Chapter 17
In the deepest, most silent hour of the night, Iain MacLean lay still upon his bed and frowned at the elaborately-carved canopy looming above his head. His hands rested atop a few thick-woven plaids, plus several layers of embroidered coverlets of the finest quality.
Despite the seeming comfort, his entire body grew more tense the longer he glared holes in the four-poster’s timber-framed ceiling. Heavy curtains, sumptuous enough to please a king, enclosed him in a cocoon of darkness. To him, a hellish trap of tartan, smooth silks, fine linens, and emptiness.
Nae, loneliness.
With a cry of anguish heard by none save his bedchamber’s well-built walls, he flung aside the coverings and sat up.
“Lileas!” His late wife’s name burst from his throat, ripped from the depths of his soul. “Where are you?”
He knew. And the answer was the reason for his despair.
The sorrow gutting him.
“I need you…” he cried as fierce pain clamped around his chest. Icy bands of steel that squeezed the breath from him and crushed his heart.
“My beloved.” This time the words were barely a whisper, ragged misery borne on an agonized sigh.
Come back to me…
The silent wish filled his head, even seeming to echo around the room.
A torment that made his eyes burn and his throat tighten.
Come back to me, the plea bedeviled him, so loud in his ears that he couldn’t even hear the crash of the sea on the rocks beneath his tower bedchamber’s windows.
The four words rang in his head, damning him until he didn’t know where they ended and his agony began.
He only knew he was broken, like as not for the rest of his days.
He didn’t care.
All he wanted was his wife. And that, of course, couldn’t be.
She was gone, forever.
“Nae…” He clutched the heavy folds of the bed curtains, digging his fingers into the richly embroidered silk as if letting go would plunge him into an abyss.
He hung his head, felt a tear roll down his cheek. “Lileas, how I miss you…”
His shoulders, once capable of carrying so much, were now rounded, hunched, and beginning to shake.
When the sobs rumbling in his chest broke free, he released the bed curtains and buried his face in his hands.
Only after he had no more tears to shed and his voice became too hoarse to sob, only then did he part the curtains and push to his feet.
The stillness of the chill, shadow-filled room was almost as great as the silence within his bed when its curtains were drawn. Even the hearth was quiet and cold, its fire long extinguished.
Dead.
Iain scowled at the soot and ash on the hearthstone. He didn’t even remember when cheery warmth had flamed there.
Yesterday? An hour ago? A hundred years? Never?
Whenever the last fire had burned, it was now spent as completely as his lady wife’s precious life.
His steps slow and heavy, he followed the path of the room’s sole illumination, a swath of moonlight. He kept on until he reached the source: an arched window embrasure cut into the thickness of Baldoon’s walling.
Heaving a great sigh, he paused there to let the cold sea air wash over him. As he did so, he rested a hand on the icy stone of the window’s edge and stared out at the endless expanse of the sea.
A soft mist, silvered by the moon, drifted over Baldoon’s battlements and past his tower window, floating through the night like a finely spun shroud.
Iain welcomed the night’s eeriness. The darkness and cold suited him. How could it not? With the turn of a single fast-moving tide, all the light and warmth he’d known had become as distant and unattainable as the moon shining so high above the horizon.
Straining his eyes, he peered out into the silver-black night, searching the shadows until he found what he sought.
The Lady Rock, half-hidden by fog, but there.
A rocky islet of death, as much a taker of life as the MacKinnon whoresons who’d stranded his Lileas out there, leaving her to drown.
Dooming his heart to die with her.
Ripping his soul to shreds.
“My love…” He spoke to the uncaring sea wind as he fisted his hands against his temples.
Pain, horror, and fury swelled within him until the force of it threatened to burst him apart.
But his grief weighed heavier than this strange, quiet night.
Eventually, his turmoil receded, leaving nothingness in its wake.
Pushing away from the window, he pulled a hand down over his face and sank onto one of the two opposite-facing seats carved into the embrasure walls.
His-and-her seats hewn of stone, hard and uncomfortable, but once a haven piled with colorful silken cushions. A favored trysting spot where he and Lileas had spent many long hours lost in the simple joy of each other’s company.
Now the cushions were gone, and so was his wife.
Letting himself sag back against the wall, he turned his head toward the sea. The Lady Rock had slipped from view, swallowed either by the cloaking sea mist or engulfed by the tide.
After a long while, he shoved to his feet and closed the shutters.
“Soon you shall be avenged, my sweet,” he said, his voice low, his hand on the damp, wooden slats that now hid the sea and its menaces.
“A sennight, no more, and vengeance shall be mine.” Turning his back on the window, he glowered instead at the dark cavern of his bed.
His cold comfortless bed.
“Seven days, and I set sail, Lileas,” he said, and started toward the hulking mass of carved oak and heartache. “I promise you, before I am done, the MacKinnons will be no more.”
About the same time, but across the boggy moorland of stone and heather that stretched between MacLean and MacInnes territory, Devorgilla bent before her hearthstone, jabbing a poker at orange-glowing peat bricks.
A shower of sparks and an earthy-sweet curl of smoke rewarded her efforts and wreathed her face with a pleased smile.
“I do ken how to tend peats!” Cackling as only crones can do, she lifted a black-booted foot, shaking off a bit of peat ash.
It wouldn’t do for a smudge to ruin her boot’s jaunty red plaid laces.
Satisfied no damage was done, she pressed one hand to her hip and again prodded the smoldering peat until the flames caught and good, fragrant smoke drifted up to the chimney hole cut in her cottage’s low, black-raftered ceiling.
Her ancient bones warm again, she leaned the poker against the wall and returned her attention to the cauldron suspended above the fire. The cauldron’s bubbling contents were most important, after all. Leaning forward, she squinted at the steaming, herby-smelling concoction, and then she sniffed.
And sniffed again.
“Humph,” she grumbled, and took a long-handled ladle off the nearby table.
Still muttering, she dipped the spoon into the gurgling brew and brought a sample to her lips. One taste, and she fair cackled with glee.
“Do ye approve?” She peered down at her boots, delighted when her red plaid laces appeared to sparkle.
Beaming now, she helped herself to a second spoonful of her brew, and was convinced.
Her excitement mounting, she used the ladle to fill a dented pewter cup to the brim. She drained it in one gulp.
“Incense and holy water be not as potent,” she informed Mab, the calico cat curled fast asleep on a bracken-stuffed cushion on the stone-slabbed floor.
Mab opened her eyes, yawned, and then gave Devorgilla a long, unblinking stare. A four-legged princess, Mab clearly resented having her sleep disrupted. But her haughty glare only increased the crone’s glee.
It was the first time Devorgilla noticed Mab’s eyes were of two colors.
Chortling with mirth, her step sprightlier than for a long while, Devorgilla crossed the cottage’s main room to the long wooden shelf that held her assortment of healing and spell-casting ingredients and preparations.
“Almost good enough to make oxen fly,” she complimented herself as she studied the jumbled collection of herbs, powders and oils, and other charmed objects.
Her lips pursed, she rubbed her chin and let her cloudy-eyed gaze dart from one earthen jar or leather-wrapped flagon to the next.
After a moment, she took a small wooden bowl and began filling it with a wee pinch of this and a more generous dash of that.
She mixed this together, then carried the bowl outside, where she lifted it up so the blend could catch the pale light of the moon.
“In the name of the old gods,” she chanted, “by the moon and the stars, I conjure you…” And on her words, a fine and rare wind, blue-white and shimmering, swept into the glade to snatch the blessing from her tongue and speed it heavenward.
Well pleased, Devorgilla lowered the bowl and gave the moon a grateful nod of thanks. When she stepped back into the cottage, she went straight to the cauldron and tipped the bowl’s moon-infused contents into the bubbling brew and stirred.
Stirred and planned, her ancient mind racing with all manner of mischief.
All manner of good.
Even if some would not yet thank her.