Jennifer Roberson (35 page)

Dair’s face blanched into alabaster. “She left of her own will.” “Oh, aye? And am I to name my sister a liar?” Robbie spat at the floor. “I dinna think so!”

“She left,” Dair repeated. “She was gone when I returned.”

“Driven away.”

“She was not.”

“Driven away by a man who would take a Campbell bizzem in his bed instead!” He glared fiercely at Cat. “D’ye think I didna see it when you gave her your bonnet? Good Christ, MacDonald, the whole encampment saw it! And not a one of my Appin men, nor any of Glencoe, who didna ken what that meant!”

“Robbie—”

But Stewart refused to listen when he could act instead. Before anyone could move to check him, he lunged forward through the soldiers and slung shackles and chain at Dair’s unprotected jaw.

Dair’s head snapped back. He rocked on his heels, then fell down against the stairs. His skull struck a riser with an audible crack.

“You bluidy bastard—” Cat, unshackled and much freer to move than Stewart, stiff-armed him back and back, knocking him off his stride until he fetched up against the wall. Folds of tartan fell from her shoulders. “You pawkie, bluidy bastard—”

There were men all around, soldiers in her house. Someone caught her arms and pulled her away from Robbie, who grinned and swore in vulgar admiration, bleeding from a split lip; but she heard naught of it, nothing more than noise, a roaring in her ears and light, too much light, filling up her eyes.

“Devil take you!” she cried, then pulled free of them all to go to Dair, sprawled so gracelessly, to kneel, to touch his bloodied face.

“Catriona—” Una blurted. “You’ll no’—”

But the words were blocked away as hands closed on her arms again. They pulled, they nagged, they dragged her away. “Let me be—”

“Put him in irons,” Forbes said. “We can tie him onto his horse.”

His voice was distant, so distant.

To Robbie he said, distantly, “That was unnecessary.”

“No, oh no,
’twas.
”

Forbes jerked his head to other soldiers. “Have Stewart taken out of here. He’s served his purpose.” He turned to Cat. “I told you, no lies would be held against you. No harm will come to you.”

A hand stayed her when she would have moved. Instead she laughed into his face, and saw him redden. Forbes turned away.

They put shackles on Dair’s wrists, locked them, then heaved him up from the floor. He was slack in unconsciousness and made no protest. Blood stained the saffron linen of his shirt. She saw a smear on the angle of the bottom step, a puddle on the floor.

Where she had stood once, in trews and shirt, confronting Robbie Stewart as he held a sword to her throat.

She could not wish upon him another fate but that he be transported to the Tolbooth and summarily hanged in Edinburgh. Save that Dair would hang with him.

The roaring yet filled her head, and the light her eyes. So much noise and light . . . she wondered if it were anger, were fear, or if something had broken inside her head even as Dair had struck his.

Robbie was gone, and Dair. They were gone, all of them gone: the soldiers, Stewart, MacDonald. Only Forbes remained.

Cat looked at him. Noise faded. The light died out of her eyes. All the weight, the pain, the paralyzing fear came up to close her throat. “Dinna do it,” she said tightly. “He’s already hanged once. ’Tis bad luck to hang a man twice.”

There was no joy in his eyes, only duty and sympathy. “The king’s pleasure,” Forbes said, and took his leave.

 

Dair roused as they pulled him from the horse. He was aware of war being fought in his belly and the thunder of cannon booming inside his head. For a moment it was Killiecrankie come again, steel blades clashing, until his feet touched the ground. Hands were on him, but it did not matter; he sagged against the garron and felt it shift.

—
och, wait
—

The motion was enough. Legs collapsed and dumped him unceremoniously onto stony ground, where raw and brutal instinct rolled his body to one side, then hitched it up awkwardly on elbow and hip despite the chains—
—no’ swords after all—
—as Dair lost the war. All that he had eaten, all that he had drunk, deserted his belly.

Had he been wholly conscious he would have felt humiliated before the Sassenach soldiers, but he was but barely conscious and therefore did not care a fig for what they thought of him. He did not recall ever having been so ill, so wretchedly ill, with pain crowding his skull and lodging in his jaw. He expelled what was in his belly, then fell to a cramped heaving despite its emptiness. His skull cracked open and let in all the light, the too-bright light of a day he would sooner forget.

Iron chimed as someone came to stand over him. The tone was flat, unfriendly. “They’ve let us stop to piss.”

Dair coughed, and wished he hadn’t.

Iron rang again. The man knelt next to him. “MacDonald.” A hand touched his shoulder. This time the tone was friendlier. “You’ll no’ choke, d’ye hear?”

Scot, not Sassenach. And a familiar voice, withal.

“Dair—” Now there was sharp concern. “Christ, you willna die, aye? And rob them of their hanging?”

Robbie. Robbie Stewart. Who was wholly responsible for his straits.

The heaving died with an intemperate quiver deep in his belly. Dair remained hunched with one leg tucked beneath him, afraid to lift his forehead from the ground. His head might fall off. The jaw, he feared, already had.

“I’ve water,” Robbie said. “Will you wash your face, man?”

He did not care the least about his face. It was all he could do to remain precariously balanced between the day and the night.

Another voice intruded. “We must go on.”

Robbie, with scorching contempt: “D’ye think he’ll run away if we bide a
wee
bit?”

The other voice, unruffled: “I think that as long as we remain in the heather we provide a target for such clansmen as would sooner see you both freed than put in Fort William. We must go on.”

“He is injured—” Robbie began.

“Then tend him yourself,” the other declared. “ ’Twas you who injured him.”

Dair, in his misery, did not know why Stewart would do other than crack his head again. Yet the hand on his shoulder remained.

“Can you sit?” Robbie asked. “They’ll haul you up again; would you give them the satisfaction?”

He would give them whatever he could manage. Dair shifted against the ground and slowly levered himself upright into a sitting position. The hand fell away with a ringing of iron links. Robbie, squatting close, eyed him critically.

Awkwardly Dair scraped a linen-clad forearm across his mouth, avoiding the heavy shackle at his wrist, then fixed his blurred vision on Robbie’s bruised face. Through the pain in his jaw, he said, “Devil take you, you pawkie bastard.”

Stewart did not choose to accept the insult. “Och, as to that—he already has.” Two-handed, he hoisted a boiled-leather bottle. “Water, not usquabae. Will ye drink?”

Upright did not suit his head. Blackness encroached. “Drink it yourself,” he managed. “And may you choke on it—”

But any retort that might have been offered was lost in the fraying decay of Dair’s consciousness.

 

Small trunks only, wood with leather tacked over, and tin bits at the corners for strength. Cat would take one garron and thus could not afford to pack more than two small trunks could hold.

Apart from the rest was a short length of fine-woven tartan spread out upon her bed—
her
bed, not her father’s—and into the center she set three items: a sword-severed length of hempen rope, a silver French-made mirror, and a blue Highland bonnet bearing badge and eagle feather. He was a laird’s son.

Una had, eventually, gone away. Cat ignored her after the first moments of argument, until Una declared her an ill-mannered, foul-mouthed bizzem, to which Cat replied, with manifest eloquence, that until Una was mistress in the laird’s place she had best tend her tongue.

Cat did not like resorting to condescension, but had wearied of provocation. And it had proved successful; Una departed swiftly. But when the door below was struck open so hard it banged against the wall, Cat realized Una had merely gone, like a pawkie coward, to bring in artillery .

They were no respecters of privacy, her brothers, had no tolerance of her wishes. They thudded their way up the stairs, yanked open her door, then crowded between the jambs. The room was not so large it supported three tall men in addition to herself, but they tried regardless of it.

Jamie was furious. He spilled such offal in his words and so many all at once that she could not decipher the insults, only their intentions. When Jamie stopped swearing at her, Dougal joined in, if with less heat; Colin merely waited until both of them were done.

“Why?” he asked then. “Why a MacDonald?”

Cat found it ironic. Not
‘why a man?,
’but
‘why a MacDonald?
’To him she offered answer; his mildness merited it. “Because at that moment, with him in my house, in my heart, there was nothing else to do but go to bed with him. Nothing else I
wanted
but to go to bed with him.” There. Frank enough. No man could mistake it, not even her brothers.

Jamie was disgusted. “I’ll no’ have any man say my sister is a whore—”

“Good. Dinna let him say it. Last I kent, a woman was no’ a whore unless she took silver for it.”

Dougal was curious. “You dinna care what they think?”

“I dinna,” Cat said plainly. “Did wondering about it ever keep you from bedding a lass?”

“ ’Tis different,” Jamie declared. “ ’Tis a man’s right to choose a woman—”

“He chose me.” She shut one of the trunks. “I dinna see the sense in explaining myself. ’Tis done.”

“Where are you going?” Colin asked.

Cat set the latch. “Glencoe. I’ve been invited.”

“Why?” Jamie, for all his noise, was desperately perplexed. “What business have you there in the midst of MacDonalds?”

Cat lifted the trunk off the bed and set it on the floor. “To tell them the truth of what’s become of him.”

“I dinna doubt they ken that already.” His irony was weighted with contempt. “The Sassenachs went there first, aye?”

“They dinna ken the truth,” she answered steadfastly. “ ’Tis for me to tell them.”

Dougal was incredulous. “Glenlyon’s daughter in Glencoe? Are ye daft, Cat? They could hold you there and demand a trade: you for Alasdair Og!”

Cat shut the second trunk and latched it.
“You
are daft, Dougal. What value am I to the Sassenachs? We are none of us Jacobites, aye?—and the Laird of Glenlyon serves King William in Argyll’s regiment.”

“You have some value to us,” Jamie declared sourly. “If Breadalbane’s son will have despoiled baggage.”

Cat laughed at him. “Breadalbane’s son despoiled his own baggage,” she said, “and then ran off with it. I dinna think he’ll be home to consider having me.”

“Cat—” As she turned toward the door with one trunk clasped in her arms, Jamie moved to obstruct her. “I canna have it.”

“Because of your pawkie pride? Well, I dinna care what you can or canna have,” she said. “I will do what I wish.”

He did not give ground. “I’ll no’ have it.”

Anger boiled up. “You are not the laird yet!” she cried. “Christ, Jamie, had Robbie lived you’d be naught at all, save a drukken man’s second son! Let me pass.”

“And Robbie
died
because of MacDonalds.”

It took effort not to shout at him, to take out her frustrations on a man who would not, or could not—despite the honesty of them, the perilous power of them—comprehend her feelings.

Cat glared into his face. “Robbie died because of me. Me, Jamie! Because I lifted our father’s dirk and snooved away to follow you on your cattle-lifting. Blame that! Blame yourself! Blame me for following you! But I’ll no’ have you blaming Dair for a thing he wasna there for!”

“And where was he?” Dougal asked. “Lifting our cattle, aye?”

“Or raping Campbell lands on his way home from butchering Argyll,” Jamie said harshly. “He was there, aye?—with all the rest of Glencoe to watch the beheading, save for the lads who came out to lift our cows!”

“You were going to lift theirs!”

“But we didna kill anyone!”

“Stop it,” Colin said, who had been quiet for too long. “Houd your gab, the pair of you. You dishonor our mother’s house with such bitterness.” He looked at the eldest. “Let her go, Jamie.”

Dougal was clearly surprised. “Colin—what are you doing, man?”

“Let her go,” Colin repeated. “Short of chaining her to the bed, you’ll no’ keep her here. She’s enough of us in her, aye?—and naught at all of our father, who’s no spine to hold him upright. You willna make her grovel, Jamie. You willna make her beg.” He flicked a glance at his sister. “And even if you could, I dinna think I would let you.”

Jamie was speechless. Colin took the trunk from Cat and nodded at her bed. “Fetch the rest, Cat. You willna go to Glencoe with naught but what you’re wearing.”

“Trews,” Jamie muttered. “Dressed like a lad.”

Dougal laughed. “Aye, but she proved she was no lad when she bedded a MacDonald!”

Jamie’s expression was bitter. “Unless he prefers lads . . . he is a MacDonald, withal—”

“Oh, stop,” Cat said wearily, wrapping up rope, and mirror, and bonnet. “Go back to your bairns and your wife, Jamie . . . surely they would do better than I to hear the droning of your pipes.”

Colin waited. Cat tucked the small bundle into her belt, then hoisted the trunk from the narrow bed she would not, so long as possible, sleep in ever again.

“Dinna be a fool,” Dougal said, with a note of urgency in his voice. “Oh, Cat—”

“Let her pass,” Colin said.

Jamie shot him a look of pure venom. “You’ll be the one to tell the tale to our father.”