Chapter Nine #3
He’d forgotten naught.
Would that he had!
“I see you do remember.” Torcaill looked at him down his overlong nose.
Ronan returned the stare.
The other’s certainty was grating on his nerves.
Even so, he had to know.
“The maid spoke true. And her ability to show you what her gift lets her see says much about her power,” the druid continued,
clearly intending to needle him. “Only those most blessed can lay hands on a nontaibhsear and grant them such glimpses.”
“The image could have come from my own youth.” Ronan squared his shoulders, warming to the idea. “Maldred’s crest was not
always as worn and indistinguishable as it is now. When I was a lad, it was —”
“Anything but ‘shimmering with a brilliance that hurt the eyes,’ ” Torcaill quoted him, looking superior. “Even then the stone’s
carvings were showing their age. Nae, nae, laddie, ’twas a look into a more distant time she was giving you, for whate’er
reason.”
“And you do not know that reason?”
The druid shifted in his saddle, his gaze — his suddenly wary gaze — sliding to a tangle of whin and broom a bit farther down
the pine-clad knoll.
“Well?” Ronan didn’t hide his impatience.
Turning back around, Torcaill peered at him from beneath down-drawn brows. “Like as not, the maid has no idea her power is
so great.”
“That is no’ what I asked you.”
“Mayhap not, but I have told you all I may.”
It was all Ronan could do not to grind his teeth. He did stiffen, and not in a way that was pleasurable.
Torcaill eyed him placidly, his hair and beard lifting in the wind. “It is not for me to question why the Old Ones let her
show you what she did. I can only tell you that they will have had their reasons.”
“Think you I do not know that?” Ronan glowered.
The druid only arched a brow.
Ronan felt his restraint waning.
“If the Wise Ones had reason to send me a taibhsear as a bride, perhaps it would serve their purpose better if I were made aware —”
“You will know what you must when the time arises for you to know it.”
As I have told you before.
Ronan was sure he heard the unspoken accusation.
He choked back a snort.
His head was beginning to ache, so he did what he could, turning his darkest look on the heavens, the gray, lowering clouds
scurrying past so swiftly. Pinning his stare on a particularly dark and thundery-looking cloud, he enjoyed his scowl.
There were satisfactions to be had in such small victories.
He didn’t dare aim such a glare at Torcaill.
Much as he’d like to!
He was about to give in to the temptation when a great gust of sleety wind whipped his hair across his eyes.
A splatter of icy raindrops stung across his face.
“Saints o’ mercy!” he groused, biting back a stronger curse as he swiped a hand across his brow.
Then he strove for patience.
Becoming riled would only serve to tighten the druid’s lips even more.
That much he knew.
Noting how clamped those lips already were, he tried to search the ancient’s face for answers.
But that, too, proved impossible.
Torcaill’s attention was already elsewhere. Once again, he was eyeing the thick growth of whin and broom crowding the lower
braeside.
Ronan immediately saw why.
Something moved there.
Something unseen and . . . heavy.
He could hear it moving through the underbrush, its lumbering passage lifting the hairs on his nape. For a moment, he thought
he caught a flicker of gray against the yellow of the whin and broom. But then the thing was gone, leaving nothing more ominous
on the hill than the rustle of leaves stirred by wind.
“I’ll be away now,” Torcaill said, sounding distracted.
Ronan flashed a glance at him, the large gray something forgotten.
Especially when the druid slid a hand into the folds of his robes, then fumbled about until he withdrew a particular leather
pouch. Age-stained, lumpy, and secured with an equally ancient-looking leather tie, the pouch boded ill.
Quite unperturbed, Torcaill hung the thing from his saddlebow.
Ronan rested a hand on his own saddlebow and leaned forward. “Did you not say you’d accompany me back to Dare?”
“I have thought better of it.” Torcaill smoothed his robes, taking care — it seemed — not to look again in the direction of
the whins and broom. “Perhaps I shall ride along the outer edges of the glen. Do a bit of circuiting. There can be no harm
in refreshing my saining sites.”
Ronan felt his impatience returning. “Tilting, weather-pitted stones that have marked our bounds since before the first dew
e’er wet Highland grass! Think you that mumbling a few words o’er their moss-grown faces will change aught?”
“That remains to be seen.”
“So be it.” Ronan nodded.
There was nothing else to say.
The druid’s straight back and the proud set of his gaunt shoulders tied Ronan’s tongue. Already he’d been more disrespectful
than he would have wished.
But so much plagued him of late . . .
“I’ve refilled my pouch,” Torcaill was saying. He patted the pouch’s bulging sides, his hand then staying there, reverently.
“Sacred ash gathered from the last Lammas fire and a few small fagots of rowan for burning, and a goodly supply of old bits
of iron.”
“Then we of Dare shall sleep at ease this night!” Ronan put as much conviction into the words as he could, well aware that
the druid meant to scatter his saining goods around the glen’s ancient boundary markers.
Mumble his spelling words, and wave his lit fagots in the air as he circled the stones.
Looking at Ronan now, his eyes gleamed.
“There’s enough should you wish me to ride past Creag na Gaoith,” he offered, patting the leather bag again. “Lammas ash is
powerful. I could —”
“Nae.” Ronan shook his head, the gesture final.
Bitter.
He should never have encouraged the old fool.
And the last thing he wanted was the ancient — or anyone — going near Creag na Gaoith.
Rock of the Wind was a black place. A mass of towering broken crags rising high above one of Dare’s bonniest corners, half of the once-proud
rock bastion now lay tumbled and moss-grown at its foot. The great fallen stones spilled into the sweet little lochan there,
the sight a damning and permanent reminder of what lay beneath.
“She needs to be let go.”
Ronan almost choked.
He did blink, the druid’s words piercing him. “She has been gone . . . for years.”
Words so true, guilt shamed him to the core. Thinking of the rockslide that killed his first wife Matilda wasn’t why the dread
name of the place sent such a flood of chills streaking through him.
It’d been the reminder of the cause of that tragedy.
He couldn’t allow the like to happen again.
Especially not to her.
His gut twisting at the thought, he shoved back his hair and set his jaw. “I’ll no’ have you or anyone poking around Creag
na Gaoith.” He spoke the sentiment aloud this time. “No good would come of it.”
Torcaill drew himself up. “Perhaps you should ride by there. Lay your ghosts.”
Ronan scowled at him.
He didn’t have any bogles.
But a short while later as he somehow found himself riding ever nearer to that once beloved spot, he couldn’t deny that something lurked in the bracken and heather hemming his path. Thick birches and bramble bushes grew there, too, almost impenetrable
— just as he remembered — until the trees gave way to the peaceful little lochan, so hidden it didn’t even bear a name.
Whatever he’d spotted up ahead, large, gray, and moving slow, didn’t have a name either.
Saints forbid he encounter the beast.
His mood was too foul to cross swords with some bespelled creature sent by the Holders to torment him.
Ronan shuddered.
He pulled his travel cloak tighter about him, glancing from right to left as he rode, conscious now of every squishy, sucking
clip- clop his horse’s hooves made on the damp carpet of fallen autumn leaves.
Then he heard it again.
A rustle of leaves as he’d caught back on the knoll. This time accompanied by the unmistakable snuffling and sniffing of a
large animal. Its panting breaths as it moved stealthily through the undergrowth.
Ronan’s heart started beating slow and hard.
He drew his sword, holding it ready.
Then he rounded a great cluster of Scots pine and rowans and jerked his steed to such a jarring halt he nearly cut himself
in the thigh.
A dog sat in the middle of the path.
“Blazing heather!” Ronan’s brows shot upward; his jaw dropped.
He swung down from his saddle, starting forward in disbelief.
But there could be no mistake.
The great tongue-lolling, tail-wagging beast sitting before him wasn’t some mysterious denizen from hell.
It was Buckie.