Jennifer Roberson

Books by Jennifer Roberson

JENNIFER ROBERSON

KENSINGTON BOOKS
www.kensingtonbooks.com

All copyrighted material within is Attributor Protected.

Table of Contents

To the true professionals:
Russell Galen, agent; Ann LaFarge, editor
Deepest thanks for unflagging faith, support, and tenacity.

And especially to the friends and family:
Debby Burnett; Mike Stackpole and Liz Danforth; Sam Stubbs;
Shera Roberson and S.J. Hardy; Georgana Wolff Meiner;
Arzelle Drew; Clare and Dick Witcomb;
Phil and Greta Murnane; Jay Dunkleberger; Tom Quaid;
Simon Hawke; Robyn Carr; Melanie Rawn; Alis Rasmussen;
Sam Hardy; New Years’/40th Birthday Gang;
Thursday Morning Corgi Club; GEnie “Runcibles;”
the household menagerie.
All of whom were there when I most needed them.

 

—Breadalbane bagpipe rant, 1692

—so bonnie was he . . . bonnie, bonnie prince
—
bonnie lad, bonnie lad
—

She made up the tune as she went, singing it in her head where no one could hear, neither her father the laird, called Glenlyon, nor her brothers, any of them, Robbie or Jamie, Dougal or Colin, who would surely laugh, or worse. She would offer them no
sgian dhu,
to stick its blade in her heart.

—
with silver in his hair, and white teeth a’gleaming—

With grave deliberation, Catriona Campbell walked the wall. It was a pile of tumbled fieldstone, all ash and slate and pewter . . . was the drawbridge over the moat leading into the magical castle, where surely she would find her prince languishing in captivity, the bonnie prince, bonnie lad, with silver in his hair and white teeth a’gleaming.

—
bonnie, so bonnie was he
. . . Cat sucked at her lip, reconsidering. Not stone, but a serpent, a silver serpent; a silver serpent-bridge stretched from bank to bank across the moat full of kelpies bespelled by a witch. She would walk the magicked serpent to rescue her bonnie prince.

—
silver in his hair, and white teeth a’gleaming. . .
Traversing the serpent-bridge required such sacrifice as the shedding of shoes, which she undertook readily; immense concentration, with bony elbows outthrust like the wings of a hissing greylag; and lastly, most importantly, the insertion of tender tongue between teeth. But the tongue was uninhibited by a portcullis of teeth. Ten-year-old Cat had shed her front teeth the week before.

“Hag!” her brothers had gleefully chorused immediately upon sighting her lack. “Toothless auld crone!”

To which Cat had replied, with grandiose derision, that at least
hers
would grow back in; fifteen-year-old Robbie, who had lost a dogtooth in a fistfight with a Campbell cousin, would lack his forever.

The argument but ten days before in the doorway of Chesthill, in the laird’s own house, might have escalated into a pitched battle save for the intervention of her oldest brother, Robbie, who had led the chorus himself. He merely picked his sister up, lugged her out of doors to the barrel put out to collect rainwater, and stuffed her headfirst into it.

Bubbling outrage, Cat banged and scraped her elbows, thrashed her legs frenziedly, and eventually realized she might do better to husband her breath rather than spend it on curses. She stilled, holding the remnants of air, hoarding her last reserve, aware of pressure stuffing her ears, dimness crowding her eyes, and the taste of whiskied water.

Sturdy Robbie slapped her on the rump as if she were a weanling calf, then dragged her forth. “There now, Cat, ye’ll learn your manners better.”

In silence, courting patience, Cat allowed him to set her on her feet. Inside her head sounded a voice, her voice, the one she kept secret from others.—
wait you
. . .
wait you, Cat
—

Robbie grinned, displaying the gap in his teeth. “There, now, Cat—”

—
now
—She loosed the mouthful of water in a deliberate, vigorous spray that soaked Robbie’s face. Astonished, he let her go; Cat tore loose and ran away before Robbie or the others, equally astonished, could catch her again.

Heading toward the front door of her father’s house, Cat twisted her head to cast a glance at her brothers. Robbie, Dougal, Colin, and Jamie were, as she fully expected, in demented pursuit.

—
I’ll beat you
—A vicious, malignant joy welled up in Cat’s chest as she thought quickly ahead to escape.

She snatched open the door, darted through, delayed three ticks of a clock, then slammed it shut in their faces.

Silence. There were no shouts, no threats, no flinging open of the door. Poised to flee, Cat waited for the rattle of the latch, the adolescent curses, the cacophony of brothers bent on punishing the youngest of them all, and a lass at that. They made a practice of it.

Surely they would come. They always had before.

Wet from her hips up, Cat dripped onto the polished oak of her father’s floor. Foreboding knotted her belly. She scowled at the nearest glazing, wondering if her foolish brothers would have the temerity to break it. Glass windows cost dearly; likely there’d just be a shutter nailed over it again, and they’d lack for daylight in the gray gloom of a Scottish winter, still months away.

And then the door at last was flung open. Cat twitched, preparing to run, and felt the welling up in her chest of the great shout she meant to make, fierce as a clansman slicing the air with a deadly claymore.

But the shout withered to breathy exhalation; shock grew roots from bare feet into the hardwood floor.

—not Robbie
—Nor Jamie, nor Colin, nor Dougal, but a man she did not know. Cat gaped.
—giant—

In fact, the largest man she had ever seen,
ever,
even in her dreams. His height was such that he was required to stoop to enter her father’s house, so he wouldn’t knock his white-maned head on the lintel . . .
after
he jerked open the heavy wooden door and bellowed rudely for attention.—
like one of Father’s bulls
—

“I am MacIain,” he shouted, “come to speak to a Campbell, aye?—and wi’out a dirk in my hand, or a sword, but soft words and fine courtesy in my mouth, instead.” He paused just inside the door, now filled with other men, and none of them her father’s. “I am Glencoe,” he roared, “come to speak with Glenlyon!”

Transfixed by his hugeness, his thunder, his overwhelming
presence,
Cat stood before him, dripping, staring, because she could not believe any man would shout so in her father’s house, or make such outrageous statements.

The giant eventually looked down at her. She saw the great white mane curling around broad shoulders; a thicket of brows hedging blue eyes; backswept, elegant moustaches, and thick, snowy beard.

Zeus!
she decided instantly, well taken by the tales her brothers had told her of Olympian lairds. But this Zeus was plainly a Scot: she saw the sett of his plaid; the great circle-shaped penannular brooch pinning the cloth crosswise to the shoulder of his buff-dyed jacket; the silver clan badge and accompanying plant crest affixed to his dark blue bonnet, clinging slantwise, Highland-style, to his massive head.

The badge glinted in wan light, transfixing her gaze. She saw the crest more clearly than the rest: a sprig of purple heather. And so she knew who he was, this giant, and what the giant wanted, and of what treatment he was deserving, he and his clansmen, his tacksmen, all gathered behind in the doorway.

She did not see her brothers. Had they run, then, knowing whom they faced? Had MacIain chased them away?

Cat was humiliated. Carefully, she spat onto the floor before his feet, clad in leather brogues glinting of silver buckles. “Dinna you knock on doors in Glencoe?” she asked with a ten-year-old’s eloquent derision born of a lifetime of bloody feuding. “Dinna you behave yourselves like true men do, and come wi’ manners as well as shouting?”

Blue eyes in deep sockets caught fire. He bent down, put out large hands, caught her by the upper arms. The growl arose from deep in his plaid-swathed chest. “Dinna ye ken who I am?”

She did. They all knew him, and cursed him over whisky. “I do! MacDonalds, from Glencoe: the Gallows Herd itself, come to steal more cows from Glen Lyon!”

Huge fingers clamped more tightly upon soaked linen and the fragile arms beneath. He plucked her from the ground as easily as he might a sprig of heather. He lifted her and left her hanging in midair, wholly dependent upon his temper as to whether she would be set down again, or dropped.

—
dinna drop me—
She thought he might; he was that angry. But he didn’t. He drew her close, still hanging, and thrust his big, bearded face into her own considerably smaller one. “Dinna the Campbells teach
you
manners, then?”

He was hurting her, though she doubted he knew it. He was so huge and she so thin; undoubtedly he’d forgotten how solid his grasp on her arms. And scrawny arms they were, too, like all the rest of her.

“I
am
a Campbell!” she cried. “And Glenlyon has taught me all the manners I must have, dealing with MacDonalds!”

“Has he, now? And why?—what would the laird want with a tart-tongued scullion like you?”

She gaped. Scullion, indeed! Her father would be furious.

But for the moment, her father wasn’t present. “Put me down,” she said. “Put me
down,
MacDonald, and take your hands from the flesh of a trueborn Campbell!”

He laughed. The giant
laughed,
throwing back the large head with its tangled swath of snowy curls. And then he set her down, firmly, and took his hands from her arms. She forebore to rub them. “Trueborn Campbell, are ye? Well, then, fetch your master, lass, and tell him MacIain is here to speak words wi’ him.”

“I’m certain he knows,” she said coldly, “you with all your shouting. ”

And indeed her father did know, shouting or not, and was abruptly
there:
startled, puzzled, frowning, yet saying nothing that might cause dirks to be drawn, or swords. Her brothers, brave now in his presence, gathered behind him, slanting her startled, disbelieving glances.

Have they naught to say to him? Campbells to a MacDonald?
Well, if they did not, she did; and would say it, wouldn’t she, no matter what others thought!

Men came into the house behind the Maclain, Highlanders all, like him, in kilts and breeks and bonnets, all wearing bright sprigs of heather and showing hard MacDonald faces. She liked none of them, not knowing what they wanted, and particularly misliking the way they brushed her aside, this way and that, until she stood at the open door, alone, behind the sea of tall MacDonalds.

Whom her father was welcoming in.

MacDonalds,
in the house.

Surely the world had ended. Or surely the world would; likely the MacDonalds intended to murder them all.

Where are OUR men
—
?
Where were the Campbell men sworn to the laird of Glenlyon?

The only men in her father’s house was the laird himself, called Glenlyon for his holdings; her brothers, who were boys; and a hard-faced clutch of Glencoe MacDonalds, whom she knew, and had always known—
and likely will always know!
—as the Enemy.

Catriona Campbell, like her brothers before her, had suckled on bedtime tales of MacDonald enmity; of the raids to lift Glenlyon’s cattle, to plunder Glenlyon’s holdings, to injure Glenlyon’s men. In her turbulent, angry dreams, Glenlyon’s only daughter courted a perfect revenge.

Now she moved to slam shut the door, hoping its noise would remind MacIain of his neglectfulness; what manner of man left open doors to houses? But a hand was there before her, preventing the closure, purposely holding the door open.

She looked up at once, thrusting out her chin. The voice in her head rang loudly.
Dinna stop ME!

She tugged at the door rudely, challenging his grasp; he did not permit it, which infuriated her. She glared at him all the harder, wishing she could kick him in the shin so he’d turn his attention elsewhere. But something about his posture stopped her.

He wasn’t a giant, like MacIain, being of a size with other men, if tall as opposed to short. And he was smiling at her, a little, but with no dirk in it, as if he understood her feelings of anger, resentment, hurt.

Cat didn’t smile back.
MacDonald!

The man looked down on her, but his expression lacked the ridicule of MacIain’s. Gravely he studied her, marking her expression, the set of her chin, the tears of humiliation in her eyes.

“Come out the house,” he said gently. “Leave the others to their business.”

“Cat,” Robbie warned; he was the eldest, and knew MacDonalds best.

For that, then, she went out the house, to poke a stick at Robbie.

The day was bright, dusted with dew. It glistened against the ground except where the MacDonalds had trampled it into the dirt. In deference to summer and Highland custom Cat’s feet were bare, making their own prints. She studied her muddied toes a long moment, wondering what he thought of a barefoot, dripping, hot-faced Campbell; then fired up again as she reminded herself it made no difference at all
what
he thought of her, she being bred of Glen Lyon and he of Glencoe.

He linked his hands behind his back as if to indicate he offered no hostility, no hand with a dirk in it, but she knew better.—
dirks come from beHIND backs as well as from in front!
She scowled fiercely, clenching her teeth, daring him to try.