What if they’d been killed too?
The thought had no sooner occurred to her when her mind started throwing up images of her sisters coated in the same blood that had covered her parents. Then her next oldest sister, Vaila, stuck her head out of her bedchamber, bringing her out of her terrifying reverie.
“Why are you talking like that, Ailsa?” Vaila asked. In the next instant, her sharp, assessing gaze took in Ailsa’s expression, her pallor, and her aspect shifted from playful to serious in an instant. “What’s wrong? What’s happened?”
Ailsa didn’t know where she got the courage to respond, but her voice was even.
“It’s Mama and Da,” she said. “Someone has poisoned them. They’re gone.”
With either of her younger sisters, Ailsa wouldn’t have been able to say this so bluntly. But Vaila was a warrior; she’d trained alongside Graham, when he was still with them, and had continued laboring alongside the keep’s soldiers after they’d lost Graham.
If Ailsa was head of the family now, then Vaila was her second. She needed to lean on her sister.
“They’re dead,” Vaila repeated in that same flat, dead voice that Ailsa had heard coming from her own mouth.
“Aye.” It came out as a choke. “And Da—Father told me that if aught ever happened to him, we must hie for the Buchanans.”
Valia’s eyes flew wide. “The Buchanans,” she said.
She knew what that would mean to Ailsa. Neither of them needed to mention it.
“I’ll do what needs to be done,” Ailsa promised her. “But first, we must go. Now.”
If news of their destination had distracted Vaila briefly, this order, sharply delivered, made Vaila’s attention grow sharp as a blade.
“I see,” she said, her shoulders drawing back like she was about to go into battle. “You find the girls. I’ll quickly gather a bag of essentials and meet you at the stables.”
“Hurry,” Ailsa urged.
The two sisters squeezed hands, just once, before parting.
Ailsa continued down the hall and found her two younger sisters in Davina’s bedchamber, as they so often were. For a split second she paused, watching the way Davina lounged on her bed, her feet kicked up behind her, as she noted something in the little book where she kept the details of her garden. Eilidh wasplaying idly with one of the pigmented pencils that Father had ordered specifically from Germany so that Davina could color her botanical illustrations. Eilidh had it balanced on her nose and kept giggling when it toppled to the side.
They were happy. At peace.
And Ailsa was going to wreck that.
“Girls,” she said. They both looked up.
Technically, Davina and Vaila were the closest in age, at one and twenty and two and twenty respectively, but the divide of the family had always meant that Ailsa and Vaila were the elder pair, while Davina and Eilidh were “the girls”.
“Something has happened,” Ailsa told her sisters, carefully moderating her tone. “I’ll explain along the way, but we must go. Right now. Vaila has gone to fetch the horses.”
Eilidh sat up, clearly confused. She opened her mouth as if she planned to argue or ask questions, but closed it again when Davina lay a hand on her arm. Davina had always possessed a talent for understanding the temperature of a room, and now she sensed that something dire had transpired.
Eilidh took the cue. She idolized Vaila anyway, and likely would have followed Ailsa right into the pits of hell if Ailsa told her that Vaila had already headed that way.
“Right,” she said, sounding much younger than her eighteen years. “I… Alright.”
“Do we need things?” Davina asked, already clambering to her feet.
“No time,” Ailsa said. “Vaila is gathering essentials. But we must flee.”
The girls just nodded, their expressions grim but determined. Ailsa adored her sisters always, but she felt an especially keen pang of appreciation for them as they fell into line like battleworn soldiers.
And if she was a coward for relishing these last few moments before she had to give the girls the news of their parents’ brutal deaths?
Well, then she was a coward. She would worry about it later.
