Sue-Ellen Welfonder - [MacLean 03] (33 page)

Nor did she seem to share Dagda’s obsession to get the bridal sheet yanked off the bed and hurried belowstairs where it’d be paraded about the hall like a war trophy.

Nay, Janet’s pretty face bore an unusual pallor and dark smudges beneath her eyes bespoke a night as sleepless as Amicia’s own.

But not a pleasant one.

“Is aught amiss . . . Cousin?” Amicia sought to win the other’s confidence by using the familiar form of address, surprising herself at how easily the term left her lips.

She laid a staying hand on the younger woman’s arm when, at last, the little troop of visitors began exiting the bedchamber, a smug-looking Dagda in the lead, the bloodied bridal sheet tucked securely under her arm.

Janet hesitated, then cast an almost frantic look at the backs of the other women. “I must speak with you,” she whispered, the urgent plea spoken almost too low to be heard above the hard-pelting rain.

Frowning, Amicia opened her mouth to speak, but the younger woman waved a stilling hand.

“Aye, we must speak, and at the soonest,” Janet urged, dropping her voice even lower. “But not here, not anywhere near the castle.”

“Where then?” Amicia spoke equally low, icy chills snaking up and down her spine at the glassy-eyed fear in the other woman’s eyes. “Tell me and I will be there.”

Janet waited but the space of one breath. “The Beldam’s Chair. Meet me there within the hour.”

“The Beldam’s Chair?”
Amicia forgot to whisper. “But that is in the middle of the high moors and the weather is fierce—”

Growing more nervous by the moment, Janet swooped Amicia’s fur-lined cloak off its peg by the door and tossed it over a chair back. “Wear your cloak and the storm won’t touch you. Just come, I pray you.”

Amicia glanced at the cloak, her stomach beginning to knot with ill ease.

Janet reached for her hand, squeezed it. “Be there, my lady,” she pleaded. “Lives depend on it.”

About the same time, but far out to sea, in the silent waters belonging to another Hebridean isle, a gentle soul sat in solitude upon the black-glistening rocks of a lone tidal islet and murmured protective prayers as she combed cold fingers through her wet and tangled hair.

Sad-eyed and cloaked in a shimmering mist of lightest green, the
gruagach
plucked at the clinging strands of seaweed she could ne’er quite get from her hair.

She could, though, do other things . . . and had.

Aye, she’d cast her every blessing around those she’d once held so dear and still did.

Something she’d done since all time was, and would continue to do forever onward so long as the sun rose upon each new day.

She only hoped she’d done enough this time, and that her warnings had been heeded.

For as with old Devorgilla’s own brand of witchy magic and incantations, there was only so much that enchantments and spells could do.

The only true magic rested deep inside every mortal man’s soul—and even the bitterest blackest wind would collapse upon itself and be turned away by a heart that loved true.

Her own heart beginning to beat more quickly, the
gruagach
ignored the numbing cold that e’er surrounded her and sent her own love across the tossing waves.

Her love and all her determination, for she, too, had once spent time with the steely-backed MacLeans.

A quality she hoped the Lady Amicia would make fullest use of in the coming hours.

Chapter Fifteen

“Y
OU OUGHT BE IN THE GREAT HALL,
laddie.”

Donald MacKinnon lowered his scant weight onto a three-legged stool in Coldstone’s bare-walled laird’s solar and tossed his eldest son a belligerent stare.

“You ne’er paid any heed to
my
claims that the Devil’s own dragonship has been plying these waters of late—why should you believe an ale-taken guardsman?”

Pausing, the old man began to cough. Great, jerky rasps that shook his frail shoulders. But the instant the coughing ceased, he pinned Magnus with another defiant glare. “Aye, you’d best hie yourself down there. Dagda will have waved your bridal sheet beneath the nose of every kinsman in the hall by now, and like as not, she already has the thing tacked to the wall above the high table.”

Magnus frowned.

“Now
that
is another fool MacKinnon tradition I swear I will have done with when I am laird,” he snapped, and made another long-strided circuit of the wretched chamber, once said to be the grandest in the castle save old Reginald’s bedquarters.

The very room he now shared with his lady wife.

At the thought of her sweetness, how she’d clenched herself around him in her passion, Magnus found some of the sourness had left his mood. He raked a hand through his hair, did his best to wipe the scowl from his face.

But he rankled at the knowledge that every long-nosed buffoon beneath his roof had examined and, with surety,
gawked
at the evidence of his passion and his wife’s innocence.

Custom or no, it was a fool and barbaric practice.

His father clucked his tongue. “Whether you change time-honored tradition or nay, for the nonce, it is still our custom and you should be belowstairs to accept the accolades of your kinsmen,” he groused, stretching his scrawny legs to the warmth of the peat fire.

“The saints know every man on the isle will be there, expecting you.” The old laird cast a glance at the crooked-hanging window shutters. “With such a black storm brewing, there’ll not be a soul working on the boat strand this morn.”

To Magnus’s surprise, the mention of the men’s daily struggle and toil to rebuild the lost MacKinnon galley fleet didn’t send a hot jab of vexation shooting through him as any referral to his wife’s well-lined coffers usually did.

Nary a wee tweak.

Nay, his ire rose from thinking of the fool bridal sheet being inspected by all and sundry. Then he heard his father’s coughing.

He stretched his arms above his head, cracked his knuckles, and blew out a deliberately gusty breath.

“Never you worry, Da. I will take myself down there so soon as we’ve determined if there is indeed a strange galley in our waters—and if so, whose it is and what their business might be.”

Donald MacKinnon snorted. “So you do believe it?”

Magnus shrugged. He did not know what to believe. But the guardsman, drink-taken or nay, insisted his ears had caught the great beating of a gong and the chanting of oarsmen—before the mysterious vessel had vanished into the mists.

Just as his da e’er claimed.

“Think you yon men cannot spot a galley without your hulking presence looming over their shoulders?” The old man fisted his hands on bony knees, cast a glittery-eyed look toward the solar’s tall, arch-topped windows and the three broad-backed men standing there. “A mercy—they’ve been staring holes in the horizon for hours now.”

Dugan and Hugh, and even Colin, with his almost-healed but still somewhat troublesome leg, stood straight-backed and silent at the windows, peering into sheets of slanting rain and trying to catch a glimpse of the supposedly approaching galley.

A task for fools, since Magnus had serious doubts any such vessel existed.

Demon-crewed or nay.

But there his brothers and his best friend stood, uncomplaining and like as not unblinking, too.

And that, when they could be below with the others. Snoring soundly on pallets before the hearth if they so desired, or joining in the bawdy revelry that had surely erupted the moment Dagda tromped into the hall with the bloodstained bedsheet.

A harmless entertainment they no doubt deserved—whether at the expense of Magnus’s indignation or nay.

“Even old Boiny would rather be belowstairs,” Donald MacKinnon sniffed from his perch before the hearth fire.

Magnus wheeled around, a decided throbbing in his temples beginning to make itself known. “That mongrel hasn’t budged from the warmth of the hearth—” He broke off to stare in disbelief at the dog.

Boiny, his great bulk no longer sprawled like a ratty gray carpet before the hearth fire as was his wont, paced as furiously as Magnus himself—only in front of the closed solar door and not around the chamber.

Stiff-legged and whining, the old dog had already worn a track in the sparse covering of floor rushes.

Magnus eyed him, an odd prickling at his scalp. But he shrugged off his ill ease. The dog was old, his mind surely as fogged as Magnus’s father’s.

“Either the beast scorns our fair company or he has his heart set on casting about beneath the hall’s trestle tables for fallen scraps of last night’s feasting.”

A good-natured chuckle from one of the men at the windows answered him. “Boiny isn’t the only one in this room who could do with some victuals.”

Dugan.

His middle brother—and the one who ate with the most voracious appetite Magnus had e’er seen.

A jab of guilt plunged straight through Magnus’s ribs to land a stinging blow dangerously close to his heart.

Magnus sighed, recognizing defeat.

He had enough experience being on the other side of victorious to be stubborn now.

Drawing a deep breath, he crossed the solar and clapped a hand on Dugan’s shoulder. “Have done with this nonsense, then, and go break your fast.” He nodded at Hugh and Colin to indicate he meant all three of them. “And take Da and Boiny with you—I will stay up here and hold lookout myself.”

“And we are like to pay dearly for stuffing our faces if you miss the ghost ship’s landing and a horde of banshees descend upon our shores!” His father pushed slowly to his feet, puffed his chest.

“Or worse, if you spot a MacDonald galley heading our way with shipbuilding supplies. As I know you, you’d have a score of bonfires set to warn them off before they’d even attempt to unload a single plank of wood!”

Magnus closed his eyes, pressed his temples. Then he let out a long, slow breath.

The time to show his heart had come.

“
Should
Donall MacLean have arranged for yet another MacDonald supply galley to bring us wood and other necessaries, I . . . I will not naysay the unloading or the good use of whate’er materials we might need to finish the rebuilding of our fleet,” he said, each word tasting like bitter ash on his tongue.

But not nearly so unpleasant as he would have thought they’d be.

Or as difficult.

“Aye, my over-proud son e’er knows what he is at and cannot see how direly we need—” Donald MacKinnon stopped his shuffle across the room in midstride. His rheumy blue eyes nigh popping out of his head, he stared at Magnus.

“What did you say, laddie?” he demanded, his bushy brows rising so high they were nearly indiscernible from his hairline. “Did I hear you aright?”

Dugan and Hugh stared, too. Both of them almost as wide-eyed as their da, slack-jawed and speechless.

Colin Grant burst out laughing.

And laughed all the harder when Magnus glowered at him.

Ignoring Magnus’s black glare, his ingrate friend leaned back against the solar’s lime-washed wall and slapped his good thigh.

“Ho, Laird MacKinnon!” The cheeky lout addressed Magnus’s father. “It would seem the clandestine trips your son has been making to the Beldam’s Chair have worked their magic,” he roared, near convulsing in his mirth. “Either that, or a certain comely wench has washed his fool head of his wretched pride.”

The old man blinked. “But what did he
say
?” He tilted his head and tugged on his earlobe as if he’d have difficulty hearing—or believing—any answer Colin might give him. “I canna think I heard him right. My hearing isn’t what it once was. . . .”

Stepping forward to sling an arm about his father’s shoulders, Hugh answered for Colin. “He said that
if
a galley is indeed heading our way, he hopes it will be another supply vessel loaded with the wood and other necessaries we need to finish rebuilding our fleet and”—Hugh cast a silent plea to Magnus over their father’s white-tufted head—“that whate’er surplus we do not need for shipbuilding, can be put to good use in refurbishing the castle.”

“Aye, that is what he said,” Colin and Dugan agreed in chorus.

Donald MacKinnon’s eyes grew round.

Round, and suspiciously bright.

Worse, he sniffed . . . and not just once.

“Saints o’ mercy, I ne’er thought I’d see the day . . .” he spluttered, rubbing a knotty-knuckled fist across his cheek.

“And neither did I,” Magnus owned, shooing them from the solar before
he
began sniffling. “Now hie yourselves belowstairs and take that fool sheet of bloodied linen down from the wall if you’d see me happy.”

Not that he could imagine being any happier than he was at the moment.

Indeed, the moment they’d all trudged out of the chamber, his face broke into a grin.

And he was still grinning when he took his place at the window to peer through the rain for a galley that might or might not be making for his shores.

Truth be told, he might grin all day.

And had Saint Andrew hisself told him, he would ne’er have believed that losing his pride would feel so damned good.

Bitterest wind buffeting her, Amicia huddled ever deeper into the thick folds of her fur-lined cloak and hurried through what had to be the worst tempest to be visited upon the Hebrides in years.

Hurried
by foot,
because even the stout-hearted garrons she’d tried to saddle in her husband’s stables had balked at any attempt to cajole them from the safe haven of their byre stalls.

Each beast she’d tried to encourage into the morning’s wind and rain had whinnied and protested with such vehemence, she’d had to give up her hopes of a mount lest the commotion alert someone to her departure.

Blinking, she swiped the rain from her brow, silently cursing her lack of skill as a sweet-talker of horses.

And her foolhardiness in agreeing to make this journey.

But now, more than half the way there, she had little choice but to keep setting one foot before the other until she reached the Beldam’s Chair—a tedious undertaking that would be well worth the effort if only Janet could indeed shed light on who was behind the troublous goings-on plaguing Clan Fingon.