Chapter 9 #2
Holly gave a wet laugh and wiped her nose on her shirt. “Tòiseach? Or just plain chieftain?”
“Tòiseach with a shoo-in for tanist. With a land swath from here to Portree.”
“Aye, second-in-command.” She smiled, and then her face fell. “I shouldn’t have done it, but he was going to take this”—she pointed at the cloth-covered item—“and he thought that I wouldn’t stop him.”
Both Rowan and I digested Mickey’s assessment of Holly and how far off base he had been in thinking she wouldn’t stop him if she felt she had to.
He had seen her as a student who asked for advice on even the smallest decisions.
He hadn’t seen her as a MacLaoch with a crush who found little ways to talk with him.
“I see,” I said, even though I didn’t, not really. I watched her relive the moment in anguish.
“I had no choice,” she pleaded and swallowed down her tears.
“I arrived too late to help; the field was charred. I couldnae believe it. I started picking up tools because I didn’t know what else tae do.
I felt so useless… I’d pieced together the battle, from the bazillion texts I had once I was back in cell range, but until then, I didn’t really understand…
I couldn’t believe we’d fought with just the tools in our sheds…
” Her story had flowed out in a strange rhythm, fast at times like a tap turned on full blast, halting at others, interrupted by her tears.
“So I wasn’t thinking straight. And that’s when I saw Mickey across the field… He was definitely not just picking up. He was at this…” She reached over and uncovered the mystery item.
“What the…” I murmured. “Is that a—”
“Babe’s coffin, originally? I’ve no clue.
I told him to drop it. Then, when he wouldn’t, not to open it.
But he did. And then…bash.” I winced as Holly mimed swinging a shovel.
She continued, “My da knows of him; he’s an archaeologist all right, but some of my da’s friends from down in Glasgow…
They say he got his start in his other career during uni…
He’s a pilfering archaeologist.” Holly made a fist and looked at it like she was done keeping secrets and the relief suddenly made her tired.
“His last big score was a gem. Word was he was getting to the end of the thing—selling off bits of it—and was looking for his next prize.
“That’s what my da had wanted to talk with ye about last month, plus whisky business,” she said to Rowan.
“But mainly they knew him, and they figured I could keep an eye on him.” She shrugged.
“Not a bad assignment as far as missives go from your father, aye? But then, the second I turned my back, he’d snuck off and found something.
That ground-penetrating radar he’d ordered had come, and he was elbow-deep in the soil.
I just couldn’t. I felt betrayed that he wouldn’t listen to me, and he was all the things I was worried he was and…
and…I might have lost my cool and cuffed him harder than I expected.
My stomach had been in knots for days; he was unconscious for like an hour.
Oh, my lord of days almighty, am I glad this is out.
I didn’t know how long I could keep him until it became kidnapping. ”
She dropped her hands into her lap with a soul-shuddering sigh.
Rowan nodded in understanding. “Aye.”
I gave her a sad smile. “Babe, when you put the restraints on, that’s the kidnapping part. And the door locking and…and yeah, all the things that were against his will.”
“Aye, I had a moment dragging him down the stairs… I really wondered what the actual fuck I was doing, but I’ll not commit myself to a task and not see it through.
I thought maybe tie him to a guest bed in the upper hall, but everyone from the battle was using ’em.
So I figured down here would be safe. He and I could have a t?te-à-t?te; then I’d make sure he left his life of crime, and he could come live with me.
It kinda worked for a bit…but now he just hollers. ”
Looking at the coffin, I asked them, “Which comes first: Offering our prayers and reburying this poor babe or calling the constable?”
Holly took a big sniff and wiped her nose with her hand then her hand on her shirt, well past caring about decorum. “Well, aye, it’s filled with gold.”
“It’s what now?” came tumbling out of my mouth just as the earth seemed to tilt beneath my feet.
She nodded as Rowan pulled out a chair. “Gold?”
“Oh aye, gold. They’re stamped, looking like Roman coins.”
Rowan sat hard on the chair. And wavered there as if he had been told Orabilia was back.
He got a long-off stare and whispered something that he and I constantly wondered about Ormr: Had he stolen Orabilia, the clan chief’s daughter, or had he negotiated for his one true love? “What’s the price for a war chief’s daughter in the thirteenth century?”
“Yes,” I said, keeping up with his thinking.
The skeletons in the field were Ormr’s men, and they had traveled with Ormr centuries ago, supposedly to assist in taking Orabilia.
Still, Rowan and I knew that they’d been in love, and likely, Ormr was, for the first time in his life, bartering for what he truly cared about. “But why a babe’s coffin?”
“Maybe he grabbed what he had on hand?” Rowan mused with me.
“Did he hear ‘coffers’ and pick up a coffin?”
Rowan said to me, “I’m not sure the wordplay is the same in his language…”
Holly cleared her throat. “Oh, it’s a coffin; there’s bones in it too.”
All three of us looked at one another and then at the soil-encrusted coffin.
I whispered, “What the fuck?”
Rowan answered, “Oh nae…”