Highlander Betrayed (Guardians of the Targe) (25 page)

J
EANETTE AND
S
COTIA
cleaned their mum’s solar while Kenneth stood at the end of his wife’s bed, as if he were afraid to take his eyes off her. Elspet still lived, though Jeanette was truly surprised by that, but Elspet was diminished even more than before. She
looked so tiny in the big bed, and so frail, as if the slightest touch would shatter her bones. Somehow ashes had ended up everywhere leaving a thin layer of grey powdery dust on everything, including all the bed linens and Lady Elspet. Helen had tended the fire and helped wipe down the chamber. Jeanette and Scotia changed the bedding and at last, Jeanette took a scrap of linen and dipped it in the bowl of fresh water Helen had fetched for them.

“Scotia,” she said quietly as she wiped the ashes from her mother’s face as gently as possible, “get some broth and bring it here. Mum? Can you hear me?”

Elspet’s lids fluttered open and after a moment she focused on her daughter’s face. Regret swam in her eyes and Jeanette had to take a deep breath to keep from letting the same emotion show in her own. She didn’t know what failing had made her unfit to follow in her mother’s footsteps, or what gift Rowan had that made her an acceptable Guardian, but the Targe had chosen and it was too late to make whatever amends might have shifted the choice to Jeanette.

“ ’Twill be all right, Mum.” She blinked hard. “I am sorry I let you down, but all the preparations you gave to me, Rowan will have. I will do whatever I must to make sure the clan stays protected. I promise you.”

Still, Elspet looked at her eldest daughter with sadness and regret.

“Will you take some broth, Mum?” Scotia stood next to Jeanette with a small cup in her hand. Elspet closed her eyes and turned her head away. Jeanette leaned her head against her sister’s arm.

“So Rowan is the one?” Scotia asked.

“Aye, ’twould appear so.”

“But why?”

“Why, indeed?” Kenneth said, the first words he had spoken since taking up his vigil at the end of the bed.

“I do not ken,” Jeanette said. “ ’Twas not how Mum said it would be when the Targe chose a new Guardian. It should not have hurt either of them.”

“Could it have hurt because it was not meant to be?” Scotia said.

Jeanette closed her eyes and tried to remember everything that she had seen and heard in those long moments when the power had been taken from Elspet and…

“It was forced on Rowan and she did not want it,” Jeanette whispered.

“What?” Kenneth asked.

“She did not want it. Rowan. She said she did not want it. She must have been fighting it.” She rose and looked at the room, remembering how things had been tossed about the room by an unnatural wind. Suspicion rose in her like a thunderhead sparking with lightning.

“I must speak with her,” she said more to herself than to her father and sister. “Scotia, you stay here. If she wakes, try to get her to drink some broth but do not speak of what just happened. She is upset by it and she should not spend her strength on fretting over what cannot be undone.”

“Are you sure it cannot be undone?” Scotia asked. “It is not right. It should be you.”

Jeanette agreed, but for the sake of her family she could not indulge herself in such feelings. “ ’Tis done. Now we must determine why so Rowan can be taught how to use the Targe.”

She picked up the ermine sack that held the ancient Targe stone that focused each Guardian’s unique gift. It belonged to Rowan now, but Jeanette would not give it to her until she was sure that Rowan would accept the duty that had been bestowed upon her this day, however unexpectedly. Though if she did not…

“I shall be with Rowan. Fetch me if Mum needs me.”

Scotia took Jeanette’s place at the edge of the bed, settling the cup on the table where the ermine sack usually sat.

“Da.” Jeanette waited for him to react. When he didn’t, she said his name again, but still he stared at Elspet. She stood next to him, wrapping her arm around his waist and leaning against him. “Come with me?”

He looked down at her then, his face ten years older than it had appeared that morning. “I will stay here,” he sighed and his
shoulders sagged. “Nicholas said there was something important to talk about. Ask him what it was and if you think it needs tending, find Uilliam.”

Jeanette wished she could stay here, too, holding their family together with her will alone, but she knew her duty lay in preparing Rowan for the tasks before her. And in order to do that, she had to find out what secret her cousin had been hiding from her, from them, for all these years.

CHAPTER FOURTEEN

N
ICHOLAS WATCHED AS
Rowan’s patience frayed. He knew she did not wish to return to Elspet’s chamber, or she would have done so already. He had considered fetching Jeanette himself, but decided, given his uncertain position at the moment, that was not a good idea. He knew there was more than one confrontation with Rowan’s family ahead of them and he would do whatever he could to take their anger onto his own shoulders, sheltering her from at least that much.

Rowan rubbed the spot between her brows and reached for the door latch just as the door swung open. Jeanette stood there, staring at Rowan, as if she were a stranger, before she scowled at him.

“You may leave.”

“Nay.” Rowan stood almost nose-to-nose with her cousin. “He must stay. We must speak to Uncle Kenneth and then I must speak with you.”

“Da said to call Uilliam if I had need, but not to disturb him. The… What happened… Mum is very weak. He will not leave her side.”

Rowan seemed to fold in on herself. “I am so sorry,” she said, reaching for Jeanette’s hands, but Jeanette stepped around her into the room. “My being chosen should not have been possible.”

“Unless you were keeping something secret, something important, powerful.”

“I am not keeping anything from you, Jeanette. I had no idea I had any gift until Nicholas helped me to see…” Her gaze flickered to him, then back to her cousin.

Jeanette’s gaze had followed Rowan’s and now rested on him. “We should not speak of this in front of him.”

“He kens—not everything, but enough.”

There was more he did not know?

Jeanette’s shoulders went rigid and her hands fisted by her side. For the first time Nicholas noticed the ermine sack she gripped. “He kens? How? Why? It is forbidden.”

“Do you think I do not ken that? I did not tell him. He figured out most of it on his own.” Rowan stepped between Nicholas and Jeanette. Nicholas leaned a little to the right so he could still see the blonde woman. “He was sent here to steal the Highland Targe.”

Jeanette cocked her head and her eyebrows rose, as if she had not heard correctly. “Steal?”

“Aye.” Rowan seemed to hold her breath while she let that information sink in.

Jeanette’s chin went up and she moved the sack behind her, holding it so Nicholas could no longer see it.

Nicholas rose and faced the women. “I was sent by King Edward, but—”

“ ’Tis too much.” Jeanette turned and strode to the door. “Rowan, do not say another word to this man.” She wrenched open the door and shouted for her father.

Rowan started forward. “Jeanette, you must—”

“Wheesht, Rowan. You have said too much already.” She screamed for her father this time and Nicholas heard the door at the far end of the corridor bang open, followed by heavy footfalls coming toward them.

“I told you not to—” Kenneth said as he came into view.

Jeanette held up her hand to stop her father, both physically and verbally. Then she pointed at Nicholas. “He was sent here to steal the Targe.”

Kenneth’s shaggy brows drew down as he looked from Jeanette to the pair in the room. “Is this true, Rowan?” He stepped in, leaving Jeanette out in the hallway and very effectively blocking the only way out.

“ ’Tis, Uncle, but—”

“For who?” Kenneth said, cutting her off.

Rowan glanced at him and was about to answer but Nicholas stepped forward. “For King Edward,” he said.

“Jeanette, fetch Uilliam and Duncan. Now!”

“Uncle?”

Kenneth glowered at Rowan. “You would bring him into our midst, into your aunt’s chamber, when you knew this about him?” It was a question, but it was also a condemnation.

“We were coming to tell you. There is another spy.”

“Another? Within these walls?!”

“Nay, sir,” Nicholas said as he moved away from Rowan, hoping to draw the chief’s anger with him. “Not within these walls, but he will be back, and he means to have the Targe for Edward whether I deliver it or not.”

“And you will NOT!” The bellowed words were matched by the menace in Kenneth as he strode further into the room.

Nicholas said nothing.

“You will not,” Kenneth repeated, shaking his head. “Rowan, you would go to Longshanks with this man?”

“Nay, Uncle.”

Emptiness unfurled inside Nicholas.

“Then you cannot take the Targe to Longshanks,” Kenneth said to Nicholas. “You shall not have my niece now that she is… She was not supposed to be—” The man scraped his fingers through his hair. “You shall not have my niece.”

“I ken that.” The emptiness spread, hollowing him out at the thought of all the reasons he could not have Rowan for himself, her lost trust heading up the list.

Kenneth stared at him for a long time. “He does not ken it all though, does he?”

“Most, Uncle, but not all.” Rowan said.

Confusion.
He does not ken it all?
There was definitely more to the Targe than he had sorted out. There was the stone, there was power, and there was the Guardian who called upon that power, but there was something about the passing of the Guardianship to Rowan, beyond that she was not Elspet’s daughter, which was not
expected. He still had so many questions—but this was not the time to ask them.

There was a thick silence in the room as the men faced off. Rowan sank down on the bed.

“Do not hurt him, Uncle. I do not believe he means us harm any longer, but there is the other, Archie, a ginger-haired man, who does. Let Nicholas help us defend against whatever trouble that one will bring upon us.”

Kenneth said nothing and never took his eyes off Nicholas’s.

“Uncle?”

“Your uncle cannot take any chances that I will bring harm to you and yours, Rowan, intended or not.” He saw a glimmer then in Kenneth’s eyes and thought, perhaps, it was respect—a little at least.

Uilliam and Duncan pounded down the corridor then, skidding to a halt at the open doorway.

“What is it, Kenneth?” Uilliam asked, taking in the tense scene.

“Take Nicholas, if that is his real name, and restrain him.”

Duncan looked shocked at the instructions but said nothing. Uilliam grunted as he grabbed Nicholas by the arm, but before he could be dragged from the chamber, Nicholas reached for Jeanette’s arm, stopping his forward motion.

“Be easy on her, mistress,” he said to her quietly, “she looks strong, but she is much bruised by all of this. She would never do anything to disappoint you if it were in her power not to.”

Jeanette stared at him as she wrenched her arm free of his grip. Uilliam marched him out of the chamber, Duncan following behind.

J
EANETTE ONCE MORE
stood in the doorway, the muscle in her right cheek working as Rowan knew it did when she was angry.

“Why would you bring him into the castle when you knew he was a spy?”

Rowan winced. Jeanette’s words stung as if they were tiny daggers thrown one by one. Rowan had been asking herself the same
thing, over and over again, and the same answer came to her over and over again. “ ’Twas the right thing to do. He agreed.”

Jeanette stared at her a long moment, her mouth opening and closing as if she tried to speak but couldn’t, until finally she said, “But you let Da take him away.”

Rowan nodded her head slowly. “We knew ’twas likely when we decided to come and tell Uncle about the plot.”

“And you are all right with that?” Jeanette took two steps into the room Rowan had shared with her and Scotia ever since she’d come here, an orphan, eleven years ago, as if she were both afraid of and angry at Rowan.

“Do I have a choice?” Anger crackled through her, shoving her heart to a rapid pace. She leaped to her feet and faced her cousin. “Do I have a choice about any of this?”

They stared at each other a long moment until Jeanette broke eye contact and looked down at her feet. “ ’Twould appear none of us has a choice about anything.”

“ ’Twould,” Rowan agreed, roughly jerking her gown to straighten it. “I ken you are hurt that I was chosen as Guardian, but you must believe that I neither wanted it, nor called it to me in any way.”

“If calling it worked, ’twould have been mine long ago.”

The sharp edge of bitterness cut through Rowan’s anger, making her suddenly aware of just what not becoming the Guardian meant to Jeanette. Her cousin had been trained to use the Highland Targe her whole life, steeped in the legend and lore of the stone and the prayers that Elspet had painstakingly taught her hour after hour until she knew them each by heart, what each was useful for, the symbols to be made in the air, the rituals to call the protective energies.