Eilidh hoped that the moonlight didn’t cast enough light to show how fiercely she blushed when he said that. The smile on his face was lighthearted and easy, but she wouldn’t have said thathelooked like an angel, not even with the lighter strands in his hair gleaming in the cool light. No, he looked more like the way the classic painters depicted Lucifer—so beautiful thateven the most virtuous would be tempted to follow him into damnation.
Not that Eilidh considered herselfespeciallyvirtuous. She’d always been a minx, just as he’d said.
She forced herself to turn to another topic before she could spend too long staring at him.
“The trails here are good for riding,” she said, casting her gaze ahead of them. “But nothing rivals riding along the shore at Castle Dubh-Gheal in my opinion.”
“It’s been ages since I’ve been there,” he said. “But I do remember how it perches on the cliff.”
“Aye,” she agreed. She could almost see it in her mind’s eye now. “There was this one point on the castle walls where you could stand and look out over the water—for miles and miles. For years, when I was a wee lass, I thought only my father and I knew about it, and whenever there was a storm gathering at night off the shore, we’d go up and watch it start to roll in. Then, one night, the clouds were taking their dear time about coming close to shore, and my mother marched right up to our secret spot and lectured us for venturing from our beds at such hours.” Eilidh laughed, the sound wistful. “As it happened, she’d always known about the spot. She had just let my father and me enjoy it together.”
“Ye miss them,” Ciaran said gently.
Eilidh waited until she could trust her voice before she spoke again.
“I do. But I also just miss my life the way it was before we came here. Not only my parents being alive and there not being a war—although those things too, of course. But I miss… knowing my path,” she finally said, realizing the rightness of that phrasing as she said it. “My sisters, they all know where they are headed in their lives now. For goodness’ sake, Ailsa is amother.”
She shook her head in astonishment. The idea still seemed so bizarre that she could scarcely believe it.
“But me?” she went on. “I am still adrift. And it makes me miss home.”
“Ye do realize,” Ciaran said dryly, “that half the guards at Buchanan Keep would behonoredto give ye a path right here, to offer ye a new life in this place.”
Privately, Eilidh smiled to herself that he had noticed. Surely he couldn’t havenointerest in her if he had noticed that, could he? Aloud, she just scoffed.
“I’m a Northerner,” she said. “I am fond of Buchanan lands, sure enough, but I cannae imagine living out my days here.”
He hummed thoughtfully. “Aye, I agree with ye on that,” he said. “Though it has been some time since I have been back to my home. It’s beautiful there, though. No matter how long I am gone, I never forget how lovely it is.”
He sounded so wistful. The longing in his voice echoed the way she felt in her heart when she thought about her home. Maybe it was the similarity, or maybe it was the moonlight, but something made her bold.
“Perhaps one day… we could visit there together?” she ventured.
He didn’t immediately answer, though there was some quality in his silence that stopped Eilidh from feeling insecure about it. When she looked over at him, she found him already gazing in her direction. Their eyes locked, and in that moment sheknewthat at least part of that vision of their future that she’d imagined he could see it too.
Grian’s scream ripped Eilidh from her reverie; he reared, both furious and frightened, his hooves pawing the air. Ciaran cried out in alarm, but Eilidh had been riding Grian for years. She controlled her mount swiftly, her grip unerring on her reins, no matter how startled she might have been.
When Grian’s hooves were safely back on the ground, however, she saw that it wasn’t merely the horse’s sudden rearing that had caused Ciaran to react.
No, it was the men, armed to the teeth and grinning maliciously as they stepped out from the trees and surrounded Eilidh.
“Well, well, well,” one of them purred, tossing a knife from hand to hand in a foolish, flashy move that would have made him vulnerable to being disarmed if not for the fact that they were outnumbered ten to two—and that the two were unarmed.
Eilidh hadn’t taken a weapon with her, after all she hadn’t planned the ride. Ewan hadn’t ever given Ciaran weapons, not when he was a newcomer to the keep.
This was very, very bad.
“What a delightful morsel that has fallen right into our laps, lads,” he went on, grinning in a way that showed that one of his canine teeth had rotted. “She’s prettier than anyone said; our master will be pleased. At least with a face like that, it willnae be such a hardship to fill her up with his heirs. And then, finally, the Donaghey Clan will be the Gordon Clan—as they ought always have been.”
Eilidh swallowed hard against her rising gorge as the men, apparently finding this hilarious, all laughed uproariously at their leader.
She didn’t quite dare to take her eyes off the mercenaries, who were edging closer and closer to her mount, but she tried to glimpse Ciaran in the corner of her vision. He was sitting very still on his horse, something strange and uncertain in his expression.
No sooner had Eilidh started to wonder about that look in his eye, though, than he sprang into action.
No, she thought feverishly as she spun Grian, urging him to kick out at one of the men who tried to approach.“Sprang”wasn’t even a good enough word for it. He was like a hurricane, with all the swift ferocity of one of those offshore storms she and her father had watched together in years gone by. He produced a knife, seemingly from nowhere, and before she could do much more than blink, he’d driven the blade through the throat of one of their attackers and stolen his sword, which he used to run through a second man.
Grian lunged again, snapping his teeth furiously at another man, and Eilidh turned with her mount’s movement, trusting the horse to execute his training. By the time she got Ciaran back in her line of sight, he had felled two more men. Each of his strikes was like poetry; with each flash of a blade that wasn’t even his, men dropped before they could blink.
