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‘Nae.’ Angus paced across the other side of the fire. ‘He is not one of us. I say kill him here and now and be rid of any menace.’
In response Isobel kneeled beside James. Pushing back her sleeve, she made a cut in her palm and another across the thickened skin below the strange mark on his wrist. Pressing them together, she smelt the rusty tang of blood.
Hecate, Cerridwen, Dark Mother Take Us In
Hecate, Cerridwen, Let Us Be Reborn.
The oath of loyalty and attachment echoed around the clearing.
‘You would protect him for ever?’ Andrew asked the question.
She shook her head, knowing he was her enemy. ‘Nae. But I swear by all the gods of this place that I will protect him for now.’
Chapter Four
He was naked.
He knew that as easily as he knew he was safe.
Isobel Dalceann was there in the shadow just beyond the candlelight, watching him with her dark eyes and stillness.
‘Water.’ He could barely get the word out.
She moved forwards and he saw that one eye was swollen, the deep bruise on her cheek below grazed into redness.
‘Who hurt you?’ His whisper was barely audible as she leaned forwards to hear.
‘I fell.’
He did not believe it, nor did he understand the shift of caution in her eyes or the gentle way she took a cloth and ran it across his chest.
‘It feels good.’ All the skin on his arms was raised with pleasure, leaning into the cool, and he saw she had a band of cloth wrapped around her palm. Another hurt. He tried to reach up and touch it, but she stopped him.
‘You must rest. Your arm has festered and only strength can save you now.’
His arm? Sliced in the sea. He remembered the boat bound for Edinburgh. He remembered the wave as it had caught them broadside, turning the vessel into the cold and green, the ropes tethering him and the sailcloth, people calling from everywhere.
He had cut free as many as he could with his knife and released them. Simon. Guy. Etienne and Raoul. Then the wooden splint had come down from the mast, broken by force of wind and wave above, turning sharp.
Aching now. Right down to his fingers in a cramping stiffness. A band circled his arm, white linen soaked in something that smelt like overripe onion and herbs strangely mixed. He could not move a muscle.
‘My sword hand?’
‘Ian says cloth sellers should have no need for such a weapon,’ she returned.
‘You found him, then, in the glade?’
‘Worse for wear with the knots you fashioned. It would have been a slow death had we come too late.’
‘Like this one is?’
Her pupils dilated. Always a sign of high emotion. Marc shut his eyes. She thought that he would die soon. Tonight even, he amended, looking at the ornate golden cross above his bed.
Other words came close. An ancient chant in the firelight! Isobel Dalceann lifting his palm against her own and cutting it open, blood mixed in an oath of protection. Was he going mad as well?
The glow from the candle hurt even though his eyelids burnt in fever.
‘Where am I?’
‘Ceann Gronna. My keep on the high sea cliffs above Elie.’
The sea was close, the moon seen through the space between skin and stone at the window. No longer full.
‘How long?’
‘Three days.’
He breathed out, nausea roiling his stomach. Even in Burgundy when the arrow had pierced his armour and gone deep into his back he had not been as ill.
‘You have tended me, then?’
Sickness. The room was full of its grasp. Basins, cloths and vials of medicine lined up on the table. His clothes were neatly washed and folded on the seat of a white ash wooden chair decorated with bands of vermilion paint. He wished he might have stood and taken charge, but not one muscle in his body would obey a command.
Helpless. The very word stung with shock.
‘You have spoken in your sleep in French of battles and of death. It is just as well that none here understand you.’
He turned then, away from her eyes, because there was a question in them that he had no answer for.
Are you an enemy?
Once I was, he wanted to say, but now? The bruising on her cheek was dark.
He should have kept silent, should have held his tongue even in the grasp of delirium. So many damn secrets inside him.
‘When you are better, you will be sent by boat across to Edinburgh.’
‘Better?’ The word surprised him. She thought he would survive this, then, this malady. Relief had him reaching out and taking her fingers into his own. Just gratitude in it. The cool of her skin made him realise how hot he was.
Isobel stood still, the nighttime noises of a sleeping keep far from this room. Her room. His fingers were strong like his body, the skin on the pads toughened by work. She felt them relax as he fell into sleep again, but she did not put his hand down as she should have, did not move from her position at his side, watching him in the midnight.
Marc. He had said his name was that when she had called him James, shrugging off the other name with agitation. He had said other things as well in his delusion that had made her glad she was alone, his green eyes glassy with the fever that raged through him, taking sense.
A warrior. She understood that now by all the other marks on his body, sliced into history. Neither an easy life nor a safe one, for fire and shadow sculptured the hardness in him lying on her bed.
He had spoken of some things that she had no knowledge of and of other things that she did.
Things such as the sovereignty accorded to David of the Scots and the ambitions of Philip of France. A king’s man, then? If Ian or Andrew had heard the words he would be long gone by now, breathless in the raging seas off the end of the Ceann Gronna battlements, only memory.
Why did she protect him?
Her eyes travelled over his body, masculine and beautiful, and with real regret she covered the shape with a thin linen cloth. Wiping back her hair with the sudden heat, she felt the raised ridge of scar and frowned.
Broken apart. By trust. It would never happen again.
With a ripe expletive she turned from the sleeping stranger and walked to the window to watch the water silver in the Scottish moonlight.
The knock on the door a few moments later pulled her from her thoughts. Andrew stood there, a pewter mug of ale in one hand and the remains of a crust of bread in the other. He walked over to Marc and laid a finger against his throat, before coming back to the doorway.
‘He is still out, I see. Ye’ll be needing help I’m thinking, lass. This captive is a way from healthy and the rings beneath your eyes are dark.’
Shaking off his concern, she faced him. ‘He is making progress, none the less. A day or two and he will be fit to travel.’
‘To Edinburgh, then. Is that wise?’
‘He has not seen the keep or the structures within it. Nor will he be given knowledge of the tunnels or of the entrance from the sea. He knows only this room,’ she added. ‘We will blindfold him when he leaves so that nothing is seen.’
‘Something is always seen, Isobel, and he looks like no cloth merchant I have ever encountered.’ The frown on his brow was deep. Concern for the security of the Ceann Gronna Castle, Isobel supposed, and those within it. A just concern, too, and yet …
‘If we kill him in cold blood we are as bad as those who come to oust us.’
Andrew laughed. ‘When David sends the next baron this summer to try his hand at the sacking of the keep, you might think differently.’
‘So you would have him as dead as Ian wants him?’
‘Not dead, but gone. The day after tomorrow even if he is no better. Do ye promise me that?’
The cut on her palm stung when she shook his hand and her right cheek ached from where Angus had hit out in the clearing after she had invoked the protections.
Probably warranted, she thought. She didn’t recognise herself in the action, either, as for so many years any stranger trespassing on the Dalceann lands had been sent away without exception.
Why not him?
Why not bundle him right now into a blanket and dispatch him west? He could take his chances of survival just as the others had taken theirs, and if God saw fit to let him live then who was she to invite danger to her hearth?
The Ceann Gronna hearth. She remembered when as a little girl her father had remodelled the fireplace in the solar, burying iron beneath the stones for preservation.
Lord, and then her father’s actions had inveigled them all into this mess when he had stood against the king in Edinburgh and demanded that the lands around this place would be for ever Dalceann. He had taken no notice of any arguments Alisdair had put forward, but had forged on into a position which he was caught in. The armies that had followed him home had been undermanned and he had easily rebuffed them, but by then they were outlawed. Surrender would undoubtedly mean death to them all and Isobel had long been one to whom strategy had come easily.
At twenty she had planned the defence of the next attack and the one after that. Now, they stood on the edge of the cliff with the world at a distance and no other great vassal of the king had ventured forth to try his hand at possession. Not for two whole summers.
So far the magic in the hearth had held. Except for Alisdair. But even his bones lay here in the earth of the bailey, defended by high walls of stone.
The unassailable Ceann Gronna Castle of the Dalceann clan.
‘We cannae hold on for ever, ye ken, Isobel. The new governance has its supporters.’
She nodded because truth was an unavoidable thing. When the time was right some of the Dalceanns would leave the keep by sea. Already the ground to the south was prepared. A different ruse and one bought with the golden trinkets and jewellery found in the French boat that had sunk a good two years before. There was still some left in case of trouble, hidden in the walls of her chamber. Alisdair’s idea.
‘If this stranger is as inclined to violence as Ian believes him to be, it would make sense to bind him in the dungeon under lock and key.’
‘You speak as if I could not subdue him, Andrew, should he become restless.’
‘Could not or would not, Isobel? There is a difference.’
His voice held a note of question and it saddened her. He had always been the father her own had not been—a man of strong morals and good sense.
A moan behind had her turning.
‘I will think on your words, Andrew, I promise.’
She was glad when he merely nodded and moved off, leaving her alone to tend to the green-eyed stranger.
She had said something of sea tunnels, Marc thought, and of an entrance from the water, but with Isobel beside him again, her hand across his brow, cooling fever, he filed the information away to remember at a later time.
His arm ached, small prickles of it in his chest and neck, the water she helped him sip tainted with a herb he did not know the name of.
The door held a key in the lock and there was rope in the shelf of a small cabinet. A fine woollen cloth hung on the wall by the bed. All things he could use to escape if he needed to he thought. But not yet. The weakness in him was all consuming and the dizziness took away his balance.
‘You need to get stronger,’ she said and her tone was angry. ‘For my protection has its limits, Marc’
Marc felt his lips tug up at each end. Not in humour, but in the sheer and utter absurdity of it all. God, when had he ever depended on anyone before and how many thousands had always depended on him? She had the way of his name, too. The fever, he supposed, loosening his tongue in the heat of swelter.
‘They would kill me here? Your people?’
She nodded. ‘For a lot less than you would imagine.’
‘And you? Are you compromised because of it?’
When she did not answer he swore, the night in the forest coming back to him. Lifting his right hand, he motioned to the wound.
‘Your blood and mine?’
‘The spirit of guardianship must be honoured in the proper way. It is written.’
‘A useful knowledge, that.’
‘You speak as if you do not believe it.’
‘Believe?’ Turmoil and battle were all he had known for a long time now. But Isobel smelt of fresh mint and soap and something else he could not as yet name. He closed his eyes so that he might know it better, every sense focusing on the part of his skin where her hair brushed against him, soft as a feather.
Hope!
The word came down with all the force of a heavy-bladed falchion—he who had led armies for the king against the great enemies of France for all the years of his life. Trusting no one. Guarding any careless faith.
It was the sickness, perhaps, that made him vulnerable or the mix of her blood against his own, inviting exposure.
He wondered just what she would do if she knew who he truly was and pressed down the thought.
