His Magick Touch #6
The scene was surreal, shocking, familiar. His dark soulless eyes found Sorcha’s from across the hall, then his lips curled into a threatening snarl. “Good den, wife.”
A mixture of fury and fear numbed Sorcha’s limbs as she watched Peigi pour ale into his goblet.
Peigi shook, she cried, she lifted her red swollen eyes to Sorcha in a silent plea to help her.
Sorcha bit back the urge to scream at Peigi to run, knowing Hector wouldn’t hesitate to give the order to kill her.
She was his captive, as was every wide-eyed woman in the hall filling his warrior’s troughs.
“Have ye no greeting words for your husband?” Hector emptied the contents of his goblet in a single swallow. His arms were wrapped in soiled bandages, no doubt hiding his disease. Unfortunately, it hadn’t killed him yet.
“Ye are unwelcome in my home.” She wanted to lunge at him and choke him and watch him die while she strangled the last breath from his lungs.
He held his chest in a mock display of hurt. “I expected a grand celebration to honour my new position.”
“Ye have no position here,” she snapped back. “I am chieftain over Clan MacNeil.”
“Ye are my wife. Everything in your possession is mine – the stronghold, the land, the chieftainship.” As fast as a whiplash, Hector threw a dagger that pinned Sileas’s wife to a trestle table by her skirt.
Maura screamed and dropped the pitcher she’d been carrying.
The crash of ceramic ripped through Sorcha’s ears like a hot blade.
She lurched forwards to aid Maura, but caught herself when Hector rose from the table.
His dominant stance bound her in invisible shackles.
For four years she’d tiptoed around him.
She knew his moods, his warning looks, his gestures, and felt defeated to be submitting to him again.
He stalked towards Maura, retrieved his blade, and threatened her with the tip. “Go to the docks and await the arrival of your kinsmen. Tell them I have their chieftain, and if they wish to keep her alive, they will abide by my instructions.”
“What are your instructions, m’lord?” Maura choked out.
“Have them board a single ship – all of them. Tell them to toss their shot into the water and return to sea.”
Maura’s fair skin turned ashen against her flame-red hair. She glanced at Sorcha, awaiting approval, which Sorcha gave without pause. Sorcha knew what Hector was capable of and she had no intention of defying him. For now.
The instant Maura was out of earshot, Hector summoned a dozen of his warriors. “Gather the men off the western side of the isle and board their ships. Go after them, surround them. When the sun breaks the horizon at dawn, load the cannons and blast them to kingdom come.”
The kinswomen’s sharp gasps hissed through the hall.
Horror gripped Sorcha with sharp claws. She had to do something to save them. To save Keiran. Pleading with Hector was futile. Cursing him would gain naught. Her surrender was what he wanted and exactly what she would give him if it meant protecting her people.
“More ale!” Hector shouted at a serving maid.
Sorcha grabbed a nearby pitcher and hoped her kinswomen followed her lead. They were hesitant at first, but once she informed them of her plan, word travelled quickly. Getting Hector and his kinsmen blootered was the only way the women would ever be able to fight them.
“We will slit their throats in their sleep. Every last one o’ them,” one woman whispered to another in the cellar as she popped the lid open on another barrel of mead.
“Nay. There are some I want unharmed.” Sorcha had spoken very little to Hector’s men in the four years she’d been married to him, but she’d known all their wives. “I’ll tell you exactly which ones we shall save.”
The next few hours proved to be excruciating, but soon Hector’s men succumbed to the drink. One by one, they fell upon the floor rushes to seek their slumber. But not Hector.
“Stay with the girl.” He issued the order to his seneschal standing beside Peigi, then latched his thick fingers around Sorcha’s wrist and dragged her out of the Great Hall. “Your sister will remain untouched as long as ye continue to behave in the manner expected of a wife.”
“Where are ye taking me?” Her heels dug into the floor. Her stomach roiled with fear. And her heart beat out of cadence waiting for him to respond. He remained silent as he dragged her up the stairwell and into her father’s solar.
“Think ye I am ignorant?” He backhanded her across the face, flinging her into the bedpost. “I know what ye and your kinswomen are doing.”
Sorcha clutched the wooden post and readied herself for his next strike, knowing it would come.
“Did ye cast one of your spells on the drink?”
“I am no witch,” Sorcha insisted for what seemed the thousandth time.
“Nay?” Hector fisted her hair and wrenched her head back. “Then why was it the moment I pushed ye off that cliff did the sun shine over my head? Green clover blankets my land now.”
A screeching caw sounded outside the arrow-slit reminding her of the last time Hector tried to kill her. “Ye are greedy. If all is right on your land, why did ye even come here?”
“Because of this.” Hector pushed his plaid and undertunic to his waist, exposing a chest covered with pus-filled boils. “’Tis because of ye my kin fear breathing my air and my mistresses willnae lay with me.”
Sorcha stared at him, repulsed. “Think ye I can heal ye?”
“Ye cursed me!” The veins in his neck protruded. His nostrils flared. “My patience for your lies has worn thin. Ye will remove this damned spell or I’ll kill your kinswomen one at a time, starting with your sister.”
Fury unleashed a strength in her that curled her fingers into her palms. She reared back her fist and threw a punch at him.