Chapter Nine
“PSHAW, LADDIE—are you going to be a great gowk and deny the curse now?”
His face flushed with triumph, Donald MacKinnon stood behind his laird’s chair at the high table and aimed a victorious, I-told-you-so stare at Magnus.
“’Tis a belly-turning sight, eh?” Jutting his bristly chin, the old man pointed at the almost-dead adder dangling from his middle son, Dugan’s, dirk blade.
“God kens, a limpet would own to the truth—admit what I’ve been telling you.
We’ve been set upon by forces darker than the crack o’ the Devil’s own behind! ”
Magnus eyed the writhing creature with distaste. “Belly-turning, to be sure,” he agreed, ignoring the rest.
His innards churning indeed, he scanned the faces of his fellow clansmen. Surging forward in a great crush, they elbowed their way from every corner of the huge, groin-vaulted hall, pressing near to gape and stare. They crowded the dais, grave-faced to a man, each one stunned into silence.
Chill gray light slanted in on them through narrow, high-set windows to illuminate their ill ease—their fulsome belief in Donald MacKinnon’s nonsensical ravings about curses and suchlike devilry.
Magnus frowned.
The discovery of the adder, and the superstition clouding his kinsmen’s eyes, laid a pall over an afternoon he’d already been dreading for days.
And now it’d gone from bad to worse.
Clearing his throat, he eyed his ashen-faced clansmen, forced himself to swallow the bitter taste in his mouth.
“My sorrow that our minds run so wide apart,” he said, steely-voiced.
“But I say you, the only fiend of hell who had aught to do with bringing yon adder into our midst is a flesh-and-blood man walking amongst us—not some nebulous creature from the hoary realm of the dead or the secret land of the fey!”
His pronouncement made, he folded his arms and let his gaze rake each man.
To his relief, he caught a few nods of accord from within the circle of gawking men.
But only a few. Most turned away to reach for the nearest ale cup or scratch with furious intent at sudden-appearing itches.
A curious affliction that seemed to ripple through the entire ranks of MacKinnons gathered in the hall.
Bothered by nothing of the sort, Donald MacKinnon all but snorted.
He flashed a defiant glare at Magnus. “You needn’t glower at the rest of us, laddie,” he said, his tone cantankerous. “I vow you’d be equally loath to doubt had you not been away all these years, if you’d seen the stress and strife we’ve suffered.”
“I have seen my share of suffering, never you doubt it.” Magnus smothered the images before they could take form, closing his mind’s eye to the sight of mangled bodies and torn flesh, his ears to the soul-splitting screams of men in mortal agony, his nose to the stench of freshly spilled blood.
Glancing at the smoke-blackened ceiling, he pinched the bridge of his nose until the memories receded.
“’Tis the goings-on and turmoil on this isle, I meant, and well you know it,” his father groused. “Our trials have been great, our sorrows endless.”
Loud cries of assent greeted these words. Shouts accompanied by the stamping of not a few booted feet and the jabbing in the air of more than one clenched fist.
Spurred on by his kinsmen’s support, the aging laird banged the hilt of his dirk on the table, silencing the men he’d just rallied. At the ensuing quiet, he clutched the back of his chair with a white-knuckled grip and fixed a hot blue gaze on Magnus.
“If you doubt me and these men of your own good blood, ask your lady wife. She has seen enough to fill your ears for days,” he said, his stare a snapping challenge.
“’Tis a wonder she hasn’t hied herself straight back to Baldoon and its curse-free, snakeless comforts!
Aye, be glad she is abovestairs tending her ablutions or whate’er it is womenfolk are e’er about, and didn’t see .
. . this! And on the very day of your wedding celebration revelries. ”
His piece said, he swayed a bit on his feet and, seeming to sink into himself, began mumbling inanities. Blessedly inaudible ones, too low-voiced to be understood.
Not that Magnus needed to hear them.
The increased mottling of the old man’s face spoke loudly enough.
As did the renewed unrest sweeping the length and breadth of the crowded hall.
“Hear me, good men,” Magnus called out to them. “Such talk serves nothing. Senseless beating of the air brings naught but wasted breath. But, aye, I agree. This”—he jerked his head toward the adder—“reeks of someone choosing the day with care.”
That last got his father’s attention. “So you admit the snake didn’t slither in here on its own to say us a fine g’day?”
Magnus hesitated, choked back a groan. “Nay, there, at least, we stand in fullest agreement. I hold that it was indeed deposited here—just not by unworldly powers.”
“So says he of little faith!” His father threw up his hands. “Faugh and bother! There be more to this world than cold steel, coin, and what we can see with our naked eye,” he railed. “Some things a man just kens with his heart, laddie. You would be wise to learn that.”
“And how say you, Dugan?” Magnus rounded on his brother, slid another half-fascinated, half-repulsed look at the dangling adder.
Dugan shrugged. Standing alone, for no one seemed wont to seek his company, he held his arm extended well before him, his swarthy features working with clear distaste.
“I say it scarce matters how the thing came to be here. Only that we found it before . . .” Dugan let the words trail off, looked across the torchlit hall to where their youngest brother, Hugh, sat on a trestle bench, a knot of cooing womenfolk gathered round him.
Magnus followed Dugan’s gaze. “Nay, my brother, it matters greatly. Hugh could have been bitten—reaching for his lute and finding an adder coiled beside it!” he said, turning back to eye the snake again.
“Think you I dinna know that!” came Dugan’s hot rebuttal, but Magnus scarce heeded him, his attention on the snake.
Skewered through the middle, it twitched and jerked in the last moments of its venomous life. Fire glow caught on the adder’s scales, turning the pale gray skin a bright-gleaming silver, while the black zigzag running down its back and the beady red eyes showed the creature to be a male.
A blessedly dead male . . . and soon to be roasted.
Cursing under his breath, Magnus crossed the dais with great strides, and snatched the dirk—snake, and all—from Dugan’s hand.
Before his brother could even think to form a protest, much less splutter one, Magnus hurled the dagger and its grisly victim into the hearth fire. Whirling back to Dugan, he unsheathed his own dirk—his best one—and thrust it, hilt first, at his brother.
“Keep it—with my gratitude,” he said, his voice a shade huskier than usual, his throat over-tight at what might have happened to Hugh. “Like as not, you saved our brother’s life.”
Dugan fingered the dirk, looked undecided.
“Think you I would stand by with that . . . thing coiled and ready to sink its fangs into Hugh’s hand?
” He lowered his voice. “He froze, I tell you. There was naught to do but knock him aside and kill the wretched creature. I just ne’er meant to shove Hugh so hard he’d stumble and fall. ”
“A hurting arm is nowise so dire as a body filled with poisonous snake venom,” Magnus said, his voice pitched equally low.
“Aye, true enough, but . . .” Dugan blew out a long breath. “It still waters my bones to think what could have happened.”
Magnus gripped his brother’s arm, squeezed. “But it didn’t—as shall naught else.”
“I pray God you have the rights of it,” Dugan said, his brow still knitted as he peered down the hall again. He had yet to sheath the new dirk.
Taking it from him, but gently this time, Magnus tucked the dagger beneath the other’s belt. He gestured round him then, waving a hand at the arras-hung walls and the many long tables already groaning with viands and wine and ales, all in preparation for the night’s feasting.
“If I am expected to accept such plentitude without a flinch, you can receive my dirk as a token gesture of brotherly appreciation, can you not?”
“Hugh would’ve done the same . . . for me, or any of us,” Dugan countered, but patted the dirk hilt all the same, at last looking a bit pleased.
“So what are we going to do about the dark powers a-slinking about within these walls?” Their father’s voice rose above the chaos again.
He stared at them from the high table as he tipped a leather-wrapped flagon of uisge beatha to his lips for a long, throat-bobbing pull of the fiery Highland spirits.
“My bones tell me there will soon be even more ruination coming down o’er our heads,” he vowed, glaring belligerence.
“In especial, now that the adder failed to do their fiendish handiwork and devil ships are plying our waters! No telling what will become of us if e’er that ill craft chooses to set ashore! ”
Magnus drew a great breath, pressed fingers to his aching temples.
“We redress the balance is what we do,” he said with all the patience he could muster.
“With the adder, this was a close strike—we dare not let any such danger come so near again,” he added, harboring no illusions of the difficulty in avoiding blows from an unseen foe.
A fiendishly clever foe.
But one he’d find—even if he had to overturn each stone of the castle, search every Devil-damned bog on the island.
An endeavor he would embark upon that very afternoon.
Hot gall thick in his throat, he tossed another glance at Hugh. His youngest brother had rolled up his sleeve now, and Dagda appeared to be clucking like a mother hen as she rubbed salve on Hugh’s fast-swelling elbow.