They were to part.
Her eyes flew open. She found the hall just the same. The fire burning lazily. Da sitting as if spellbound by the bard’s music. The others at their ease, drinking ale. And Finlay, Finlay with his head bent gracefully over the strings of his harp.
Everything just the same, yet nothing was the same. It felt almost as if, somewhere, a wheel had turned.
Why should she imagine such a scene as that one, even in a brief flash? It had never happened; she’d never made love with a man, any man, in a tiny room while harp music swirled around them.
It must be pure fancy, though she was not a fanciful woman.
But ah—had not Finlay told a tale of such? The two lovers, Deathan and Darlei, set to part and making desperate love together in a tiny chamber adjacent to his father’s hall.
It must be that, which Finlay’s music brought to mind. For an instant she’d imagined she was Darlei, that wild-hearted Caledonian princess held fast in the arms of the man she adored.
She stirred, took up a pitcher, and moved about the room refilling cups, even though there were two serving women already at that task. She could not keep still.
Finlay, as caught up in his music as she, did not glance at her. But she paused near him, the better to hear him play. The exquisite quiver of each string. The beauty of his hands moving across them.
He ended one tune with a shimmering flicker of notes and began another in an odd key, sad and beguiling, that once more sent her senses skittering away. An old tune it must be. Unfamiliar.Familiar.
Surely she’d heard it before, mayhap long ago in childhood, come from another harper’s hands. Da used to invite in any that were passing. And she had a good ear.
She would have to ask Finlay where he got his tunes. From all over, he would likely say. Had he not told her he had gathered them in Wales and Brittany and Ireland?
She needed to ask him again, with more insistence, where he’d got the tales he had told. How he knew so much of them. She must sit and speak with him—
The tune ended and the spell broke. All at once, Katrin was able to move. People stirred. The evening was done.
She would, however, carry that last tune into her dreams.
She went out and walked, once the hall had cleared, through the soft dark of the evening. She could hear voices from behind her, the last of the clan’s folk straggling home. A big treat it was for them to be called to the chief’s hall so often, for a chance to listen to a harper of Master Finlay’s ilk.
He had gone off already to his chamber.Geordie’s chamber.
She listened as the voices died away, and the hiss and draw of the waves filled the night. There was no moon, but a stone path led the way up the slope to the graveyard.
Was anybody here? Hard to tell among the yew trees, the rowans, and the heather. She paused at Geordie’s grave and began to speak.
“Are ye here? Are ye back in yer room? I swear sometimes I can feel ye, as if I might turn around and ye will be standing there. Is there somewhat ye want of me? Something ye need for me to do? If so, just say so. I will do anything.”
Silence but for the sea behind her. Long ago, if the harper could be believed, this place had belonged to her ancestress’s grandsire. Bradana’s.
Katrin’s roots ran deep into the stony soil. If Geordie’s did also, how could he be anywhere else?
“Tell me what to do with these wild feelings that fill me,” she bade her brother. She had never imagined such a love as the harper had described between her ancestors, those two who seemed to have journeyed together through time from life to life.
Such was but pure fancy, was it not?
Chapter Five
The Gallowglass trooparrived the next day, bursting upon the keep with such a clatter and furor that Katrin scorned herself for having kept watch all the while, fearing she might miss them. No one could miss so many strapping males at full bore.
They arrived on foot, being in fact a troop of foot soldiers, a group of some thirty in number, all big and heavily armed.
All loud.
From the outset, Katrin knew life at Murtray would never be the same. She hoped Da understood what he had wrought.
She watched from the main door as they passed through the gate and into the bailey where, as she understood, most of them would bivouac until Earl Randolph called them up. Indeed, Da had told Katrin that he meant to send a message to Earl Randolph upon their arrival letting him know he now stood ready with reinforcements.
