Jennifer Roberson (7 page)

She bit her tongue on a protest. To them she was a lad. She knew instinctively it was best they believed her so.

Wood popped in the fire, startling twitches in them all. Robbie grimaced as a dirk point cut flesh. Cat waited stiffly. No one said anything. There was no sound at all save for the crackle of the fire, and the grit of brogans on stone. She swallowed tightly, staring hard at Robbie. He would do something. He
would.

She shivered involuntarily, then winced as the grip on her arm spasmed shut. She felt tension in the air, sensed a subtle, increasing anxiety, and realized with a twitch of surprise that none of their captors knew what to do. The men were off with Atholl, or raiding Argyll’s lands; the young men left behind had gone reiving for cattle, not for people, and were none of them experienced at dealing with captured Campbells.

“Who are you?” one asked sharply. “Which Campbell are
you
?”

Cat stared wide-eyed at her brother, begging guidance; it came as a single raised shoulder:
‘answer them as you will.’
She swallowed hard again, then made her voice gruff. “Colin.”

“Colin? Colin? Colin and Robert?” One of the MacDonalds by Robbie grinned. “The drukken man has a son named Robbie, and a son named Colin. Have we caught Glenlyon’s bairns?”

The ‘drukken man.’ Humiliation stung. She saw the same response in Robbie’s face: a taut, angry mortification that MacDonalds should know Glenlyon’s weakness and bait his children with it.

“Glenlyon’s bairns?” another asked, and a third made a vulgar joke about the Laird of Glen Lyon and sheep.

The MacDonald who held Cat’s arm dug the dirk point into her rib. It was a small pain, a petty taunt meant to force acknowledged submission; Cat squirmed off the point with her lip caught between her teeth and swore mutely to give him nothing.

“Are
you
a sheep, then? Have you wool on your head?” He pricked her again, giggling, then abruptly snatched off her bonnet. “Have ye—” But the taunt died out on hiss of shock as coiled braids fell down.

“—lass,” someone blurted.

Another hooted. “
—ewe—
”

Robbie’s anguish was eloquent, his helplessness exquisite. But acknowledgment was swift.
They’ll no’ be expecting a lass to fight—
Cat made a fist of her free hand and swung with all her might as she wheeled sharply toward her captor. The blow landed square on his nose. “
Chruachan
!
”
she shouted furiously as the blood burst forth in a torrent.

Crying out as Cat’s fist struck his nose, the MacDonald fell back. Robbie lunged as the others moved. “Dinna
touch
her—” He tried to tear his arms free. “Cat—Cat
run
—”

Cat staggered away. “Robbie!”

“—Cat—
run
—” He struggled again, drawing their attention away from her.

It nearly was successful. Startled MacDonalds grabbed for him, shouting frantically at one another not to let the Campbell go.

“Cat—
run
—”

She stumbled, fell, scrabbled up again.

Robbie cried out furiously. Cat swung around . . . saw the struggle, the steel, the awkward scramble; saw the tangle of scrabbling limbs as they pulled her brother down. One of them sat on the upthrust rump, pressing Robbie’s body flat; another lay athwart his shoulders with an elbow dug into an ear.

I canna leave him here
. . . Cat could no longer see her brother’s face. Beneath the cluster of kilted MacDonalds she could no longer see much at all of Glenlyon’s heir, nor the scatter of dirks and
sgian dhu
tossed carelessly on the ground. They lay beneath her brother, beneath the pile of bodies.

Her captor nursed his nose, hawking and spitting blood. Cat snatched up rocks and began hurling them at MacDonalds.

Several of Cat’s stones struck flesh. Then the MacDonald whose nose she had broken garbled something unintelligible and caught a flopping braid, roughly jerking her down. Screeching, Cat sprawled; he jerked again, then dragged her across rocky soil. One thick MacDonald wrist was pressed against his streaming nose.

She clamped a hand around the braid near her scalp to reduce the pain and tugging even as she scrabbled with her other hand, hunting rocks. The MacDonald saw it, jerked again, then began to wind the braid around his wrist. He would pull her in, she saw, until he owned more than her braid.

Someone shouted something. Cat understood none of it. But abruptly the MacDonald who restrained her released his grip.

Cat lay belly down against hard ground. She twisted her head toward the others and saw how they scrambled up; how they backed away; how, with faces blanched white, they stared at the body lying slack upon the ground.

At Robbie Campbell’s body.

“
Robbie
—” Cat scrabbled to hands and knees. “
ROBBIE
—”

The MacDonald nearest turned on her sharply; before she could rise he planted a foot against her shoulder and shoved her down again.

“We didna
mean
—” someone began, while another MacDonald hushed him.

“Come away,” another said to his bleeding kinsman.

“But we
didna
mean it!” another cried. “Not this—”

“Ewan—come
away!
”

As Cat scrambled to her brother the MacDonalds came away, fading out of firelight into the shadows beyond. She heard the sound of horses. Heard the sound of flight. Heard the sound of MacDonalds who had killed Glenlyon’s heir.

At first she could not turn him. He was heavy, and slack. Finally she gripped the cloth of Robbie’s shirt and plaid and pulled him over, grunting with the effort; one arm flopped across her rigid thigh. Cat hung there, staring at the bloodied shirtfront. At the dirk,
her
dirk, that Robbie had grabbed as the bodies came down upon him, the weight and force driving the blade meant to defend himself into his belly instead.

Her dirk. Her
father’s
dirk, that she had stolen.

His mouth hung slackly, crusted with dirt. Blood smeared his chin. A welt ruined a cheek. His eyes were open, transfixed by shock and death. They stared at the darkness.

To Cat, they stared at her.

“
Robbie!
” she shrieked.

And shrieked, and shrieked, and shrieked, until the night rang loud with her grief.

R
obert Stewart of Appin hooted aloud and swept off his dusty bonnet. He ran a hasty hand through sandy hair, mussing it so thoroughly it stood up in tufts. “Christ’s wounds, MacDonald, but there isna a bonnier place in Scotland, aye? Have ye no’ seen such a brawlie castle?”

Indeed Dair had—in Edinburgh, Inveraray, Stirling; but he agreed amiably that indeed Castle Stalker was superior in all ways.
Best to let Robbie have it, or he will argue about it all day!

But he felt a pang of guilt. To be fair, Stewart’s beloved home
was
impressive: Castle Stalker was an upthrust, sharply rectangular explosion of perfectly quarried stone. It shook its peaks and angles free of the tiny islet of Loch Laich, offering but a few trees for character, and rose importunately from the waters of Loch Linnhe, where a man required a boat to cross from land to islet. Against the pewter blue of the loch and the viridescence of hills beyond, it loomed a rigid sentinel in defense of its inhabitants. A cocky rival chieftain who thought to throw out the present clan and replace it with his own would find cold welcome.

He knew better. He was MacIain’s son, albeit second-born; nonetheless, Dair wanted little to do with the castle and nothing at all to do with lairdship.

Stewart stood up in his stirrups. “The brawliest castle in Scotland!”

Dair grinned as the Appin men shouted clamorous accord. He purposely did not glance at his MacDonalds for fear he would see in their faces what he felt in his soul: a deep love for the harsh grandeur of Glencoe’s mountain fastness, the hard-running waters of its river, the looming mountain called the Pap, the array of falls cutting vertical cliffs out of jagged granite.

Appin’s Loch Laich was very like a hundred other islets scattered as pearls from a broken necklace. Castle Stalker had a hard, sharp beauty, like cut diamonds; Dair preferred the rounded cabochon that was Glencoe.

He shifted in the saddle to ease weary buttocks. He was in no mood to visit here with Glencoe only miles away. But he and his MacDonalds had promised to aid the Stewarts in their quest to carry home vast amounts of plunder and their share of cattle. Once in Appin the ebullient young Stewart heir, oblivious to Dair’s weariness and edgy restlessness, insisted MacIain’s son come all the way home with him to Castle Stalker.

“You willna deny the hospitality of my house,” he declared.

Dair, who had been suckled like all clansmen on the sacred Highland duty, thought of his father, of his father’s insistence on proper manners, and most particularly of his father’s wholly predictable reaction if
his
son were so benighted as to decline an invitation to sup with the heir of a clan traditionally friendly to MacDonalds.

And now the clouds had come down to mass across the land. Rain was imminent. “I’ll come,” Dair agreed.

Robert Stewart, leading the tail of gillies and tacksmen who tended the myriad livestock acquired from their raiding forays, nodded matter-of-fact acknowledgment; he had expected no other answer. “We’ll butcher a stirk for meat, and I’ll have the bard in to sing you the songs of Stewarts, and Appin.” He grinned slyly. “Come get out of the rain and meet my sister, Jean, who will no doubt be much taken with all the Glencoe-men!”

Dair slanted him a sidelong glance, then squinted at the castle in elaborate skepticism. “And is she bonnie, your sister?”

Stewart’s laughter rang loud, echoing against the castle perched on its rocky islet. “Good Christ, MacDonald, of
course
she’s bonnie! She looks like me!”

Laughing in spite of himself, Dair clapped a hand to his heart in mock pain. “A brawlie blow, Stewart!”

Stewart nodded matter-of-fact agreement. “I’m verra good with dirk or
sgian dhu
—” He grinned. “And never cross me with a claymore in my hand!”

Dair grinned back. They were in that instant in perfect accord.
But if it should ever come to a battle
—He broke off the thought, looked again at the almost-laird of Appin, who seemed as sharply cognizant of the moment as he himself.
If it ever comes to a battle, I want Robert Stewart at my side.

Of such men, of such ruthless, reckless, resolute men was a stronger Scotland born.

 

Cat’s trews had come to be torn. She did not recall how, only that the threadbare seat had at some point surrendered its meager strength and abjured responsibility for guarding her dignity.

She had no dignity. She had no mind to care. She had only a wild grief that drove her ruthlessly through the darkness, stumbling and staggering her way along the narrow track in an effort to go home.
There is Robbie—Robbie to tend
—If she could reach Chesthill, or even a tacksman’s dwelling, someone would help her do it. She would not fail him in this, albeit she failed him otherwise.

Guilt was merciless.
Without me, he wouldna be dead.

She flogged herself with it. Perhaps that was how her breeks had come to be torn.
Without me, he wouldna be dead.

She heard a sound, and stopped short.
MacDonalds
. . . Were they coming back? Did they mean to kill her, also? Cat hugged herself, shivering in the darkness.

Without me, he wouldna be dead
. Without MacDonalds, also. But it was
her
dirk, the dirk her father had set aside because of all the nicks. She had lifted that dirk as she intended to lift a cow, and it had killed Robbie.

Without me
. . . Cat heard the rattle of stones. A muffled, wuffling sound. Even as she prepared to flee, a shaggy calf wandered out of the darkness and stopped, blinking great eyes at her.

“—only a
cow
—” Cat clutched her plaid-swathed chest, breathing rapidly. She convulsed as fright bled away, replaced with a bone-deep trembling in the aftermath of panic.

A cow. A calf. A Campbell calf, or a MacDonald. She believed it more likely it belonged in Glen Lyon, as the MacDonalds had come raiding before
she
could.

Cat laughed a little, then bit it back before the noise escaped her control and she keened like an old woman. “—brawlie calf,” she crooned, marking its plumpness. “A braw, sonsie calf—” It was significantly less painful to think of living calves in place of dead brothers.

She put her hand on its damp, flared muzzle. Its breath was warm, sweetly redolent of summer grass. She bent, blew her own breath into its nostrils. It whuffled back.

A little Campbell calf.

The thought was abrupt.
Robbie would want me to bring him home
—Robbie would.

For Robbie.

Robbie’s calf.

Behind her, away against the scree, the untended fire beside her brother’s body died to ash and embers. It had been a small, unprepossessing fire, meant for men bent on cattle-lifting; was now lackluster tribute to Glenlyon’s slain son, the impetuous young Campbell heir who one day would have been laird. The embers, Cat knew, would burn out before dawn. But by daylight she would be back, and the firelight wouldn’t matter.

Robbie’s calf whuffled again.

If she unwrapped her belt, she would lose her trews entirely. So Cat unpinned and shrugged out of her plaid, then twisted it into a rope. With it knotted around the calf’s neck, she turned toward Glen Lyon.
We’ll go home, brawlie lad.

She thought briefly of Mairi Campbell, now bereft of her Robbie. And if there were a bairn, it would never know its father. Only its begetting, its heritage, and the name of a man long dead.

 

In Edinburgh, with the rain rattling glass, the Earl of Breadalbane looked upon Glenlyon. Nostrils flared slightly: Distaste. Distrust. But the earl had learned never to discard a single potential ally, despite apparent ineptness, lest he relinquish an advantage.
And there will be one—there will be a task for him. I will use him well, one day.
“Robin.” He waited until Glenlyon’s attention came back from its wandering. “You are not a political man.”

Glenlyon shifted irritably. “What do I care for such things? Kings do as they will. Parliament does as it will. Politics have naught to do with the Highlands.”

Breadalbane demurred politely. “It is no man’s failure that he not be acquainted with the perambulations of the Privy Council and such men as Tories and Whigs—God knows there is intrigue aplenty both foul and formidable.” He tapped a fingertip against the paper. “But there is the matter of the king.”

Annoyed, Glenlyon frowned.

“There is opposition to James.”

Glenlyon stirred. “Argyll’s dead.”

And replaced by his son, the tenth Earl of Argyll
. . . Inwardly Breadalbane grimaced. Glenlyon was blind, unremittingly blind. “Other opposition. James is Catholic. He holds the throne though Catholics are barred from such things; Parliament, for now, looks the other way. But he is unpopular with those men who prefer to retain what power they carved out of the Commonwealth.”

Glenlyon frowned incomprehension.

In brief digression, the earl wondered if it was a natural inclination for his kinsman to be ignorant of such matters, or if perhaps the whisky had rotted his brain. Patiently, he said, “James was permitted to inherit the throne despite his faith because his brother, Charles, sired no children on his barren queen . . . and after the turbulence of Cromwell’s interregnum, no man desired political upheaval. Thus Protestant England inherited Catholic James and his equally Catholic wife . . . but there are those who now desire the sister in place of the brother. Mary.”

He waited for comment. Glenlyon offered none.
It
has
rotted his brain!
With precise diction, he clarified further. “Mary is Protestant. Her brother
defies
the Church of England . . . but Mary is of the proper faith, and she had the foresight and good sense to marry a Protestant, albeit a Calvinist: the Dutchman, William of Orange.” He waited again. “Do you understand?”

“What has this to do with Scotland?” Glenlyon asked peevishly.

It took immense patience not to shout. “
All
things have to do with Scotland. Mary is a Stuart, aye? Her husband is not. He is a Dutchman. His interests are different, his priorities otherwise.”

“Good Christ—d’ye think this matters to me?” Glenlyon was clearly out of his depth, and frustrated by ignorance. “James. Mary. What is the difference?”

“The difference is
power
, Robin. Until Argyll’s downfall, Clan Campbell was the most powerful in all Scotland. Our position is precarious, now . . . there are MacDonalds to contend with.”

He paused. He wondered briefly if his ignorant, bankrupt cousin comprehended any measure of what the Earl of Breadalbane hinted. One man might call it treason.

I call it survival.
“Folly, aye?” Breadalbane sipped whisky; smiled across the liquor at his befuddled kinsman as he spoke of treason. “To put all our faith in a king who may be removed within a year?”

Glenlyon was silent. Rain rattled the latch on mullioned windows. Outside, the glow from lamps in Holyrood were wan blots against the darkness. The earl did not know if Glenlyon contemplated the magnitude of what he suggested, or cared little enough about any of the repercussions that would alter the shape of his country. But then Highlanders, for the most part, cared more for cattle than politics.

Breadalbane took up the folded paper and replaced it in the leather casket. He closed the lid, fastened the hasp, then looked once more at his kinsman. Commitment was his to make, his sacrifice. Or Glenlyon would commit nothing to Breadalbane when the earl most needed it. “I supported Charles during and after the Restoration,” he said. “I supported James against Argyll’s folly by keeping half of Clan Campbell home from the most recent hostilities. But I am convinced the days of our present monarch are numbered, Robin—and I am not a man who desires to see his clan fall on hardship because of policies determined by the Sassenachs in London.”

Two spots of color burned high in Glenlyon’s face. “You willna support James now?”

“True power lies in supporting the man most likely to keep the throne. James will lose it, I think . . . and a woman shall inherit it from him. But William of Orange is no fool; he will make his own decisions. England will answer first, and Scotland shall follow.” Breadalbane’s gaze was unwavering. “I prefer to lead.”

Glenlyon sat very still. Then he stirred, like a dog newly roused, and pulled himself upright. He looked at the casket on Breadalbane’s desk.
“Comhairl’taigh.
”

“Indeed.” The earl spread his right hand over the domed lid. “If I am to succeed in maintaining Clan Campbell’s preeminence, I will require the support of Breadalbane and Glenorchy, which are mine—and Glenlyon, which is yours.” He paused. “For the time being.”

Robert Campbell’s lips pulled back from his teeth. “You’ve no respect for
me!
”

“You were a soldier, once; I do not forget it.” Breadalbane smiled unctuously. “There is worth in you yet, Robin. One day, I shall require it—
and you
—in some other enterprise.”

Glenlyon’s waxen face congealed into something akin to a painted mask come to life. His voice, newly strengthened, boomed out harshly. “Until then?”

Breadalbane spread his hands. “Until then, go home to Glen Lyon. Keep your cattle close. Let no MacDonald set foot on Campbell land, lest there be tragedy of it.” He rose, pushing back his chair. “Will you drink whisky with me, Robin? To the destruction of MacDonalds?”

Glenlyon, exalted by renewal, laughed too loudly as he lunged from the chair. “Christ, John, I thought you meant to put me out wi’out it!”

Breadalbane recoiled. “What kind of a Scot—a Highlander!— would I be if I denied a man hospitality?” He briefly touched his cousin’s shoulder, then moved to the sideboard. He poured two glasses full, put one into trembling hands, and waited.