Chapter 37
They weren’t there.
Donall stood just outside the secret tunnel and washed down his disappointment with a deep breath of cold rain-scented air. It was late, and a low, chill mist drifted over the vast, rock-strewn moorland spread before him.
“Bluidy hell,” Gavin swore beside him, wheezing. Hands braced on his knees, he slid an astonished look at Donall. “Nae men, no’ even our horses. There’s nothing here but drizzle and mist.”
“Aye.” Donall leaned back against the cold rocks of a nearby outcrop and glanced at his friend. “So it seems.”
“The laddie must no’ have reached Baldoon.” Gavin tipped back his head to stare up at the moon.
Nearly full, it still rode the grayish sky, slipping in and out the clouds, as elusive as the MacLean warriors they’d hoped to find waiting for them.
“I was sure they’d be here.” Gavin joined him at the outcrop. “What are we to do now?”
“What, indeed?” Pushing away from the rocks, Donall stretched his arms over his head and flexed his fingers.
He stared out across the moor, gray and black at this hour.
An empty world of odd-shaped shadows, rolling hills and bramble-filled gorges, broken only by rock, heather, and a few wind-stunted trees.
The whole of it stretching in eerie silence all the way to Baldoon.
“Well?” Gavin kicked a pebble. “Shall we go back?”
“Nae, we walk.” Donall started forward, knowing his friend would join him. “If the gods have any mercy, we’ll reach home in a day and a half rather than two.”
“And then?”
“That’s the easy part.” Donall shot him a look. “We ride back and rescue my bride.”
“I dinnae see them.” Rory peered into Donall and Gavin’s gloom-ridden cell. “They’re gone.”
“Bah! The door was barred.” Niels pushed past Struan and Isolde to enter the cell, Rory following him.
“By the hounds…” Niels set his hands on his hips and turned in a circle. “Where are they?”
“The gods only know.” Rory made the sign against evil.
Isolde didn’t know what to think, but she risked a glance at Struan and saw his fury.
“Find them,” he ordered the two guards. “Perhaps they’re hiding under their pallets.”
“I dinnae think so,” Rory called back to them as he and Niels went to peer out the cell’s window, an opening far too small for any man over eight summers to wriggle through.
Leaving the window, they kicked at the empty pallets, stirring up clouds of dust and dried bits of straw. Niels stopped first, spinning around to frown at Isolde and Struan, both still outside the half-opened door.
Moonlight and shadows did frightful things to Niels’ broad and open face, but the bewilderment in his eyes set Isolde’s soul free. He and Rory had nothing to do with the disappearance of the MacLean and Sir Gavin. And that meant only one thing…
The MacLean and his friend had escaped.
Isolde clasped a hand to her breast. “Thank the ancients,” she gasped, and tears leaked from her eyes.
“Be silent.” Struan jerked her arm. “They cannae be gone,” he called into the cell. “Keep searching.”
“There’s nowhere else to look.” Niels started forward, Rory behind him. “I dinnae know how, but they’ve escaped.”
“An accomplishment you fools will no’ enjoy!” Struan sneered, and slammed the door in their faces.
Isolde’s eyes rounded as he secured the drawbar, locking them in.
“What are you doing?” She stared at him, horror washing over her.
“You cannae guess?” He dragged her away, pulling her in the direction opposite from the hall. “Ridding myself of you, is what I am doing.”
“What?”
“Did you no’ hear me?” He glanced at her. “Do you think I have my dirk at your side because I love you?”
“Oh, gods…”
“They willnae help you.”
“You are mad.”
He snorted. “Does it matter?”
“You’re going to kill me.”
He didn’t answer.
Isolde’s heart raced and terror, black and cold, tore through her. She dragged her feet, praying someone – anyone - would come, would see them.
But no one appeared, no one saw.
She opened her mouth to scream, but her throat had gone so tight, nothing came out but a rasp.
He quickened their pace, sweeping her toward a barred door half-hidden in shadow at the end of the passage.
The entrance to the sea dungeon and every bit of nastiness Dunmuir had ever possessed.
Or excreted, for the ancient stair behind the door ended in a ruinous passage that served as a receptacle for Dunmuir’s latrine chutes.
“A fitting tomb, eh?” He glanced at her as he unbarred, then kicked open the door. He dragged her down the steps to the stinking morass. At the bottom, his fierce hold on her was all that kept her from falling into the muck.
“Almost there,” he gloated as they slogged through the foulness.
At last, he slowed their pace, then stopped before a narrow gap in the dripping stone wall of the passage.
Isolde stared at him. “The oubliette is in there. You can’t mean to plunge me into it?”
“Aye, I do,” he said, snatching a torch from its wall bracket. “Down you’ll go into the chamber of little ease – your cares, and mine, over,” he said. “Your passing will be accepted as having come from your own hand. The tragic result of giving your affections so unwisely.”
Isolde’s heart stopped. Slammed against her ribs and froze for horror.
“No one will believe you.”
“Of course, they will.” He spoke calmly. “Broken hearts and shame often drive women to such measures.”
“My heart isn’t broken. I love the MacLean. He loves-”
“Tell that to the oubliette,” he said, and shoved her through the wall-crevice and into the small, cave-like cell.
“Gah!” She landed on her knees and quickly pressed the flats of her hands against the cold, damp floor, felt all around her before she dared push to her feet and inch toward the wall.
One false move would send her tumbling through the jagged gap yawning across the stone floor.
The opening into the oubliette, a cramped, bottle-shaped chamber cut deep into the bowls of the earth. A space so small that a soul could neither sit nor stand, but simply wait hunched over, until death brought release.
Struan squeezed in behind her, then thrust the torch into an iron holder on the wall. He positioned himself in front of the opening to the passage, blocking her escape.
But that was pointless.
As clan war leader, her uncle wore more steel than many English knights.
She didn’t doubt he’d use it.
Indeed, he’d skewer her.
Nor could she hope to escape later for the entry crevice could be sealed from outside with a secret door and chains.
“I see you understand.” He nodded once. “Be glad you were able to know a man before you die,” he added, his crudeness so unlike his usually pious tongue. “Your sister knew love as well, or so it would seem from the hue and cry her husband raised when he found her.”
“What are you saying?” Isolde stared at him, seeing the truth in the madness in his eyes.
Struan was the murderer.
“Why?” Horror coiled through her, cold and terrible. “How could you?”
“To meet an end,” he said. “Sacrificing her to the Lady Rock stirred up the old enmity and gave me the best means to lead Donall MacLean into a trap. Lileas’ besotted husband would ne’er stomach bringing his beloved wife home to Dunmuir. I knew he’d press his brother to carry out the sad deed.”
“Why did you want the MacLean?” She feigned calm, hoping for time.
His face hardened. “I had my reasons.”
Isolde forced herself to keep talking. “After Lileas wed, everyone agreed the old feud was over and the Lady Rock should be put behind us, remaining in distant past where the sad tale belongs. Why ruin the alliance Da strove so hard to achieve?”
The odd light glinted in his eyes again.
“Because I ne’er wanted an alliance. I wanted, I want, Doon.
” He spread his hands. “All of it. But even I know I could ne’er seize it from a clan as powerful as the MacLeans.
With their laird gone, and his grieving brother stepping in for him, it would only have been a short time before Iain MacLean’s temper plunged Baldoon into chaos. ”
Isolde frowned, a new thought coming to her. “That would open the gates for you to take it, with Balloch’s aid. That’s why you wanted me to marry him.”
“You have a wiser head on your shoulders than your sister and my brother between them.” He looked at her, almost fondly. “They never suspected anything.”
“They…” Isolde couldn’t finish.
“Aye.” He spat into the dark opening of the oubliette. “I eased your father’s way to the heavens, too, though his death was not planned. When he became so ill with that last fever he’d caught, I couldn’t resist taking a pillow and putting him out of his misery.”
He spat into the gap again, a swifter, more angry spit this time. “It was a debt long overdue.”
“How could you?” Isolde felt the blood draining from her face, from her heart. “You are vile. A crazed monster.”
“Aye, and so I am,” he agreed, staring at her but seeing something, someone else. “I have been mad since the day my parents and your lady mother’s decreed she should wed Archibald and no’ me. She loved me, no’ your father.”
He fisted his hands and began pacing the cell. “Me, me, me!” he railed, shooting her a glare that went straight through her.
Straight through her and into the past.
“We were lovers.” He whirled to face her. “She pleaded, cried, and came to me on her knees, beseeching me to stop the marriage. But none would have any of it. She was to wed your father, the future laird, and that was it.”
“You err.” Isolde shook her head. “Mother loved Da. All speak of their great passion. She waits for him still, every day, in her chair by the fire.”
“Aye, she loved him, and loves him still!” he roared, the veins in his neck bulging. “My brother stole her heart, turned her against me. But she was mine first, and ’tis me she looks to for comfort now,” he added, somewhat calmer. “She’s lost her senses and remembers nothing of the past.”
Isolde pressed herself against the cold rock wall behind her. The odd light in his eyes had turned even more crazed. Each time he stopped pacing to glare at her, she feared he’d grab her and throw her into the gap in the floor.
Glancing at the door, she willed someone to appear. “You should forgot the old times, let the hurt-”
“Nae, I remember!” He thumped a fist against his breast. “I always will, and I shall have her. Her, Dunmuir, this whole isle.”
Pausing, he shoved back his hair. “I will have it all. Everything Archibald stole from me and more.”
Isolde didn’t know what to say.
He came to stand before her. “My plans would have worked had you not ruined them by coupling with him.” He grabbed a fistful of her hair, yanked her head backward. “I will win yet – with you gone.”
“Nae, you are wrong.” Her eyes watered with pain, but she forced herself to bear it, to shake her head in denial. “Donall will come for me,” she said, anger beginning to re-fire the dull clump of steel in her belly. “He’ll bring his men, the full might of Baldoon.”
“The dead cannae be rescued.” He let go of her hair and peered at her. Once again seeing her and not the past. “Your foolish twit of a sister wasn’t rescued by a MacLean husband, what makes you think a MacLean lover can save you?”
“Because he will,” she said, lifting her chin, her steel shining again.
My heart knows it.