The Healer's Gift (10 page)

Chapter 7

“Someone’s coming.”

Logen barely heard Coira’s whisper, so deeply was he lost in the memory of her in his arms. But the words set him on immediate alert. “Who?”

“I dinna ken, but I dinna think I like it. I thought I felt…but perhaps I was mistaken.” She shrugged, but her expression told him she was still concerned.

Logen frowned and studied the woods around them. No one in their group had elicited a concern from Coira. Had someone else followed them? “How many?” He kept his voice low.

She held up one finger. Then after a moment, four. “It must be Elizabeth, the healer and the guards. Aye, I recognize Elizabeth.”

“Ye do? Does she seem upset?”

Coira’s eyebrows lifted. “Nay.”

“Keep picking, then. I’ll watch for them.”

In moments, he saw movement through the trees and heard the sounds of four people moving through the woods—twigs snapping, bushes rustling.

“Ah, here’s some!” Elizabeth’s voice carried through the undergrowth. Whatever they searched for, she’d found.

“Elizabeth! Over here!” Coira’s exclamation startled Logen, but he should not have been surprised that she would summon her friend. He had resigned himself to the fact their time alone had ended. And now that it had, he wanted Coira to tell him which of the guards had caused her such disquiet.

“That’s where the two of ye got off to,” Elizabeth exclaimed as she approached them.

“Aye, and look at what we found!” Coira held up her basket brimming with herbs and roots.

A bit eagerly, Logen thought, but he hoped no one noticed.

Logen traded glances with the healer, who gave him a knowing smile, eyebrows raised as she glanced to Coira and back. Logen should have been irritated by her presumption, but relief flooded him instead. Perhaps there would be one person in the clan who would not object to the idea of Coira and him together. He kept his expression impassive and turned his attention to the two guards. Both seemed intent on the surrounding forest, as they should be. Coira did not seem to be concerned by their presence. She and Elizabeth were busy comparing the contents of their baskets.

“A successful outing, laird?”

The healer’s question, asked as she moved to stand next to him and regard the lasses, could have seemed innocent enough, but Logen knew from her smile a moment ago that she had something besides foraging in mind. He chose to take the high road and ignore her implication. “It appears so. ’Tis good the autumn has been mild so far. I’m surprised ye had such success this late in the season.”

“It seems we all did.”

He kept his gaze on Coira and Elizabeth, but felt the healer shift beside him.

“She’s a riddle, our Coira. But worth the effort.”

“Ye think so?” What was the healer trying to tell him?

“She’s been hurt, healed, and changed by it. Much as ye have been.”

That brought him up short. “I havena changed.”

“Aye, Logen MacDugall, ye have. I remember the lad who left here all those years ago. Anger over yer parents’ deaths drove ye to fight anything that moved. Eventually, ye learned how to win. That may have saved yer life at Flodden, but since then, ye think before ye decide to resort to violence. An admirable trait in a laird, if ye want my opinion, and one lacking in the last three who graced the high table by treachery.”

Logen swallowed, forcing back the bile that rose at the mention of Flodden. “We’ve no’ seen the last of that.”

“Nay, and those who remain have learned to keep quiet and carefully choose their time to strike.”

“Who are they?” The healer passed almost unnoticed among the clan. Perhaps she’d heard things.

“I wish I could tell ye. I dinna ken. But whoever leads them is crafty. And careful.”

“Ye have some ye suspect.”

“Aye. Watch yer back, laird. Fortunes have changed with the slash of a dirk.”

****

Coira breathed a sigh of relief that Elizabeth seemed focused on the late-season bounty they’d discovered, rather than on the fact that she and Logen had been alone for quite some time. As fast as Elizabeth talked, it was clear what they had found excited her.

Logen and the healer were deep in conversation, but she couldn’t hear them over her chatty companion.

“Let’s try this way,” Elizabeth said at the end of a long, breathless sentence.

Coira realized she intended to head off into the woods again. Why not? They were out here for that reason. Coira let her take the lead, but as Elizabeth moved away, something else started to invade Coira’s senses.

Hatred. Not heated fury. Cold, calculating hatred that she recognized. Coira froze in her tracks. Where? One of their guards? Why had she not sensed this before? The person who’d pitched Logen overboard into shallow water was here. She spun in time to see Elizabeth’s guard draw his sword and rush at Logen and the healer.

Coira screamed a warning, but Logen was already pulling his claymore and moving away from the healer, drawing his attacker with him. Coira ran to the healer and pulled her back so that several trees provided a barrier between them and the combatants. Elizabeth had run up at Coira’s scream and now stood at her side. “Where’s the other guard?”

Ach nay! Was he in league with the attacker and trying to get behind Logen? Coira searched the surrounding area with her eyes and her empathy. There! Thank goodness, he was making his way toward them while keeping one eye on the two men fighting. Intent on his duty to protect them? She couldn’t tell yet. Elizabeth’s fear and excitement were too close, too loud. Coira reached for the healer, hoping to find calm, but a deep sense of foreboding swirled like a whirlpool in open ocean, treacherous, ready to pull her into its depths. Nay! The healer had given up on Logen, but Coira would not.

She stepped away from the other two women. The healer’s guard, intent on the combatants, radiated concern—but for whom? At least he wasn’t trying to interfere, so Coira turned her attention back to Logen. He fought with cool precision, blocking each attempt to injure him or take his life. The guard was neither as skilled nor as lucky. In moments, Logen backed his attacker against a tree, his dirk’s edge against the man’s throat while his sword braced against the man’s sword arm, preventing him from using the weapon.

“Who do ye fight for, Andrew?” Logen’s tone brooked no refusal, no hesitation, but the man held his silence.

Anger, cold and deadly as a winter storm, rolled off of him. Coira glanced at Ross, the guard who’d stayed with the women. He scanned the woods around them. Had he heard something she’d missed? She moved closer. He was tense, but not expectant. Doing his job, then, being vigilant while Logen dealt with the traitor.

“Who?” Logen’s sharp demand rang through the forest and echoed harshly back to them.

“Gareth. And Alasdair. Others.”

The man swallowed and Coira wondered how he’d avoided getting cut. Despite his anger, Logen must have lifted his blade just enough to grant the man the ease to speak. And swallow.

“There’s more of us than ye ken.”

Coira flinched at that, but Logen’s determination to find out what the guard knew remained a steady, inevitable, force, like the incoming tide.

“Who’s in charge? Who is willing to kill again and again to control the clan?”

“Ye’ll never see him coming,” the prisoner scoffed. “The others didna. But yer return to the clan disrupted his plan. He’ll remove ye in his own good time.”

“Ye’ll tell me who he is.”

Andrew pursed his lips, considering, Coira supposed, whether he had a choice.

“I dinna think I shall.” With that, he jerked forward against Logen’s hold, causing the dirk’s sharp edge to bite deep into his throat. Blood sprayed around the blade as Logen jerked it back, too late.

Andrew dropped his sword and sank to his knees as blood pumped from the slice in his throat.

Logen cursed and tried to put pressure on the wound. There was too much blood. His hand kept slipping off.

Coira rushed forward to help, but the man was already dead.

Logen waved her back, finally allowing the body to topple to the side. He wiped his hands and dirk on the dead man’s clothes and stood, staring at the body. “What just happened?”

His words were spoken so softly Coira doubted anyone but she heard them. “Logen.” She uttered his name just as softly, shocked at the turn of events, saddened by the grief quickly washing away the vestiges of surprise and anger in him. She’d been wrong to deny him her help. If his life was at risk from men who would throw themselves on his blade to protect their leader and their conspiracy, then she had no choice. No matter what it cost her, she must help him.

He turned to face her and the others, his expression grim. “He chose to die rather than give up the name of the person behind all the deaths, all the misery, in the clan since Flodden. Who among us commands that kind of loyalty, of sacrifice?”

Logen eyed the other guard. “Do ye ken?”

The man shook his head. “Whoever it is, they’re adept at staying in the background, laird. Pulling strings. I think he’s been studying ye, waiting, looking for weaknesses.”

“This is the second attempt on my life,” Logen answered. “Whoever is behind this has decided they’ve waited long enough.”

“I’ll be at yer back, laird. So will Darach. And a few others we’re sure of.”

“I’m glad of that. But how many does this puppet master have? Enough to divide the clan’s loyalties again?”

“I canna say...”

“No one can!”

Logen’s shout of frustration startled Coira into stepping back. The outburst, out of character for him, released some of his pent-up frustration. Given the circumstances, she couldn’t blame him, even though Elizabeth had flinched. The healer studied him through narrowed eyes.

“This clan is calm on the surface but deep currents run beneath it,” Logen continued quietly. “Rip tides. Much more and they’ll tear the clan apart. We must put a stop to this.”

“How, laird?”

“By rounding up the men this poor soul named. And their close kin and associates. Someone must be found to answer for what they’ve done to the clan.” He gave the dead man one more glance before gathering them with a gesture. “Come on, we’ve work to do.”

****

Coira studied the men lined up below where Logen stood at the high table. The men Logen had detained. Darach and the remaining guard from their escort into the woods, Ross, along with a few other trustworthy men, stood on either side of the accused men with weapons drawn, eyeing the suspects.

The rest of the clan listened to Logen relate what the guard who’d attacked him in the woods had revealed before killing himself on Logen’s blade.

The entire scene was a mummery intended to give Coira the opportunity to use her gift against each man. She could not walk past them in the dungeon without raising questions about her presence she did not wish to answer. Nor did Logen want her ability revealed, not before all this ended, and preferably never. So she stood to the side near the front of the crowd, struggling to sift the impressions she received while she protected herself as best she could from the uproar of emotions behind her.

Were these men the ones Logen sought? Her impressions might give Logen the leverage he needed. He hoped pressure applied to the weakest among them might result in confessions that implicated the others in their conspiracy and identified the leader. Otherwise, he wouldn’t know whom to trust, whom to believe, or how widely the conspiracy had infected the men of the clan.

One woman’s cries distracted her from the general sense of shock and anger piling up like a wall of storm clouds. She couldn’t be sure unless she heard the woman speak, but she got the sense it was the soft-voiced one she’d overheard in the garden. The one who seemed to know something. If she wept for one of the men now facing the clan, she had indeed known more than she had revealed to her shrill friend.

Coira shrugged off the distraction and rebuilt her dunes at her back, blocking the storm of emotions coming from the people behind her. Then she imagined a narrow beach between her and the surging sea of emotions coming from the men Logen accused, giving her some distance from their pain. She allowed their feelings to wash over her, one by one. A few were fearful, watching their guards and expecting, she supposed, to meet death at the hands of their outraged laird. Several were red-faced, their angry glances darting around the room. Angry at Logen? At being held captive before the entire clan? At being accused, though they were innocent? She couldn’t tell. A few more, whose eyes remained downcast, radiated shame. Some of those might be redeemable, if Logen chose to give them a second chance.

Only one man stood out. In appearance, he seemed little different from the others. He waited calmly, quietly, eyes cast down, but Coira sensed amusement bubbling within him. Beneath his passive surface, he hid arrogance, irritation, and condescension…and a cold calculation.

He had to be the leader. If he was accustomed to ordering assassinations and causing chaos, Coira imagined he would be confident of his men’s loyalty—or their fear of him—to protect his identity.

Coira caught Logen’s gaze as it passed over her and nodded minutely at that man.

Suddenly, one of the other prisoners crumpled. The distraction was all the man Coira suspected of being the leader needed. He shoved the men beside him toward the guards moving to aid the fallen man, then before anyone could react, he pulled the dirk from the nearest guard’s belt and dodged around a table, grabbing the lass nearest at hand out of the crowd.