She didn’t weep, but she began to have some trouble breathing. And when three medieval guys gathered around her and tried to offer her suggestions on how to regain her breath,she knew they were doing their best in spite of the way they were suffocating her. She didn’t have the heart to tell James MacLeod that patting her on the back with his hands the size of dinner plates wasn’t helping at all.
Again, medieval chivalry was rather tough stuff.
“Food first,” Jamie announced, “then you’ll work with Patty this morning whilst Ian and I decide on a plan. What can you do?”
“Besides kill men with my bare hands?” she asked, dragging her sleeve—the sleeve of the coat Nathaniel MacLeod had given her—across her eyes. “Pick locks, hot-wire cars, and curse in six languages.”
“That won’t help you against steel, lass,” Jamie said with a faint smile, “but we’ll solve that in time. Can you spin? Cook? Tend sheep?”
“I draw and I can drive fast cars.” She paused. “I spent a summer working with a blacksmith at a medieval faire.”
Jamie lifted an eyebrow. “In a true forge?”
“Yes.”
He looked at Patrick. “Feed her, train her, then let’s send her off after him. I don’t like the feeling of the world this morning.”
“That’s because you made your own breakfast,” Ian said with a snort. “How you manage to toddle from one end of the day to the other without aid, I just don’t know.I’llgo cook you something, Mistress Emma.”
Emma thought that might be best. She walked with Ian away from the door.
“Now, tell me a little about your friend,” he continued. “I understand he’s filthy rich and looks a bit like a Sasquatch. Or Nessie. Never can keep it straight.”
“He looks like me,” Patrick said, falling in on her other side, “which makes him very braw indeed.”
“The saints preserve the unfortunate lad if that’s what he faces in the mirror every morning,” Ian said. “What’s your pleasure, Emma? Do you mind if we call you Emma?”
She shook her head. “I’m fine and I’m not really hungry—”
“You will be once Pat has finished with you,” Ian said cheerfully, “and you’ll want to ask me all kinds of things about the Fergusson dungeon—”
“Shut up, Ian,” Patrick said.
But it was too late.
She came to an ungainly halt and looked at them both, each one in turn. “What?”
Patrick rolled his eyes. “Ian, is it possible for you to ever think before you open your mouth?”
Ian sighed deeply. “Apparently not.” He looked at Emma. “He’s in the Fergussons’ dungeon.”
“How can you possibly know that?” she asked in astonishment.
Ian shifted. “I had a feeling.”
Patrick sighed gustily. “You can blame that onyourcooking, not Jamie having called us to come over for a parley.”
“About Nathaniel?” Emma managed.
Patrick nodded. “I rang Stephen de Piaget this morning and asked him to find out if Nat’s dagger was still in Edinburgh. He made a call, then rang me back to tell me aye.” He looked at her seriously. “If Nat wasn’t currently loitering in that dungeon, his dagger wouldn’t have been found there hundreds of years later by my loose-tongued cousin standing to your left and given by me to that collector of ancient weapons you met recently in the old city.”
“That’s all you have to go on?” she asked. Her mouth was suddenly so dry, she could hardly get words out.
“It’s enough,” Patrick said quietly.
She stopped still and looked at him. “Is he dead?”
Patrick lifted his eyebrows briefly. “Hard to say. Any opinions, Ian?”
