Chapter 28
CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHT
“Fourteen south, six east along the ridge road. The rest I scattered through the fishing villages where the Norseman’s scouts willnae even ken they’re there.”
Niall stood in the doorway of the solar with his arms folded, delivering the report with the flat disinterest of a man recounting the weather. He was broad, scarred across the knuckles, and possessed the particular talent of never asking a question that wasn’t his business.
Douglas Graham didn’t look up from the map he was studying. “And?”
“Ragnar’s patrols watched ‘em go. Two scouts tracked our lads past the headland before turnin’ back.” A pause. “They think ye’re pullin’ out.”
“Aye.” Douglas traced the curve of Uist’s southern coastline with his thumbnail. “That’s the idea.”
Silence settled between them, filled only by the wind shouldering against Mingary’s seaward wall. The castle clung to its headland like a fist of dark stone, squat and graceless, its curtain walls angled to break the Atlantic gales that hammered the peninsula nine months out of twelve.
But it had not been built for a Graham.
Douglas had taken it through leverage and a well-timed loan to a lesser chief who’d drunk his way through three harvests—the kind of transaction that would never be found in a charter but held firmer than any royal seal.
Niall shifted his weight. “Some of the lads are wonderin’ when they can come back.”
“They’ve served their purpose well enough I’d say.” Douglas straightened from the table. “Half of ‘em dinnae ken why they were sent in the first place, Niall. The other half ken better than tae talk. Let ‘em scatter.”
Niall absorbed this the way he absorbed everything—without expression, without objection. It was why Douglas kept him around. He’d always believed that loyalty was cheap and silence expensive.
And Niall gave it freely.
“There’s the matter of the captain,” Niall said. “He’s been in the lower hall since before dawn. Nervous as a rabbit in a snare.”
“Good.” Douglas picked up the cup of wine he hadn’t touched yet and studied it without drinking. “Nervous men listen.”
“Want me tae bring him up?”
“Nay.” He set the cup down. Smoothed a crease in the map that didn’t need smoothing. “Let him sit in it a while longer.”
Niall’s mouth twitched—the closest he came to commentary. “Ye’ve been lettin’ a lot of things just sit lately, me laird.”
“I dinnae appreciate yer tone.” Douglas said, his hazel eyes flashing. “Six weeks isnae sittin’, Niall. ‘Tis buildin’.”
Douglas moved to the window. Beyond the headland, the sound stretched gray and restless toward Mull, and past that, the open water where the shipping lanes bent north toward Uist. He could see the route in his mind the way other men saw roads—every current, every blind approach, every stretch where a ship could change course without being spotted from shore.
“The Stag of Uist is a disciplined man. And such men trust their own judgment. They watch, they weigh, they count.” He turned.
“So I gave him somethin’ tae count. Withdrawals.
Departures. Men leavin’ me service in numbers that tell a very specific story. ”
“That ye’ve lost yer nerve.”
“That I’ve lost me resources. Me men. Me stomach fer the fight.
” The corner of Douglas’s mouth curled. “After the village—after I lost Cormac and the others in that alley—he expects me tae cower in some obscure corner of Scotland tae lick me wounds. And the Stag has been watching me dae exactly that fer six weeks.”
“Have ye?” Niall asked, and it was the closest thing to a probing question he’d offered in months.
Douglas held his gaze. “What dae ye think?”
Niall said nothing. Which was, of course, the right answer.
The lower hall smelled of brine and tallow and stone that never fully dried. Mingary sat so close to the water that the sea found its way into everything—the mortar, the timber, the air itself.
Douglas descended the stone stairs with the measured stride of a man who understood that making someone wait was its own currency, and took the chair across from the cold hearth without offering so much as a greeting.
Rowan Taversham stood near the grate, grizzled and wind-beaten, with the leathery hands of a man who’d spent twenty years hauling rope and reading tide charts.
He operated a merchant cog out of the Orkney routes—a vessel licensed to trade along Ragnar Ketilsson’s coastal waters under the Bergen compact.
He was also two hundred marks in debt to a moneylender in Kirkwall who had recently, and quite coincidentally, come under Douglas Graham’s patronage.
“Sit,” Douglas said.
Taversham lowered himself onto the edge of his chair as though it might give way beneath him. “Me laird, I—”
“When yer ship enters Uist’s harbor,” Douglas cut him off, “and the guards already ken the captain, already ken the crew, already ken the manifest matches every entry in the harbor master’s ledger—how thoroughly dae they perform searches?”
Taversham swallowed. “They… count the crates. Check the seals.”
“And?”
“And... that’s the whole of it. They dinnae open every one. Nae fer a vessel they’ve cleared a hundred times before.”
“So ‘tis just as I thought.” Douglas leaned back in his chair, his index finger tapping his chin. “Ye have tae understand, Captain, trust is nay more than a man-made system. And every system has a gap wide enough tae sail through, if ye ken where tae look.”
“Me laird, I dinnae understand what ye’d be wantin’ me tae—”
“Then I’ll speak plain and slow so ye can keep up. There’s a shipment due in three days. Timber, iron, salt. The last passage before the autumn currents close the route.”
“Aye. I’m tae oversee the exchange—”
“Ragnar Ketilsson’s wife will be at that harbor.”
Taversham went still. Not the stillness of composure—the stillness of a fish caught in a current too strong to fight.
“She willnae be there at the start,” Douglas continued.
“But she’ll come. She’s the sort who cannae leave well enough alone—and I’ll make sure there’s somethin’ tae draw her out.
A forgotten document. A discrepancy in the terms. Somethin’ small enough that she’ll think it beneath her husband’s attention, but urgent enough she willnae wait fer his blessin’ tae fix it. ”
He watched Taversham’s face cycle through understanding, then denial, then the grey pallor of a man who sees what’s being asked and knows he cannot refuse.
“When the last crates are bein’ unloaded, ye’ll give the signal. Six of me men will be among yer crew, disguised as deckhands. They’ll handle the guards.” Douglas paused. “Ye’ll handle the ship.”
“Handle the—” Taversham’s voice cracked. “Ye’re askin’ me tae abduct the wife of a Viking jarl. On his own shores. Under his own—”
“I’m nae askin’ ye anythin’, Captain.”
Douglas reached into his belt pouch and produced a folded parchment. He laid it on the table between them, turned it so the figures faced the captain, and waited.
Taversham stared at the debt record. Every mark, every missed payment, every lender’s note that now bore Douglas Graham’s seal instead of the Kirkwall moneylender’s.
The silence stretched. Douglas let it.
“He’ll kill me,” Taversham whispered. “When the savage finds out—and he will find out—”
“He might.”
“Might?” The word came out strangled. “The man’s called the Stag of Uist fer a reason, me laird. I’ve seen what his kind dae tae—”
“Good. Then ye ken perfectly well what’s at stake.” Douglas folded his hands. “But that’s a problem fer after, Captain. Right now, yer problem is the two hundred marks ye owe a man who answers tae me, and what becomes of yer wife and daughters in Kirkwall when I call that debt due.”
The last of the fight left Taversham’s body the way air leaves a punctured bellows. His shoulders dropped, his hands went flat on the table, palms down, as though bracing against a floor that had tilted beneath him.
“Three days,” Douglas said quietly.
“And the woman?” Taversham’s voice was barely a sound. “What’s tae happen tae her?”
Douglas stood and straightened his tunic. “Ye’ll take her alive and undamaged.” He waved his hand dismissively. “She’s nay use tae me otherwise.”
He was halfway to the stairs when Taversham spoke again, raw and wrecked. “I’m a dead man either way, aren’t I.”
Douglas paused and considered the question with the same detached precision he applied to everything.
“Most men are, Captain. The only choice ye’ve ever had is who kills ye, and how much time ye can buy yerself before they strike.”
He climbed the stairs without looking back.
Niall was waiting in the solar, leaned against the wall with his arms crossed, the same position Douglas had left him in, as though the man had simply stopped moving the moment the door closed.
“Well?”
“He’ll see tae it.” Douglas returned to the window.
The sound had darkened toward evening, the water running black where it broke against Mingary’s rocks far below.
From that headland, on a clear day, a man could see the shipping lanes that fed the western isles—every vessel that passed between the mainland and the Hebrides moved through waters Douglas could watch, if not yet control.
But he would, very soon. “He hasnae got the spine fer much else.”
“And if the Norseman’s guard is heavier than ye expect?”
“It willnae be.” Douglas pressed his hand against the cold stone of the embrasure.
“I’ve given Ragnar Ketilsson exactly what he wants—a month of silence, a retreat he can measure and count and explain tae his men.
I’m certain he’s already easin’ the watch.
already lettin’ his people believe the worst is past.”
He turned from the window and met Niall’s flat gaze. “That will be his downfall. The trade comes in three days. Isolda Ketilsson walks herself ontae me ship, and the Stag and the entire wretched Pact discovers what every man discovers when he lets a woman past his defenses.”
“What’s that, me laird?”
Douglas smiled. It was a thin and all teeth but there was no triumph in it, not yet. It was the expression of a man who had watched every piece on the board drift to exactly where he needed them and now had only to reach out and close his hand.
“That love is the widest gap in any wall ever built.”
He turned back to the sound and waited.
Soon, he would have Isolda in his grasp. And then, he would use her in whatever way necessary to shatter the sham of the Pact.