“Think it looked this way before?”
He looked at her. “I would guess so, but I’ve never been this far north whilst... well, you know.”
“I know.”
He stopped and turned to her. “I have to solve this.”
“We,” she said firmly. “We have to solve this.” She looked at him seriously. “What you’re not saying is that things were rolling along as usual until that afternoon I saw you in the middle of a battle.”
He nodded, but he wasn’t sure he could give voice to any of the facts. The truth was, whilst her arrival in Benmore had changed his heart, their journey to Cawdor had changed things in a way he honestly couldn’t put his finger on.
He was beginning to wonder what encountering his dagger in Thomas Campbell’s shop in Edinburgh had set in motion.
“Nathaniel?”
“I will solve this,” he said, dragging himself back to the conversation at hand, “whilst you stay in your lovely cottage and look at your board for clues. Paris calls for us to visit it in the future, and if you’re not with me, I won’t go.” He looked at her seriously. “What if I lose you somewhere in the weeds of the fourteenth century?”
“Well, I wouldn’t want to rob the world of its freshest poetic voice,” she said thoughtfully.
He had the feeling she had no intention of doing anything but exactly what she wanted to do, which he knew should have alarmed him very much indeed.
“Very sensible,” he said. “Speaking of sensible, I called James MacLeod and made an appointment for tomorrow.”
“I wondered what you were doing,” she said with a frown.
“Likely marching into a battle I haven’t the skill to fight,” he said grimly. “I’ve been instructed to bring my sword.”
“Do these guys do anything else?”
“I suspect not, and I imagine they assault life with the same sort of enthusiasm they pour into their swordplay. What was it you called that sort of rubbish?”
“Patterns,” she began, then she pursed her lips. “Mock me all you like, but you have to admit there’s truth to it.”
“There’s more truth to it than I want to acknowledge,” he said honestly. “I have the feeling our good Laird Jamie conducts his life now just as he did hundreds of years ago. He doesn’t seem to have given up using a sword to make his point, as it were.”
She smiled faintly. “He’s in the right place for it, I guess.” She walked with him a bit longer, then looked at him. “Can he help, do you think?”
“There’s only one way to find out.”
She nodded, but said nothing else. He understood, for there was nothing else to say. Either James MacLeod would have answers for him or he wouldn’t.
He could only hope when he heard those answers, they would be ones he could stomach.
Chapter 25
Emmasupposed, thinking about it as the sun was dropping toward the west the next afternoon, that whether or not James MacLeod could help them or not wasn’t the only thing they’d found out.
She sat on a bench pushed up against a castle wall with a blanket as a cushion and a water bottle keeping her warm under another blanket and watched absolute madness going on there in front of her. Patrick MacLeod was a civilized gentleman compared to his brother when it came to swords. James MacLeod was... well, she didn’t know what to call him. Ruthless, maybe. Dangerous, possibly.
Medieval, definitely.
If she hadn’t seen his birth date, she might not have believed it—well, actually she would have believed it without hesitation. The man was as intimidating as any other medieval clansman she’d encountered so far, only he took it to a level she almost couldn’t believe.
Chief of the clan, and rightly so.
She had to admit that Nathaniel wasn’t doing poorly with the business of swords. Jamie probably could have had him for lunch, but it wouldn’t have been an easy meal to choke down. Nathaniel was tall, strong, and fast. That, and he seemed to have an extensive vocabulary of medieval insults that left Jamie grinning ferally every time Nathaniel pulled one out and flung it at the laird of the hall.
She was in trouble. Very big trouble.
