At The Laird's Command (Sword and Thistle Book 3) (15 page)

John hadn’t known it. Hadn’t been sure. She’d said that she loved him, but then he had broken her heart. She couldn’t
still
love him, could she? Not after more than a month in another man’s bed…
 

“I am not shallow-hearted,” the laird said, not liking the quaver in his voice.

“Entirely
empty
-hearted then, is it?”

It was too much to bear that Ian could say such a thing to him. “It’ll never be enough for you, Ian, will it? You want my clan. You want my woman. Well, when I’m dead, you’ll have them both—”

“Don’t play the martyr with me. Just marry the bloody Donald girl! For the love of God, John. Agree to their terms, surrender the castle, and save your neck, damn you.”

John had made an oath to the Mackenzies. He’d made an oath to Heather, too. He couldn’t see the point in breaking either, just to save his neck. “Is that what you’ll do, when you’re chieftain, Ian? Break your oaths?”

“I’m not saying your choice is easy. But you have a
choice
. You can negotiate or you can fight, and we’ll be beside you either way. We’ll die with you to the last man. But not if you give up. Not if you sit up here in your tower, trying to control matters after your death, babbling about how I’m going to be chieftain.”

“You are,” John said. “Once you let the enemy into the castle.”

Ian went red, and his fists clenched at his side. “You—you think I’m the traitor?”

John let his eyes lock on his kinsman’s. “I think you’re a wise man and you know there’s a deal to be made. You aren’t the one with an oath of alliance to the Mackenzies, after all. I am. When it is all said and done, and my head is on a pike, you can deny letting them in the walls. You can let them take you prisoner for show, if you must, until the clan is appeased. I’m sure overtures of this sort have been made to you already…either through your mother or directly to you when I sent you out to speak with the enemy.”

Now Ian went from red to purple. “What if such overtures
had
been made? You actually think I’d entertain them. After all the years I called you not only my kinsman, but my friend. After all we’ve shared. You think I’ll betray you?”

“I know you will,” John said, feeling the tightness in his chest as he said it. “Because I’m commanding you to do it.”

Ian was a big, brawny warrior. A man who could stand at his post for hours without tiring. He had an endurance about him and a singleminded purpose that John had often envied. But at these words, his kinsman’s knees went a bit wobbly, and he seemed to lose all place of himself in the world. “
What?
”

“It’s the only way for me to both keep my honor and protect Clan Macrae,” John explained, as calmly as a man could explain his own demise. “Accept whatever offer has already been made to you. And if one hasn’t been made, then I’ll send you out for another parley and you can offer to betray me. Barter for the lives of the villagers. For whichever holdings of mine they’ll let you keep. They might even make you constable of this castle, to hold it in allegiance to them, though that might be too much to ask. What
I
ask is that you watch after Heather. Do that, and my clan and my woman are both yours.”

The laird never saw the blow coming.

One moment, he was giving the painful order and the next Ian’s fist was connecting with his face. The crack was shattering—knuckles against jaw. The pain of it nearly blinded him. And he could taste the iron tang of blood in his mouth. A moment later they were grappling, grabbing one another by the collars of the shirt, shoving and straining.
 

“You dare to strike your laird?” John shouted, true rage coursing through his veins that he hadn’t let himself feel before now. The laird returned the punch, delivering a solid blow that snapped Ian’s head back, and spouted a fountain of blood from his nose. “I could have you killed for it!”

“Do it if you can,” Ian cried, tears in his eyes as he readied his fist for another swing. “Because you’re right. I want your clan. I want your woman too. But I would never have taken either from you. And I’ll be damned if I let you give them to me. You can find someone else to be your Judas.”

~~~

HEATHER

Not long after I watched Ian storm off in a rage to confront the laird, Brenna hovered in the doorway. “Will you need help dressing?” Brenna asked, her skin still pale from the poisoned well-water, and her lower lip a bit quivery, lending her speech a bit of a slur.

“You shouldn’t be up and about!” I cried, rushing to usher her into a chair.

“There’s no point in laying about feeling poorly if you can be useful while feeling poorly,” she said, adjusting her cap with exactly the sentiment I’d come to expect from her.

“You’re lucky to be alive,” I said, mournfully, for the shepherd’s boy didn’t make it and several others emerged with such weak thumps of the heart, it was as if they’d never recover. “In any case, you need not worry about dressing me anymore. I’m not the laird’s lady any longer, and as you can see, I’ve managed to dress myself.”

Brenna’s eyes darted to the unmade bed, then to me, then away as if she couldn’t bear to think of how low I’d fallen. “I’ve been saving something for you. Now is as good a time to give it to you as any.” With that, she drew from a pocket in her apron two biscuits and a little pot of heather-laced honey. “The biscuits are hard enough to chip your teeth, but I remembered how much you liked the honey. And it’s the last we have in the castle.”

“Oh,” I said, my mouth watering for it, even as my stomach tossed. “But tell me you didn’t steal it from the larder…”
 

If she’d gotten past Malcolm to do that, we’d both be hanged!

“Of course not. The cook doled it out to me in compensation for giving up my salt-beef to the warriors. I thought I’d share it with you, since you once shared yours with me, when you first came here, and the laird wished to spoil you so…”

My heart swelled a bit that she remembered me kindly. I felt very selfish for it. “I’m so grateful, but I really couldn’t eat a bite. You have it. Enjoy it for me.”

She dipped the biscuit into the honey, as if to entice me. “Oh, I should think you need it more than I do. You’ve been through so much. I cannot imagine how it’s been for you, Heather. To nearly be killed by assassins then abandoned by the laird.”

Abandoned by the laird.

Those words still thudded into my chest and stole my breath away. That was exactly the way of it. And I wondered if it would ever stop hurting.

“Take the honey,” Brenna said. “Keep your strength up. I imagine Ian Macrae is a demanding man.”
 

There was something in the way she said his name that held a note of reverence, but also a touch of possession. Another glance at the rumpled bed told me how resentful she was of my sleeping arrangements.
 

That was the my only warning. The only thing that sent the hairs up on my nape. The only reason I pulled back just as she raised the biscuit to my lips. “I said I’m not hungry, Brenna.”

“Of course you are,” she replied, her eyes hardening to mean little slits. “Voracious as any harlot. So why not open your mouth wide for a little honey the way I’m sure you open it wide for the men you seduce.”

The beckoning glitter of the honey in the light was as sharp as a dagger tip. I grasped her by the wrist to stop her from pushing it into my face. “What’s in the honey, Brenna?”

“Don’t you know? You took it from me and then I took it back.”

There was a certain madness in her expression, and the squeak gone from her voice. She’d always seemed a timid thing to me, in everything except for her love for Ian Macrae. Was that what she meant? “I didn’t take anything or
anyone
from you.”

But her eyes darted to the windowsill and when I looked, I realized something was missing. The jar with the rune symbols. I hadn’t returned it to my sister because I hadn’t quite figured out the mystery of it, but it was gone from my windowsill where I’d left it. How long had it been gone? I’d been too busy helping the castle with its dwindling supply of water to notice it’s disappearance. And now a terrible suspicion welled up in me that Brenna had taken it, and that she knew exactly what was in it. “T’was the jar you took, was it? And it was poison.”

“Belladonna,” she confirmed, with a malicious snarl.

I cursed myself for a fool.
Belladonna
. Beautiful woman. It was there for me to see all along if I had been clever enough to see it. I didn’t have knowledge of herbs and poisons—that was my sister’s realm. But I knew enough to deduce that if Brenna had taken it and laced my honey with it, she wanted me dead.

I might have told her that what passed between Ian and I at night was entirely innocent, or at least mostly so. I might have tried to defend my conduct. But the thought that I might be with child brought forth in me nothing but a fury of indignation. “Get out, you jealous little viper. And find some hole to hide in before I tell the laird and his men that you tried to murder me with food you probably
did
steal from the larder after all.”

“You won’t tell anyone anything when you’re dead,” she said, breaking free of my grasp. The biscuit and the poisoned honey fell to the floor, but from her apron she drew out a knife. “Now I must gut you, when you could have done it easier. Poison isn’t so painful. A flush, a rash, a bit of stumbling and hallucination before you fade away…”

My hands flew up and away at the sight of the butcher knife, my heart thumping wildly. Even though I could scarcely think of anything but the sharpness of it, her words slowly penetrated through the haze of fear. The symptoms she was describing were the same as she’d suffered…

“Come to your senses, Brenna. The poison has destroyed your mind!”

She didn’t reply, but swiped with the knife. I shrieked and jumped back from the slash of her blade, throwing a chair down between us to stop her. And in spite of my fear, another realization struck me.
 

Assassins
, she had said. Not assassin.
 

The laird had told everyone it was a lone assassin. Only me, Malcolm, and Ian knew differently. And I gasped, “By the blood of Christ, Brenna. You’re the traitor, aren’t you? You let those assassins into the castle to kill the laird. But why?”

“I did it for
Ian
,” she said, thrusting again with the knife, the tip catching the lace of my sleeve and tearing it open. “So he would become laird. He would never take it himself. He’s too honorable. Someone had to do it for him. I’m going to make him the laird of Clan Macrae, which he should have been from the start. When I do, he’ll see that your love is tawdry and cheap and for sale. But my love is true.”

“Your love is
true
?” I asked, in outrage, scrambling with my hands along the dressing table for something to use to defend myself. “You nearly killed him that night, did you know that? He was wounded fighting the assassins you let into the castle. That’s what comes of your love.”

“He shouldn’t have been anywhere near the laird’s chamber! I think it’s your fault he was. I don’t know how, but I have my suspicions. I know that the laird shares women, and I’ve heard you moaning like the whore you are in his rooms. I won’t let you corrupt an upright warrior like Ian Macrae.”

With that, she thrust her knife again and this time she struck true. I didn’t feel the blade go into my side—at least, it felt more like someone had punched me rather than stabbed me. But the warm gush of my own blood told me what had happened.
 

Another woman would have fallen to her knees with the pain, I suppose. But the dark games I played with the laird conditioned me to take pain and turn it to something else. Sometimes lust. In this case,
fury
.
 

And in my fury I struck Brenna so hard that stumbled. Her foot caught in the sticky honey on the floor. She fell, hard, the knife skittering out of her hand. I grabbed it up before she could rise. “Guards!” I screamed, wondering why I hadn’t thought to do it before. Perhaps it was the shock of it.
 

But Brenna was nothing if not wily. Apprehending her danger, she too began to scream for the guards. In fact, she staggered to her feet, then made for the door, shouting, “Help! I’ve found the traitor!”

Then she ran.

It was a castle under siege. There was no where for her to escape, was there? But perhaps she meant to give some sort of signal to our enemies.
 

“Guards!” I cried again, giving chase.

Flying down the staircase, her fair hair flying free of its bonnet, Brenna called back to me, “Who do you think they’ll believe? A good girl like me or a scheming strumpet whose witch of a sister keeps poisons in the physiker’s laboratory?”

“They’re going to believe
me
,” I said, entirely sure of it. And finding strength in myself
because
I was sure of it. Leaving a trail of blood behind me, I staggered after her as she ran out—not into the castle courtyard, but towards the sea wall, where a cold wind blew fiercely underneath clear winter skies.
 

Maybe she did have a plan of escape. Was there a boat waiting for her at the sea gate? How deep did the conspiracy go? I caught her by the hair just as she reached the first notch in the wall, and whipped her back against the stones. She grasped me too, trying to throw me from the wall.
 

In this, she was foiled by two things.
 

First, though I was bleeding badly from the injury in my side, I was too strong for her. Second, we’d come upon Arabella at the sea wall, watching for Davy’s corpse to wash up, as was her daily habit. And upon hearing my shrieks, my sister sprinted toward us, shouting, “Brenna! What are you doing?”

“She’s the traitor,” I cried over the wind, while Brenna scratched and bit and kicked at me.

Arabella saw the blood on my dress, then her eyes narrowed at Brenna. “It was
you
? You vile, tattling, little rodent!”

“That’s rich coming from the
other
castle whore,” Brenna spit. “Fortunate thing that Davy died with a good name before he could marry you and sully it.”