explode, wouldn’t it have all flown away from her? A new understanding occurred to her and she spoke slowly, carefully, putting pieces together as if she were re-assembling the stones from that horrific day.

“I think my mum did that. They were arguing about living so far away from everyone. Da wanted to move nearer to his family but Mum was afraid what his family would do if they learned of her feyness, of her odd ability to move things with her thoughts. She was afraid they would call her a witch, or do something worse.”

She listened to the argument in her memory, something she’d long since thought she’d forgotten but it was there, waiting for her to rediscover it. “Her own family had not wanted her. She once told
me that her mother, who I learned then was not her real mother, had found her at the mouth of a barrow when she was only three or four. Her real family had probably left her there for the fey to take back to their realm. I do not think she had a happy childhood, for it was her wish to live away from everyone and when her foster mother died, she did just that, moving away from the clan that barely tolerated her, out into the forest where no one would bother her. I remember them yelling. I remember Da saying there was nothing to fear, that she was as normal as the next woman, and Mum said…”

Jeanette let her cousin be silent for long moments before she urged her to continue. “It’s in the past now, Rowan, but we need to understand your gift.”

Rowan closed her eyes, letting the memories become vivid pictures behind her eyelids. “Mum screamed, ‘Truly?! Is this normal?’ and then the house exploded.”

“And why do you believe you killed them, not your mother?”

“Because they would have been fine, with everything blowing away from them except… except for the parts I blew back at them.”

“Rowan, look at me.”

Rowan let her eyes open, replacing the horror of that destroyed grove with her cousin’s serious expression.

“You were a child and you were protecting yourself. Do you think your mum could have lived with herself if she had lived and you had died from her temper? Can you imagine my mum living with such a thing?”

Rowan shook her head and a single tear broke free from her lashes and trickled over her cheek. Jeanette quickly wiped it away.

“You were a child. Clearly your gift is triggered by high emotion—fear for your life, anger with Scotia…”

“I understand the fear triggering it, but why that time with Scotia?” Rowan asked, happy to focus on something that hadn’t ended in anyone dying. “The wall should have fallen away from us if I caused it, but it did not. It fell toward us except for that one part. Could someone else have a similar…”

“Gift, Rowan. I know you do not see it as one now, but I am certain ’tis a gift. We must learn how you can use it with the Targe.”

“But the wall…”

“It did not fall away from you, into the bailey. Hmm, I wonder if there is anyone who saw it actually fall?”

“Denis was at the gate. He might have seen it.”

Jeanette was nodding, one finger tapping her lips. “We need to speak with Denis. We need to understand exactly how that wall fell in order to determine if that was you, or something else at play.” She jumped to her feet and was out the door before Rowan could say anything. Jeanette leaned back into the doorway. “Are you not coming?”

Rowan recognized Jeanette was on the hunt for knowledge. She looked down at the dirty and still-damp clothes she wore, shrugged, and followed, pleased that Jeanette’s anger had dissipated but worried about what they would learn.

N
ICHOLAS ALLOWED THE
silent Uilliam to drag him out of the tower, and across the bailey. He did nothing to rile the man any more than he already was. He needed Uilliam to calm down enough to listen to him, to understand that he was not the risk facing them, to convince Kenneth that Archie and King Edward were the immediate danger. They stopped before one of the small outbuildings built against the curtain wall. Duncan opened the door and Uilliam shoved Nicholas inside.

“You can rot in here for all I care,” Uilliam hissed at him. “Longshanks will not see his blasted spy again, ’tis a sure thing.”

Duncan glared at him and Nicholas’s stomach dipped. Duncan had been quickly becoming a real friend, not like Archie, and Nicholas was surprised how sad he was to lose that. At least Rowan had not severed their relationship… not completely, anyway.

The thought of Rowan had him pushing off the wall he’d landed against, reminding him of just how much was at stake if he could not make them understand.

“There is more danger here than me, lads,” he said. “There is another spy, Archibald of Easton. He knows about the Highland
Targe. He was sent here with me to find it, to take it… or destroy it.” That got their full attention.

“Destroy it?” Uilliam stepped into the still-open doorway, blocking out most of the lingering twilight so that Nicholas could not make out his expression, though the waves of anger and distrust rolling off the man were not to be mistaken for anything less than mortal danger.

“He kens it is kept here. He kens that I suspected that Lady Elspet controlled the Targe. He will come for it, for her.”

“How does this Archibald of Easton ken this?” Duncan’s wary voice came from behind Uilliam. Duncan shoved his way next to the bear so he could see into the chilly, damp hut.