“I’ll not have the thing in these walls!” Valdar jammed his hands on his hips. “The stone, I mean,” he added, quickly crossing himself. “Maldred can stay where he is.Requiescat in paceand all that! But the stone comes out o’ the tomb —”
“Begging pardon, sir, but I don’t think it is a tomb. Not a real one, anyway,” Hector chimed in, his face bright with his daring.
“Eh?” Valdar’s brows shot upward. “What’s this, laddie? Since when is a stone hole with bones in it not a tomb?”
Hector shuffled his feet, the coal spade clutched in his hands. “I have good eyes, sir,” he offered. “Everyone says so and . . .”
“Go on.” Ronan put a hand on his shoulder, squeezing. “Why do you think it’s not a tomb?”
“Because . . .” The boy swallowed, then rushed on, “it’s acircularspace, and the stones lining the walls look like Maldred’s old crest stone above the keep door. The heights are about the same, though the stones at the back look a bit taller than the others.”
He bit his lip and glanced round as if he expected someone to naesay him.
“I’ve heard the seannachies,” he continued when no one did. “The ones that claim Maldred’s crest stone was taken from an ancient stone circle and . . . and if you look close” — he glanced at the opening in the floor — “you’ll see there’s a stone missing down there. And —”
“— tradition says, this keep was built atop that circle,” Ronan concluded for him.
The boy nodded.
“He speaks true,” Torcaill confirmed, glancing up from where he knelt at the opening’s edge. “The old crest stone would fit perfectly into the gap in the circle. And” — he used his staff to pull himself to his feet — “Maldred is sitting against the circle’s recumbent stone. Even its two flankers are there, still guarding the recumbent.”
He smoothed a hand down the front of his robes. “So, aye, the lad supposed rightly. Maldred did choose the circle as his tomb.”
“And he can fine well stay there — as I said!” Valdar assumed his most stubborn look. “You” — he wagged a finger in Ronan’s direction — “can do what you will with his stone. Just see that it vanishes.”
“Dinna you worry.” Ronan slid an arm around his lady, pulling her close. “I already know what needs —”
“Sirs!” One of the kitchen laddies trampled down the stairs, coming to a panting halt at the bottom. “The guards at the gatehouse sent me. A great knightly host approaches, riding in fast from the west.”
Ronan raised a brow. “Any word who they might be?”
But he already knew.
“MacKenzies.” The boy’s answer confirmed the worst.
Gelis gasped and Ronan flashed a look at her, not surprised to see that her face had drained of color. Apparently she, too, knew the riders were anything but her kinsmen.
“Sir.” The kitchen boy tugged on Ronan’s sleeve. “What shall I tell the gate guards?”
Ronan kept his tone neutral, not wanting to frighten the lad. “Tell them I shall ride out to meet with the riders,” he said, a chill sweeping him.
When the lad turned and raced back up the stairs, he frowned.
Dungal Tarnach had kept his word.
He’d come for his stone.
And he hadn’t wasted any time.
“You can’t think to ride out to meet them alone.”
Ronan resisted the urge to squirm beneath the fire in his lady’s eye. Saints, but she could look at a man. And this look wasn’t one of his favorites.
Frowning, he wrapped a hand around her arm and drew her away from Dare’s open gate and out of his long-nosed men’s hearing range.
“I must go alone.” He clamped his hands on her shoulders, willing her to understand. But when he sought the right words and none came, he simply spoke the truth. “I have to risk a chance on honor.”
“From those who would guise themselves as my kin?” The heat in her eyes kindled. She jerked free of his grip and tossed back her head, her anger almost sparking. “They will skewer you before —”
