Chapter 12 #2
patted her neck and Alina handed over the mare’s reins.
Roark handed Beasty’s over to another hand
and offered Alina his arm. Laying her hand on his arm, they
followed the greybeard up stone steps to the entrance. One of the
men-at-arms who’d ridden in with them opened the heavy double doors
and they followed the greybeard into a large, open entryway.
“Wait here,” the greybeard told them.
Roark patted Alina’s hand on his arm and took
in the grand staircase leading up to the second story. There was a
dining hall to their right with not one, but two high tables and
six low tables. To their left was a huge common room with a large
hearth built into a stone wall and chairs, benches, and sofas
spread all over the room.
He heard voices and footsteps coming from the
dining hall and stood at alert as Alina gripped his arm. The
greybeard followed behind a handsome man in his middle years with
shoulder-length, dark brown hair and a short beard shot through
with the first steaks of grey, accompanied by a slim sylph of a
woman of the same age with light blonde hair braided and piled high
atop her head. Both of them were dressed in good, plain, unadorned
linen clothing.
“I’m Owen, laird of clan MacLeod and Silver
Water Keep,” the man said. “This is my wife, Lady Siusan. I know
who you are, Roark MacInnes.” His deep green, thickly lashed eyes
took Roark in from head to toe before settling on Alina. “Who might
you be?”
“I am Alina,” she said with a dip of her
knee. “Princess of Sea Ridge in the Northlands. Daughter of King
Jerrik and Queen Alyssa, granddaughter of King Aleksandr and Queen
Sahar, and great-granddaughter of King Asad and Queen Oona, who was
the daughter of Aaron and Iseult, who was the daughter of Isolde of
the clan MacLeod.”
The laird’s green-eyed gaze fixed on Alina.
“You certainly know the maternal lineage of the MacLeod side of my
family,” he said. “But then, so do many people.”
Alina dipped her head and said nothing. The
laird looked to his wife, who glanced from him to Alina and back to
her husband.
“She does have the MacLeod eyes,” she
said.
“Aye,” the laird agreed. “That she does.” He
took in her dirty, ragged state and boy’s clothing. “Still, she
could as easily be some poor cousin’s by-blow.”
Alina visibly stiffened. “I assure you I am
who I say I am.”
“That may be,” the laird said, nonplussed.
“If it is, I assume you’ve come here counting on our kinship for
protection.”
“We have,” Roark answered. He held the
laird’s waiting, watching gaze. “If you know who I am, then you
know the story being spread about by Roger MacKinnon, laird of
North Shore Keep.”
“I do,” Laird Owen said. “His story is that
you and a serving wench,” he indicated Alina, “set a trap for and
murdered his son.”
“The only trap set was for the princess and
her parents,” Roark told him. “A trap I was, to my dishonor, a part
of. All to settle a twenty-year grievance, which I’m now trying to
make right by getting the princess back to her family.”
“Did you kill the laird’s son?”
“No.”
The laird looked to his lady, whose nod was
almost imperceptible. He swept his arm toward the dining hall. “You
two look half starved,” he said. “Come, sit, eat. Tell us your
story of how you came to be here.”
***
Alina paced herself with the fresh bread,
soft cheese, and red, juicy berries the kitchen maids set out as
she and Roark sat across the table from Laird Owen and Lady Siusan.
Between bites, she couldn’t help staring at the laird’s eyes, so
like her mother’s, or her own. The laird kept staring into hers too
as Roark told him and his lady of how Roger’s scheme to kidnap her
for ransom first came about, how he and Leif saw it through,
thankfully leaving out the details of how she’d led him like a
lovestruck fool to the lake and allowed herself to be taken.
He told them of starting to suspect the
veracity of Roger’s version of the wrongs done him and his family
by Alina’s parents, of finding out about Roger’s real plan for
selling Alina in the same desert slave market where Oona and her
sister, Lyrra, had been sold, and of how Roger intended to let her
parents think her dead for the rest of their days while he gloated
from afar, his coffers full of the gold he’d sold Alina for.
Roark told them of Leif’s attempt to rape
Alina in the stables, and she found she couldn’t meet the lady
Siusan’s kind eyes, though the shame wasn’t hers.
“I wanted to kill him,” Roark admitted.
“Alina stopped me to avoid the very thing we’re accused of and
running from now. We left him tied, gagged, and unconscious, but
alive. We were leagues away before we heard he’d been killed by a
scythe to his chest.”
“Why didn’t you go to your family for help?”
Laird Owen asked.
Alina glanced at Roark. “We would have,” she
said, not exactly lying. “We were told his father had sided with
Roger.”
“Ah,” Owen said. “I see.”
“We decided to cross the Mounths,” Roark
continued, “to make for the North Sea Firth, where we hope to find
a ship to sail Alina home. A storm waylaid us for a few days and
then we were overtaken by a band of men intent on collecting the
reward Roger offered for us.”
“What happened?” Lady Siusan asked.
“Roark’s horse went lame so he stayed to
fight them and give me time to get away,” Alina told her. “He
killed two of them before they managed to take him.”
“And?” Owen said, glancing at the two of them
sitting at his table.
“Alina doubled back and drugged the three
remaining men with a vial of White Milk in their wine and rescued
me,” Roark said, grinning at Alina. “And here we are.”
“That’s quite a story,” the laird said.
Alina pulled the pearl from between her
breasts, unclasped the copper chain, and set it on the table. She
met and held the laird’s serious, green-eyed gaze with her own.
“Would a serving wench have a necklace like this?” she said in the
Green Isles tongue. “Every word we’ve told you is true,” she said
in her Northland tongue. “I swear it on my mother’s eyes,” she said
in her mother’s native Rus. “I swear it on my great-grandmother’s
grave,” she said in the desert tongue.
Laird Owen sat back, cocked his head, and
turned to the greybeard who’d brought them here, and who’d been
standing at his laird’s and lady’s backs the whole time. “Did you
understand any of that, Niels?” Owen asked.
“The first part,” Niels answered. “She said
that every word they told you was true in the Northern tongue. The
rest of it?” He shrugged.
Alina eyed the hawk-nosed Niels. “From what
part of the Northlands do you hail?” she asked in their Northern
tongue.
“From the western mountains,” he answered in
kind. “Twenty and five years ago.”
“My paternal grandfather, King Anders, would
have been recently deceased,” she said, “and my great-uncle,
Alviss, newly named king.”
“Yes,” Niels said. “I’d heard of them, and
the family’s troubles. Something about a cursed throne.”
“The only curse was my great-uncle Fenrir and
his yellow beards,” she said. “It was he who tried to have my
father and mother murdered. Roger and his brother Donald were two
of Fenrir’s yellow beards.”
Niles looked to his laird and dipped his
head.
“What do you want of us?” Laird Owen asked
them.
“Help finding a ship to sail Alina home,”
Roark said. “Shelter and protection until she sails.”
“Only her?”
“I’ve asked him to sail back with me,” Alina
told them. “Roark means to stay to try to make things right between
his family and Roger’s.”
“I see.” Owen looked from Roark to Alina.
“Your father won’t seek revenge on this Roger?”
“Revenge?” Alina shook her head. “No. I do
think he’ll seek justice. He is a king who’s sailed much of this
world. He’ll take the laws and politics of this land into account
no matter what he chooses to do.”
Laird Owen sat back, his expression one of
contemplation. Then he placed both hands palms on the table.
“You’re both welcome to stay here under my protection while I sort
a few things out,” he told them. “In the meantime, I suggest we
agree on a story about who you are and why you’re here that will
keep your true identities secret from all but the five of us in
this room.”
***
Alina returned to her guest chambers from the
bathhouse dressed in her old, but relatively clean long tunic and
apron to find a mossy green long tunic and darker green apron laid
out on the bed. “Thank you, Lady Siusan,” she said to the room.
She stared down at the bed and flopped down
on it. It was big, soft, and clean, and she would be sleeping in it
alone, as much to keep to the propriety of their host’s home as to
maintain the story that would explain to the rest of the household
how and why she and Roark were there. An empty pit formed in her
belly when she thought of never sleeping cocooned in Roark’s
embrace again. Of never feeling his hands and mouth roaming over
her bare skin, never making love with him again.
Rolling onto her side, she stared at the
closed door to her room and grinned. Roark’s room was next to hers.
Surely, they could manage sneaking in and out of each other’s
rooms, each other’s beds while here, whether that be for one night
or ten.
She stood and doffed her old coarsely woven
long tunic and dressed in the soft, finely woven long tunic and
apron on the bed. Her hair was still damp from the bath, and she
felt a stone lighter with the dirt and grime washed out of it.
She found a comb and brush on the dressing
table and set to work on the knots and tangles, remembering how
Roark would comb her hair with his fingers, rubbing delightful
circles with his fingertips into her scalp, and other places.
Squirming on her seat, she concentrated on plaiting her hair in one
long braid, pulled on a pair of soft, kidskin boots that were at
the foot of the bed, and opened the door to find Roark standing
outside of it, his hand raised as if about to knock. His warm smile
melting Alina’s already overheated body.
“You look beautiful,” he told her, offering
her his arm. “Not as beautiful as you did in the green worm weave
you wore on Spring’s Eve, but green is definitely your color.”