Chapter 16
Calum blinked. “You’re what?”
Freya nodded. “The Storyteller.”
His head swam, fogged from sleep, as he fought to understand her words. “What do you mean?”
She drew in a wet breath, her heavily lashed eyes flicking up at him. “I’m sorry, Calum. I swear to ye, we never meant to put anyone at risk. We only meant to help. Please—dinnae be angry.”
He stared, reeling. “What are you telling me, exactly? Who is we? You and who else?”
Her brows arched in distress, her face raw. “Tyr.”
The familiar strangeness in the tales he’d read fell into place—the mission at the Aird of Sleat, the uncanny insight into his thoughts on the mission that night, the voice of someone who knew him well. His mouth went dry. “My father has been helping you write the stories?”
Tears seeped from her eyes, and she swiped her sleeve across her streaming nose. “Not write. He commissioned them long ago—just after you went to Mull.”
The room tilted and swayed. Calum grabbed for the crooked mantel, his ears stuffed with wool, his limbs heavy as stone. Uselessness washed over him and he stumbled forward.
Freya caught him, guiding him into the lumpy blue chair by the hearth. “Please—you must stay awake.”
He rubbed his face, struggling to focus. “I dinnae ken what’s come over me. I feel…muddled.”
She pressed his hands to the chair’s arms. “Hold on. Keep your eyes open. I’ll show you what I mean.”
She climbed the ladder to the loft and opened her trunk, shifting neatly folded clothes, shoes, and keepsakes aside.
Through drooping lids he watched her slide away a hidden panel. From it she withdrew a stack of papers, a bundle tied with red ribbon—and a green stocking.
His eyes shut. When he forced them open again, she was crouched before him, patting his cheek, clutching the items to her chest. “That’s it—stay with me.” She held out the stocking. “It began more than ten years ago, with this.”
He turned it in his hands, dazed. “A stocking?”
She nodded, draping it over the ladder’s rung. “Your father devised it as our signal. When I needed to speak to him, I hung it on a loose stone in my father’s fence. When he had something for me, he’d hang its mate from the hawthorn facing our house. We’d meet at Lealt Linn. Then give his signal.”
The memory flickered through Calum’s dimming mind. “A hooting owl?”
She nodded. “When he hoots back, I know it’s safe to meet. At first we only met when I was in trouble with Papa. If he lost his temper, or I grew afraid, I’d hang the stocking and Tyr would help me find a way through it.”
“Go on.”
“Tyr heard me spin many tales beside the fire when I stayed with them after you left. I suppose he enjoyed them, for he gave me a dispatch at one of our meetings and asked if I could write him a ballad.”
“What did the dispatch say?”
Drawing a steadying breath, she slid a folded square from the ribboned stack. “This one.”
He opened it, eyes moving across the words. “The first raid at Perthshire. With the MacGregors.”
She nodded. “You were mentioned three times. You set yourself apart in that raid—you became Lachlan’s ensign.”
From the bottom of the pile, she drew two more pages. “And this is what I wrote.”
He took them and read the title aloud, his voice rough. “Cù Cogaidh of Jura.”
The ballad opened in the thick of the fight, his bravery laid bare, his thoughts of Jura woven into verse.
She had even set down how he’d tried to save the young MacLean lad struck by a javelin.
In her lines, the mud and blood of that day became something else—something beautiful, lifting him from horror into legend.
Realizing he had not spoken, Calum looked up. Freya brushed tears from her face, trying to smile. “You were the youngest ever appointed to leadership in the MacLean guard. Your father was so proud. It remains his favorite tale.”
He could only stare, words lost.
“Then came your time with Hector, when you took Lochbuie from the MacFadyens.” She handed him another dispatch, another tale. “Your appointment as commander of the Lochbuie guard.”
And then, after a pause, she withdrew a third.
“One day your father hung the stocking. For the first time, the story he gave me wasn’t about you.
It was Lochindorb—the MacFadyen plot, Hector’s mission to save his wife.
I didnae want to write it, but your father insisted.
” She matched the tale with the dispatch. “So I wrote this.”
Calum took the thickest stack from her hands. The title struck him cold. The Beithir. The very tale the king had read. His voice rasped. “You made Hector’s legend. You gave him his war name.”
Freya sank into the mismatched chair beside him. “The name was your father’s, not mine. Tyr said Hector once came to a meeting soaked to the skin, looking like a drowned beast. He heard Murdoch call him Beithir at the first meeting concerning the Wolf, and thought it apt.”
Emotion battled within him. “Freya—how could he, how could you, not see the danger if these tales were intercepted?”
Her eyes dropped to the stack of missives. “I admit I wondered when your father asked for a story that didnae feature you. But he never confessed he had circulated them—not until the night you returned.”
Calum fought the drowse clouding his mind, forcing his eyes to stay open. “How did he circulate them?”
“A minstrel he met at Findlugan. Còta Liath. He knew Lochindorb would bring war with the Wolf, that you’d be dragged into battle after battle.
He only wanted to aid you—to curry favor with other clans, to swell your ranks, to demoralize the enemy.
He wanted you to have every advantage. He only meant to help. ”
Calum pressed a hand to his face, struggling to think through the fog. “Your tales, however well meant, have wrought havoc among the clans.”
Freya squeezed her eyes shut, clutching the papers to her breast. “I swear, I didnae know he sent them. I had no inkling. Calum, if my father had known I was the Storyteller, the price I’d have paid would have been steep indeed.
I only wrote because your father asked it of me.
I thought you were meant to be the heart of my stories. Look.”
She handed him the remainder of the stack.
He read through the epic of his years on Skye—Léo’s imprisonment, his dreams, Birdy’s skill, the raid on the Aird of Sleat, the granaries’ destruction, the Staffa raid, the final battle.
It was stirring, a tale to rival any of the epics of auld. Yet something in it rang false.
“You’ve made me quite the hero.”
A wet, exasperated chuckle broke from her. “To us on Jura, you are the hero. You’re one of us, and you’ve fought for our place and honor among the islands.”
The final piece slid into place. His voice came low. “That is why the clan welcomed me home? Because you kept my flame alive here on Jura?”
“Your father. I only wanted to help Tyr.”
I only wanted to help Tyr. The words pricked him, spreading unease through his fogged mind. At every opportunity she reminded him that his feelings for her were not reciprocated. He’d wanted to believe that perhaps one day she would love him, but he was getting nowhere.
“Is that why you asked at the chapel if our union could be undone? Do you think so little of me to think that I would leave you if I knew? Is there nothing about me, truly nothing, that appeals to you beyond escape from your father?”
Blood drained from every pore in her face. “Calum, you are my friend. I—I was afraid. You gave everything for me, how were you to feel when you learned that I was the very person your team is hunting?”
Feeling more a fool than ever, he realized his head was swaying, fighting the urge to return to sleep. Something was wrong. This wasn’t mere drowsiness. “Why do I feel this way? What have you done?”
Dropping her eyes, she reached into her cloak and handed him a packet of herbs. “I’ve put henbane in your milk.”
He stiffened at the deception. “You’ve drugged me. Why, Freya?”
Unable to look at him, she spoke in a quiet voice like a child. “To make ye rest so I could slip away for the storytelling. It’s how I was able to sneak out of my father’s house every Wednesday to tell tales. And to the ceilidh to dance with the clan.”
To dance with the clan. The simple words overturned everything.
She hadn’t slipped away to dance with him.
Freya’s kindness and generosity belonged to all, not to him in particular.
Between them there was only a shared clan, a dance long ago, and a favor repaid when she helped him escape. Nothing more.
A long silence stretched between them. She began to shift under his examining stare.
“Papa only took a third of his milk that night. It’s why he woke so easily when Rory came.
Why I was caught. Why he was so angry. Why our marriage ever happened.
But you must believe me Calum, I am grateful that you’ve wed me. Truly.”
He wanted to crawl into his bed and pull the covers over his head until morning. “I see. This…” he groped for meaning, wavering his shaky hand between them. “…is what we are. I do something for you. You do something for me.”
Her head tilted. “I—of course. Has that no’ been our way? I promise I will think of a way to make this up to you.”
He exhaled feeling empty. “It is all transactional.”
She stared at him, her eyes sparkling with tears.
Those eyes. The beautiful pools of green and blue narrowed and he felt them flick over him as he hunched lower into his seat.
It wasn’t fair. He shouldn’t still feel this way.
He shouldn’t want to kiss her so much. To hold her in his arms. To pretend that there was something loving growing between them.
“Calum…no…it’s—I’ve hurt you.”
He pressed his forehead into his hand, unable to bear the pity in her voice. “Please. Stop. Where did you get the henbane? I recall my father swore by it—for a troubled mind’s rest.”
“Aye.”
He lifted his head. “He told you to use it on me?”
She nodded. “The morning of our wedding. Calum, I should have told you before we wed. I wanted to, but I was afraid of how you’d react.
But now…I know you willnae hurt me. I cannae keep lying to you as I lied to my father I willnae live that way anymore—not when you’ve been so kind. And now I’m afraid of…of…”
The terror etched upon every feature of her face split his heart, but he forced himself to continue gripping the solid arms of his chair unsure of what was true and what wasn’t. “Afraid of what?”
“Rory.”
The name caused a rupture of sobriety and he forced himself higher in the seat. “Why are you afraid of Rory? You were betrothed to him. I thought you preferred him—and I’ll be honest, Freya, in this moment I am struggling to believe otherwise.”
“I didnae tell you everything.”
A fierce swell of protectiveness rose inside him. His heart pounded, senses circling like a hound catching scent of danger. “What else have you left out?”
Ashamed, she dropped her gaze to the floor. “The week before you returned, they had me scribe our banns. I stopped before I finished and told them I wouldnae marry him. He reacted badly.”
“The bruise on your cheek?”
She nodded, then jutted her jaw to show a chipped bottom tooth. “He is jealous. Ruthless. Relentless. He knows secrets about every clan and chief in the Isles. And now that I’ve spurned him, I fear he’s taken it personal. I need you, Calum. I’m afraid.”
Fire scorched through his muddled senses. He wanted to sweep her into his arms, but everything felt tainted. He wasn’t sure what was allowed now and what wasn’t. What part of his affection she welcomed or merely tolerated.
Forcing his chin up, he met her remorseful eyes. “So I am truly a means to an end, then.”
Her eyes went wide. “No, Calum—it’s no—you’re twisting my meaning. I dinnae know how to explain. All I know is that I am telling you this because I realize that I was wrong.”
People had wed for worse reasons. Could he truly blame her for seizing any escape from her life she could? Yet the knowledge that she held no affection for him burned in his breast, blotting out all else.
“Do you believe I will protect you until my dying breath?”
Her gingery brows knit “Aye. I trust you more than anyone.”
For a moment his chest swelled—then he crushed the tenderness down. “I wish I could say the same.”
Her head bowed again, stricken.
His eyes focused on the tear in the front of her dress. “What happened in the woods, Freya? Tell me the whole story.”
Her voice was small. “I spied a shadow in the woods walking home. I thought it an animal and made my way back along the loop, hoping to avoid it. When I passed the half-sunk boulder I looked behind me and realized it was a man. I called to him, hoping it was a villager or perhaps Murdoch because of the quiver on his back. The man was dressed in a cowl, it was so dark I couldnae make out his face. He drew an arrow and shot—”
In an instant he was on his feet, staggering toward his armor, feeling as though heavy blocks were tied to his arms and legs.
“Calum, ye cannae go outside and search. You’re not well. I couldnae bear it if you were hurt. What would I do if I lost you?”
He buckled on his cuirass feeling wounded. “If something should happen to me, you will bear the protection of my father. The clan doesnae know we have no’ brought our marriage to completion this night. You must make them believe we have, that you carry my heir. Use me to get out of here.”
Tears blinked in her eyes. “That’s no’ what I meant.”
He tried to keep the bitterness from his voice as he snatched the green stocking from the rung of the ladder.
“It is my part of our arrangement, wife. If something happens, have my father take you to Lochbuie. Hector and Cara will keep you safe and allow you to join their clan. You willnae live in fear again. Do not return to your father.”
“Arrangement? I didnae mean to deceive you—”
He headed for the door. “You did mean it. Otherwise you would have told me before we took our vows. I admit it’s my own fault for feeling this way—that you would love me was my own foolish hope.
This marriage repays you for all you’ve lost in the ten years since you helped me.
I am no’ angry with you. Not for the tales, for your omissions, for how you feel.
I see now what lies between us—and why you’ve made your choices. ”
“Calum…”
Bog padded after him and he snapped at him, frustrated. “Stay! Stay with Freya.”
“Please don’t leave.”
“I’ll send Fraser down here to stay with you. Bar the door. Dinnae leave until morning.”
“Calum, please…”
Heartbroken, he wrenched the door open and ran.