“You mean Town Blair?”
Geordie nodded. “There’s troubles.”
Lachlan sighed and walked toward the pallet Geordie had abandoned. He sat on the edge and then turned, swinging his legs up onto the thin ticking and cocking one arm behind his head.
“Troubles at Town Blair.” Lachlan stared up at the ceiling, fluttering in relaxing waves of shadows and light. “I would think you to care little for any troubles at Town Blair, even if there are any. Seems to me Town Blair has everything they want now, and nothing they don’t.”
“That man come back,” Geordie said, looking down at Lachlan where he lay.
“What man?”
“The man with the boats. The man who wanted Tommy.”
Lachlan looked at Geordie from the side of his eye. “Aye? How would you be knowing that, Geordie? You said you doona go near Town Blair.”
“Murdoch told me.”
Now Lachlan turned his head to look at the man properly, then he swung his legs over the side of the pallet and sat up.
“Murdoch knows you’re here?”
“Murdoch’s always knowed I was here. Was him let me stay.”
A little shiver of cold raced up Lachlan’s spine. “Did he tell you to go back, Geordie? To take me with you?”
He shook his head solemnly. “Nay. It was a warning, what only meant for me. So’s I could be sure to stay away from the wood. It’s the reckoning, Edna’s son. When the Blairs will pay for all their wickedness.”
“Then why tell me? Why do you want to go back?”
“Them fair lasses. Finley Carson. And the yellow-headed lass. They’ve gone up the path. They doona ken what will happen.”
Lachlan felt his brows draw together and he stood slowly, slowly. Finley and Kirsten, whom Ina thought were at Kirsten’s family’s longhouse. What possible reason could they have for going to Town Blair?
Geordie’s unsettling, queer gaze never wavered. “It’s time for us to go now.” He turned away, but, rather than exit into the receiving chamber of the old house, Geordie wobble-walked to the high-set opening in the storeroom that led to the soaring shaft. In a blink, he had scrambled up the rock and was gone.
Lachlan stood there for what felt like a very long time, unable to make sense out of what Geordie Blair had told him. Was he dreaming? All of it seemed impossible. Murdoch had known a Blair was living in the old house? How could the Carson chief know the same man who had ravaged Carson Town had called on Town Blair? And why would Finley, of all people, decide this night to make the long journey to the people she swore were her enemies?
Where had Geordie Blair gone?
Lachlan walked to the opening. “Geordie!”
“Hurry, Edna’s son.” His voice sounded somehow far away.
Lachlan scrambled up the wall and into the dark shaft, where the flickering light of the fire could not reach. His boots crunched over ancient wood as he came into the center of the shaft, squinting up into the darkness, blinking in hopes of accustoming his eyes to the gloom, the tiny square of night sky so far above him moonless, starless.
“Where are you?”
Lachlan heard a huff of breath and then a skittering of pebbles rolling, bouncing down the walls of the shaft.
“Up top,” Geordie called. “Hurry now.”
Geordie had already climbed all the way up and out of the shaft, to the clifftop above the town, Lachlan realized. He walked to the wall and felt along its rough surface for the indentations of the crude ladder.
“Edna’s son!” Geordie chastised in an annoyed tone. “It climbs the same, all the way. You doona need your eyes.”
Lachlan could not hazard a guess as to how many times Geordie Blair had made the treacherous climb to the top of the cliff in all his hermit years living in the old house. Thousands, likely. And so what Lachlan could claim over the man in youth and strength was easily eclipsed by Geordie’s experience.
And he could not simply forget that he was being led to the top of a deadly precipice by a man who’d been in hiding from his people for thirty years, upon receiving information from the chief of Lachlan’s enemies.
