“Every last one of the Black Stag’s men departed with him,” he finally reminded the older man. “You saw them go. I rode with them to the end of our glen.”
“Be that as it may, one of them returned.” Valdar leaned forward in his high-backed oaken chair. “A courier, he was,” he insisted, his furred bed-robe straining over his girth. “Sure as I’m sitting here.”
A courier from hell, Ronan almost blurted.
Instead, he choked back a snort, doing his best to disguise it as a cough.
Already the old man’s face was flushed red and glistening, while the light from a spiked candle near his chair clearly showed tiny beads of perspiration beginning to mist his brow. Most worrisome of all, his eyes glittered dangerously and he couldn’t seem to keep his left foot from thumping against the floor rushes.
Ronan didn’t want to think about what might happen if his grandfather knew the missive’s contents.
He could scarce stomach them himself.
A warning, Raven . . . meet me at the Tobar Ghorm on the morrow’s noontide to learn who amongst your men would betray you. Do not be late and come alone . . . your own life and the lives of those you hold dearest hang on a thread. Ignore my summons at greatest peril.
Dungal Tarnach
Frowning, he rolled up the parchment and thrust it beneath his belt, not bearing its blackness in his hands. He could feel the inked poison affecting him, drying his throat and making the pain in his ribs throb and burn.
Still, he had to get to the bottom of it.
“The man was winded.” Valdar stabbed the air with a finger, making his point. “He’d ridden hard and fast by the looks of him, said he only wished to deliver Kintail’s letter and be on his way.”
Ronan went to stand before the fire, stepping close to catch the warmth of the well-burning birch logs. “MacKenzie didn’t send him. He had nothing at all to do with it.”
“So say you!” Valdar hooted.
“Aye, that is what I say.”
Valdar shook his head.
“Split me! Kintail wanted to surprise us, is what he did.” His beard jigged with conviction. “That’ll be the way of it, I vow. The reason you didn’t see his man circle round and ride back here.”
Ronan folded his arms.
“I knew Kintail before you were born, know him as well as I knew your own da.” Valdar half-rose from his great carved chair, but dropped down again almost immediately.
Almost as if his legs wouldn’t hold his great bearlike body.
“Like as not he wishes to announce a lairdly feasting at Eilean Creag,” he boomed, regardless. “Invite us all for a sennight’s merrymaking to mark your nuptials! Or” — he hitched up his squirrel-lined robe and wriggled his brows — “perhaps he seeks a Dare man for his other daughter, the more quiet, older one.”
Ronan said nothing.
Twice now, his grandfather had swiped an arm over his brow. And the damnable scroll — whatever its true purpose — was burning a hole in his side.
Soon, he, too, would have sweat streaming out of his pores.
He could feel it coming.
“And you,” Valdar roared, displaying his powerful lungs to be unaffected, “you dinna even believe the man was a courier.”
He leaned forward again, his big hands gripping the chair arms. “I see the doubt all o’er you.”
Ronan glanced up at the hammer-beam ceiling and released a long, slow breath.
Then he strode across the tapestry-hung chamber and unlatched the nearest window shutters. He flung them wide despite the night’s raw, wet wind.
“I didn’t say the man wasn’t a messenger.” He stepped back from the blast of icy air. “Only that he wasn’t a MacKenzie.”
