He didn’t dare aim such a glare at Torcaill.
Much as he’d like to!
He was about to give in to the temptation when a great gust of sleety wind whipped his hair across his eyes.
A splatter of icy raindrops stung across his face.
“Saints o’ mercy!” he groused, biting back a stronger curse as he swiped a hand across his brow.
Then he strove for patience.
Becoming riled would only serve to tighten the druid’s lips even more.
That much he knew.
Noting how clamped those lips already were, he tried to search the ancient’s face for answers.
But that, too, proved impossible.
Torcaill’s attention was already elsewhere. Once again, he was eyeing the thick growth of whin and broom crowding the lower braeside.
Ronan immediately saw why.
Something moved there.
Something unseen and . . . heavy.
He could hear it moving through the underbrush, its lumbering passage lifting the hairs on his nape. For a moment, he thought he caught a flicker of gray against the yellow of the whin and broom. But then the thing was gone, leaving nothing more ominous on the hill than the rustle of leaves stirred by wind.
“I’ll be away now,” Torcaill said, sounding distracted.
Ronan flashed a glance at him, the large graysomethingforgotten.
Especially when the druid slid a hand into the folds of his robes, then fumbled about until he withdrew a particular leather pouch. Age-stained, lumpy, and secured with an equally ancient-looking leather tie, the pouch boded ill.
Quite unperturbed, Torcaill hung the thing from his saddlebow.
Ronan rested a hand on his own saddlebow and leaned forward. “Did you not say you’d accompany me back to Dare?”
“I have thought better of it.” Torcaill smoothed his robes, taking care — it seemed — not to look again in the direction of the whins and broom. “Perhaps I shall ride along the outer edges of the glen. Do a bit of circuiting. There can be no harm in refreshing my saining sites.”
Ronan felt his impatience returning. “Tilting, weather-pitted stones that have marked our bounds since before the first dew e’er wet Highland grass! Think you that mumbling a few words o’er their moss-grown faces will change aught?”
“That remains to be seen.”
“So be it.” Ronan nodded.
There was nothing else to say.
The druid’s straight back and the proud set of his gaunt shoulders tied Ronan’s tongue. Already he’d been more disrespectful than he would have wished.
But so much plagued him of late . . .
“I’ve refilled my pouch,” Torcaill was saying. He patted the pouch’s bulging sides, his hand then staying there, reverently. “Sacred ash gathered from the last Lammas fire and a few small fagots of rowan for burning, and a goodly supply of old bits of iron.”
“Then we of Dare shall sleep at ease this night!” Ronan put as much conviction into the words as he could, well aware that the druid meant to scatter his saining goods around the glen’s ancient boundary markers.
Mumble his spelling words, and wave his lit fagots in the air as he circled the stones.
