Her emotions welling, she strained her eyes to peer through the billowing sheets of thick white mist drifting across the cobbled bailey.
A sea of familiar faces returned her gaze.
Beaming faces full of pride and hope.
Beloved souls she hadn’t seen in many long months, but that now smiled up at her from the bottom of the stairs. They also shouted well-wishes, some lifting their voices to be heard from as far away as the distant gatehouse.
Clinging to Rhona’s hand, Caterine drew a deep breath of the frosty air and struggled to find her voice.
“Are there truly so many?” she finally pushed past the hot lump swelling in her throat. “I do not trust my own eyes.”
“Ah, but you can,” Rhona answered, a catch in her own voice. “They are here in numbers to rival the stars in the night sky. I vow they line the land-bridge to the mainland, and clog the cliff path to the village.
“And,” she went on, tilting her head to the side, “if my ears aren’t teasing me, isn’t that the kirk bell?”
It was.
Muffled by sea fog, but its every chime striking loud and beckoning in Caterine’s heart.
The bell’s pealing, and her companion’s excitement, swept her away from her cares, filling her, too, with exhilaration.
And hope.
Her soon-to-be-husband gave her that.
In truth, the unexpected happiness had been building ever since he’d ridden into the courtyard, dropped on bended knee, and pressed a gallant kiss to her hand.
The hope, and a sense of rightness, had arrived later. But it grew stronger by the day.
“Come, my lady,” Rhona urged then, tugging her down the stairs even as she spoke. “It’s time.”
Aye, it is, and many blessings to you…
The voice, feminine, dark and sultry, rose above the revels of the crowd, soft as the drifting mist, but as distinct as if the words had been whispered directly to Caterine.
She whirled around to ask Rhona if she’d heard the voice, too, but James had already seized her friend’s arm and was now escorting her to a waiting horse.
And not a one of the boisterous shouts of the villagers matched the soft, almost melancholy, note of the woman whose blessing had just hushed past her ear.
A chill that had nothing to do with the frosty, cloud-cast afternoon streaked down her back. She glanced about, then drew her cloak against the cold, and let Eoghann help her onto her horse.
Eager to reach the little clifftop chapel and the brave champion who awaited her there, she’d no sooner gathered her reins before a furtive movement near the seaward wall caught her eye.
A lone woman stood there, hauntingly beautiful, dark as Rhona, but tall and willowy.
Strangely silent.
And cloaked more by the swirling mist than the cowled robes she wore. As Caterine stared, the woman lifted her hand in salutation, then drew the back of her fingers across her cheek, just below her shadowed eyes.
As if to wipe away tears.
Caterine’s nape prickled and she tried to wheel her mare toward the woman, to go to her, but in that same moment, Eoghann smacked the horse on the rump and James called out the command to ride forward.
Her efforts thwarted, Caterine and her little party clattered beneath the raised portcullis of the innermost gatehouse. But before her horse could carry her too deeply into the darkness of the tunnel-like pend, she twisted around to look back.
The woman was gone.
Nothing moved near the seaward wall save curtains of shifting mist.
