Chapter Six #2
“Sounds like you were the opposite of me,” she said.
“Out of my sisters, I’ve always been the sensible one.
While Elise was out causing mayhem and Sarah was busy putting the world to rights, I was usually at home studying.
I wouldn’t have snuck away from my tutors to go exploring.
I would have been more likely to ask for extra homework.
Yep. You could say I was the dull one. Still am, really. ”
“Dull?” Cailean said, his brows rising in surprise. “Nay, lass. Dull is the last word I would use to describe ye.”
“Oh?” she said in a teasing voice. “Then how would you describe me? Charming? Absolutely bloody amazing?”
His dark eyes fixed on her face. “Aye, lass,” he said softly. “I would describe ye as all of those things.”
Rose went still. She’d meant it as a joke. She knew she was none of those things. But there was no amusement in Cailean’s expression, no hint that he was teasing her. Her stomach fluttered.
“I never took you for a flatterer.”
“I’m not. Just honest. And you missed something off your list. Stubborn. Why else would we be riding to a place in the middle of nowhere despite my protests?”
Rose laughed. “Oh, definitely stubborn. It’s a family trait.”
A small smile quirked the corners of his mouth. “Damn it,” he said dryly. “Two stubborn women in my life. Managing one is hard enough. Have ye met my daughter, Catriona?”
Rose sucked her teeth. “Well, they say the apple never falls far from the tree. I wonder where she gets her stubbornness from?”
“Not from me, that’s for sure.”
“Oh?” Rose raised her eyebrows. “So you’re blaming her mother then?”
It was the wrong thing to say. The moment the words were out of her mouth, she knew it. Cailean’s expression, which had been relaxed and open, suddenly closed.
“Time is getting on,” he said. “Come, let’s pick up the pace.”
He nudged his horse into a trot, and Rose cursed herself inwardly. Why had she said that? Why had she brought up Cailean’s wife?
Idiot, she chided herself. Think before you speak!
They rode in silence, Cailean a glowering presence ahead of her, and he kept the pace such that it precluded any further conversation.
Rose bumped along behind him, trying to remember her riding lessons and find the rhythm of her mount.
She wasn’t very successful. Snip might be a docile mount, but she still had a backbone like a saw and it felt like it was trying to snap Rose in half.
Oh yes, she was definitely going to ache in the morning.
She could have cried with relief when they rounded a headland a long time later and Cailean announced that they’d arrived. He pulled his mount to a halt, and Rose let out a long, grateful breath.
“Remind me to strap some cushions to the saddle the next time we go riding,” she muttered, leaning forward so she could rub her backside. “Or better yet, knock me on the head and wake me up when we get there.”
Cailean glanced in her direction. “I dinna have such a death wish that I would ever knock a MacFinnan spellweaver on the head.” He nodded at the scene in front of them. “But at least yer backside can rest now for a bit. This is North Cove.”
Rose looked out. Ahead of them lay a wide horseshoe bay.
A beach of sand so pale as to be almost white sloped down to the water’s edge, and she could see layers of flotsam lying along the tide line, washed up at high tide.
From this distance, she couldn’t make out what the flotsam was. But she could smell it.
Rotting fish.
She pressed her sleeve across her mouth and nose. “Ugh. Lovely. Well? Shall we go and have a look?”
Cailean swung his leg over his horse’s back and jumped down. He landed lightly for such a big man, and he turned in a slow circle, taking in the view from all angles before he answered her.
“Aye. There’s nobody else here. It seems safe enough.”
Rose wasn’t sure what sort of danger he was expecting. Leaning forward and clinging to the saddle horn, she managed to swing her leg over the horse’s back and slide ungracefully to the ground. Her knees buckled as her feet hit the sand, and she would have fallen had she not been clinging onto Snip.
“Are ye all right, lass?” Cailean asked.
She waved away his concern. “Fine. Fine. Nothing a Swedish massage and a few gin and tonics wouldn’t mend.”
He gave her a bemused look but didn’t comment. From here, a series of sand dunes led down to the beach. Waves lapped at the shore with their incessant sigh and moan, and the wind was stronger, whipping her hair out behind her and filling her nostrils with the dead fish smell.
She put her sleeve over her mouth again and followed Cailean down the dunes and onto the beach. Just as she’d expected, the flotsam scattered along the tide line turned out to be dead fish.
They were everywhere, in all shapes and sizes. They formed a wide line almost the entire length of the beach, marking the extent that the water reached at high tide. Rose spotted more of them bobbing in the water, their silver bellies flashing in the sun.
Cailean’s expression was troubled as he took in the scene. “I dinna like this,” he muttered.
Rose was inclined to agree. Something didn’t feel right, and it wasn’t just the dead fish and the smell. Something felt… wrong. Unnatural. She studied the beach in both directions, trying to put her finger on what was bothering her.
And then it hit her.
“Where are all the scavengers?” she asked, turning to look at Cailean. “Where are all the gulls and crows and goodness knows what else that should be here feeding on all this? It’s a feast too good to miss, but there isn’t a single one. No creature would ignore a glut like this unless…”
“Unless they knew something was wrong with it,” Cailean finished for her.
Rose nodded. In the wild, scavengers would leave carcasses of animals that had died from illness as they could smell the disease. Was that why there were no scavengers here?
Careful where she put her feet, Rose picked her way through the detritus and down to the water’s edge. The soft hiss and sigh of the waves seemed a strange counterpoint to the death that filled the water. The waves were littered with tiny corpses bobbing in the surf.
“There must be thousands of them,” Rose muttered, turning to Cailean. “Have you ever seen anything like this before?”
Cailean’s eyes were troubled as he looked around. “Nay,” he murmured. “Never. What could have caused such a thing?”
If this had been the twenty-first century, she would have suggested some kind of chemical spillage or other pollution. But there were no chemicals that could cause this in 1498.
She walked down to the water’s edge, to where the sand was damp from the tide, and crouched. Careful not to let the water touch her as it came in, she held out her hand, hovering it just above the level of the waves, and closed her eyes.
As she opened herself up to her power, the sigh of the wind and the movement of the waves seemed to come alive.
They whispered against her senses like living things.
The beach, the rocks, the hills, all seemed to vibrate with a kind of energy.
She could feel the life forces of the horses they’d left at the top of the dunes, stronger and more pulsing than those of the land.
And Cailean…
Cailean was a whirlwind of energy that buffeted against her senses like a thunderstorm. He was coiled power and unleashed fury; he was granite strength and burning heat. It took an immense effort to pull her awareness away from him.
She forced her attention to the waves, sent her mind skimming along the ocean bed, through the kelp forests that danced below the surface, between the rocks and little gaps where tiny creatures lived.
Then suddenly, she felt it.
A sense of wrongness permeated the waves like black ink spilled into clear water. It was dark, unnatural—and she had felt it before. It was the same thing that had burned her when she’d examined Drew.
With a gasp, she opened her eyes and rose but staggered with sudden dizziness. Cailean’s arm shot out to steady her, his strong fingers closing around her upper arm.
“What is it, lass?” he asked. “What’s wrong?”
“Dark,” she whispered. “Something dark.”
Cailean’s hand rose to grip her other arm. Gently, he turned her to face him. “What do ye mean?”
She swallowed. Took a deep breath. Forced herself to look at him. “I understand now. Why my magic didn’t work on Drew. Why none of Beatrice nor Maggie’s remedies has helped. This is not a sickness, Cailean. It’s a curse.”