Chapter 14
Ciaran stretched his shoulder, testing its range of motion, as he crossed down to the training yard.
The master healer had told him that he could train.
“As long as ye don’t feel pain. Aches are fine, but nay pain.
Dinnae look at me like ye dinnae ken the difference, sir; I swear, ye warriors are all the same.
” Today was the first time Ciaran had felt equal to the task.
He supposed that six days wasn’t actually that long in the vast scheme of things, but he’d felt every moment of the idleness like another jab against his wounds.
He couldn’t afford to linger abed, not when Gordon still posed a threat to Eilidh—a far greater threat than she, or any of her protectors, realized.
So, as soon as he was physically ready, he made his way down to meet the other soldiers. He would forsake his pride and beg for a weapon if he needed to. He couldn’t stand this feeling of uselessness any longer.
James raised an eyebrow when Ciaran joined the other men, but nobody made any protest when he helped himself to a practice sword from the pile.
He felt his confidence rush back the moment he held the blade in his hand.
It wasn’t his sword, and it wasn’t particularly sharp.
It hadn’t been weighted for his reach or his grip.
But he was a warrior, down to his treacherous heart, and he was not whole without a weapon at his side.
“Have ye finally come to learn from a clan that kens sommat about fighting, then?” Captain McGregor called, the challenge in his voice playful rather than a true slash at Ciaran’s pride.
Another surge went through him. He wasn’t about to let that sort of an opportunity slide.
“Och,” he said, stripping from his borrowed shirt.
He had too few possessions to his name right now to lose one to mere training.
“Ye read me wrong, Captain. I’ve come here to see if your lads can hold their own against me.
I reckon they’d faint dead away at a training session that Gunn warriors complete before breakfast.”
One of the younger lads looked like he wanted to protest this, but when he glanced around and saw that the old warriors were grinning, he went along with everyone else to line up for drills.
For an hour, never once forgetting that James McGregor—a legendary fighter in his own right—was watching, Ciaran led the men of Buchanan Keep. He drilled them endlessly on footwork, on feints, on the kind of lightning-fast strikes that had kept Ciaran alive innumerable times.
None of the men uttered so much as a single word of complaint. No matter what Ciaran threw at them, they met his commands with grim determination.
But it wasn’t enough. To win against Gordon, they needed to be better.
And, from the expression on James’ face—and on that of Arran, who had come to join James’ observation midway through the session—they knew it.
“I’ll admit that ye ken how to fight or at least how to direct others,” Arran observed lazily, his hand drifting toward the pommel of his sword. “But can ye hold your own?”
Ciaran suspected that this offer was a gift. He’d come to this Keep twice now on the brink of death, and then the men had graciously allowed him, this unknown interloper, to order them about for more than an hour.
Arran was giving Ciaran a chance to show that he deserved their attentiveness.
He spread his arms wide. His shoulder didn’t tremble, not even when he held the sword at a full extension.
“Against one of ye?” He tsked, shaking his head, his green eyes twinkling. “It wouldnae be fair for me to even try. I wouldnae wish to shame ye in front of your men.”
Arran’s jaw twitched, but James quickly stepped up at his side.
“Would two suit ye, then?” he asked, the tiniest mocking lilt in his voice.
Ciaran grinned. “It’s a start.”
They came at him then, all fury and thunder.
If he had the breath, Ciaran would have laughed out loud at how good it felt to feel his body respond to his every command practically before he had even finished thinking it.
He dodged and wove for a moment, getting their measure, playing the defensive briefly.
It didn’t take long for him to see it, the way these two complimented each other spectacularly.
James, lithe and feline, used his agility and speed to overwhelm his opponent.
Arran, broader, used his strength to his advantage.
Aye, James was fast, and Arran was strong—but Ciaran was both.
He dodged one of Arran’s fierce blows, the kind that would have made his arm go numb up to the shoulder if he’d tried to parry it, and had used a neat little twist of his own blade near the hilt of the other man’s to part Arran from his weapon.
He barely had time to turn before James, darting forward—damn, but he was fast—swung at him.
This time, Ciaran caught the blow in a clang of steel on steel, then hooked the crosspiece of the grips together.
He used his weight to press against James with all his might until the man either had to step back and acknowledge the win or be knocked flat on his back.
James held a hand wide in a gesture of surrender, a wild grin on his face.
“Yer reputation is well-deserved, Gunn,” he praised through his heaving breath.
Ciaran might have won the bout, but he, too, was gasping for air from the exertion. He was, after all, only halfway healed.
The soldiers around them whistled and cheered, and hell if that didn’t make Ciaran feel good, too; they might have hated him for defeating their leader, but instead, they embraced him as though he was one of them.
But nothing, he found, felt quite as incredible as the moment that he recognized the little golden figure standing out near the edge of the yard. Glee sparkled in her eyes, and she shot him a beaming, glorious smile, as bright as the dawn.
Eilidh had seen his triumph.
Ciaran drew in a breath, and, just for that moment, he remembered what it felt like to be whole.
He should have resisted seeking her out.
He’d done well, keeping his distance from her while he’d been convalescing, through the very simple tactic of feigning sleep every time she’d come to see him.
Cowardly, perhaps. But it had been effective, especially since she was being perpetually trailed by a guard, and she clearly hated to inconvenience her shadow.
Theoretically, it was easy to avoid her now that he was mobile. It was the right thing. The safe thing. The more time he spent around her, the more she became a weakness that Gordon could exploit. The longer he didn’t tell her the truth, the deeper his debt of lies became.
But that smile had healed something in him, like a cautery against a wound, and it hurt as much as it provided relief.
It made him helpless against her.
He told himself he was just wandering, just testing his body’s endurance after his recent injury. But it wasn’t a very good lie, and the falsehood fell entirely away when he heard her voice.
“—and the brave warrior knew the princess as soon as he saw her, and the spell that had been cast so long ago finally flashed into being,” she murmured.
He peeked around the door to see her sitting in the new baby’s nursery, the child’s sleepy face nestled against her breast as the boy’s dark, curious eyes looked at her like he had never seen something so wondrous.
Ciaran could relate to that all too well.
It was good to see her back to her usually cheery self, making up grand stories and playfully narrating them. She hadn’t done that in a while since they had been attacked. Another thing he blamed himself for.
“The warrior had paid dearly for his courage,” she went on, reaching a finger up so that the baby could clutch it in his chubby little hand. “He was harmed, but the princess stayed at his side, bestowing her blessing in the hope that it would return him to her. And it did.”
She punctuated this with a soft kiss to the boy’s forehead.
Christ, but she was irresistible. Ciaran got another one of those flashes where it was all too easy to imagine what an impossible future might look like between them. How easy to pretend that this was their babe that she soothed, that they had found a path forward together? But it could not be.
He took a step forward into the doorway, catching her attention. She looked up sharply, blinking in surprise, but she didn’t interrupt the speedy cadence of her story. Her eyes were luminous, her gaze locked in on his, as she spun the tale for the weary child.
“But the threat was not over,” she continued.
“The evil sorcerer still threatened the kingdom, and when he sent his soldiers after the princess, who do ye think was there? Aye, the warrior, of course! He defeated the enemies, countless though they were, and then the princess knew. He was the one to whom Fate had promised her, and the one to whom she had been promised as well.”
The baby rustled slightly in her arms, and Eilidh and Ciaran both looked down to see that he was asleep. Her lips twisted in a small smile as he took another step closer.
“I dinnae ken if that means that I am a fine storyteller or a dismal one,” she admitted.
“Who could resist the lure of the princess?” he asked teasingly. “Or… the Laird’s daughter?”
She flushed at his obvious hint that he knew the basis for her little fairy story.
“Ach, ‘tis an artist’s prerogative to take from real life but then to embellish,” she said, clearly a bit abashed at being caught out. “Ye needn’t think anything—“
He cut her off with his lips on hers.
It was a true kiss this time—no danger, no distractions.
It wasn’t hurried or impatient, though Ciaran did feel ravenous for her.
But this was a kiss like the one they might have if they truly had all the time in the world.
He was not at all certain that the pang he felt in his chest as her lips met his wasn’t the sensation of his heart cleaving directly in two.
What if? What if he could have this? What if he could have her? What if he could do it all; fight every enemy, earn her trust, atone for his sins? What if he could go to bed every night like this with the taste of her on his lips?
The baby stirred in her arms, smacking his lips noisily, though he didn’t wake.
It was enough to break the spell, though, the one she’d woven with her story and the lush softness of her mouth. He pulled back.
“We need to speak,” he said. “Uninterrupted. Without something calling either one of us away.”
She regarded him for a moment in that way of hers, the one that reminded him that she was more than silly laughter and pert looks, the one that said that she was the latest daughter in a long, noble line, and that she had the canny mind to show for it.
When she looked at him like this, he feared that she could see right through him, like an angel assessing his soul at St. Peter’s gates.
“Aye,” she agreed, nodding as though the weight of the choice required the motion to seal it, like a handshake on a bargain, or a kiss at the altar. “Yes. Tonight? We can meet in—” The faintest hesitation—“my bedchamber?”
“I’ll see ye there,” he said, fighting the urge to rub at the place where his heart was practically burning inside his chest.
He couldn’t afford to think about visiting Eilidh in her bedchamber not with the babe sitting right there. It would be unseemly, given how Ciaran’s body wanted to react to the idea.
He left, hearing her coo soothingly to the stirring babe as he went. Christ, but no woman had ever affected him like this, and he knew, somehow, that none other ever would.
He dared to feel something like hope as he returned to his bedchamber. He would bathe and dress properly for meeting Eilidh tonight. He would show how he respected her, show that this was no mere trifle to him, despite his earlier actions.
And then he would come clean. No matter that she was likely to cast him aside forever as soon as he did.
Strangely, he didn’t feel only terror at the idea. He also felt… lighter, as if just deciding to unburden himself from his secrets started the process of lifting the weight.
He was practically laughing at the thought when he went to sit on his bed and found that every iota of mirth in him froze over in an instant flash of ice.
Because there, on his pillow, was a necklace—one he recognized from trying to avoid watching Eilidh fiddle with it through dinner the other night. It was a small thing, a shiny wee bauble, but what had caught his attention was the ribbon, which was the exact shade of seafoam green as her eyes.
Or, rather, it had been. Because now it was soaked in blood.
The bitter tang of it filled Ciaran’s senses, and it was only the fact that he’d just left Eilidh and come straight here that kept him from a full-blown panic.
It couldn’t be her blood. There wasn’t time to harm her and plant this here, not between when he’d seen her and when he’d arrived. It wasn’t hers.
But the thought provided little relief, especially when he saw that the pendant lay atop a note, the words clear even where the paper was spattered with streaks of gore.
Kill the Buchanan heir, it read. Or watch your land burn.