Chapter 23 #2
The wind outside picked up and a gust blew in, swirling ‘round the room. One of the candles flickered out. Suddenly the room was all shadows.
“Good night, my lady.”
Her burning eyes adjusted and she wiped them and turned quickly. “Wait!”
The guard started to close the huge door.
She rushed forward. “My furs….and a flint and oil reed? To light the candles?”
He glanced at the candle pricks and nodded. The door closed and the bolt swung into place with a loud scrape, leaving her alone as the sound of his bootsteps disappeared down the tower stairs.
An empty feeling inside her, she stared at the closed door, confusion and despair fighting for control of her thoughts.
Montrose? But he was not Montrose. She placed her hand on her belly as it turned over and she felt a sharp pang in her chest. She bit her lip and closed her eyes, and the image of him came into her mind, a man desperate and alone, standing before two graves in a burned out castle.
An image she understood. She knew desperation.
The first time she had stolen from anyone it was for food.
They were starving. Their stock was gone, except for their own mounts.
They had nothing. Their father had been dead for four years and her poor brothers had struggled. So she stole first, and they got by.
Aye, she understood Lyall’s actions. Desperate people did desperate things. She did not believe for a moment he had been pretending to care for her anymore than she had been pretending. She loved him, and in spite of himself, she believed he loved her.
I cannot do this was what he had said. Now she understood.
Oh, Lyall, what shall we do?
She closed her eyes. Her mind was full.
I have sisters. She was not the only daughter.
How could she have sisters? Did the king hide all his children? She laughed then at the madness of it all before she grew thoughtful. If she were the eldest, then they could not have shared a mother. If she was hidden away, they must have been, too. Could they be as rough and wild as she was?
Or was she the only pawn, the eldest, the man called de Hay had said, and supposedly worth something to the father who had never met her and worth all that much more to his enemies.
If there was one thing she would never allow herself to be, it was a pawn.
Lyall’s eyes remained locked on the empty spot at the top of the stairs where Glenna had disappeared, and told himself that regret was for those who had a conscience, and he never claimed to have one.
Why then did he have the urge to draw his sword, grab her, and die if he had to, fighting to get her away from this place to which he had brought her?
Long ago, he knelt and avouched to a life of honor, only to have his honor questioned again and again because of the name he carried—his father’s black legacy.
He was the son of a man who had no honor, and in time, he learned there were not enough vows in the world to change the dishonor of his name.
Around him, men’s voices pierced his consciousness.
“The armorer overcharged me. I threatened to take his fingers one by one if he were to act the fool again.”
“…came walking out of the hayloft after the milkmaid only to have her young brother conk him out with a barrel stave.”
“’Aye…the best piece of horseflesh I’ve ever cast these old eyes upon. ‘Tis a smaller, swifter breed of palfrey, bred in the west, on the isles, from Barb bloods and another desert breed. I would give a year’s wages for one.”
Lyall cast a quick glance over his shoulder. Frasyr’s man at arms was the one lusting after one of the rare bloods, those the Gordons raised, smaller, swifter breeds of riding mounts like Glenna’s Skye.
A vision of the island swam before his eyes--fields covered in heather, Glenna riding with her romping hound, her laughter or a challenge…
all that was left in her wake. So bright was the image, so strong the sound her voice, that his breath caught.
His clothes felt suddenly small, and he tugged at his tunic as if he could cover up what he was feeling—the most intense sense of loss.
Part of him wanted to sink into the ground.
In a shadowed corner, de Hay was talking with Frasyr.
Meanwhile some of the guards were beginning to sprawl out on wooden benches and pallets, some went abovestairs as pages brought lavers for washing and thickly frothed ale for them to drink themselves to sleep.
Before him a maid with a ewer of thick brown ale ran into a bustling squire who precariously balanced a flagon of wine on a tray and had not been paying attention.
Brown ale went everywhere, and the two began bickering until they were quieted by a sharp command.
“I will have a word with you, Robertson.”
Light from a candle suddenly appeared at his shoulder. De Hay was standing next to him, and he took a goblet of wine from the squire and demanded Lyall follow him from the hall.
Inside a private chamber with plenty of candlelight, Huchon de Hay sat down in a chair at a wide hewn table and set a coffer before him and unlocked it. Without looking up he said, “Is she as simple-minded as she appears?”
“More so,” Lyall lied.
“Then your task cost you little trouble to earn this.” De Hay held out a parchment. A thick gold ring with a mark Lyall had never seen was on his long fingers.
Lyall steeled himself to look into his eyes and appear passive.
When unrolled, the papers revealed a sealed and witnessed document bequothing all of Dunkeldon and its lands, borders, crofts and income and tax fees from the village of Dunwood and the nearby Tay crossing to Sir Lyall Robertson and his heirs.
Lyall’s hands shook slightly as he read it.
De Hay stood. “Dunkeldon is yours.”
“Aye,” Lyall said, lingering in his own hopelessness, unable to know how to act or what to do next. He half-expected the parchment to burn its image into his palm. He finally held in his hand all that he had craved for more years than he had lived on Dunkeldon lands.
“You may go,” de Hay dismissed him, and Lyall walked out to the great hall.
As he walked away without purpose, he realized the place stank of burning mutton and sweat, ale and wet, fetid rushes.
The stink grew stronger. He needed fresh air.
Smell was his only sense, and it was acute and overpowering.
Had someone touched him, he doubted he would feel it. Had the Devil himself arisen there before his eyes, he would not have seen him. Had the ground opened up and the screams of Hell surrounded him, he would not hear them.
The coward in him wanted to run, an urge he had felt often in his lifetime but never admitted or acted upon. He didn’t have the courage to be a true coward. He walked on, feeling nothing, yet wondering if betrayal carried a stench.
Outside, he headed straight for the stable, saddled and mounted his horse, paid the guard a pretty sum to open the gate, and rode out, only to have to bribe the castle ferryman to barge cross the lake.
The wind was picking up overhead, and it blew water from the white-capped lake into his eyes and face, and rocked the wooden raft so hard he had his hands full calming down his high-spirited horse.
On the opposite side he eased his skittish mount off the rocking raft to soft ground, and he kept along the edge of the lake as the wind calmed down, and in time, so did his horse.
At a break in the trees, he dismounted and his horse was happy to eat grass.
But Lyall’s state of mind was in turmoil as he paced across the damp grass in the dark.
Dunkeldon was his. After all the time and the pain and disappointment. After keeping his eye on the prize with a single-mindedness that had gone on for so long, eventually he drove himself from the hearts of his family.
What price so dear one pays….
He was alone in the grand quiet of the moment he had waited for, yet there was great noise inside his head he could not shake off.
At the edge of the lake, he stopped. The waters spanned out before him, past the castle rock, and into the great beyond, proving itself broad and distancing and making him feel small.
Now the prize was his, and instinct told him that he needed to remember his father and Malcolm; all he had done had been for them.
He closed his eyes to take his memory back in time. But he saw nothing familiar. No features he could remember, nothing but the shadows of two men.
What punishment was this? He could no longer conjure up their faces.
When had that happened? How long had it been since he could see their features in his mind’s eye, since he could hear their voices in his head?
He could not remember if or when he had tried.
He massaged his brow and frowned, then swiped his hand over his mouth and chin, rough with beard.
The images were lost to him, and he understood like a fool does after acting the idiot that he had traded his memories of his father and Malcolm for the land.
Their images were gone, wiped clean from his mind and memory.
He had lost everything, and justified doing so by telling himself the greatest lie: all he had done, he had done for them.
His gaze went to the castle tower, where dim light shone vaguely from an arrow slit. As clear as a summer sky he saw Glenna Canmore walking regally up the stone steps and taking with her his lost soul.
Lyall could not breathe. He fell to his knees, his control gone. Suddenly all the air in his lungs had been stolen, then next…the blood in his veins disappeared, his bones felt brittle and dry as an old corpse. He was empty.
Dunkeldon was his but at what cost?
He knelt there taking long breaths and staring at the flickering, distant light in the tower, until he flung his head back and cried out, a sound that was like that of a lone wolf who lost its mate, a sound that echoed out over the water, into the ground under him and through his body, a cry that filled his throat and left it rough and scratched, and when he found his voice again, the words from his mouth were, “What have I done? What have I done!”
A moment later a knife pricked his throat as someone gripped his hair tightly in a fist. “It matters not what you have done because you are a dead man.”