Chapter 11
CHAPTER ELEVEN
The victory did not remain simple once Isobel was alone.
While she crossed back into the castle, the noise of the yard followed her in fragments: the boy’s bright cry, the men’s murmured astonishment, the dull thud of arrows being pulled from straw.
Each sound ought to have pleased her. She had stood before MacLean men and not shamed herself. More than that, she had won.
Yet beneath the satisfaction lay something less comfortable.
Ruaridh MacLean had bowed his head to her before them all.
A clean victory, he had said.
The memory warmed her pride and unsettled her in equal measure. She did not want fairness from him. Fairness complicated hatred. It gave the mind small, inconvenient places to wander.
By the time she reached her chamber, the wool gown clung unpleasantly at her shoulders from the heat of exertion, and her arm ached from drawing a bow too heavy for her. She closed the door and stood with her back to it for a moment, breathing in the quiet.
She changed slowly, not because she required the time, but because the act steadied her.
The gown she chose was darker, plainer, better suited to walking than proving points before lairds.
When she tied the laces, she found her fingers still remembered the bowstring.
There was tenderness where the string had pressed, a small, almost secret pain.
She looked at her hand and, against all reason, smiled.
A knock came.
Isobel folded the smile away at once. “Come in.”
Sorcha entered with a basket over one arm and a look of such studied innocence that Isobel immediately suspected she knew everything.
“Me lady,” Sorcha greeted her. “I thought ye might wish tae walk a little, now the whole castle has finished speaking of ye.”
Isobel fastened the last tie at her wrist. “Has it?”
“Aye.”
“How unfortunate. I had hoped only half the castle had found the matter interesting.”
Sorcha’s mouth twitched. “Half the castle saw it. The other half has improved it.”
“Improved it?”
“By now, ye have struck the target from the battlements, blindfolded, while the laird wept from shame.”
Despite herself, Isobel laughed. The sound surprised her. It seemed too light for the room, too unguarded for the morning after everything. Sorcha smiled more openly at hearing it, and Isobel felt a pang of gratitude so sharp she nearly resented it.
“I dinnae recall the weeping,” Isobel mused playfully.
“Nay, but men are modest about their tears.”
Isobel reached for her shawl. “And the laird? Is he modest about his defeat?”
Sorcha glanced at her quickly, then away. “The laird is modest about very little, but he is fair.”
Isobel drew the shawl around her shoulders. “So people keep suggesting.”
“They are nae always wrong.”
“Nay,” Isobel said, and disliked the concession the moment she made it. “Only inconvenient.”
They left the chamber together. At first Sorcha spoke of ordinary things, such as which passage led to the smaller chapel, which stair was warmer in winter, and where the best light fell in the afternoon.
Isobel listened with attention, partly because she wished to know the castle, and partly because Sorcha had the rare gift of offering information without making it feel like charity.
Still, the castle knew she was there. It was in the way two servants turned aside before they reached her, though the passage had room enough for four.
It was in the silence that settled over a group of women mending linens near a window.
One lifted her eyes, saw Isobel, and lowered them again so quickly the gesture felt more deliberate than a stare.
Isobel kept her spine straight. She had been looked at by men at an auction. She had been measured, priced, and delivered to an enemy before witnesses. A few cold glances in a corridor should not have had the power to hurt. And yet they did.
Sorcha stayed beside her, not before her, as though leading a prisoner, or behind her, as though attending a lady she did not wish to know, but beside her. The difference mattered.
At the turn of a passage, an older woman stopped speaking when they approached. Her gaze fell at once to the MacDonald brooch Isobel still wore. The woman’s mouth tightened. Isobel’s hand twitched toward it before she stopped herself.
She would not hide it. She would not smooth herself into a shape more pleasing to people who would dislike her regardless. That brooch was not her father. It was hers.
Sorcha saw the movement. “Some here will look at it and see only what they lost.”
Isobel’s throat tightened, though she did not allow the feeling into her voice. “And what did they lose?”
Sorcha did not answer at once. They had come to a narrow gallery where the windows opened toward the sea. Wind pressed faintly through the stone seams, carrying the cries of gulls and the salt damp of the shore below.
“Faithers,” Sorcha said. “Brithers. Sons. Men who went out in boats and didnae come back. Men who came back but were never the same. Crofts burned on Morvern. Cattle taken. A winter when there was barely enough meal because stores had been raided before the frost settled.”
Isobel looked out through the window. The sea below struck the rocks in white bursts of foam. It was beautiful, from such a distance, but cruel, when one imagined bodies on it.
Sorcha continued. “The laird’s faither died because of MacDonald men. There are folk here who remember his body being brought home.”
Isobel closed her eyes briefly. She had known, in the manner one knew the shape of an enemy tale.
MacLeans said MacDonalds killed their men.
MacDonalds said the same in return. It had always been told to her in large, convenient words: feud, blood, honor, justice.
Those were words men could carry into a hall and set upon a table like coins.
But Sorcha did not speak in large words, and that made it heavier.
“Me brithers died too,” she revealed.
The words were not planned. Once spoken, they seemed to remain between them, pale and exposed. Sorcha turned toward her fully.
Isobel kept looking at the sea. “Because one raid answered another, and one insult required blood, and every man who died became a reason for more dying.”
Sorcha didn’t rush to fill the silence, and that mercy undid Isobel more than comfort might have done.
“I am sorry,” Sorcha said at last.
Isobel swallowed. “So am I.”
It was the first time she had said it at Duart without meaning herself alone. Below in the yard, a shout rose and faded. Somewhere deeper in the castle, a door closed. Life continued with dreadful indifference, as it always did after loss.
That, Isobel thought, might be the most unbearable thing about grief.
The morning had scarcely settled into its proper shape when the first warning came.
Ruaridh was standing in the outer passage with Brodie at his side, listening to a steward’s account of stores and repairs with only half his mind upon it.
The other half, traitorous and unwelcome, had remained in the yard, fixed upon the memory of Isobel’s last arrow striking clean and sure before every watching eye.
He had not yet decided whether the recollection irritated or pleased him more.
Then one of the watchmen came in at speed. He wasn’t running, for no man ran through Duart unless death itself had entered behind him, but rather, he was moving with such hard urgency that the steward broke off at once.
“Me laird.”
Ruaridh turned. The man was wind-reddened, his cloak was darkened at the hem, and his breath was still touched by the cold outside. “Ships were seen beyond the eastern point. Three at least. Keeping distance, but nae fishing craft.”
Every idle thought left Ruaridh at once. The passage seemed to narrow around him. The scent of damp wool, rushes, and smoke sharpened into something almost metallic.
“How long ago?”
“Seen first near dawn. One vanished behind the skerries. There is reason tae think it made shore.”
Brodie cursed under his breath. Ruaridh did not. His anger came too cold for that.
For one moment he saw the map of his island not as land, but as weakness: inlets, paths, gullies, hidden approaches known to men who had once traded with them, feasted with them, betrayed them.
He thought of the village, the children, the women walking between croft and shore.
He thought, with a violence that startled even him, of Isobel moving through his castle with no understanding yet of where danger might come from.
“Enemy men?” he asked.
The watchman’s jaw tightened. “We cannae say certain.”
“Then say likeliness.”
“Likely.”
There it was. Ruaridh’s hand closed once at his side, not upon a sword, though he wished for one. It closed upon nothing, which was worse.
“Send scouts,” he gave the order.
The watchman straightened.
“All northern tracks. The lower paths by the burn. Both approaches tae the village. I want men on the cliffs and riders inland. If there are strangers on me ground, I want them found before they learn where they have come.”
“Aye, me laird.”
“And send word tae the shore watch. Nay boat comes near Duart unseen. Nay fire is left unanswered. Nay man assumes this is rumor because he is fond of sleep.”
The man bowed and went at once.
Only when his steps had faded did Brodie speak. “Ewen?”
Ruaridh looked toward the narrow window at the end of the passage. Beyond it, the sea lay bright and merciless beneath the pale morning, as innocent as any liar.
“Who else would be fool enough?” he said through a sigh.
Brodie’s expression hardened. “If his men are already ashore?—”
“Then they have made their first mistake.”
There was no heat in his voice. Brodie knew him well enough to hear the danger in that.
Ruaridh turned from the window. The castle, moments ago merely his home, had become again what it had always been beneath comfort and habit: stone, weapon, refuge, trap.
Every passage had to be guarded. Every door had to be considered.
Every person within his walls had to be accounted for, including the wife who would hate being accounted for most of all.
He pushed the thought aside because it had come too swiftly.
“Find Torin,” he ordered.
Brodie nodded. “Shall I send him tae the scouts?”
“Nay. Send him tae me.”
Brodie glanced at him, understanding at once that this was not a message to be carried through servants. “Yer study?”
“Aye. At once.”
“And Lady Isobel?”
The name struck harder than it should have.
Ruaridh’s jaw tightened. “She remains inside the castle.”
Brodie’s brows lifted very slightly, but he was too wise to comment.
“She isnae tae be frightened with half-truths,” Ruaridh added.
“And when she notices the whole castle moving like a kicked wasp’s nest?”
“Then I shall have the pleasure of being accused of tyranny again.”
A grim smile touched Brodie’s mouth. “Ye married a woman with sharp eyes.”
“I noticed.”
He turned before the other man could read more in his face than he intended. His boots struck the stone with hard, even force as he made for his study. Men stepped aside as he passed, sensing the change in him before hearing the cause.
By the time he reached the door, his fury had settled into purpose. He thought of the ships near his coast, of men possibly on his land, and of Ewen testing the edges of Duart before the marriage had even cooled in gossip.
Ruaridh opened the study door and stepped into the dimmer room, where maps waited upon the table and the smell of ink, leather, and cold ash hung in the air.
Let them come, then.
If they had set foot upon his island, they would soon learn that Duart did not merely keep wolves in its stories.