Chapter Forty-Seven
Molly knew of an old man two villages away who, she said, had a head full of knowledge.
A scholar he had been in his youth, and kept the history of Western Scotland.
He might well be able to identify the plaid Finlay’s companions had been wearing on their way into battle, if Finlay could describe it to him.
It being too far for Molly to walk, Finlay went alone, choosing a day that at the outset looked to be fine, but which deteriorated into biting wind and snow before he reached his destination.
The old man lived beside a tiny stone church, and sometimes, so Molly had said, served as its caretaker. His daughter admitted Finlay to the cottage, telling him that aye, her father was to home.
“Are ye looking for lodging?” she asked, eyeing Finlay up and down.
“Nay. I am but seeking some knowledge.”
That won a smile. “There is naught Da likes better than sharing out knowledge.”
Finlay found Pádraig MacKay sitting beside his fire, puffing on a pipe near as long as his forearm. A number of leather-bound books occupied a shelf behind him, but as Finlay was to learn, he did indeed keep most his knowledge stuffed inside his head.
He had quick, dark eyes and an equally quick mind. He listened to Finlay’s accounting as if rapt, puffing increasingly denser plumes of smoke from his pipe.
“Ye ha’ the manner o’ a storyteller,” he remarked when Finlay finished. “A fine voice for it. Ye might be a bard.”
“I think I was one,” Finlay admitted. “I canna remember all of it—yet.”
“A bard who went to war.”
Finlay hesitated. “A bard in this life—mayhap a warrior in previous ones.”
“Aye, so.” Pádraig did not look surprised. “And yer blood?”
“Eh?”
“Yer background, man.”
Finlay related the bits he could remember of his youth, living in the south, for that much of memory had returned to him.
Pádraig smiled. “This plaid ye would chase down—”
“’Tis the woman I would find.”
“Aye, so. One plaid sounds much like others, in the describing. Green, ye say. Wi’ red and white? It might be almost anyone’s.”
Finlay’s heart sank.
“Do no’ look so downhearted, man. Since yon battle in the south, the accounts ha’ been flying. Many are the men who passed through this way, bound north and homeward. Since I collect the lore and the wisdom, all o’ it comes to me.
“There is only one chief who wore a tartan woven wi’ green and white, who marched wi’ his daughter into battle, and that was Anders MacMurtray.”
MacMurtray. The name seemed to chime and twine through Finlay’s mind. As if a door opened within him, he remembered.
He saw a hall, a fine structure filled with rapt listeners, their eyes fixed upon him as he wove and spun his tales. His own gaze drawn to but one among his listeners. A woman. Tall she was, with honey-colored hair and pale blue-gray eyes. In those eyes lay his entire world.
I will find ye. Always.
“Where is this place?” he asked old Pádraig. “Murtray.”
“North o’ here, a good distance north up on the coast. Ye will ha’ a long trudge ahead o’ ye, if ye go.”
He would go.
“If ye mak’ yer way to the sea and can find the means to sail, ’twill be quicker. So long as the weather allows.”
A small, light boat clad in oiled skin, bobbing on the breast of the ocean. A woman with wide blue eyes leaning toward him.
“Adair.” She spoke his name.
Adair. He was Adair MacMurtray, come from Erin.
Even as Pádraig’s daughter slid a mug of warmed ale beside his elbow, he told the old man sitting opposite him, “I begin to remember. All the things that have been scattered since the battle. They come in pieces and I maun fit them together.”
Pádraig leaned toward him, his dark eyes bright. “Then remember this.”
*
Finlay spent the night with Pádraig and his daughter, tucked into the corner beside the fire with a borrowed blanket.
For aye, he knew now that Finlay was his name.
Ardahl? Well, Ardahl had been his name also, once upon a time.
As had Adair, Deathan, and Quarrie, each in its turn.
Did it matter, a man’s name, so long as a single flame burned in his heart?
Pádraig, with a world of knowledge in his head, knew many things. The history of all the western clans and much about their lineage. He told it simply even as Finlay might relate a tale, and helped to slot many of the pieces into place in Finlay’s mind.
“The current Chief of Murtray—or he who was Chief of Murtray, for I hear that man has since died—had a great-grandfather, and that man had twa sons. They quarreled, so ’tis told, which is an old habit among members o’ that line.”
“So it is,” said Finlay, remembering.
“The quarrel was a fierce one, and the younger son took himsel’ away to forge his own path in the world.
They say”—Pádraig’s lively gaze met Finlay’s—“he traveled south even into Wales, where he married and had a son of his own. He then returned north, for no Scot can keep awa’ fro’ Scotland for long. ”
“Nay.” Alba, land of magic that had taken him to its heart.
“And his son, they say, won a place as master o’ arms for a chief out in the islands.
For the blood of warriors was still strong in his veins.
But he died in a battle and his good wife from an illness not long after, and his son was passed to others to raise.
And that son might have been a warrior also, like so many of his ancestors, and indeed, ’tis said he did start training early, but he abandoned the pursuit.
For the harp.” Pádraig’s dark gaze met Finlay’s.
“Me. Ye be speaking o’ me.” Finlay went breathless, as if struck a blow to the heart. “How d’ye know these things? How, when I do not?”
“Am I no’ a scholar? And ha’ I no’ been collecting such knowledge all my life?” Pádraig leaned toward Finlay. “’Twas fate that sent ye here, lad, to me.”
’Twas the turning of the wheel that created his life—life after life.
He struggled to draw breath. “Ye are saying I am a descendant of Murtray?”
“Aye, how else could it be?”
How else, indeed? For he remembered being Ardahl the warrior, and Adair the exile, Deathan the second son who loved a princess, and Quarrie who wed a Norsewoman.
The pieces of the past shattered by the violence of the battle fitted together so he remembered not only the pieces, but how—and most of all—why they fit.
Ah, did not memory travel via the blood?
“By God,” he whispered.
“Murtray lacks a chief, having left none but his daughter, Katrin,” Pádraig told him.
Katrin. The name whispered like music in Finlay’s mind.
“And ye be that man they are wanting. I suggest ye get there promptly and claim yer place.”
Finlay, as chief? Ah, he cared not for the place of chief, though he would fill it if he must. Had he not always been good at fulfilling his duties?
What he wanted was the place at Katrin’s side.
He rose the morning after Pádraig told him all this and, with many thanks and expressions of gratitude, took his leave.
Outside, beside the tiny stone church in the cold air, he gazed upon a world reborn.
High above the hills the skies cleared, yesterday’s snow showers flown.
Sunlight shone through in racked beams, ladders of light reaching northwestward. Leading him where he needed to be.