“Of course not,” Melody echoed, voice dropping to a murmur. “Well, I can say that there are rules about courtship in London. All sorts of silly rules and traditions, but people ignore them all the time. My sister used to say that people are the same everywhere, though. Sometimes people are shy or have reasons not to declare themselves. They may be afraid of rejection or some other consequence. So, regardless of whether you are in London or the Highlands, there is no reason to think that a person does not care for you simply because they do not declare themselves. Not if their behavior implies that theydocare. Perhaps that is their way of declaring themselves, after all.”
Kat frowned, chewing on her lower lip. “Nay, there’s more to it than that.”
“More to what?”
Kat flushed. “Nothin’. I didnae mean… nothin’.”
Melody opened her mouth to ask another question, but decided against it. Kat seemed happy enough to be friends, but there was no denying it was early days. It would not do to scare her off yet.
A friend, Melody thought, biting back a smile.At last. Emma would love her, I think.
The maze of corridors spat them out into the wide, drafty hall that led outside. The door was open, letting in a gust of fresh, cold early-morning air.
“Here we are, lassies!” Sophie called back cheerfully and went clattering outside. The two women were obliged to jog to catch up with her.
When Melody stepped outside, unforgiving sunlight seared her eyes, forcing her to raise her hand to block out the light. The air was crisp and cold, and even at that early hour, there were peopleeverywhere.
The courtyard buzzed with activity. Women dashed to and fro with large baskets of laundry balanced on their hips. Men rolled barrels and maneuvered hand-pulled carts over the uneven cobbles. Chatter filled the air, dozens of conversations crossing over each other, interspersed with sharp bursts of laughter. Itwas bewildering, and if Melody hadn’t had Sophie’s hunched back to follow, she would have easily gotten disoriented.
“Where are we going?” she called, noticing how several heads turned at the sound of her English accent.
“I thought we could take a tour of the trainin’ grounds,” Sophie called back. It sounded as though she was holding back laughter.
The two women had no choice but to follow. Abruptly, the crowded cobblestones of the courtyard gave way to hard-packed dirt and patches of scrubby grass. The people all but disappeared, and the noise gradually receded behind them.
New sounds appeared. Melody craned her neck at the sound of blades clashing together, trying to see where the noise came from.
Sophie led them along a narrow terrace, sheltered by an overhang, and turned to face the training fields.
Theyweretraining fields, Melody could see that now. A gaggle of about six or eight men stood in the center, most of them leaning on wooden training swords and staves, watching two men fight in the middle.
These men were not using wooden swords. Theclangshe heard was the clash of metal on metal.
Both men were bare-chested, dancing nimbly around each other. They were large men, stocky and broad-shouldered, but moved as lightly as dancers.
With a jolt, Melody realized who they were. The larger of the men was Callum, and the smaller was Lucas.
Transfixed, she took a step forward. Callum had his back to her and did not glance back to look at them, not even once. When he moved, the muscles on his back rippled and knotted, sliding evenly under sweat-glossed skin. He lunged forward, swinging the sword as easily as if it weighed nothing at all.
Lucas dodged, the blade hissing through the air only inches from his ear. Kat gave a barely-smothered gasp of panic.
The two men moved again, their feet skimming across the ground until their positions were reversed. Now Lucas’s reddened, sweat-drenched face was hidden from their view, and Callum was instead looking straight at them.
Melody had, of course, never seen a bare-chested man, not in real life. However, there were occasional sculptures and paintings depicting men in states of undress. Respectable ladies were not, of course, supposed to look at such things, but as far as she could tell,everybodytook a peek sooner or later.
Callum looked exactly like the sculptures she had seen, the men draped in stone-carved cloth. His torso narrowed to a sharp V, the shape disappearing beneath the waistband of his kilt. A fuzzof damp black hair curled over his chest, and the trail continued down the line of his abdomen, also disappearing beneath his kilt.
Melody’s throat had gone dry. She could not look away. Was he not cold? She was not close enough to see if there were goosebumps raised on his damp skin. He moved again, swinging the sword, and she saw how his muscles bunched and tautened with the movement. There was something else, a mark, or…
A scar. It was a scar.
Over the swell of his left pectoral, there was a knobbled circle of scar tissue, a darker shade than the rest of his skin. The scar rested directly over his heart and perfectly matched the scar she had seen in that pamphlet.
“That scar,” Melody managed, not quite able to keep herself quiet. “How awful it is.”
She felt eyes on her, and glanced sideways to find Sophie watching her with something like amusement.
“Aye, it’s a bad one, all right,” she agreed neutrally. “There are wars amongst the clans from time to time. It is easy to be hurt.”
