Alex was quick, and he was bold. He knew he could do it.
There was nothing he would hate more than to be locked in a confined space for months or years. He would rather fight a hundred battles, die a dozen ugly deaths.
And yet, a man must make the sacrifice that is needed, not the one he would choose for himself. If serving as the Crown’s hostage would buy Connor time for the clan, Alex must let them take him.
Albany waved his hand at the guards and shouted, “Seize him!”
CHAPTER 19
My, don’t ye look lovely,” Glynis’s aunt Peg said, clasping her hands together in front of her. “The gown fits ye like a glove.”
Glynis ran her hands over the soft wool. It felt strange to be wearing her mother’s clothes. Bessie, the slight, middle-aged maid, had found the trunk with her mother’s things in the attic.
“Ye are just her size,” Bessie said, as she fastened the last button at the back of Glynis’s neck. “And just as pretty.”
“My father always said how much I was like her.” And he never seemed to notice the look of irritation on her stepmother’s face when he said it.
For the first time, Glynis felt guilty, knowing how worried her father must be about her. They had always had a close bond, though their fights since she left Magnus had strained it badly.
“I’ll never understand what possessed my sister to run off and wed that wild Highlander,” Aunt Peg said, touching the back of her pudgy hand to her forehead.
“He was devilishly handsome,” the maid said in a voice too low for her aunt to hear.
Glynis did not believe that was the reason her mother had followed him across Scotland, though her father must have been handsome as a young chieftain.
“It was because he loved her so much,” Glynis said.
She felt a sting in her eye, thinking of her father’s daily visits to her mother’s grave. How many times had she spied on him there as a child and heard him having a discussion with his long-dead wife? If Glynis had grown up expecting to have love in her marriage, it was her father’s doing, however inadvertent.
“Love doesn’t put food on the table,” her aunt said. “Henry’s left his shop to take us on our errand, so we must not keep him waiting.”
Glynis had a hundred questions she wanted to ask about her mother, but her aunt had had little to say on the subject when she inquired earlier.
In far too short a time, Glynis found herself on the High Street again. The city was nothing like the soft, dreamy images she had of it. Her nursemaid, Old Molly, had told her stories about her parents falling in love here when her father was called to court. According to Old Molly, her father had been a lost man from the moment he first saw her mother on this very street. How had he noticed her in the midst of this chaos?
“Is it always like this?” Glynis asked. The constant noise of voices, carts, and clanking bells made her head throb.
“Aye,” her aunt said. “Exciting, isn’t it?”
“There’s no place like it, except for London,” her aunt’s husband said. Henry was a squat, bald-headed man who seemed as mild and pleasant as her aunt.
As Glynis followed them through the doorway of yet another shop, she had to turn sideways to avoid a woman carrying a large basket. They had visited half a dozen shops, and her aunt and uncle had not purchased anything.
“What is it you’re looking for?” Whatever it was, Glynis hoped they found it soon.
Glynis felt an elbow in her side and looked down to find her aunt beaming up at her with a smile so big that her eyes nearly closed above her plump cheeks.
“A husband,” her aunt whispered in a giddy voice. “Henry says two of the unmarried merchants are interested in ye already—and we’ve only been out an hour!”
* * *
Blackness settled over Alex’s soul as the door clanked shut behind him. In the dim torchlight coming through the door’s iron grate, he took in his cell. He was in the undercroft that carried the weight of the castle and rested on the black rock on which it was built.
The curved ceiling was too low for him to stand, so he sat on the uneven rock floor and held his head in his hands. His freedom was everything to him. Sailing, fighting, swiving. That was his life. His cell didn’t even have a window.
He had known it might come to this when he agreed to come to court for Connor, but he hadn’t let himself think about it. Most hostages were kept in better quarters—apparently he’d made a poor impression on the regent.
As the hours ticked by, Alex wondered how he would keep his sanity in the months to come. He felt the weight of the tons of stone above him.
