“Mine also.”
“A curious thing, that! Is there nay a song about it?”
“The minstrel boy to war is gone, in the ranks o’ death ye will find him.”
“Aye, that is it. What a lovely voice ye do ha’.”
He hadn’t realized that he’d sung the words. He felt odd. Unsteady. His fingers caressed the shattered wood in his hands.
Molly said, “Here is the rest o’ it here in yer pack. I do no’ think it can be repaired.”
“Nay. Och, nay.”
But the songs were still there. The songs remained with him.
Chapter Forty-Four
Finlay remained withMolly and worked her croft as the winter came on, even though his heart longed with a deep and persistent ache to reach home. Since he could not remember where home might be, it seemed best not to stir even after his strength began to return.
He felt he owed her, this old woman who had doubtless saved his life. Strong as she was, she struggled visibly with the chores she faced, doubly difficult in the cold, and those tasks grew easier and easier for him.
She called him Ardahl, or lad, or more frequently laddie. As the days passed, a rare and true affection grew between them.
She sang the old songs for him, all that she could recall. And like a dam breaking, those songs brought others to him, words and tunes and all, his fingers twitching for want of the strings. With the songs came pieces of memory. Places he had sung and played. Grand halls and humble cottages not unlike this one.
The pieces of himself, coming back to him, and with them an increase in his longing.
For the girl with the golden hair who stood in the sunshine.
Sometimes her name whispered in his mind so fleeting he could only just catch it.Liadan. But the love, oh, the love found him in full.
He and Molly sometimes sang together at their work, and then in the evenings to pass the time, his smooth voice blending wondrously with her sweet, fragile one. She clapped her hands like a young girl in delight over their singing.
“So many songs ye do know,” she said one evening after he’d begun recalling more tunes than she knew. “D’ye think ye were a shanachie?”
“Aye, I do think so.”
“Then why the sword? And why awa’ in the battle?”
That refused to come to him. Indeed, he scarce recalled the battle, though he knew full well he had come from there.
One market day when the weather was not too harsh and Molly had some eggs to sell, she persuaded Finlay to accompany her. She gave him her husband’s kilt and plaid to wear, and even his boots, as Finlay’s own were too worn.
“How braw ye look,” she said, smiling. “Everyone will think ye my long-lost son.”
Finlay wondered then if in her heart Molly wanted him to stay. Part of him would not mind. Yet the wheel of his life turned with him upon it, toward what he needed quite desperately but could not quite see.
Folk in the market town of Kintail were curious about him. Molly was forced to pause and explain his presence again and again. He gleaned news of the battle, which was being called the Battle of Neville’s Cross, and what a disaster it had been for the Scots. The king captured and held in chains in far-off London. Scotsmen killed in their hundreds. Scots lords taken for ransom, or slain.
“It has broken our back, it has,” one old man declared, and Finlay thought of his harp, no doubt shattered against a stone.
When folk in the town asked where he was from, he answered only, “North and west o’ here,” quite certain of that much, though not sure how he knew.
When a woman eyed him up and down and asked Molly outright, “Will he be stayin’ wi’ ye, then?” He and Molly exchanged a look but gave her no answer.
They were quieter on the way home, both with thoughts crowdingtheir minds. Would Molly ask him to stay? To become in truth the son she likely thought him?
The last thing he wanted to do was hurt her feelings. But he felt as if a great wind lay at his back, pushing him toward what he could not see.
