Chapter Ten #3
In the end, it was she who agreed to the marriage.
And yet, why? She couldn’t lie to herself.
She hadn’t married him solely because it would bring the clans closer to peace, or that it would make the King’s decree an easier transition for her clan.
If Rory had been proved cruel, or showed no reason, she would have begged her father for alternatives.
She would have denied it outright and not heeded his words to think.
No, she hadn’t married him simply for the clan’s sake. She’d married him because he...affected her. The moment he’d entered the courtyard alone and yet undeterred, the instant his eyes had caught hers and the distance between them hadn’t mattered, something of him had pierced her.
Oh, she’d been infuriated by his comment on the leeks and him being a Lochmore from the clan she’d hated all her life, she’d would have gladly shown him out the gates. But she could not avoid her curiosity, her fascination with him in the small room.
She couldn’t avoid her attraction to him in her bedroom.
Except now after a night spent together, she had to question what part of her decision was based on her meeting Rory, or on a secret told to her by Rhona the former healer.
On her deathbed, Rhona had been ill, half-coherent, but enough of her words Ailsa understood. Rhona had confessed a secret that affected the Great Feud between the clans about a baby, named Rory, given away in the dead of night.
That name. Rory. Could that baby be her husband?
His name was too significant. Too much of a coincidence and he lived near McCrieff land. Then there was also the fact he drummed with his left hand. That he arranged his food, touched her intimately with his left hand.
Could he be left-handed? It was rare, so rare.
She couldn’t be certain. For it appeared he used his sword with his right, his dining knife with his right, yet she was an observer.
He wasn’t as fluid with his right hand as he was with his left.
As if he forced himself to use that hand instead of his dominant hand. Why did he do it?
It was almost as if he was trying to prove himself. He had nothing to prove. All she knew with certainty was that his name was Rory and he was left-handed. If what she was just beginning to guess was true, however, his very existence changed everything.
When the Great Feud began seventy years ago, the story as she’d been told was that a Lochmore woman fell in love with the McCrieff Chief and grew ripe with his child.
For unknown reasons, she married Lochmore’s Chief instead.
When the McCrieff child and woman died, it broke the McCrieff Chief’s heart.
She’d found the story sadly tragic as a child, but it was the baby’s death she mourned the most. That baby was also named Rory.
What if he had lived? As a child herself, it had made her think about life and death and she’d often asked Rhona questions.
However, when Magnus was killed, she knew without a doubt she wanted to be a healer.
So she’d followed Rhona, the clan healer, who couldn’t at the time have been that old and was disgruntled that a pesky child hounded her. They soon became very close. Years later, she was able to care for Rhona when she was dying.
Ailsa took great pains to care for her alone, for Rhona, as a healer, knew many clan secrets and at the end of her life she mumbled when she hurt, when she slept. And Ailsa heard many secrets, especially one that would change the course of their clans for ever.
Ailsa couldn’t get it out of her thoughts now. That Hamish had raped a woman named Marion from the Clan McNeill, that the babe born of that rape was given to another family and one outside the clan. Never liking Hamish, Ailsa had been fiercely glad that child escaped.
Yet, could that babe born of hate have been given to Lochmore’s Chief and passed as his own?
Could Rory be Hamish’s son? For Rory was large and left-handed like Hamish.
To have one or the other traits was unique—to carry both was rare.
Rory would be fully a McCrieff then. There would be no need for a feud or poison or finding a killer. He wouldn’t have to prove himself.
She was tired, worried. Perhaps even grasping at any ideas to make her marriage to Rory work. There was danger here and she was married to a stranger who was kind one moment and cutting the next.
Though she felt something for Rory, she didn’t know him. At first, she thought there could be peace, but not as long as Paiden lay ill and possibly dying. She felt so helpless with his care, hopeless she couldn’t have just married a man she fell in love with.
And she couldn’t call him by his name. That was telling how deep her conflict went. She knew, he, too was conflicted. They’d said their vows, but he hadn’t taken her maidenhead.
She knew her secrets, what were his? It was too much to think about. Too many uncertainties. Maybe her mind was playing tricks on her.
Under no circumstances could Rory be Hamish’s son and a McCrieff. Under no circumstances could he be named after the McCrieff babe who died in the Great Feud. It was too fantastical to be true.