Chapter Five #2
“A not-too-near one, I am betting?” the long-nosed knave pursued, tracing a slow finger round and round one of the concentric circles carved on the chair arm.
“Kin is kin.” Magnus let out a long sigh. The blackguard was pushing him over and beyond his patience. “Sakes, Colin, she is the one I spoke to you of months ago . . . the cousin I meant to dower with some of my tourney winnings.”
Turning aside, he pressed his fingers against his temples. “Do you not see I have failed her, too? She is a bastard, see you? No man will have her without a notable dowry. And now—would that it were otherwise—it would seem I must hurt her heart as well as leaving her dowerless.”
“I would take her. Dowered or no.”
Magnus swung back around. “And her bastardy?”
“Traitor, thief, advantage-taking sorner . . . those are the titles that carry shame, my friend.” Colin eyed him, his expression bitter earnest. “On my soul, if she would have me as I stand before you—my lands burned, my keep in ruin, and no family to welcome her to their hearth, then I am telling you I care little if she is a by-blow . . . and even less whose!”
“And that she fancies herself . . . I mean, you care not that—”
“That she thinks herself taken with you?” Colin finished for Magnus, his roguish smile beginning to spread across his face again. “Guidsakes, MacKinnon, think you I could not turn her head if I put my mind to it?”
Magnus hesitated, his gaze on the dark, lowering clouds. Of late, there was scarce little he cared to put his faith in—even Colin Grant’s redoubtable skill at charming women.
Whole legions of them the last time Magnus bothered to notice.
“She but needs a bit of wooing,” Colin expounded, clearly warming to the notion. “She is a fine and high-spirited lass—a meet bride to walk beside me on a path that will prove anything but smooth.”
“She is notable strong-willed,” Magnus argued, nudging a spongy clump of red-brown sphagnum moss with the toe of his boot. “Do not think I am not fond of her, but I would be honest with you. Her tongue—”
“Devil take me, but I am betting her tongue could make the hardest man beg for mercy.” Colin released a low, appreciative whistle, slapped his good thigh. “I’ faith, the mere thought of such sweetness is a nigh unbearable incitement.”
His jaw near hitting the squishy ground, Magnus stared at his friend. “Sakes, you have naught else on your mind? In these sore times?”
“I would rather dwell on bliss-spending thoughts than otherwise.”
Magnus suppressed a derisive snort.
His own thoughts went to his friend’s empty coffers, the rubble and waste of his once-proud holding. The injured leg that, unless healed properly, would hamper him for life. Truth be told, the list of woes and misfortune plaguing them both could be recited until the morning broke.
Magnus’s head began to ache.
“I canna believe you would obsess yourself with wenching when your prospects are more bleak than mine,” he said, pinching the bridge of his nose. “At least Coldstone Castle is yet standing—such as it is.”
Colin’s good humor faded, but only for a moment. “The lass has a lusty touch, see you? It took all my strength not to run full-stretch when she was a-washing round my ballocks yester eve,” he confessed, having the decency to appear a wee bit abashed as the admission left his lips.
“But never you mind her sweet-stroking fingers.” He leaned forward, looked directly into Magnus’s eyes. “Do you not ken what a boon having such a braw lass at my side would be for me—facing what I must?”
Well-chastised, Magnus nodded. What else could he do? Already, he could feel the heat inching up his neck to tinge his cheeks.
The inference behind Colin’s words could not have been more plain if he’d held a gazing glass before Magnus’s nose.
Ten gazing glasses!
Still, their plights could not be compared.
His was . . . different.
Colin took life too lightly, lacked Magnus’s deeper-sitting beliefs and values.
His abiding sense of responsibility.
Even so, the lout had made him feel every inch a stone-hearted buffoon. Magnus cleared his throat, ready to apologize—even if he knew himself in the right.
“I did not mean—”
“I ken what you meant,” Colin said, all smiles again. He waved a careless hand. “As for wenching, so long as my obsessing is but to lay claim to one bonnie piece, what can be the harm in it?”
Magnus rubbed his throbbing forehead. Now he did feel the buffoon. “And here I’d been thinking—”
“That I would use the shadowy confines of a window embrasure to coax a kiss from my best friend’s wife?” Colin made a wry face, but his tone conveyed he bore no ill feelings.
And if Magnus yet harbored any doubts, Colin’s broad wink allayed them.
“Discredit my honor if you must, but ’tis well you aught ken my taste in women,” he minded Magnus. “Have we not enjoyed enough shared evenings of, shall we say fair entertainment, for you to recall I have e’er looked to abscond into the heather with pale-haired maids?”
“Och, to be sure, I remember well,” Magnus agreed. Indeed, the image of Colin with a veritable parade of Janet look-alikes on his arm tramped across his mind’s eye. “You e’er sought wee slips of lassies with corn-colored hair and huge blue eyes.”
Colin nodded, looking pleased. “Aye, so I did—and still do, I vow! Just as you e’er looked to lose yourself in the arms of sultrier beauties with well-rounded curves.”
“Your observation skills serve you well,” Magnus conceded.
Looking down, he made a pretense of studying his knuckles rather than risk letting his astute friend glimpse the damning truth behind his fascination with raven-haired women.
His pitiable penchant for painting another woman’s face on every dark-haired lass who’d e’er deigned to hitch her skirts for him.
Amicia MacLean’s face.
The one he’d carried in his heart for more years than he cared to remember.
Disaster and havoc.
Nothing left but a few scattered stones . . . the dust of your bones.
Tears, lamentations, even a falling upon your knees will not avail you.
The malice-filled recitations came with the turn of the tide, the wind and the sea echoing each hate-filled cry and carrying their wrath from the bowels of Coldstone’s most secret heart to a place enfolded by a quiet too deep for human ears—a lone tidal islet too forsaken for even hermits and holy men to seek a foothold upon its jagged, black-glistening surface.
The Isle of Doon’s accursed Lady Rock.
A threshold to another world, and where things have no reckoning of time, though none would suspect the like—none save Doon’s own blessed gruagach.
A benevolent female spirit, older than the ages, she whiled on the islet now, toying with the ropey strands of seaweed tangled in her unbound hair, her very presence making her an interloper in time. A trespasser in a world she’d walked often and in many guises, some of them human.
A world that, at times, she’d held more dear than had been good for her.
In recent years by earth reckoning, she’d thought she’d found peace at last, believed she’d addressed and attended the duties gathered during her last sojourn upon Doon’s fair shores.
But certain tasks yet bound her, in particular the malevolence of a vengeful soul soiled by irrevocable darkness.
So she returned again and again, braving the loneliness of her perch in the sea, and scarce noting the waves, breaking high and icy cold against the islet’s treacherous rocks.
With an ache in her heart, but a purpose unbending, she endured the lashing wind and steady drizzle, her gaze ever fixed on the massive walls of Baldoon, mighty stronghold of the MacLeans and her last home in a world she’d not quite been ready to leave.
In that short mortal existence, she’d been Iain MacLean’s first bride. Fated to perish at the hand of a greed-consumed kinsman for the good her passing would eventually bring the clans whose well-being she was destined to guard.
And now, in her true form once more, she sheltered them from every dark wind and sought to keep them from harm for so long as they walked the earth.
Her great love for them welling in her heart, she watched Baldoon’s silent walls and sent those within all her goodwill and strength. Welcoming light shone from a few of the castle’s narrow-slit windows, the golden warmth beckoning fiercely, but only as echoes of another time.
Precious memories of days gone by, each one caught up by the wind and hurtled through the night as swiftly as they’d come.
Bittersweet moments vanishing without a trace, just as the dark one’s rantings just now, had struck and then sped past her.
Each malediction barreling onward to plague and unsettle other hapless souls who, like her, ought better be at rest.
So she tore her longing from a place she’d best tread no more, and made cause with the windy night . . . with the powers imbued in her present state.
By a softly muttered incantation or two, and a fervent belief in the good of her work, the gruagach summoned a fine and luminous mist of green.
Just enough magic for the whisper of a sigh to whisk her from the wave-splashed rocks of the tidal islet, so bound to her by fate, to the comforting hearthside of a trusted friend—the cozy thatched cottage of Devorgilla, Doon’s e’er-dutiful and revered wisewoman.
Not that the gruagach sought a fireside blether this darkest of nights, nor even a taste of the cailleach’s famed heather ale. Truth be told, Devorgilla slept . . . if her intermittent snores and wheezes were any indication.
For a good long while, the gruagach peered down at the old woman, then gave a light wave of her hand, filling the room with a soft, shimmering mist of palest green.
A wee precautionary measure to keep the crone lost in her dreams, and to win herself a few unobserved moments to look about and see if her quiet urgings had been heeded.
Or if a stronger, more forceful intervention would be required.