Chapter Three
“SO YOU ARE BACK!”
Magnus jerked, his fingers tightening on the soot-smeared doorjamb of his now-vanished bedchamber before he wheeled about to face the second fetching young lass he’d have to disappoint that night.
“Praises be!” His cousin Janet MacKinnon stood before him, all gleaming silver-blond hair and rosy-flushed cheeks.
“I prayed God every night that He keep you safe,” she breathed, one hand pressed to her breast. A teensy package, she beamed up at him, her great blue eyes alight with adoration.
“Faith, I can scarce believe it is you.”
“Och, ’tis me, sure enough,” Magnus said, waves of shock still coursing through him. “And come home to more surprises than I have known for long.”
Janet’s face clouded. “Would that it were not so,” she said, glancing aside before he could catch and hold her gaze.
Even so, Magnus eyed her sharply, discomfort coiling in his belly, for the sudden petulance of her tone and the fading of her smile revealed more than her words.
But the taint of cold smoke permeating the dank passage vexed him in a far worse way.
Aggrieved as seldom before, he tossed another quick glance at the charred devastation of his former bedchamber. “Blood of Christ—the entire east tower is naught but a burned shell . . . all floors, gone.”
Though clearly months had passed since the fire, he could almost feel blistering heat pouring off the blackened stones, even taste the coppery stench of fresh-spilled blood on chill, acrid air.
His stomach churned with the well-remembered reek of burning flesh.
Horrors he’d hoped he’d left behind him on the red-stained banks of the River Earn.
Shuddering, he pushed all thought of Dupplin Moor and its appalling ruin from his mind. “The fire, were there any . . . did anyone . . . ?”
Janet shook her fair head. “There were no injuries,” she said, understanding. “Nothing was astir in this part of the keep that night.”
Magnus released the breath he’d been holding.
But a good deal of his tension remained.
He had yet to see his brothers.
“Hugh and Dugan kept quarters in the east tower. Just below mine,” he minded his cousin, the travails of recent weeks letting his every nagging doubt roll off his tongue far too easily. “Their chambers are as gone as mine.”
Janet drew a cautious-sounding breath, her attention on a deep-splayed arrow slit cut into the passage’s thick walling. “It saddens me that I must be the one to tell you of these ill happenings,” she said, finally looking back at him.
Something in her tone prickled the fine hairs on the back of his neck and he studied her face in the flickering torchlight, looked for signs that she sought to cushion a blow.
“Your brothers are hale and unscathed.” She took his dread, deftly displaying her unsettling ability to ken his mind. A talent he’d found plaguey annoying in their youth but welcomed all the more now, this moment.
“And where are they?” That came gruff. “Do you know?”
Janet nodded. “They are with the other men, working with the shipwright, down on the boat strand. The lot of them toil by pitch-pine torches until the small hours,” she told him.
“And you needn’t thank me for telling you,” she added with a glimmer of the cheekiness he’d so cherished in her as a young lassie.
A sassiness that, in recent years, had sadly given way to moon eyes, pouting lips, and fluttering lashes.
Soppy silliness he’d ne’er had time for in any female, least of all one he loved as a sister.
And as if she’d probed his mind yet again, her expression sobered. “You need not grieve for them or anyone else within these walls. No one suffered aught in the fire. Naught save the scrapes and bruises we harvested afterward, clearing away the rubble.”
She looked away again, this time peering past him into the shadows of the ruined tower. “It happened during the Yuletide celebrations, see you?”
“So?” He didn’t see at all.
A fire was a fire was a fire . . . and a life was a precious and fragile thing, its breath and pulse snuffed out in less than the blink of an eye.
That much he’d learned.
At the latest, after seeing Scotland’s finest spill their life’s blood beneath a hailstorm of English arrows.
“I dinna see what Christmastide revelry has to do with sparing men the warmth of a raging inferno.”
“And I say you should.” She flipped her braids over her shoulders, gave him a challenging look.
“Or have you not done any carousing on the tourney circuit, Magnus MacKinnon? Have you forgotten that nights of chaos and conviviality often leave the best of men not just reeking of stale wine and light-skirted kitchen lasses, but also sleeping openmouthed on the floor rushes?”
“Christ in hell.” Magnus swallowed the bile rising in his throat. “Are you telling me the men of this household lay about beneath the trestles—drunken—whilst the whole of the east tower went up in flame?”
Janet peered hard at him. “Would you rather they’d been asleep in their beds? In that selfsame tower?”
She had him there.
Magnus clamped his jaw, gave her a stiff nod. “You are right, to be sure,” he conceded. “But it is still shameful. A sorry business.”
“A sad affair, aye—but caused by a lightning strike. The most alert guardsmen could not have prevented it. Though some say the old curse guided the bolt’s path.”
Magnus snorted. “Pray, spare me such foolhardiness. I have no wish to hear it.”
Half-turning aside, he stared into the wildly sparking flame of the nearest wall torch. Nigh guttered, its hissing lent a macabre note to their discourse, but he strove to ignore the infernal crackling . . . just as he paid no heed to Janet’s fully inappropriate adulation.
In an effort to restore the easy camaraderie they’d shared as children, he swung back around and reached a quick hand to tweak her nose. “And you, cousin mine, have too good a modicum of wits to let such prattle as ancient curses and predictions of doom pass your lips.”
“You ken how tongues will wag.” She shrugged. “The lightning did strike the very tower Reginald of the Victories’ lady wife is said to have jumped from.”
“Hoary maledictions and stones that bear such sorrow they canna even warm beneath a summer sun’s sweetest heat!” Magnus shook his head. “’Tis all twaddle spun by the seannachies on cold and dark winter nights and naught else, I swear you.”
“Never you mind what the storytellers put about,” Janet said, her lilting voice going breathy.
Excited. “All will be good now you are here again.” She reached for him, gripping his hands despite the sooty grime on them.
“Tush, but it is overlong you were away. Aye, here is a grand and notable night.”
Schooling his features lest a smile encourage her or a grimace tread too heavily on a heart he’d rather not injure, Magnus disentangled himself from her grasp.
“And you are looking bonnier than ever, Cousin.” He laid especial emphasis on their blood connection, however remote it might be.
“It grieves me that I have not done better for you.”
“Oh my soul! And you say I speak babble and nonsense?” She waved a dismissive hand.
“The bards have been singing your praises throughout the Isles these past years,” she countered, tipping back her head to stare up at him.
“The tales are innumerable. All are in awe of your prowess on the tourney field . . . your feats of valor at Dupplin Moor.”
“Nevertheless, I stand before you without a handful of silver to call my own,” Magnus said, the weight of what he must tell her heavy on his tongue.
“The modest fortune I’d amassed in ransoms and prize goods on the tourney circuit was robbed from its hiding place while I fought a battle doomed to failure before any of us could shout our war cries. ”
He rubbed the back of his neck, wished he had not just sounded like an embittered, battle-weary graybeard.
“Hear me, lass, I even bartered my best jousting mount to pay mail to more black-hearted cateran toll collectors than I care to remember.” He did not mention that the fine-blooded beast had been his only such mount.
“The last of my coin went to a lesser MacDonald chieftain for passage on his galley.”
Janet didn’t flinch, but a trace of sympathy flickered across her pretty face. On seeing it, Magnus knew a near-irresistible urge to throw back his head and roar with impotent fury.
Instead, he ran sooty fingers through his hair and took a deep breath of stale, dank air that still smelled thinly of smoke and burned timber.
“God’s eyes,” he swore, glancing up at the corridor’s stone-vaulted ceiling. It, too, bore greasy streaks of thick black soot. “Do you have any idea what those thieving clansmen charge for the privilege of crossing their Highland territories?”
He clenched his fists, blew out a hot breath before he looked back at her. “Do you not see? Saints, had I not been in possession of such prime horseflesh, like as not, I’d not be standing here this moment.”
“But you are here . . . and well.”
Magnus pinched the bridge of his nose. A persistent ache pounded behind his forehead, and if one more person, man or beast, gave voice to how well he appeared, he would not be responsible for his actions.
Thinking he heard footfalls, or mayhap the telltale click-clicking of a dog’s nails, he stared round, scrunching his eyes to peer into the darkness, but naught moved in the long passage save inky shadows and the intermittent burst of sparks from the smattering of poorly burning wall sconces.
His scalp prickled nonetheless. Turning back to Janet, he let out his breath on a long, weary sigh. “See you, lass, I lost the moneys I’d hoped to use to dower you,” he blurted before he lost his courage as well. “Nary a siller remains.”
To his amazement—or mayhap not—she evinced nary a sign of dismay. Indeed, she stretched up on her toes and gave him a quick peck on the cheek!