The weight of his words echoed around the campsite, a testament to the depth of McRae’s hatred.
Magnus felt a chill that had nothing to do with the cold upland air. He’d known McRae despised him, but this was beyond anything he’d imagined. The sheer venom dripping from McRae’s tongue shocked him to his core.
“Why?” Magnus found himself asking, his voice barely audible over the crackling fire. “Why do ye hate me so much? What I did to ye was an accident!” His voice cracked, sounding once more like a sixteen-year-old boy desperate for acceptance.
McRae’s expression was cold and dead as he looked at Magnus. “Why? Ye ask me why? Look around ye, Magnus. Look at what I’m reduced to. Consorting with outlaws and resorting to petty criminality to survive. But I used to be so much more. Once, I was on the cusp of everything I’d worked for. Dun Crogan was mine and the lands around here were going to follow suit. Ye were to be the key to that. With the north’s most powerful warrior to lead my warband, all would have submitted to me. But ye ruined it all. The damned Order of the Osprey took ye away from me andye went all too willingly didnae ye? Ye threw everything I’d done for ye back in my face! And not content with that, ye did this to me!”
He gestured at his crippled body and the scar running down his head and beneath the collar of his tunic. “Ye reduced me to this! Ye took everything from me! So now I’m going to take everything from ye in return. I told ye there is more than one way to destroy a man, Magnus. Ye dinna need to kill someone to do that.”
“Ye are insane,” Magnus breathed. “How did I not see it? How did I not see what kind of man ye really are?”
McRae’s lips pulled back from his teeth in a snarl. “I am what ye made me!”
“Nay,” Magnus said, shaking his head. “That’s a weight I’ve carried around my neck all these years but now I realize it wasnae mine to bear.Yemade yer choices, McRae, just like we all do.”
Choices weave our fate, Magnus Kerr. And ye are at a crossroads.Those were the words Irene MacAskill had spoken to him and, for the first time, he understood what she’d been trying to tell him. He could not take responsibility for other’s choices. Only his own.
“Pah!” McRae hissed. “Enough of this!” He turned to O’Connell. “Yer next target will be Talbrook and ye will take Magnus with ye.”
“Talbrook? Where Morwenna and Able Dunnock have their farmstead?” said O’Connell. “But we’ve already hit that place. Burned a lot of it, just like ye ordered.”
“Aye, and so they will just be starting to rebuild. Imagine their distress when they’re attacked a second time and realize it’s Magnus who’s leading that attack!”
O’Connell’s eyes widened, a flicker of understanding dancing in their depths. A slow, sinister smile curled his lips, and he let out a harsh laugh that echoed through the eerie silence of the camp. “Ye’ve got an interesting mind, McRae,” he said. “I’ll give ye that.”
McRae tapped the side of his head. “Oh ye have no idea, my friend. Ye have no idea.”
Chapter 19
Izzy was used to hiking but she’d never hiked this fast in her life. As if sensing her urgency, Snaffles was moving like the wind. Instead of ranging all over the place like he normally did, stopping to roll in things and eat grass, he had his nose to the ground and was following the scent at a lope that had Izzy, Emeric, and the others struggling to keep up.
They’d left the horses behind and were now traveling on foot up into the Dragon’s Back. It was slightly unsettling how familiar the landscape was. It had barely changed at all in the hundreds of years between this time and her own and if she didn’t know it, she could almost believe she was on one of her usual hikes in the twenty-first century.
Until she looked behind and saw the line of burly Highland warriors that were following her, that is. Emeric was right behind, with the rest of his band strung out along the narrow trail, except for the scout he’d sent riding to the settlement Izzy had pointed out.
Izzy had no idea if her plan would work. She had no idea if the people she’d sent the scout to find would answer her call, but it was a risk she would take a hundred times over if it meant saving Magnus. So she stumbled along in Snaffles’ wake, choosing the trails she knew would offer the least trouble and give them the greatest chance of catching up with Magnus.
If anything happened to Magnus, she would be lost. Utterly lost. That he’d come to meanso much to her in so short a space of time still shocked her, but she no longer questioned it.
A choice is coming, my dear, and it will lead ye to a path ye’d never thought to tread. Will ye be the woman who let fear hold her back, or will ye be the woman who saw through the fog and dared to journey to her destiny?Well, here she was, making that choice. Making the choice to be somebody she’d never been before, making the choice to risk everything for a chance at something she’d never dreamed she could have. She hoped Irene MacAskill would be proud of her.
