Chapter 21
After helping those in the castle to prepare for the imminent arrival of Longshanks’ men—gathering provisions, creating salves and healing stations, filling water jugs from the well—Isabel had been certain she’d fall into a deep sleep.
But, in reality, her sleep had been restless and full of terrors.
Her bedchamber was warm, the hearth banked low through the night, the heavy blankets soft enough to coax even the crankiest bairn into a deep and dreamless rest—but not her.
The wind had quieted after midnight, its earlier force softened to little more than a distant sigh against the stone walls.
By every measure, it should have been a place of comfort.
If anything, sheer exhaustion should have carried her away.
And yet her mind had refused to follow her body in sleep.
Each time she closed her eyes, the same image returned, uninvited and unrelenting: the burned-out abbey.
Blackened timbers collapsing inward like the bones of a crumpled body.
Ash drifting through the air in slow, weightless spirals.
In her nightmares the smell of smoke clung to everything, even after the fire itself had long since died.
And beneath the carnage, the glint of metal in the soot.
The ring Freckles found. The one she believed to be Kerr’s.
Deciding she’d sleep when all this was over, Isabel climbed out of bed, careful not to disturb Elsa who was also tossing and turning.
She sat on a narrow stone bench by the arrow slit window of her chamber.
Stared into the darkness, imagining all manner of horrible things until the pale morning light spilled slowly across the land.
When she glanced down at her finger, those first sprays of sunlight caught the rubies on her thumb that surrounded the crest. At some point in the night, she’d put Kerr’s ring on her thumb.
Isabel had cleaned the ring carefully the night they arrived, wiping away the soot that had dulled its surface, revealing the engraving beneath. The fire had shockingly not destroyed it. Whatever story this ring carried, had survived. She just needed to find out what.
She studied the engraving. A hawk, with wings half spread, as though caught mid-flight. Beneath it, a shield.
Isabel frowned slightly as she studied it again, her fingertip tracing the edges of the carving. She had spent more time than she cared to admit turning it over in her hands, searching for something—some detail she had missed, some meaning that might explain why it unsettled her so much.
The English burned villages during raids.
That was common knowledge, spoken of in courts and whispered in fear among those who lived too close to the border.
Isabel herself had comforted many a family left destitute from the English’s hungry flames.
But that abbey had not even been visible from the main road.
How had the soldiers stumbled across it and what happened to its inhabitants?
A knock sounded at the door, soft but insistent, pulling her from her thoughts.
When she opened it, one of the castle maids slipped inside, carrying a folded blanket draped over her arms. Elsa sat straight up on her pallet and then shot to her feet, issuing apologies to both Isabel and the newcomer.
“Dinna fash, Elsa. We both had a rough night of sleep.”
The maid set the blanket aside but did not leave immediately. Her gaze dropped to Isabel’s hands.
“Pretty ring. Does it belong to your da?”
Isabel let out a quiet breath, not quite a sigh. “If only,” she said leaving it at that.
But as the maid started to back out of the chamber, Isabel called her back. She held the ring out. “Have ye ever seen this crest?”
The maid leaned closer, squinting slightly as she examined it. “I canna say that I have. It looks… noble, though.”
“Aye,” Isabel said softly.
“Someone ought to know the crest,” the maid replied.
After the maid left and Elsa scurried around to do her morning chores, Isabel rose from where she perched by the window.
A decision was forming before she even fully considered it.
She slipped the ring from her thumb, bid Elsa to dress her, and tied the ring to a string around her neck.
She gathered her cloak around her shoulders and left the chamber.
Most of the castle had already risen. The great hall hummed with activity, daily life unfolding despite the imminent threat of the English.
Men moved through the space carrying crates and tools, their voices low but purposeful.
Women gathered near the hearth, speaking in tones that blended easily with the crackle of the fire as they worked on mending hose and shirts.
A boy crossed the floor with a bucket nearly too large for him, water sloshing over the edge with each determined step.
There was a strength here that Isabel had not expected—a sense of continuity that stood in stark contrast to the whirlwind of outcomes she had left behind in her chamber.
She found herself lingering for a moment, watching the movement of it, the ease with which life continued. And then she remembered the ships, the ring tied round her neck. The burned-out abbey. All of it connected somehow.
She approached an older man, the broadness of his brow and spark in his brown eyes similar to Angus, seated near the hearth, his attention fixed on a blade he was sharpening with a whetstone.
“Good morrow, Ulrich,” she said.
The man looked up immediately, and though his gaze was now on hers, his hands continued to stroke the blade with the stone. “My lady.”
“I hoped ye might help me identify something.”
Isabel lifted the string and ring from around her neck and passed it to Ulrich. Freckles climbed from her place within her bodice and hopped over to Ulrich’s shoulder to peer at the shiny object.
Ulrich took it carefully, turning it in his roughened hands, his expression thoughtful at first, and then his brow creased. “Well now,” he murmured.
“Ye know this seal?”
“Aye.” He drew out the word, as if he were trying to decide how much to convey.
He turned the ring again, holding it closer to the light. “That belongs to a man who swore loyalty to Kerr not long ago.”
Isabel felt the chill immediately.
“Kerr?” Zounds, this man’s name kept coming up.
“A minor lord,” the man said. “Mainland. Not powerful on his own—but he chose his allegiance carefully.”
So not Kerr’s ring… But another?
The man handed the ring back, his attention already returning to his work as though the matter were simple, and she were dismissed.
But it was not simple, not even close. And Isabel refused to be dismissed. “Are ye certain?”
Ulrich glanced up at her again. “Could be mistaken, of course, I am getting up there in age, but, alas, I do believe it to be Kerr’s man. Canna remember his name though.”
Isabel’s thoughts began to move with sudden, urgent clarity, the scattered fragments of the past few days aligning in a way that made her breath catch.
Kerr. Inverlochy. The man who had watched her without speaking, without drinking, his attention fixed in a way that had unsettled her even then.
The burned abbey. Hidden too deep in the trees to be discovered by chance.
The ring left behind, not discarded, but lost in haste.
None of it had made sense before, not fully—but now the pattern revealed itself with chilling precision.
That fire had not been the careless destruction of a passing raid.
It had been deliberate. A place chosen, because it was off the main road.
And those meeting there would not be seen.
Isabel’s pulse quickened as the realization settled into something solid and undeniable.
It had not been a random act of violence. It had been an assembly.
She lurched away from Ulrich, causing him to startle and nearly drop the whetstone, but she was already up and out of the great hall.
Moving through Dunvegan as though she had lived there since she was a lass.
Following a tether that could only be described as a line of instinct to him.
Freckles was on her heels and Zeus materialized from somewhere to scurry beside them.
She found Lachlan in the training yard, where the morning had already taken on the hard, physical pulse of preparation.
The air clanged with exertion and steel, the scent of sweat and worn leather rising beneath the steady strike of blades meeting in practiced combat.
Their fighting style was so different from that of her uncle’s men.
Somehow, they managed to be both wilder and more controlled at the same time.
And when they felled an opponent, they immediately reached down to lift one another up.
There was a sense of camaraderie, brotherhood, that she hadn’t seen in Uncle Robbie’s men.
Men moved across the packed earth in pairs, their boots grinding dust into the ground as they circled and lunged, the clang of metal echoing off the surrounding stone walls.
Above them, the sky had gone from sunny to an unyielding gray, the wind cutting across the yard in low gusts that tugged at her cloak and carried the faint tang of the sea loch.
Lachlan moved among them with ease, his presence both firm and commanding without the need for a raised voice or force.
He corrected a stance with a brief touch to a man’s shoulder, stepped in to demonstrate a parry with precise efficiency, then withdrew again as the men resumed their sparring.
Only the slightest limp suggested he’d had an injury.
The fact that he’d recovered so quickly had to be a miracle.
Isabel was reminded then, as she watched, as her heart sped up, this was his world—one shaped by discipline, strength, and the constant readiness for violence—and he held it with the kind of authority that came not from title alone, but from trust.