Chapter Six
The swish, swish, swish of the brush and the repetitive movements as he groomed Arrow’s tail helped to calm Cailean a little.
The silver stallion, gifted to him from Jamie Donald, lord of the Kingdom of the Isles, bore it with relatively good grace, although he snorted and stamped occasionally to tell Cailean that it was high time he was taken for a run.
“Easy, lad,” Cailean murmured. “I’ll take ye out soon. I promise.”
Around him, the stable hands were busy with their work: mucking out, grooming, feeding. They gave Cailean a wide berth, perhaps sensing that their laird was not in the best of moods this morning.
No matter what he did, he couldn’t get the image of Drew’s contorted limbs out of his head. Was that what lay in store for them all if this sickness couldn’t be contained? Was this what lay in store for his daughter?
The thought twisted his stomach with fear, and his pulse ramped up a notch. No, he told himself. It won’t come to that. I won’t let it.
But the truth was, no matter his protestations to the contrary, this was one enemy he was helpless against. Swords and muscle were of no use. He could do nothing. Only Rose MacFinnan had a chance against this enemy.
His hand stilled, and he placed his palms flat against Arrow’s sides as his eyes closed. He took a deep breath, trying to steady the thumping of his heart.
She had tried, and she had failed. What chance did any of them have if even a MacFinnan spellweaver could not help?
Ye shouldn’t have put your faith in her, an insidious little voice said in the back of his head. Or anything to do with gods and magic.
When had he forgotten his own rule?
When Rose MacFinnan walked into your life, he answered himself. And made you hope.
He sighed. When would he learn his lesson?
“Over there, my lady,” he heard one of the stable hands say suddenly. “Ye’ll find him at the end.”
He opened his eyes and turned to see the object of his thoughts standing in the doorway. Rose picked her way gingerly around the piles of hay and manure the stable hands were raking up and wove her way towards him. When she was a few paces away, he held up his hand to stop her coming any closer.
“Careful of Arrow. He can be a bit bitey.”
Taking hold of the stallion’s halter, he led him back into his stall, patted him on the flank, and then rejoined Rose in the aisle.
“That’s a fine-looking animal,” she said, watching Arrow tucking into the fresh hay in his feeding trough. “Even if he is a bit ‘bitey.’”
“Aye, and as haughty as a prince,” Cailean replied. “It was three weeks before I could even approach him.” He cocked his head. “Is everything all right, lass? It’s not Drew, is it?”
She shook her head. “Drew is as you left him. Maggie and Beatrice are watching him. It’s just… just…” She trailed off, glancing down at the palm of her hand. There was a large red mark there, like a burn.
“What have ye done?” he asked, alarmed. “Here, that needs treatment.”
He took her arm, led her over to the water trough, and dunked her hand into the clear, cold water.
She didn’t protest but only smiled at him wryly. “I thought I was the healer?”
“Aye, well, in my experience, healers are not very good at looking after themselves.”
She snorted softly. “You sound like Elise.”
“Elise?”
“My little sister. She’s always telling me I don’t look after myself properly.”
So, she had a sister? Cailean filed this little tidbit away. He pressed a little further. “Yer family must be missing ye. Yer husband? Bairns?”
A shadow passed across her face. “Perhaps they would be,” she replied, “if I had either. But I don’t. So they won’t.”
She wasn’t married. Why was he so pleased by that?
He lifted her hand out of the water and carefully examined her palm. “That needs ointment. I know Beatrice has some comfrey—”
“Later,” she said, gently extricating her hand from his. “I need to talk to you first.”
He looked at her sharply, the tone of her voice sending a warning down his spine. “About what?”
She looked up at him, her eyes reflecting the dim light inside the stable. She took a deep breath, seeming to steel herself for what she had to say. “I don’t think the sickness is a normal sickness,” she said quickly. “I think it’s being caused by… something else.”
“Something else?” he said, frowning. “What do ye mean?”
She shook her head, frustration on her face. “I don’t know yet, but when I examined Drew just now, I felt… something.” She curled her fingers around her burned palm. “Maggie and Beatrice told me strange things have been happening around the island. They mentioned fish dying in droves?”
“Aye, up at North Cove.”
“I want to see it.”
“Dead fish? What have they got to do with any of this?”
She glanced at her palm again and then fixed him with a determined stare. “I don’t know, but I intend to find out.”
Cailean didn’t reply, digesting this in silence.
Two days ago, a villager from North Cove had arrived at Dun Mallach with an odd story about all the fish in North Cove dying.
Cailean had his advisors take down the man’s story, but with everything else going on, a few dead fish had seemed of little importance.
Rose MacFinnan, though, obviously disagreed.
He scrubbed a hand through his hair. “All right. I’ll have Cook pack something for breakfast and we can leave right away.”
Her shoulders sagged, and she let out a long, slow breath. “Thank you.”
“Don’t thank me yet,” he said wryly. “It’s quite a way to North Cove, and the roads are bad. By the time we get there, ye might well be cursing me instead.”
*
Rose’s prediction proved to be true. It had turned into a bright, sunny morning with a fresh breeze blowing in off the sea. If she didn’t have so much playing on her mind, it could almost have been pleasant.
She and Cailean had left Dun Mallach behind, he riding Arrow, she riding a docile white mare called Snip, and they’d eaten breakfast as they rode.
Rose didn’t know what the little pastries filled with nuts and raisins were called, but they were delicious, and she helped herself to four of them from the packet in her saddlebag as they wended their way along the coastline, heading north.
At first, the area around Dun Mallach had been heavily populated, and they’d passed through several villages where the inhabitants came out to call greetings to their laird and stare at the MacFinnan spellweaver in their midst. Rose did her best to set them at ease, waving and smiling, and calling out a hello to show she was just a normal person like them, but she wasn’t sure she succeeded.
Most of them stared at her with something approaching awe.
This adoration was, she thought, going to take a bit of getting used to.
But as they’d traveled farther north, the settlements had become sparser and the country more rugged and broken. Here, the few settlements they spotted were farther inland and consisted of isolated crofts surrounded by rocky fields dotted with sheep and Highland cattle.
Cailean was a towering, silent presence at her side as they rode, his dark eyes scanning the terrain continually, as if alert for danger.
He’d donned a huge sword, which he wore strapped across his back, and she knew he also had daggers tucked into the tops of his boots. He looked like a man expecting trouble.
But, she reflected, watching him surreptitiously as they rode, he seemed like a man who always expected trouble.
He rarely smiled, but on the odd occasion when he let his guard down, such as around his daughter Catriona, he seemed a different man entirely, one whose eyes shone with amusement and whose warmth was plain to see.
She would like to see that Cailean MacNeil more often.
“How long until we get there?” she asked him.
He turned to look at her, one eyebrow raised. “That’s the third time ye’ve asked that question.”
“It is not.”
“It is so, and the answer remains the same. We should be there by midday.”
Midday? Aargh! That was ages away! Already her backside was beginning to ache from the hard saddle.
While she enjoyed riding, and Snip was an exceptionally friendly and docile mount—a deliberate choice on Cailean’s part, no doubt—her muscles were no longer used to riding, and she suspected she’d barely be able to move come the morrow.
This was your idea, she reminded herself. So you’d better stop complaining. After all, the company could be worse.
She found herself studying Cailean again. The sea breeze was sending his hair whipping out behind him in a dark cascade, and his cheeks had a faint blush from windburn. He rode his horse with the ease of someone who had grown up in the saddle and seemed utterly at home in this wild landscape.
“So,” she said, looking around. “This is Barra, huh?”
Cailean followed her gaze, his dark eyes trailing the outline of the land. His harsh expression softened a little. “Aye. This is Barra. A more beautiful place ye willnae find in all of God’s creation.”
Rose had to agree. On a day like today, with the sun glinting off the sea to their right and the glens and hills to their left sparkling like emeralds, she could well understand why Cailean’s voice throbbed with pride to call such a place home.
“And this must have been your stomping ground when you were a kid?” she said, giving him a grin. “Aww, I can imagine a little Cailean running around here looking cute.”
“Cute?” he snorted. “Hardly. When I was a lad, I was a terror. I used to sneak away from my tutors at every available opportunity and spend my time out here hunting and fishing and exploring all the places I wasnae meant to go. The more forbidden or more dangerous, the better. I think I turned my parents’ hair gray before its time. ”
Rose’s grin widened. He would have been a cute kid, no matter what he claimed. With that thick, dark hair, those big eyes, and high cheekbones, he would probably have gotten away with murder. And as a young man, he’d no doubt had the lasses of Barra swooning all over him.