Chapter Sixteen
“WHAT DO YOU MEAN she is gone?”
Magnus stood on the threshold to the great hall, staring at Colin. Hot disbelief pounded through him, and his good humor from just moments earlier vanished like a puff of smoke.
“She can’t be . . . gone.” Agitation—and fear—welling inside him, he clenched his hands lest he seize his friend by the neck opening of his mailed hauberk and rattle a better answer from the lout’s lying lips.
But even before his stopped heart could resume beating, Dugan and Hugh came barreling into the hall from behind him, their own blanched-white faces underscoring without words that Colin was speaking the truth.
Bitter-cold dread squeezing the breath from him, Magnus stared at the three men, razor-sharp fear twisting his gut.
Now he knew why his scalp had prickled earlier.
Swallowing against the tightness in his throat, he focused on Hugh. “Tell me this is madness . . . that it is not true.” Saints, just putting his fear to words sliced his heart. “There must be some mistake.”
But Hugh shook his head. “They are nowhere to be found,” he panted, bending forward to brace his hands on his thighs. “We’ve searched every corner and cranny in the castle—even looked behind doors and beneath beds. They—”
“They?” Magnus’s already-hot-burning nape flamed with a fresh rush of scalding heat, even as his blood turned to ice. “Who are they?”
“Your lady wife, wee Janet, and that old she-goat, Dagda.” His da spoke up from where he stood, wringing his hands before the displaced high table. “The three of them have vanished without a trace. No one’s seen ’em since earliest cockcrow.”
“Christ . . . in . . . His . . . heaven!” Magnus roared, blood pounding hot in his ears. “My heart’s treasure . . .” That last was spoken on a thin breath of defeat, and so low he wasn’t even sure if he’d said the words aloud.
He only knew the entirety of his world spun and whirled around him and that he was struggling to draw air through a throat that seemed too tight for even a sliver of a breath to pass through.
“Why didn’t someone fetch me?”
“No one went for you because we did not think aught was amiss until just a short while ago. It was expected they’d be found,” Colin said. “Sakes, you ken they could have been anywhere—minding women’s business or suchlike.”
Magnus’s stomach turned over. His heart plummeted. It was the suchlike that terrified him.
“I told you to be wary,” his da minded him, making it worse. “The Devil crew from the ghost galley’s done and snatched all three of ’em. I can feel it in my bones!”
His bones jellied with horror, Magnus pressed an icy-cold hand against his chest and swept the hall with a furious glare.
His kinsmen, each one looking as stricken as he felt, averted their gazes.
The remnants of their raucous fast-breaking told him why.
The evidence taunted him from the tops of trestle tables in a disorderly welter of overturned ewers, empty ale cups, and trenchers of half-eaten bannocks—puddles of spilled ale speaking the loudest.
That, and the damnable bridal sheet still tacked proudly to the wall behind the high table.
The bastards had been reveling.
The whole merry lot of them, carousing in jest and good cheer, whilst his lady and two other kinswomen had been spirited away right from beneath their fool noses!
And while he, mayhap the greater fool, had been standing watch in the lofty laird’s solar, peering through curtains of rain for nonexistent ships.
“’Tis the curse again, I tell you,” his father insisted. Rocking back on his heels, he stared up at the stone-vaulted ceiling. “I knew we’d not seen the end of old Reg—”
“A pox on Reginald and his curse if e’er there was one—which I still do not believe!” Magnus jerked, a muscle leaping in his jaw. “Ghost galleys and long-dead ancestors do not abduct innocent, living women.”
The old man’s lower lip jutted. “Then what happened to them?”
“Saints alive!” Magnus exploded. “Think you I’d be standing here like a dimwit if I knew?”
His gut tied in more knots than he cared to imagine, Magnus pulled a hand down over his face and tried to think. There had to be an explanation. Like as not, they were off in some remote corner of the castle, entertaining themselves by watching the storm. Counting lightning bolts to pass the time.
No one of any intelligence would venture out into a tempest of such gale-gusting ferocity . . . and his braw lady wife had more wits about her than most men.
Even Janet and old Dagda, vexing as the seneschal could be, knew better than to tempt fate by hieing themselves into the full fury of a Highland storm once unleashed.
So where were they?
A soul-deep ache, dull-edged and throbbing, beginning to replace his initial hot burst of fury, Magnus paced before the trestle tables, the muscle jerking at his jawline keeping an annoying rhythm with his fast, long strides.
“Think!” he groused at his brothers as he strode past them. “And you!” He shot a look at Colin. “You are e’er trailing after Janet—have you any notion what could have happened to them? Where they could have gone?”
But Colin only shook his dark head, his expression grim. There could be no help there, no spark of sudden and bright inspiration.
Colin Grant, for all his earlier jollity, looked a man suffocated by the crushing weight of his own dread and fears.
And seeing his friend’s e’er-so-carefree face drawn tight and pale only increased Magnus’s own alarm.
Think, he had to think.
He glanced at his brothers again. “Is it certain they are not within the castle walls?”
“We have looked everywhere,” Dugan said, and Magnus’s heart sank.
“Then we must search the whole of the isle—storm or no.” He flickered a glance at the peat fire, noting at once that old Boiny’s favored place before the hearthstone loomed empty.
He stopped his pacing at once, looked around. “Where is Boiny? Is he gone as well?”
“Och, nay, Magnus,” a kinsman standing near the back of the hall called in answer. “That old cur is still about—he’s just casting around for scraps. Been o’er by the door the best part o’ the last hour.”
O’er by the door?
At last, Magnus knew what had been nagging at him. Scarce noticing his kinsmen’s stares, he tore through the hall, running for the great shadowed arch of the keep’s main entrance.
The one that opened into the bailey and the rain-lashed morning beyond.
And sure enough, just as the old dog had done at the closed door to the laird’s solar, Boiny now fretted back and forth in front of the keep’s heavy, iron-studded door.
His stumbly, hitching steps and stiff-legged gait lanced Magnus’s heart, but it was the dog’s pathetic whines and the look of terror in his milky brown eyes that curdled his blood.
“They’ve been taken,” he said, his voice deadly calm and all the more dangerous for it.
Never more sure of anything in his life, he whirled to face the men who’d followed him.
“Which one of you searched my bedchamber?” he demanded, curling his fingers around the hilt of his sword.
“’Twas me, sir.” A timid-voiced laundry maid with a shock of bright red hair squeezed her way forward. “Your brothers had some of us searching abovestairs. I be the one who looked round your bedchamber,” she confessed, her face flaming scarlet. “I even peeked beneath the bed, I did.”
Magnus eyed the lass, tried to school his features into a less fierce scowl. “Did you notice if her cloak hung on its peg by the door? You’ll ken . . . the fur-lined one she’s e’er complaining is too cumbersome to wear?”
The girl clapped a hand to her cheek, shook her head. “Nay, my lord. Looking back, I don’t think the mantle was there where she hangs it. Aye, I am certain it was gone.”
Nodding his thanks, Magnus turned to his men.
“Those of you not afeared of a bit of rain or bloodshed, buckle on your sword belts and be prepared to overturn every stone and clump of heather on this island until we find my wife and our kinswomen,” he said, already yanking open the hall’s massive oaken door.
A furious welter of wind and rain gusted inside, guttering torches and blowing clouds of choking smoke into the men’s faces as they surged forward to scramble down the rain-slicked outer stairs to the courtyard below.
And the moment the last one hurried past, Magnus made to follow them—but not before he dropped to one knee and gave Boiny a fierce hug.
“I owe you one, old friend,” he said, hooking his fingers into the unhappy beast’s heavy collar until one of the more stout-armed kitchen lasses stepped forward to take hold of him.
Boiny’s heart may have been burning to tear off in search of his two-legged friend, but the dog’s advancing age and his weak legs would ne’er survive the brunt of the storm.
His throat tightening again, Magnus reached to tousle the dog’s rough fur before he turned to race down the stairs. “Never you fear, old boy, I’ll find her,” he said, as much for his own benefit as the fretting dog’s. “And when I do, may God have mercy on whoe’er took her.”
A furious ride and much rain later, Magnus halted his garron atop the high dunes hemming the isle’s crescent-shaped boat strand and . . . frowned at the hellish scene before him.
He drew a sharp breath. Indeed, if he believed in such foolery, he would have sworn some ancient Celtic deity bent on wreaking her wrath on God’s good earth had conjured the morning’s storm.
Ne’er had a worse fury blasted across the Hebrides—not since the raging tempest that had destroyed the MacKinnon fleet some years ago.
And if the wild-winded squalls howling around his ears were any indication, this storm stood a good chance of smashing the score of half-built new galleys lining the golden-sanded beach.
Hoping to find his lady down there somewhere, of her own free choosing or otherwise, he spurred down the dunes, pulling up as close to the tossing surf as his garron would venture.