Wanton clasped his hand, allowing herself to be lifted up beside him.
Field Note 17.0: Survival likelihood increases by eighty-three percent when accompanied by statistically handsome variables. Addendum: Freedom, it appears, rides bare-thighed.
Chapter five
In Which Scientific Vigilance Meets Scottish Distillation
The great hall of Glenravish was less a room than a riot illuminated by firelight. Flames leapt as if competing for dominance. Men shouted in a language that sounded like English left to ferment. Somewhere, a piper was strangling nationalism to death by melody.
Wanton crouched behind a suit of armor, notebook open, pencil poised, the picture of stealth—if one ignored the bonnet bobbing above the visor.
She peered around the armor’s elbow. Tavish stood at the center of it all, towering and infuriatingly unassassinated. His laugh was rare, brief, but it stirred the hall like a gust of wind through embers.
“Subject appears relaxed,” she whispered, “but deceptive calm may precede assassination attempts. Also, the pudding jiggles suspiciously.”
Tavish conversed MacNab of Glenlachlan, a laird with a beard so large it might qualify for clan status. Between them resteda weapon that looked more altar than object—an ancient war hammer displayed on a tartan-draped table. Iron head dark with age, handle bound in leather worn smooth by generations, its surface gleamed faintly where the carvings caught the firelight.
Tavish laid a hand on it, the gesture almost reverent.
“This is Brònach Buaidh,” he said. “The Hammer of Ancestry. My forebear wielded it beside Robert the Bruce at Bannockburn. It’s said the blow that broke the English line came from this steel—and that as long as Glenravish keeps it, the land remains ours.”
MacNab nodded, grave and approving. “Aye, every glen has its heart. Lose it, and the hills grow silent.”
Wanton crouched behind her chosen suit of armor, notebook open, bonnet bobbing with curiosity.
“Field Observation 24.3,” she whispered. “Male emotional stability appears to depend upon proximity to blunt instruments.”
She squinted at the relic. To her, it was a perfectly ordinary application of mass and leverage—fascinating, yes, but not metaphysical. Yet the air around it seemed to hum, as if belief itself had weight.
She frowned thoughtfully. “So they’ve built their property laws on symbolic metallurgy. Remarkably inefficient, though rather poetic.”
Her pencil scratched another note.
“If teapots carried such influence,” she muttered, “the Empire would already be under female rule.”
Her eyes narrowed. Near the whisky table, Malcolm—too clean, too smug—was speaking in low tones to a servant.
He was all sharp planes and self-regard: black hair, blacker heart, the sort of lean, angular man who looked as though he’d been carved by ambition and polished by resentment. Of the MacTease bloodline, he had clearly inherited only the whites of the eyes.
Wanton squinted at him. Field Intuition 18.1: Never trust a man whose hair and conscience share a pigment.
Besides, he was the very one who’d threatened to “toss her like a spindly caber.” She still hadn’t decided whether that was an insult or a mathematical impossibility. Either way, she disliked him on principle.
A suspicious number of nods occurred.
Wanton gasped softly. “Whispers plus proximity to alcohol equals conspiracy. The math is irrefutable.”
The servant crossed the room and approached Tavish with a flask. The perfect, damning flask.
“Oh no you don’t,” Wanton murmured, snapping her notebook shut and rising to full, disastrous height. “Not on my scientific watch!”
She lunged.
Chairs scraped. A tray of bannocks took flight. One piper yelped as she careened past, bonnet askew, all righteous purpose and questionable trajectory.
“Don’t!” she cried, vaulting a startled dog. “It’s poisoned!”
Every head turned. Tavish did too—just in time for her to collide with him. The flask flew. She snatched it midair like a woman possessed by equal parts courage and idiocy.
