Conall looked to the sky. There was just enough daylight left.
He passed through a tiny clearing surrounded by pines and saw the lumpy, snow-covered bones of Eve’s horse. He stood there a long moment, staring at what was left of the carcass, and had a sudden pang of sympathy as he thought of how difficult harvesting the meat must have been for Eve. Injured and alone, save for Alinor, and both of them being hunted by the grays. He could not imagine her angst at having to saw frozen flesh from an animal she had cared for all the way from England—she’d likely named the beast.
Conall moved on from the copse of pine and saw Ronan’s tree ahead—the tallest, widest gnarled oak in this part of the forest, ringed by a tapering skirt of rocks. He stopped, still some distance away, and stared at the tree where his uncle was buried, facing the distant, hated Buchanan town. A punishment even in death.
He betrayed us.Conall could almost hear his father’s voice speaking the words he’d heard so many times, slurred with drink and perhaps regret.He would have given the Buchanan our lands, brought them into our very town and welcomed them to all we had. Forher.He would rather pay homage to Angus Buchanan before his own clan, his kin. Me own brother. I had to protect us. I hadta.
Conall could never persuade his father to speak of his uncle Ronan while sober, and engaging Dáire while he was in his cups was dangerous, his drunken temper poisoned by bad memories and held only by a thin thread, liable to snap and strike at whoever was around him. But Conall and his brother, Duncan, had heard whispers from the townsfolk and had assembled the story themselves as best they could.
Ronan MacKerrick, brother to Dáire, had fallen in love with a woman from the Buchanan clan—sworn enemies of the MacKerricks. The greedy clan bordering bountiful Loch Lomond repeatedly encroached on MacKerrick lands, stealing their game and pushing their own northernmost boundary ever onward by sheer force. The Buchanan town dwarfed the MacKerrick and, although never a clan to take insult lightly, engaging Angus Buchanan’s people in a full-on war would have been foolhardy.
But Ronan had pressed that if he married a Buchanan woman, the two towns could find peace. Conall’s father staunchly disagreed, arguing that once Angus Buchanan had his claws in the MacKerrick town he would swallow it up whole, and the MacKerricks would cease to exist.
The rest of the details were spotty for Conall and Duncan, but there had been some sort of clandestine meeting between Ronan and the Buchanans, and Dáire MacKerrick’s suspicions had been confirmed. Then, the battle had commenced—Ronan MacKerrick giving his own life to protect his poisoned love, Minerva Buchanan. The Buchanan’s own wife was dead, and many of the Buchanan clan elders.
Ronan had been the only MacKerrick to die.
Neither Conall or Duncan had any memories of Ronan, having just come into the world when the two towns came to catastrophic blows. But their mother had told them that Ronan had been a good man, not so much the traitorous monster that Dáire described.
“Folk will do desperate things for love,” she defended Ronan many times. “Some good, some nae so good. Your da is a good man. He loved his brother, and he loves his clan.”
“Good day to you, Ronan,” Conall said aloud, his voice muffled by the smothering cold. “’Tis your nephew, Conall. I’m the MacKerrick now—Da’s passed on. Five years this spring.” He paused, feeling both foolish and somewhat justified to be speaking to a pile of rocks around a tree.
“I’ve got me a Buchanan woman at the hut in the vale, brought back to Scotland by your own Minerva. I’m going to set it to rights. You can tell her to let us be now. She’s already taken it all—my wife, my bairn, my pride. I’m doing what Da couldna—I’m payin’ her quarter. Enough is enough.”
A soft sound, like a woman weeping, floated on a gust of icy wind, and chills caressed Conall’s neck like a warning. He listened for a breathless moment until he heard it again.
It sounded as if it was coming from the other side of the tree.
Conall’s boots crunched the snow as he slowly, slowly stepped around the wide island of rocks in the sea of white. And he thought he was, in that moment, to meet his own death.
Lying on the rocky pyre was one of the evil grays—smaller than Alinor and sickly thin, its fur full of impossible age. Its teeth were bared in a nasty, yellow grin below a muzzle wrinkled away in a snarl.
Conall knew then that he faced the beast he once thought he’d killed at the hut. Steamy breath hissed out at Conall as the growl grew into one of recognition from the beast’s emaciated belly. It trembled, whether from disease or preparation to spring.
Conall swallowed. If he ran, it would chase him and, even as obviously ill as it was, Conall knew it would be upon his back before he could take a score of strides. It would kill him, for certain, and then what would become of Eve?
He dared not try to nock an arrow—too much time. His hand went slowly to the hilt of his sword and he gripped it firmly, began to inch it upward. If the wolf charged him, he could run it through again, as he’d done in the clearing.
He will only come back,a quiet voice in the back of his mind warned.
Conall stared at the wolf, and the wolf stared back, still growling and shaking. Its eyes were so black. Conall’s own eyes were beginning to feel as though they were freezing in their sockets. He had to blink.
The wolf was gone.
Conall cried out hoarsely and spun around, his sword drawn in a flash and ready to swing, but he was alone in the still wood.
His bowels suddenly felt watery and hot.
He turned back to the tree and saw that in the place where the wolf had lain was a limp pool of black. Conall stepped toward it as if he could do nothing else. Climbing the rocks, he bent and picked up what revealed itself to be a long length of cloth.
’Twas an old, patched cloak, smelling of smoke and cold and bitter spice. Smallish, a woman’s cloak.
Conall began to tremble, much as the old wolf had.
And then the chorus of howls broke through the frigid gray light, its singers invisible behind thousands of trees. Conall turned, the cloak in one hand, his sword in the other, and stumbled on the loose rock underfoot. The howls seemed to be coming from all around him, screaming out his name, sucking the weak light from before his eyes. He felt as though his heart was breaking.
Conall stumbled down the rocks and ran toward the hut. To sanity. And to Eve.
