Chapter 15
Chapter
Fifteen
Lael blew into the gaols like a wrathful wind, her long, pale blue skirts sweeping the length of the crude dirt floor. “Keane! What ha’e ye done?”
Despite that he had not seen her now in more than a year, her face was unchanged.
At thirty-two, after having borne four children—one nine, one eight and two wee ones under the age of four—Lael still looked like a lassie herself.
The last time he saw her she was still pregnant with bairn number four, and he had yet to meet the youngest of her brood.
He leaned back against the prison wall. “I thought for sure my return to Keppenach would see me cozied in your new keep, with a brazier burning at my bedside. Instead, you toss me into your brig.” He smiled wryly, though his sister didn’t appear the least amused.
Her hands seized the prison bars. “Would that you had ne’er laid eyes upon this scabrous piece of my home,” she lamented. “Ach, Keane! I ha’e no love for these gaols.”
Keane shrugged, uncertain what to say.
“At least ye are no’ in chains,” his sister said, pointing at the wall beside him, where a pair of ancient, rusted irons with sharp-edged cuffs were bolted into the stone wall. By the looks of them, they would rot a man’s arm off. “Broc was held here once.”
There were few who’d not heard that tale.
Troubadours sang of it still. Ten years past, his sister Lael had ridden out from Dubhtolargg, beside Broc Ceannfhionn, intending to take Keppenach.
Instead, they’d found their heads in a noose.
At the very last moment, the Demon Butcher rode through Keppenach’s gates, like a devil in black.
Jaime cut her down from the gibbet, then promptly wed her.
Unfortunately, Cameron’s cousin hadn’t had quite the same reception, despite his good fortune in the end. “Here, in this cell?”
Lael nodded. “Aye,” she said, and then she turned to face him with tears glistening in her stark green eyes. “Tell me what happened, Keane.”
“Haven’t they already said?”
Despite her glittering eyes, Lael tilted him an impatient look—that same impertinence he knew and loved so well. “Ach, now, would I be down here askin’ if I knew? Nay, Keane. They’ve ensconced themselves in Jamie’s solar to discuss the matter—away from prying ears.”
“Yours included?”
“You are my brother, after all.”
Keane attempted to laugh, but the sound came out bitter. “A lot of sway that won me at your gates.”
Lael’s face fell. She gripped the bars with both hands. “Dinna make light of this, Keane. This is a serious matter, and ye dinna catch the king in a forgiving mood.”
“Is he ever?”
Lael gave him another impatient look, clearly in a less jovial mood than even Keane—which was saying quite a lot. “Aye,” she said quickly. “I have come to know the man and he is not the villain I once feared.”
“So says the woman who once cuffed him in the face?”
His sister’s cheeks blossomed with color.
But she was being sincere, he realized, and she was defending the man whom she’d once sworn to kill—the very man who’d stolen their sister Catrìona from her bed in the middle of the night and then carried her south to barter in marriage to a fat, greasy-haired English earl.
“So now ye tell me ye’ve a fondness for the eejit? ”
“Shhhh!” Lael demanded, turning her head to be certain the guards did not overhear. “Dinna say such things! ’Tis no time for jests, brother.”
“Apparently not. It appears to me ye lost your good humor, right along with your desire for vengeance.”
“Aye, well, at least I do not wear his livery and then break his faith with every other word!”
Leave it to his sister not to mince words.
Keane said naught in response, for it was the truth she spoke, and despite that he was innocent of whatever charges he had been accused of, he was indeed being a hypocrite, for he’d accepted a post he was loyal to in action, but not in spirit. He served a king he did not believe in.
Lael released the prison bars, crossing her arms, stepping back to survey his cell. “If they dinna release ye soon, I will send blankets and food.”
Keane nodded a bit more soberly, realizing his sister was tormented. He didn’t wish to give her any more grief.
She pointed to the cell beside him. “Even after all these years, I canna come here and not think of her. This is where they found her, ye ken.”
Aveline of Teviotdale.
Even without her speaking the name, Keane knew instinctively that it was who Lael was referring to.
Aveline had been Rogan MacLaren’s mistress, sent to spy upon Lìli in Dubhtolargg.
Though instead of counting her good fortune to be away from Rogan, the lass begged Aidan to return her to Keppenach to bear Rogan’s babe.
And then she’d vanished, just as simply as that.
Apparently Rogan buried her alive. When they discovered her body, her mouth had been stuffed with a wad of cloth, her hands were gnarled, her fingers bent to claws, as though she’d taken her last breath while attempting to scratch her way out of the casket she’d been buried in.
There were claw marks along the ceiling of her tomb, bloodstains marking the splintered wood and splinters beneath her black nails.
Lael pulled her cloak together against the damp chill of the gaols. “They locked me in the cell with her. I found her only by chance, digging to pass the time.”
Rogan MacLaren was long dead, but the stories of his terror lived on. Keane could still spy the agony of it writ upon Lael’s face. “Rogan was a bastard,” he said.
“Tell me about it,” she agreed. “And while you’re at it, tell me ye dinna know that she was a daughter of Moray.”
Keane’s gaze must have registered his shock.
“You did not know?” his sister asked breathlessly, clearly relieved to discover it was so. She exhaled a long breath and her shoulders rested, a bit more relaxed.
“Lianae?”
Lael nodded. “’Tis true,” she said. “She confessed as much before the king, and I heard it with my own two ears.”
“A daughter of óengus?” Keane said, just to be sure he did not misunderstand.
Lael nodded. “The very one.”
Closing his eyes and leaning his forehead against the bars, Keane processed the new information.
For a long, long moment, he didn’t know how to respond.
He thought about the bruises on Lianae’s legs, and realized what it meant: The man she would have been promised to would be a man of consequence…
the Earl of Moray came to mind—a rightful claimant to the throne.
Despite that fitz Duncan should have inherited the crown as King Duncan’s eldest son, he took a bribe instead, settling for the title of Mormaer.
The man’s temper was renown. He was a cruel bastard on the field, to be sure.
Clearly, he was in his bedroom as well. It was said he, himself, had felled óengus of Moray on the field during the battle at Stracathro in Forfarshire…
Fitz Duncan killed Lianae’s father.
Had they already spoken their vows?
The pit of Keane’s stomach turned at the thought.
His sister accurately read his expression. “Ye dinna mess around, brother dear,” she said, and then she laughed softly as she shook her head.
Squeezing his eyes shut, Keane knocked his head once against the cold, hard steel. “What else di’ ye hear?”
“Not much,” his sister confessed. “Even despite that I kept my gob shut—for once—they tossed me out.”
“Jaime?”
“Nay.” She shook her head. “It was David. But I, for one, have never seen him so furious, and Jaime daren’t defy him over this. Nor would I.”
Lael shivered yet again, and this time Keane understood it was probably not from the cold. The look in her eyes was full of agony and for the first time since his arrest, he fully realized the severity of his position.
This was not a simple matter. Not only had he abetted a woman who would flee her given duty—by the king’s writ—it was Lianae’s brothers who had been suspected of rousing the rebels. It was their men his mesnie had been sent to ferret out from the northern woodlands.
While Lael was once held here and somehow escaped the gallows, she was not proof against Keane meeting the same fate.
With the kingdom so much at odds, it would be an easy enough decision for the king to make to simply wipe this frustration off his plate.
He had more than enough to deal with in Northumbria, and Keane had never once made his loyalties known.
If he were David, he would wish to eliminate all trials in the north before traveling south.
Cailleach only knew, where the man stood now—with most of Scotia under his rule—not even Aidan would be a threat.
And now—only now—did he understand the true folly in never choosing sides. “What do ye think he will do?”
“It all depends.”
“On what?”
“On what she says to him now.” She eyed Keane meaningfully. “They brought Lianae into the solar as they ushered me out.”
“Una! Una! The babe is come!”
Realizing time was of the essence, Constance shouted at the top of her lungs, tripping over her own two feet as she stumbled up the stone-littered hill.
There was just enough snow on the ground that she couldn’t see the smaller stones and she didn’t know precisely where to go.
Alas, but everyone else was far too busy, boiling water and preparing for the birth of the laird’s new child.
Someday, she and Kellen would be expectin’ their own.
The very thought renewed her pace—past the guards on the hillside.
Like stone effigies, they seemed completely oblivious to the falling snow, and she marveled that they could remain, night and day, guarding the vale, come what may.
She had never witnessed such steadfast loyalty as she did in these men, not even with her uncle Iain, who claimed a blood lineage to Kenneth MacAilpín!