“Predicament?”
“There is currently nay heir to Murtray—”
If he said so one more time, she would beat his head in.
She thought furiously. “Oran MacGill is already married, is he no’?”
“He states in the letter, if ye read on, that his wife has most fortuitously died—”
“Fortuitously?”
“That is the word he used. He is thus a widower.”
“He wants the lands. Naught but the lands.”
“He will be able to defend them.”
Slowly, in defiance of her rage, Katrin turned to face Dougal more fully. “Ye are never telling me to accept this—this vile offer?”
“We ha’ discussed it and—”
“Ye ha’?”
“I and your father’s other advisors.”
“Get out o’ my sight.”
“Mistress!”
“Get out before I say or do somewhat I will regret.”
The old man moved stiffly toward the door, turning back at thelast moment. “I hope ye will consider, mistress, wha’ yer father knew full well. Ye maun exist, now, solely for the benefit o’ this clan.”
“Do no’ tell me my duties. I understand them.”
He went out. With fastidious haste, Katrin fed the parchment to the flames of the sleepy fire.
Chapter Forty-Six
Burning the letterfrom Oran MacGill did little good. It had already been read and debated by Katrin’s advisors. MacGill’s messenger still lingered, awaiting a reply. The damned matter would not go away.
If Katrin had felt besieged before, she now felt ravaged to pieces. She awoke with a knot of dread in the pit of her stomach and thought of little but her predicament all day long.
Had she not earned the place of chief in her own right? Had she not marched to war at her da’s side? Got him home again against terrible odds? Could she not be trusted to lead the people with whose welfare she had been entrusted?
If she wed Oran MacGill, Murtray would cease to exist in its own name. Aye—she might bear sons, though the very prospect of them being Oran’s sons made her skin crawl. But they would live beneath MacGill’s banner evermore.
Her father’s advisors might argue that MacGill offered them protection, for that they continued to do in the days that followed. She viewed it as a great loss of independence.
She remembered Oran MacGill. Aye, indeed, she did. And as she pondered his unwelcome offer, other pieces of memory began falling into place within her mind.
The stories Finlay had told there in her father’s hall before all this began. Had he told them by chance, or by intention?
It seemed now she recalled Finlay’s every word, burned into hermind as he was burned into her heart.
She took to walking great distances out from the settlement to escape her advisors as much as the eyes of her clan’s folk. She walked northward up the coast to the place where Adair and his Bradana had come ashore so long ago, that he might fight the battle that won this very holding for him. She walked south, where Deathan and his Caledonian princess, Darlei, had once met together. She even walked up into the forest to the place she imagined a half-ruined cottage had once stood—the place where a Scotsman and a Norsewoman had taken refuge together in an effort to ease their all-consuming need for each other.
And the truth, in all its surety, took hold inside her, deeply rooted, unshakable. Whether Finlay had intended to tell her so or nay…
