Return of the Highlander (Immortal Warriors) (12 page)

“Learn from my mistakes, you mean?” he said bitterly. “Oh, aye, there’s something, I know it, but mabbe I dinna want to learn from it. Mabbe I’d do the same thing again.”

That didn’t sound good. He knew something, or sensed it, and whatever it was it made him uncomfortable with himself.

Behind her the door rattled again.

“I am no’ the man this legend speaks of,” Maclean whispered furiously. “I am not!”

“Maclean—”

“They have turned me into a monster! A beast to frighten wee children!”

“Please, Maclean—”

“And you believe them. I see it in your face, Bella Ryan. You brought me here to shame me and to prove yourself right. Deny it if ye can!”

And of course she couldn’t.

The door was flung open and he was gone. Bella started to follow him, opening her mouth to try and comfort him, and was startled by the sound of a giggle. A child was waiting to one side of the door, gazing at her with round blue eyes.

“You’re talking to yourself,” the child announced, and giggled again. Then, turning and running back toward his family, “That lady’s talking to herself!”

Bella groaned. That was all she needed, someone to tell the museum authorities that she was a dangerous nutcase.

The sun was shining outside, as it often did after a late summer shower. It would probably rain again soon, but for now the air was fresh and warm and she felt as if she could see the grass growing.

“Maclean?” she hissed, glancing around her. He had come this way, so where was he? “Maclean!”

But there was no answer.

Maclean walked with long furious strides. He
didn’t know where he was going, and he didn’t care. It wasn’t true! And yet his heart ached. He knew that he had done something. Something terrible. He needed to face it, the
Fiosaiche
probably wanted him to face it, but at the same time he was afraid to do so. Bella was saying he was to blame. The empty land, the broken castle, the disappearance of his people. Bella believed it was all his fault, and now she would write it down so that others would believe that, too.

Self-doubt and disgust ravaged him. Surely a man who had played a part in such an atrocity was not entitled to a second chance? Then why had the
Fiosaiche
brought him back?

As a punishment? To taunt him with the knowledge? Maybe he was doomed to this half life for the
next
two hundred and fifty years. Better if he had never awoken.

And yet deep in his heart he knew he needed to
know the truth, to face it, no matter how horrifying it might be.

Ishbel.

Why did her name return to him again and again, like a curse?

He had to know.

Maclean’s head ached and he shook it like a maddened bull. The waves of pain brought pictures, and as he concentrated the pictures gradually grew brighter, clearer. The past was being replayed for him, but in silence, as if he were watching it from a distance.

A mere spectator.

Let her go, son.
Trembling tones; his mother spoke.
Let her have the chance of happiness that I ne’er did. Let her find a man who is no’ blighted like ye are, whose heart has no’ turned to stone. Morven, ’tis no’ wrong to want to be loved. Let Ishbel go home to her father and make a life for hersel’ there.

And then Maclean, in a roar:
Let her go! After all I’ve given her? She is to be my wife, we made a vow. Who are you to know of such things, you who betrayed my father and broke his heart? No, I will not let Ishbel go! I’d rather see her dead.

Maclean saw himself returning from Culloden Moor, only to find that, just as she had promised she would, Ishbel had left him. She had run off with Iain Og, the son of his piper, a lad who was lowly and unimportant in comparison to Maclean. That she had chosen him was an insult, but more than that, Maclean felt a pain so extreme, so intense he wanted to break every bone in Ishbel’s body. This was a blow to his pride as a husband and a man and a chief. It was understandable, and yet…

Looking at his reaction from this distance, Maclean was puzzled. There was more, something he wasn’t remembering. But already the pictures in his head had moved on. He heard his voice echoing through Castle Drumaird….

I will go after her and bring her back and no one will stop me!

Maclean fell to his knees on a stretch of wet grass surrounded by a narrow garden. A bell was chiming the hour, and a car sped past on the road beyond the museum. Maclean neither saw nor heard. He was spinning back into his own past. And he was no longer at a safe distance, he was right
there
.

Living it.

Women. There were dozens of them. They had come to Castle Drumaird to plead with him not to follow Ishbel. They were crowding into the great hall, strangely silent, their faces wan. Maclean sat in his great chair, watching them suspiciously. There was his mother, her familiar face with hollowed cheeks and lined brow, her hair swept up untidily beneath the fold of her yellow arisaid. She seemed tentative, more anxious than usual. Maclean had seen little of her since his father died, not that he had seen much of her beforehand, but somehow he had thought that when his father was gone she might have taken a step back into his life rather than withdrawing even further from him.

But then why would she? They were strangers, or near enough, and there were memories between them that neither wished to revisit. Her betrayal during his boyhood resonated with him still and he knew he could
never forgive her. And yet…he needed her now. He wanted her approval.

Unaccustomed tears prickled his eyes, frightening him, hardening him, and he set his jaw. He would not tell her of the sacrifice he had made in order to stop Ishbel from hating him, and how she had betrayed him anyway. He would not tell her of the vow he had made, and ask her where he had gone so wrong.

His father would have said it was just punishment for allowing the softness inside him to escape the chains and locks he should have kept upon it. He had been weak, that was the simple explanation for all of this. He had been weak in the worst possible way—with a woman.

His mother came closer, the other women huddled behind her, and for a strange, ecstatic moment Maclean wanted to believe she had come to offer him comfort, to sympathize with his plight. She alone must understand how he was feeling. But then she began to speak and he realized she hadn’t come for him, she had come as the spokeswoman for Ishbel and all the other women. He was the enemy, it seemed, and she had set herself firmly on the other side.

“Our menfolk have barely come home from Culloden Moor, Morven, and we do no’yet know what will happen to us because of the Rebellion. There are whispers that the English have sent ships to our coast carrying men who are ready to burn out traitors. Ye should be traveling to Inverness to ask pardon. Ye should be vowing your allegiance to King George. But now ye wish to take us with ye into further danger. I say
no,
Morven.”
Her voice wavered but she stood tall, as though his glowering did not give her pause.

Even as disappointed anger simmered within him, Maclean realized he was not surprised she was so respected that she would be chosen as the one to speak to him. His father had always treated her with scorn, but Maclean knew many of the others had never accepted his bitter and damning comments, and now that his father was dead she had grown in stature.

Sometimes he thought she was the true heart of Loch Fasail, but he never told her so. It was not his way. Maclean did not speak of his feelings. He had been taught not to.

And now here she was, standing before him, standing against him, and in her eyes was the same expression she wore when she had looked at his father.

“Ishbel vowed to pay ye back. She swore it, we all heard her. Dinna go after her. There is something ominous about this matter. For your own sake, Morven, dinna go after Ishbel. Dinna do this thing. I know matters have no’ always been well between us, but listen to me. Stay home, and keep us safe.”

He wanted to believe she had his welfare at heart, but his doubt was stronger. He had believed in Ishbel, and look what had happened! He would not put himself into such a vulnerable position again.

“My intended wife has run off with a boy when she could have had a man. She has insulted me. Should I just shrug and say ’tis acceptable?”

“Morven, let her go. She’s not worth the having.”

“That’s not the point!” he roared.

She blinked, and for a moment he thought she might realize, might somehow see inside him to his aching heart. “Shedding more blood is not the answer.”

“I’d shed Macleods’ blood any day,” he retorted.

“If ye go after her there will be death. Ishbel will no’ return willingly. She will fight ye, she will resist ye.”

“She is a woman,” Maclean sneered. “What can she do to me?”

His mother’s eyes grew cold, and he knew she was again remembering other times, other words and another man.

I am not my father!
he wanted to shout, but he bit his tongue. Because if he had been his father Ishbel would never have dared to run away with Iain Og.

“Look into your heart, Morven,” she said, and her voice had lost its tenderness. “I canna believe there is not some spark of life there yet, some small coal of warmth and compassion. Let Ishbel go. If you follow her and force her to your will, then you are not my son.”

He didn’t answer her. He told himself that her words meant nothing to him. Seeing the implacable set of him, the women began to beg. They even wept. But still he refused to be swayed, and eventually he rose to his feet and said the last words he ever spoke to them.

“What sort of Highland chief listens to the bleating of womenfolk? What sort of a man would I be if I allowed Ishbel to go free after such an insult simply because my mother begged me to?”

And then he walked away.

Maclean sat on the damp grass and saw in his mind’s eye those women’s faces. All dead. All gone. His mother’s pale eyes awash with tears as she pleaded for him to listen. For this once, to listen to her. As if she were his equal. As if her age and experience made her so. As if she had never preferred her lover over him, just like Ishbel nearly thirty years later.

The cold wet grass soaked into his kilt, but Maclean didn’t feel it or care. The pain inside him made such trifling things unimportant. When Bella had said that he was to blame, she’d been right. Fundamentally he was. He and his men had set off after Ishbel to bring her back, and at some point after that the English must have come to Fasail and slaughtered his people, and he hadn’t been there to fight for them.

They had ridden into his lands unopposed while his men lay dead or dying at Mhairi.
That
was the great battle he remembered, the one between his men and Ishbel’s father—Macleans and Macleods, dying in the heather. And while they fought over a fickle woman, Loch Fasail had lain unprotected.

Maclean frowned, sitting up straighter.

How had the Macleods killed his men so easily? Maclean knew he was superior in numbers and skill. Despite their weariness his men should easily have subdued Auchry Macleod and his clan.

Maclean sighed. He was clutching at straws. History blamed
him
for the bloodshed at Fasail, not the English. Whoever it was who held the sword, it was Maclean who was the monster, the coward, the black-hearted beastie.

And what of Ishbel? Had she survived the encounter
between Maclean and the Macleods? He tried to picture her in that final battle. Was she there, somewhere, watching on? Did she weep when she saw her would-be-husband die? Maclean knew he had killed Iain Og; he did not remember the details, but he knew.

But try as he might, Maclean could see no image of Ishbel, pale and weeping, as Maclean fought Macleod. All he felt was the guilt and horror that had beset him once before, that sense of dread when he found himself in a place where he should never have been. And now he knew why he felt like that. The women of Fasail had begged him to stay and he’d refused. They were right and he was wrong. And at the very end he’d known it.

Maclean pressed his face into his hands.

“I killed you once, Maclean. I can do it again.”

Ishbel!

Maclean sprang to his feet, drawing his broadsword in one fluid motion and turning to face the woman he had once wished to marry. Her whisper came from behind him, so close that she must be standing at his back, breathing on his nape. She could touch him, if she wanted to. If she had a dirk, she could kill him.

But there was no one there.

Confused, Maclean turned again, his sword in front of him, his gaze sweeping over the bright flowers and the damp grass, knowing that no mortal woman could move so swiftly.

“Speak!” he demanded. “Are you invisible like me, Ishbel?”

Nothing, not a sound.

And then something caught his eye. A woman, at some distance, her golden hair gleaming in the fading
summer light. She was wearing trews in a red and green pattern and a dark jacket. She turned, a brief glance over her shoulder. He could not see her face. And then she was gone.

Maclean’s skin crawled and he found himself seized by a new fear.

Had the
Fiosaiche
brought Ishbel into the mortal world, too? And if so, then why? What could Ishbel want from him?

Apart from his death.