CHAPTER 10
The Scottish Highlands
1311
The windswept Scottishhighlands stretched endlessly before Callan Graham, rugged and untamed. The sky above, the color of old steel.
With each step, he felt the uneven ground beneath his worn boots, the familiarity of the terrain resonating deep within. He moved with a purposeful stride, a solitary figure amidst the untamed beauty.
Tall and heavily muscled, he’d pulled his shoulder length dark hair back with a scrap of plaid as the wind blew through him. This desolate bit of land was as much a part of him as the blood that flowed through his body.
On a rocky outcrop dotted with heather and jack pine, overlooking a sweeping vista of land and sea, Callan paused, taking in the view with a sense of bittersweet nostalgia.
The vivid colors of heather had faded and now muted gold, grey, orange, lavender and green took their place. Golden afternoon light gave way to gray, a sign a storm was coming while the steely gray waters of the sea were choppy and fretful, much like his mood of late.
Callan leaned against a rock, out of the wind, his worn plaid keeping him warm as he wondered how many times he had stood in this exact spot as a boy, dreaming of the day when he might finally explore the world that lay beyond these majestic highlands.
It seemed the time had finally come.
He reached into his sporran, calloused fingers carefully retrieving a weathered letter. The single sheet of parchment was yellowed with time, each crease a testament to the years it had endured.
As he unfolded the letter, his mother’s words unfolded with it as he traced each curve and stroke of faded ink. Her words sprang to life once more—ghosts of a distant time brought back from the shadows.
She worked at the village inn as a serving maid. When he was a boy, he thought her a Celtic goddess, with her wild auburn hair falling across her face, eyes alight with curiosity. He knew she must have turned the head of every man who entered the inn’s doors in those days. His mother had been an irrepressible force who refused to accept the role that the clan, and its chief dictated for her, longing for more, much as he did.
The ink on the page, faded but still legible, wove a tale of love and longing, of two souls colliding across the chasm of status, and hatred between their clan and the English.
The words flowed, recounting his mother’s love for an English aristocrat, far from his own lands, named Hugh Brandon, the Earl of Ravenswing. In defiance of both their families, they’d been thrown together by the fates.
Callan’s eyes moved across the words, his expression shifting like the changing skies above.
He imagined how their eyes must have first met across the crowded room with the Englishman seated at his table, while the lovely barmaid went about her work, the smell of peat smoke permeating the air.
Yet in that fateful moment, all else would have faded to gray. How many times had his mother refilled the nobleman’s drink that night, lingering a few heartbeats longer than necessary as their glances locked? The thrill of the forbidden would have ignited the spark.
Their love blossomed in the midst of feuds, the clandestine meetings described in the letter a testament to that fact. Though Callan didn’t know whether to marvel or cringe at his mother’s daring, to pursue a love affair with one not only meant to be her sworn enemy, but one so above her own station in life.
The letter told of a future she had imagined, free of the clan and his family, a place they would go where no one would care who they were. She had been so young and naïve to think an English aristocrat would have left his own rich wife for a poor Scottish maid.
After he and his mother had been banished, Callan had asked her many times to tell him of his true father, for he had heard the rumors, had been in fights with boys from the clan who dared to sully his mother’s honor. But all she would say, her eyes sad and faraway, was that he was an English traveler, and she hoped one day he would return for them, for she had written to him to tell him of Callan, letting him know he had a son, and she was sure he would return.
The pain of his mother’s absence mingled with the beauty of the words, creating a storm of emotions within him at the truth she had kept from him.
When he’d first found the letter hidden amongst her things after she died, Callan had been too grief stricken to open it. As time passed, he’d kept it as a talisman, to remind him of how the clan had turned them out, turned their backs on them.
Then one day after he’d been in another village, and heard yet another accusation about his mother, he’d gone to an old ruin and there, away from prying eyes, pulled out the letter and read the damning words, the truth sinking like a stone deep within his gut.
His father’s true identity, hidden from him for so long, was finally unveiled. The revelation that his father was an English aristocrat who had likely enjoyed his time with Callan’s mum and then left without a backward glance filled Callan with resentment.
Resentment for the man who had been absent from his life, curiosity about the person he never knew. The conflict raged within him for years, a stormy sea of emotions.
An onslaught of memories flashed through Callan’s mind in the cold mountain air. He saw again the day the awful truth had first come to light, when their clan had finally discovered the evidence of his mother’s affair, when they’d said how she’d sullied her honor and reputation.
When his mother had discovered she was with child, a widower in the clan married her, knowing she carried another man’s child. She let him believe it was a man from a rival clan who had been killed in battle before they could marry.
Yet as Callan grew, he looked nothing like his parents, with his aristocratic jaw and nose, the piercing green eyes and black hair. His mother and her husband had auburn hair and brown eyes, the man slight of build and short, while Callan stood over six feet tall and broad of shoulder, and so the rumors grew louder.
When the man he thought was his father fell ill, he confessed all to the priest, who immediately told their chieftain.
