Sue-Ellen Welfonder - [MacLean 03] (4 page)

Naught lurked in the gloomy corridor save a musty-scented chill and the wispy smoke haze of a guttering wall torch. And rather than Dagda’s approaching footfalls, the only sound to be heard above the patter of rain was the breaking of waves on the not-too-distant shore.

“Devil take that she-goat’s cheeky hide if she doesn’t hie herself in here with refreshments, and before long!” Donald MacKinnon scolded, swaying a bit on his feet.

At once, Magnus thrust out a quick hand to steady him. “Unless her knees have grown less creaky in my absence, she’ll be needing time to make her way up from the kitchens.”

“Faugh!” The old laird shook off his son’s hand and aimed another pointed stare at the dark-yawning passageway. “She gets about well enough when she wishes to poke her nose where it don’t belong.”

Magnus drew a deep breath. “That may be so, but you needn’t have troubled her with fetching aught for me. I’ve no stomach for drinking healths this night.” He paused to glance over his shoulder. “Though I’ll wager Colin would welcome a wee posset to aid his sleep.”

“A posset?”
A richly masculine voice rose from the shadows near the hearth. “What man worthy of the title would long for a posset when such fairness stands before him?”

Her attention arrested, Amicia turned toward the voice, watched as a swarthy-looking man of about the same number of years as Magnus carefully heaved himself off a low, oaken bench.

Nigh as fine on the eyes as Magnus and equally mud-splattered, he came forward with slow, purposeful strides. But a thin line of white around his lips and a not-quite concealed wince undermined his best attempts at hiding the pain each movement cost him.

“Please, sir, you are injured. Keep your seat, I pray you,” Amicia urged him, her heart twisting at the way he favored his right leg. She tried to wave him back, but he came ever onward, his hands extended in such sincere welcome her breath caught with emotion.

Would that Magnus had greeted her half so warmly.

“Guidsakes, you witless lout—where are your manners?” The swarthy man, clearly a fellow knight, clapped a hand on Magnus’s shoulder as if in scoffing reproach, but his white-knuckled grip indicated he had sore need of the support.

His chivalry required no such bolster. “Pay my good friend no heed,” he advised her. “The great lump is but too stubborn to admit that your beauty would banish the cares from the most troubled of brows.”

Sweeping her the best bow he could, his injured leg considered, he captured her hand for a featherlight kiss. “Colin Grant of . . . och, just Colin Grant, fair lady, and I am yours to command.”

A blush blossomed on Amicia’s cheeks. “I thank you, noble sir, and I shall honor your friendship.” She slid a sidelong glance at Magnus, noted the tight press of his lips, the muscle jerking ever so imperceptibly at his jaw.

Could he be jealous?

Her pulse leaping at the possibility, she smiled at the goodly man who’d so valiantly offered to champion her. “Aye, but it is as a leal friend I would see you, Colin Grant, ne’er a servant, for your gallantry lifts you high in my esteem.”

“As you wish, my lady.” Colin inclined his dark head.

Magnus frowned all the blacker.

He cleared his throat . . . a mite too loudly. “You will have scarce time to attend her wishes or be her friend, leal or otherwise,” he intoned, a thread of irritation in his voice. “The Lady Amicia shall be returned to her brothers as soon as her coffers of coin and sundry other dowry goods can be loaded onto the next passing galley our signal fires can draw to a halt.”

“Young Magnus! How are you faring?” A tall and strong-backed older woman surveyed him from the doorway. “Tsk, never you mind,” she added, running a shrewd gaze over him. “I can see with my own two eyes that you’ve a long, hard road behind you.”

“I am well enough, or was—” Magnus caught himself. He would not add insulting innocent women to his growing list of faults.

Though from the way the Lady Amicia straightened her spine and drew back her shoulders, like as not she knew exactly what he’d been about to blurt.

Feeling ridiculously guilty, he opened his mouth to say something—
anything
—to erase the hurt she tried so valiantly to hide, but Dagda spoke before he could.

“You won’t be needing to set any signal fires,” she announced. “’Tis onto a fine new galley of your own you can soon put your bride if you truly wish to make a blithering fool of yourself. But like it or no, her strongboxes have already been well-emptied.”

The old woman sailed past him, her black skirts swishing, a tray of a cold-sliced seafowl and crisp-baked bannocks with honey clutched in her hands.

“Or did you not come by way of the landing beach?” She plunked the tray on the room’s sole table—a rough-hewn, wobbly-legged one of age-blackened oak.

Turning, she dusted her hands. “Dinna tell me you haven’t asked where your brothers be?” She slid an accusatory glance at the old laird. “Has himself there not told you those two rascals and every man with good arms has been working day and night to rebuild your lost fleet?”

Magnus all but choked. “I know nothing of this,” he spluttered when he could find breath. “Other unexpected matters kept me from enquiring of Hugh’s and Dugan’s health . . . or their doings.”

His stomach, queasy already, tied itself into knots. “The MacDonald galley that bore my friend and me passage dropped us by the cliffs, at the sea gate. They did so at my behest—I couldn’t bear to see the wreck-strewn shore of the landing beach.”

Dagda snorted. “Those wracks be long gone, never you mind,” she declared, smoothing her palms on the stiff black linen of her widow’s skirts. “We had need of the wood for fuel and repairs round about the keep.” She nodded to Amicia, her taciturn features softening for a moment. “Thanks be to your new bride, a score of fine, new galleys will soon be moored off MacKinnons’ Isle.”

“By the Mass! No-o-o.” The denial burst from the heart of Magnus’s smashed pride. “Our fleet should have been rebuilt with MacKinnon coin and none other.” He shook his head, striving to control his features. “This is not to be borne. I cannot allow—”

“You are letting the pain of recent days blind you to what is wise and right.” Colin clamped iron-tight fingers around his arm, squeezing hard for emphasis. “And you are doing hurt to those who should be cherished and protected from such outbursts.”

That last, a barely audible whisper close by his hot-burning ear.

Jerking free of his friend’s grip, Magnus swiped the back of his hand across his brow. Sakes, but his forehead was perspiring. As was all of him . . . icy cold rivulets of sweat streaked down his back in torrents.

And the truth of Colin’s reprimand only increased the copious flow.

As did his father’s mumblings about being
an auld done man.

Feeling quite old and done himself, he shot a look at Amicia and knew an immediate jab of guilt upon noting the sudden pallor of her cheeks.

His da received a savage glare. “You are behind this,” he rapped out, his ire laying a more bitter edge on his words than he would have wished. “I vowed when I left that I’d make things aright, and I would have. Even now. And at the soonest!”

“You do not ken the ill winds that have been sweeping o’er this isle,” Donald MacKinnon insisted, his voice catching. “Troubles where’er we . . .” He trailed off, hunching over as great, rasping coughs seized him.

When they subsided, he straightened, a shaking hand pressed to his chest. “Donall MacLean has proved himself a strong friend,” he got out, speaking with effort. “He sent us enough good Scots
siller
to commence work even before the Lady Amicia set foot on MacKinnons’ Isle.”

“This has naught to do with MacLean’s generosity. There is none in all the Isles who’d deny he is a good and honorable man, a fine laird. I mean no ill to him.” Magnus paused, blew out an agitated breath. “I would only that you’d waited until my return.”

Donald MacKinnon plucked at his lower lip, a flush staining his cheeks. “Nay, nay, nay, laddie,” he said at last. “We couldna done. Not with your lady’s dowry coming to us, a gift from the heavens.”

He stared at Magnus, his expression an odd mix of defiance and . . . dread. “We could not wait another day, see you. The cur—”

“God’s eyes!” Magnus’s patience snapped. “The only curse e’er visited upon this isle is the inability of its keepers to hold fast to their fortunes,” he declared, not troubling to lower his voice. Bile rising in his throat, he swept everyone in the room with a heated stare. “That is the truth of it—I promise you!”

“Nay, you mistake. A shadow has lain across us longer than time can remember,” his father minded him, belligerence in his reedy voice. “For sure since the day the first laird, Reginald of the Victories, set the foundations of this stronghold.”

“Reginald of the Victories, whom God rest, made his own fate—as do we all.” Magnus flung out an arm to take in the whole of the solar’s pathetically bare walls. “No powers of darkness e’er railed against him or these stones, never you fear. Naught clouds the fortunes of the once-great Clan Fingon but our own wretched ineptitude.”

His own inadequacies clawing at his innards, Magnus smoothed a hand over his tight-pressed lips and began pacing the solar. But his foul humor tagged after him, its cloying grip too firm to outmaneuver.

Sakes, the chamber’s very emptiness of furnishings mocked him. And the few remaining amenities only underscored what little comforts Coldstone Castle could offer. A lacking that would pain him all his days if he could not soon amend it.

Not at all sure how he meant to do so, he passed one of the wide arched window embrasures and a chill blast of damp, salt-laden air hit him full in the face, making him shiver and worsening his mood.

Scowling, he drew his plaid closer about him and glanced into the shadowy alcove, glared at the useless, rain-warped shutters. But it was the two flanking benches of the deep embrasure that drew his eye.

Stripped to the naked stone, they met his wrath face on. Twin-staring slabs of cold gray, full of silent accusation and seeming to follow his progress around the room, aimed recriminations at him that proved every bit as damning as the distress in his father’s eyes.

The disappointment on Amicia MacLean’s lovely face.

The pity in the sad shake of Colin’s head, and the tsk-tsk’ing reprimand of old Dagda’s sharp-edged tongue.

Wishing he’d held his own, he wheeled about to face his father. “Ne’er would I censure you for believing such foolery—God kens enough storms of plaguey fortune have washed o’er this isle throughout the centuries for any man to call us Devil-damned, but I’d wished to have done with it myself, see you? Without outside aid. Not Donall the Bold’s. Not his undeniably fetching sister’s. Not any man’s. I—”

He broke off, his voice cracking in his vexation. Determined to spare himself further humiliation, he made straight for the door, intending to absent himself with all good haste, but a gentle hand lit on the mail of his sleeve.

“A word with you, sir.”

To his surprise, or perhaps not, that one touch, and the caring in the Lady Amicia’s deep brown eyes, proved as mighty a hold as Colin’s most steely-fingered grip.

Instinctively distancing himself, he waited, but she only gave him the faintest smile. A wee, hesitant one as if she, too, bore her own vexing cares.

As if she might need him.

A notion too dangerous to ponder.

So he pushed it away, and found his voice in the doing. “Aye?”

“Can we not share a walk?” she wanted to know, the soft lilt of her Isleswoman’s voice as seductive as the compassion warming her black-lashed eyes. She pressed his arm. “Mayhap up on the ramparts where we may speak privily and unguarded?”

Magnus shook his head, tried not to inhale her warm, womanly scent. “There is scarce little to be said before I have had time to consider this . . . this
state of affairs,
and what can be done about it.”

Lifting her hand from his sleeve, she smoothed the backs of her fingers down his cheek. “You are sure?”

“Never more so,” Magnus blurted, feeling her touch ripple in too-pleasurable waves over and through the whole of him. “Walking with you on the battlements would not allow me the peace I need to think.”

And for very different reasons than she suspected!

“Very well.” She dropped her hand. “But allow me one observation, please.”

“So long as you are here, you may speak your full mind.” He aimed a sidelong look at his father and Dagda. “I do not hold much with intrigues and secrets.”

“Then know that I saw you shiver when you strode past the opened window,” she began, her features carefully schooled. “Consider, too, good Magnus, that even as a chill breeze brings gray clouds, so can that very wind banish the darkness so the sun can warm all in its wake.”

Magnus stared at her, wordless.

Wholly lost, he found himself overcome by an irrepressible urge to draw her to him and drink in her sweetness and warmth until he fair drowned in the good of her. But any such indulgence would only make it more difficult to send her away, so he held his silence.

His father suffered no such affliction. “Heh, heh!” He crowed with righteous glee. “See what a fine bride I found you,” he declared, jabbing the air with a knotty finger. “She is not only pleasing to look at but wise . . . as you’d be if you’d heed her wish and take the air with her.”

A sage nod from Dagda and the narrow-eyed urging on Colin Grant’s face unhinged Magnus’s tongue. “The only taking I’ll be doing is to my own good bedchamber,” he said, turning on his heel. “I’ve sore need of rest. Whate’er needs to be yet discussed can be done on the morrow.”

“Your bedchamber?” Donald MacKinnon’s brief burst of high humor vanished as if it’d never been. “You canna sleep there—we’ve readied the old quarters of Reginald of the Victories for you . . . for you and your bride. She is already settled there.”

“My room will serve me well enough.”

“But—”

“On the morrow, Da.” His mind set, Magnus strode from the solar.

“Saint Columba—save us! Ooooh, blessed martyrs . . . !” the old man cried after him.