The rest of the fine turned toward their own homes singly and in pairs, with no farewells, no calls of good night or further encouraging words for Lachlan. In a moment, only he and Marcas and Dand were left on the green before the Blair’s house.
Marcas spoke first. “We’ll give the Blair the night. Sure, Archibald’s had a shock. I ken you’re angry, Lach, and Harrell had no leave to so offend you. But we canna risk further division in the clan now that old troubles with the Carsons have risen.”
“Icanna risk, you mean?” Lachlan demanded. “That’s why they came, is it nae? Whatever it was the Englishman told them, they carried grievance for it to the fine.”
It was clear that Marcas was carefully weighing his response. “Aye. In part. It concerns the treaty.”
“I want that message,” Lachlan said, and he held out his hand. “I have a right to read with my own eyes that which has damned me.”
Marcas reached into his shirt at once and withdrew the sheets of paper. But before he handed them over, he held Lachlan’s gaze. “What happened all those years ago—you are to blame for none of it. I know you’re a good man, Lachlan.” The words sounded like a warning.
Lachlan pulled the papers from Marcas’s grasp. “I’m the man you raised me to be. The man this clan raised me to be.” He turned and began walking back across the green.
Dand’s footfalls quickly caught up with his. “Da’ll talk sense to him, you’ll see. Sure, tomorrow the Blair will have thought things through differently.”
But what if he doesn’t think things through differently?The words ran unbidden through Lachlan’s mind, and the memory of the old man’s condemnation rose up before him like a specter.
Yer nae grandson o’ mine…Dead to me.
Lachlan didn’t know what Marcas could say that would change the Blair’s sudden hatefulness toward him, even considering that Marcas was the chief’s cousin.
Lachlan stopped in his tracks as the implications of the thought blossomed. If not for Lachlan, Marcas—and then Dand—would have been in line to lead Clan Blair.
“What is it, Lach?” Dand asked, looking up at Lachlan eagerly.
Does he even realize?Lachlan wondered.
“Nothing. I’ll be at the store,” Lachlan said. “I need to be alone for a bit.”
Dand seemed to hesitate for a blink, but then nodded. “Sure. I’ll see that Mam keeps some supper for you.”
He doesn’t realize he could be chief because he doesn’t care.
Lachlan couldn’t reply past the constriction in his throat, so he turned away and pushed into the storehouse, closing the door behind him. He waited there in the dark until he heard Dand’s strides growing faint, and then Lachlan unlatched the clasp that held the upper and lower halves of the storehouse door together. He swung open the top half and hooked it to the wall so that it remained open, and then he turned to find the lamp on the post.
The low flame gave just enough light to illuminate the luxurious piles of fragrant hay and barrels of oats in the generous space. Lachlan moved the lantern to a post nearer a tall stack of dried grass opposite the door and then collapsed back onto it, the papers still gripped in his hand across his chest. He let his gaze go through the doorway, across the green, where the standing torches were dying, the Blair’s house only the faintest suggestion of gray roofline in a blacker night.
What could these pages say that could possibly give his grandfather cause to hate him?
Icy water holding him down, his foot slipping from the rock so that he fell deeper into the churning maelstrom. He couldn’t get a grip. Where was Marcas…?
Lachlan’s shudder jarred him back to the warm glow of the storehouse: quiet, fragrant, safe. He carefully unfolded the pages and began to read.
13 February 1458
To Edna Blair, or if deceased, the fine of Clan Blair, especially Archibald Blair:
Dearest Edna,
I will tell straightaway that which is of dire importance: if you bore my child these score and ten years ago, you and that child—anyone of my blood—are in grave danger. Gather your things at once and leave Town Blair and tell no one where you go.
’Twas not the Carsons who attacked Town Blair…
Thomas pressed his back into the smooth bark of the tree, the dawn light illuminating the cold mist swirling along the forest floor. All around him in the thick and smoky air were the sounds of active battle: swords clanging, shouts of attack and surprise, the screams and groans of the dying. He stood in the forest between Loch Acras and the sea draped in a Blair shawl, watching for more dark shapes of men through the trees. If he removed the shawl, any Blair who happened to see him would cut him down; if he left it on, it marked him as an enemy to the Carsons. He had no friends here.
He closed his eyes for a moment and forced himself to swallow, take a deep breath. He must only think of surviving this battle, staying hidden and alive long enough to smuggle Edna and Geordie from the dying, starving town without any more bloodshed. Edna, with her dark eyes and impossibly long, brown curls; Archibald Blair’s defiant daughter, who had cared for him in his captivity.
You must take me with you, she’d panted into his ear, her small, upturned breasts like pears, her body frantic atop him while he lay chained in the storehouse.I would take my own life rather than starve or lie beneath Harrell. Men like me. You like me. You must…
