Chapter Two #3
His da received a savage glare. “You are behind this,” he rapped out, his ire laying a more bitter edge on his words than he would have wished. “I vowed when I left that I’d make things aright, and I would have. Even now. And at the soonest!”
“You do not ken the ill winds that have been sweeping o’er this isle,” Donald MacKinnon insisted, his voice catching. “Troubles where’er we . . .” He trailed off, hunching over as great, rasping coughs seized him.
When they subsided, he straightened, a shaking hand pressed to his chest. “Donall MacLean has proved himself a strong friend,” he got out, speaking with effort. “He sent us enough good Scots siller to commence work even before the Lady Amicia set foot on MacKinnons’ Isle.”
“This has naught to do with MacLean’s generosity. There is none in all the Isles who’d deny he is a good and honorable man, a fine laird. I mean no ill to him.” Magnus paused, blew out an agitated breath. “I would only that you’d waited until my return.”
Donald MacKinnon plucked at his lower lip, a flush staining his cheeks. “Nay, nay, nay, laddie,” he said at last. “We couldna done. Not with your lady’s dowry coming to us, a gift from the heavens.”
He stared at Magnus, his expression an odd mix of defiance and . . . dread. “We could not wait another day, see you. The cur—”
“God’s eyes!” Magnus’s patience snapped.
“The only curse e’er visited upon this isle is the inability of its keepers to hold fast to their fortunes,” he declared, not troubling to lower his voice.
Bile rising in his throat, he swept everyone in the room with a heated stare.
“That is the truth of it—I promise you!”
“Nay, you mistake. A shadow has lain across us longer than time can remember,” his father minded him, belligerence in his reedy voice. “For sure since the day the first laird, Reginald of the Victories, set the foundations of this stronghold.”
“Reginald of the Victories, whom God rest, made his own fate—as do we all.” Magnus flung out an arm to take in the whole of the solar’s pathetically bare walls.
“No powers of darkness e’er railed against him or these stones, never you fear.
Naught clouds the fortunes of the once-great Clan Fingon but our own wretched ineptitude. ”
His own inadequacies clawing at his innards, Magnus smoothed a hand over his tight-pressed lips and began pacing the solar. But his foul humor tagged after him, its cloying grip too firm to outmaneuver.
Sakes, the chamber’s very emptiness of furnishings mocked him. And the few remaining amenities only underscored what little comforts Coldstone Castle could offer. A lacking that would pain him all his days if he could not soon amend it.
Not at all sure how he meant to do so, he passed one of the wide arched window embrasures and a chill blast of damp, salt-laden air hit him full in the face, making him shiver and worsening his mood.
Scowling, he drew his plaid closer about him and glanced into the shadowy alcove, glared at the useless, rain-warped shutters. But it was the two flanking benches of the deep embrasure that drew his eye.
Stripped to the naked stone, they met his wrath face on. Twin-staring slabs of cold gray, full of silent accusation and seeming to follow his progress around the room, aimed recriminations at him that proved every bit as damning as the distress in his father’s eyes.
The disappointment on Amicia MacLean’s lovely face.
The pity in the sad shake of Colin’s head, and the tsk-tsk’ing reprimand of old Dagda’s sharp-edged tongue.
Wishing he’d held his own, he wheeled about to face his father.
“Ne’er would I censure you for believing such foolery—God kens enough storms of plaguey fortune have washed o’er this isle throughout the centuries for any man to call us Devil-damned, but I’d wished to have done with it myself, see you?
Without outside aid. Not Donall the Bold’s.
Not his undeniably fetching sister’s. Not any man’s. I—”
He broke off, his voice cracking in his vexation. Determined to spare himself further humiliation, he made straight for the door, intending to absent himself with all good haste, but a gentle hand lit on the mail of his sleeve.
“A word with you, sir.”
To his surprise, or perhaps not, that one touch, and the caring in the Lady Amicia’s deep brown eyes, proved as mighty a hold as Colin’s most steely-fingered grip.
Instinctively distancing himself, he waited, but she only gave him the faintest smile. A wee, hesitant one as if she, too, bore her own vexing cares.
As if she might need him.
A notion too dangerous to ponder.
So he pushed it away, and found his voice in the doing. “Aye?”
“Can we not share a walk?” she wanted to know, the soft lilt of her Isleswoman’s voice as seductive as the compassion warming her black-lashed eyes. She pressed his arm. “Mayhap up on the ramparts where we may speak privily and unguarded?”
Magnus shook his head, tried not to inhale her warm, womanly scent. “There is scarce little to be said before I have had time to consider this . . . this state of affairs, and what can be done about it.”
Lifting her hand from his sleeve, she smoothed the backs of her fingers down his cheek. “You are sure?”
“Never more so,” Magnus blurted, feeling her touch ripple in too-pleasurable waves over and through the whole of him. “Walking with you on the battlements would not allow me the peace I need to think.”
And for very different reasons than she suspected!
“Very well.” She dropped her hand. “But allow me one observation, please.”
“So long as you are here, you may speak your full mind.” He aimed a sidelong look at his father and Dagda. “I do not hold much with intrigues and secrets.”
“Then know that I saw you shiver when you strode past the opened window,” she began, her features carefully schooled. “Consider, too, good Magnus, that even as a chill breeze brings gray clouds, so can that very wind banish the darkness so the sun can warm all in its wake.”
Magnus stared at her, wordless.
Wholly lost, he found himself overcome by an irrepressible urge to draw her to him and drink in her sweetness and warmth until he fair drowned in the good of her. But any such indulgence would only make it more difficult to send her away, so he held his silence.
His father suffered no such affliction. “Heh, heh!” He crowed with righteous glee. “See what a fine bride I found you,” he declared, jabbing the air with a knotty finger. “She is not only pleasing to look at but wise . . . as you’d be if you’d heed her wish and take the air with her.”
A sage nod from Dagda and the narrow-eyed urging on Colin Grant’s face unhinged Magnus’s tongue. “The only taking I’ll be doing is to my own good bedchamber,” he said, turning on his heel. “I’ve sore need of rest. Whate’er needs to be yet discussed can be done on the morrow.”
“Your bedchamber?” Donald MacKinnon’s brief burst of high humor vanished as if it’d never been. “You canna sleep there—we’ve readied the old quarters of Reginald of the Victories for you . . . for you and your bride. She is already settled there.”
“My room will serve me well enough.”
“But—”
“On the morrow, Da.” His mind set, Magnus strode from the solar.
“Saint Columba—save us! Ooooh, blessed martyrs . . . !” the old man cried after him.
Ignoring his father’s haverings, Magnus stalked down the gloom-chased passage, making straight for the turnpike stair.
But try as he might to seal his ears, his da’s gabblings echoed through the shadows, craftily using the wan light of the smoking wall torches to find every wee crack in Magnus’s armor.
And to his worst horror, the most disturbing objection of all found his ear just as he reached the upward-winding stairwell.
“Your old room is no more, laddie. The power o’ darkness snatched it away—”
Half-convinced his exhaustion and ire had conjured the absurd words, and not his babbling sire, Magnus took the stairs two at a time all the same.
At the second landing, he sprinted down an even mustier-smelling corridor, but knew a great sigh of relief when he spotted the familiar oaken door to his boyhood bedchamber at its end.
Feeling much the fool for letting the old man’s ravings get to him, he yanked open the chamber door . . . and near stepped into a black-yawning abyss.
“A mercy . . . !” Clinging to the sooty doorjamb, he stared in disbelief at the gaping darkness that had once been his room. His da had been right. . . . The chamber no longer existed.
It had indeed been snatched away as if by some evil enchantment.
Or an ancient curse.
Not much later, a stealthy darkness crept over the neighboring isle of Doon, cloaking not just the coastline but sweeping land-inward until even the loneliest moorlands and peat hags lay silent and deserted in the black, bewitching night.
Doon’s Islesfolk slept as well, lulled into deep slumber by the comfort of their turf fires and the quiet of the chill Highland night.
Aye, they slept . . . all save one.
Devorgilla, Doon’s resident cailleach since longer than stones were old, tossed and turned within the thick, white-washed walls of her thatched cottage. And as ne’er before, her pallet of dried heather and bracken proved too lumpy to spend her aged bones a good night’s rest.
Blowing out a frustrated breath, the crone rolled onto her side and flung a knotty-elbowed arm over her grizzled head. Truth be told, there was naught wrong with her bed. Were she honest, she doubted the finest high folk in the land slept more comfortably than she did on her bed o’ heather.
Nay, it was the eerie, dark green shadow she’d spied lurking over MacKinnons’ Isle earlier in the day that stole her sleep and prickled her nape.
Out gathering herbs and other vital ingredients for her potions and charms, she’d glanced across the sea and seen the strange darkness swirling round and o’er the other island like some vile and pulsing dome of sheer, living evil.
Ne’er in all her years had she looked on such malevolence.