CHAPTER1
Thirteenth-Century Scotland
The Highlands
“Leave off, Graham. I did not ask yer opinion. The last time ye nettled me into seeking a wife from among the Sinclair women . . . ” Ronan Sutherland shook his head and did not bother finishing that sentence. Instead, he clenched his teeth at the unpleasant memory. What an ill-fated venture that had been, and Graham damn well knew the truth of it.
“That was not my fault.” Twin curlicues of faint white smoke spiraled up from each of Graham’s glistening nostrils. “Ye ken verra well the severity of the head cold I suffered that season. True clarity in a dragon mist vision is damn nigh impossible to achieve when one’s head is befuddled by snot while in that form.”
A dragon with a head cold. Ronan snorted at the memory, his huffing breath misting in the cold morning air. Dragon by day. Man by night. Aye and for certain, Graham the man had been uncharacteristically ill that spring. Therefore, Graham the dragon had not fared so well either. His fiery sneezes had nearly decimated the southern tower and half the skirting wall around Draegonmare fortress.
They had finally been forced to relocate the ailing dragon, moving him to the stretch of caves running the length of the western shoreline of the loch. The loch that formed the center of this mist-shrouded land hidden from prying eyes for centuries by a witch’s curse. Raw stone and the deep trench of icy loch water were among the few elements able to survive Graham’s uncontrolled blasts.
“And ye fail to remember,” Graham continued in a wounded tone. “I never told ye to choose the one ye called Mistress Kenna. Ye can thank the fickleness of yer own second sight for that wee mess ye got yerself into. Ye wouldna listen. Ye were stubborn as a lad, and ye’ve not changed a whit over the past three centuries. But now we both know the correct path. It has been confirmed by the old Sinclair woman herself. Hell’s fire, man. Her invitation was more a summons than a request. I dinna ken why ye are not willing to try again so we can both be rid of this wretched existence.”
Ronan palmed the partially carved knot of pine in one hand until it rolled to the perfect angle. Steadying his blade with the ball of his thumb, he peeled away another thin sliver of the pale fragrant wood. He was in no mood to revisit the subject of choosing another wife for what seemed like the hundredth time. Graham had worn that discussion ragged.
The only way he had briefly silenced the nattering bastard was when he threatened Graham with a century of solitude by telling the dragon he was going to travel to Ireland to escape his incessant caterwauling. Ronan knew this was the only effective threat to use on Graham. After all, the curse also bound the beastie side of him to the sea. The only way the dragon could venture farther than the mists surrounding the lands of Draegonmare was to access the sea through the ancient tunnels hidden in the depths of Loch Ness.
Once past the protective barrier of the mists, Graham had to remain in the briny water—whether in human shape or dragon form. It was not a problem during the daylight whilst he was the beast, but it was damned uncomfortable in the chill of the night as the man.
The great sulking monstrosity had promptly clamped his scaly jaws shut and submerged into the darkest depths of the waters. He had risen only when the setting of the sun returned him to human form. Then Graham the man, horse trainer to Ronan’s father and lifelong mentor to Ronan, had stomped up and down the rocky strand beside the lapping water, silent as a church mouse and sullen as a jilted maid.
The curse bound them to one another but an even stronger connection joined the two. The men had formed a precious brotherhood after surviving so many centuries together. By the witch’s words, Graham was the only human privy to Ronan’s beginnings and allowed to witness the birth of the cursed child—the child born as a wolf cub to the king’s leman after she had been cursed into the form of a wolf. The dragon Graham guarded the wolf and her pup by day, as did the man Graham watch over them at night. When the stirrings of manhood and the need to mate forced Ronan into human form, it was Graham who taught him the ways of man.
Ronan had enjoyed that rare bit of peace from Graham’s insistent nagging. But then the summons from MacKenna keep had stirred Graham’s kettle of chaos back to bubbling. The MacKenna emblem, alongside another sigil Ronan failed to recognize, sealed the yellowed parchment square with two blood-red circles of wax. As soon as he had opened the message and read the single line, Ronan knew the owner of the second mark: Mother Sinclair—matriarch and unrelenting force of the time-traveling women who had united with Clan MacKenna. Her words still sent an ominous shiver up his spine and stood his hackles on end.
“It is time.”
Three simple words, but Ronan knew their meaning immediately: If he wished to finally break the curse, It was time to return to MacKenna keep.
He rolled the tension from his shoulders and turned his attention back to his carving. His heart was weary of battling the ancient witch’s damning powers. Thrice, he had attempted to break the curse. Three times, he had failed. He needed distance from it. Needed peace. After all, since the curse rendered him immortal, It was not as though he risked running out of time.
Perhaps if the quest were ignored for a bit, Graham’s attention might be swayed from the matter entirely. Winter would be full upon them soon; it was no time to consider travel. Ronan affectionately clapped a hand on Graham’s cold, scaly side. “Mayhap when spring warms the land, I will consider a visit to MacKenna keep, aye?”
He meandered closer to the mouth of the cave, lightly running his hand along the rough ridges of Graham’s back. “And I know ye are not to blame for my poor choices of the past. But I weary of the hunt for the lady foretold to free us of this fate.”
With an arm propped on the stone ledge, he sadly smiled down at the carved dragon in his hand. “Perhaps yer breath is the only element capable of adding a bit of warmth to this hidden part of the Highlands. Perhaps it is better that we move forward and embrace this existence we already have and know.”
“I would be finished with this damnable curse. And this existence.” Graham grunted with a jaw-cracking yawn while resettling his wings. He flopped his scaled length along the edge of the stone ledge. His massive girth slithered deeper into the debris littering the wide limestone shelf jutting out from the cave. Twin clouds of smoke huffed from each nostril as he propped his multihorned muzzle on his claws. “Thanks to yer father’s witch of a wife, yer cursed to spend eternity seeking a healer for yer sorrows and I am cursed to walk along beside ye like some scaly, oversized pet during the day and yer damned footman by night.”
Graham licked out his forked tongue, then snapped at a cloud of buzzing midges circling too close to his snout. “I hope that woman is roasting in the hottest corner of hell for coming up with this ridiculous form of a winged lizard that most dinna believe exists.”
Ronan chuckled as he compared the bit of carved wood with the magnificently hideous beast lounging beside him. Graham must have ingested too much char this morning. Whenever he overfed on the favorite fish of his human form, the beastie waxed particularly morose and even whinier than usual. “Aye, my friend. We are a pathetic pair, are we not?”
Ronan ran his knife tip along the curve of the miniature wooden dragon curled in his hand, and his blade slowed as he added another row of points to the tiny, ridged back. “A healer for his sorrows.” Why would Graham choose that particular wordage?
The memory of Mother Sinclair’s shared vision of her granddaughter residing in the future flickered across his mind. A beguiling smile and gold-green eyes flashing with . . . what? Ronan closed his eyes and concentrated on the image Mother Sinclair had conjured across the reflecting pool. The lass was fair to look upon for certain, but there was more to her than mere physical beauty. Her reflection pulsed with an unexplainable energy. An energy that beckoned him, filling him with an anxious aching need to capture it. But what if he did and she was not the one? Then what?
He shifted uneasily on the shelf of stone, moved to a chunk of wood upended into a makeshift stool, and closed his eyes. Mother Sinclair had sworn she had the answer he sought. His salvation was not to be found in Kenna after all but rather in one of her other granddaughters. A younger one. A twin gifted with a healing touch. The old woman had assured him that this particular time-traveling Sinclair lass held the key to unlocking the prison of his curse.
He counted backward. The young woman should be nearly twenty-one summers of age by now. Mother Sinclair had said it would be so. Mairi. Aye, that was her name. The Lady Mairi Caledonia Sinclair.
But what if Mother Sinclair was wrong?
He leaned forward and thought harder. Mother Sinclair had spoken at length about the youngest twin granddaughters of her brood, the last two sisters yet to join the family at MacKenna keep.
A shudder stole across him as he pondered all the women he had met at castle MacKenna during his last fateful visit. Mother Nia Sinclair, the fearless grandmother of the Sinclair lasses, had made it quite clear that neither of her absent, youngest granddaughters was of an age to be wooed at that time.
