Her gaze dropped, giving her only response.
Angus couldn’t help it. He snorted. “Ye are daft. Or I am.” At her gasp, he knelt before her, shaking his head. “I’m sorry, lass, I didna mean that. And I’m sorry about what I said in the woods. I ken ye wouldna do what I accused ye of. But this…what ye seem to think…’tis no’ possible. If ye’d been there, ye’d be under the tree with him, and we’d be scraping yer remains into the ground along with his once this storm is over. The only way ye could have prevented this is to have been with him somewhere else.” Angus shook his head as a wildly different possibility occurred to him. “If ye had some power that lets ye move things, I’d have to think, given yer uncle’s intentions and yer own reluctance to marry Colin, that ye dropped the tree on him yerself.”
“What?” Shock--or outrage--pitched her voice high and rising.
“Did ye? If I’m to believe ye have this ability, then did ye use it to kill the man yer uncle intended to force ye to marry?”
Outside the croft, the wind picked up, roaring like a battering ram pounding the stones outside. Angus spared a moment to hope the roof would remain with the structure, but his regard never left Shona.
Her face went from ruddy to ghastly pale. “How can ye think such a thing?”
This time she’d pitched her voice so low, he barely heard her words.
“Ye’re asking me to accept the impossible. If I do, the rest is also possible, is it no’?”
Angus hated accusing her. But if his questions shattered this wall she’d built around herself and let her grief pour out, or her anger, well, anything was better than this pitiable silence, this wounded, guilt-stricken tension holding her in its grip.
Her gaze dropped to her hands. “I was with ye.”
Her words had no inflection and gave him no clue if she meant them as a defense or an accusation. He’d failed to break through her reserve. She’d gone back to being closed in, her features bereft of any feeling.
He tried not to think about how well their walk had started and how badly it ended.
“For a time, aye.” He scrubbed a hand through his hair, debating how much to tell her. “Lass, I’ve known someone who claimed to have an ability beyond mortal ken. A talent to heal all hurts. But when it really mattered, she couldna do what she promised. What I prayed for. She couldna save my brother’s life. Her talent was unreliable—or never existed. So, nay, I dinna believe any of what ye have no’ actually said is possible.”
The door slammed open and a gust of damp air blew Brodric into the croft. “God almighty, ’tis raw out there,” he announced as he grabbed the door’s edge, swung around behind it, and shoved it closed against the raging wind. “I barely made it here. A few minutes more and I wouldha blown all the way to Court. Ye wouldha found mesipping tea with the ladies,” he added in a falsetto, a big grin on his face, then he shuddered. In his normal voice, he continued, “I’m glad to get inside,” as he secured the door. “I’d no’ be fit company for the likes o’ them.” Then he turned, took in the tableau before him, Angus’s tension and Shona’s tears, and closed his mouth. And he opened it again. “Now what have ye done, Angus?”
Angus improvised. “She hasna been right since seeing Colin under the tree, ye daft lug. What else would ye expect from a lass save weeping?”
Brodric shrugged and took a step toward her. “Naught else save wailing, I suppose.” He stopped when Angus shook his head, giving Brodric a clear warning to keep his distance. “A sad business, that,” he said, angling to a chair by the fire instead of continuing toward her. “We tried for the longest time to lift the tree off him, but there were too few of us, and he was already…gone.”
Angus frowned. “How long did ye try? How long before I arrived did the tree fall?” Shona’s eyes widened, but he ignored her. The question might further hurt her feelings, but he had to know.
“A long while,” Brodric answered, puzzlement clear in his drawn-down brow. “There were two men with him. They tried at first, then one brave fool risked getting crushed and stayed with him while the other ran for help. Eventually, a crowd showed up. We sent the women away for their own safety when the wind’s howling worsened. Then Shona arrived, and on her heels, so did ye.” He paused and looked from one to the other. “Were ye together, I take it?”
Angus ignored his implication, too focused on the timing Brodric described. He had no doubt Shona had still been withhimwhen the tree fell. Even if her wild intimation about her ability was true, she could not have done what he’d accused. Colin had simply been in the wrong place at the worst possible time. Angus didn’t know why that filled him with relief, but it did. His chest expanded with the first easy breath he’d taken since he and Shona had argued in the woods, before she’d run from him. He hadn’t really believed the rash story he’d spun, and she’d admitted nothing, but he was happy, nonetheless. It was impossible for her to have had anything to do with Colin’s death.
Shona, he finally noticed, eyed him, looking like a dog that had been kicked too often and waited for the next blow to land. Did she fear him? Or something else? He squatted beside her, shrugged, and huffed out a breath. “Ye couldna have done anything.” Knowing his statement would raise questions in Brodric, he counted on his friend’s discretion. They were all on tenterhooks, nerves raw from the accidents at the hall, Colin’s death, the storm…nothing seemed to be going their way.
Her only response was a shallow dip of her chin before she turned her back to him and faced the fire. He deserved that, he supposed.
Brodric’s frown deepened as he looked from Shona to Angus, back and forth several times. He rose, as if to go to the lass. Angus held up a hand, forestalling any more questions. With a nod and a glance toward Angus’s bed, which earned him a frown, Brodric fetched the whisky, plunked himself down and leaned back in his chair, then took a long pull on the bottle. Angus yanked the only other seat away from the table, grabbed the bottle out of Brodric’s hand and offered it to Shona. She took a sip and passed it back to him without comment. They settled in to wait out the storm.
* * *
Two days later, Angus crossed the village on his way to answer the council elder’s summons. The clan had ridden out the windstorm with no further casualties. He expected to face a storm of a very different kind when the Council met again to choose a new chief, but given their history, that day might not come for months.
A day spent chopping wood freed Colin’s crushed body. Its condition made moving it to bury him with those who’d died in the invasion last autumn too difficult to contemplate. They’d buried what remained quickly, on clear ground next to where he’d died, turning the blood-soaked soil beneath him into the grave. It was grisly, awful work, but it was done.
They had no priest to sanctify the ground, but the clan prayed over him, and Angus hoped that was enough. Colin had been laird, after all, if only for a few days. One of the stone masons would fashion a marker for his grave. Angus didn’t know what else they could do, except carry on. Despite his best efforts, it seemed like that’s all they’d been doing since the lowlander army arrived all those months ago. Carrying on.
When, he grumbled to himself, would they be whole? Rebuilt? Recovered and back on solid footing? Colin’s death was another blow—one that left them, once again, vulnerable to internal strife as well as external threats. Over the winter, Angus had done his best to suppress clan and lowlander infighting by keeping everyone as busy as possible. They’d gotten through with the Lathans’ help, but he did not want to depend on their largesse forever. MacAnalen was a proud clan with deep roots in Scotland and Ireland. He would not be responsible for letting this branch wither away, no matter who became the next laird.
Shona, who’d avoided him these last two days, had been on his mind much of the time. Her arrival had brought about a change in his outlook, and plunged him into fantasies of a better future with her by his side. Yet here he was, caught in the same doubts and frustrations. He needed her more than he wanted to admit, but she seemed determined to have nothing to do with him. He couldn’t blame her, not after he accused her of trying to trap him into marriage. God, he’d even accused her of killing Colin.
And if he became laird? If her uncle still wanted to curry favor, the thing she most dreaded might gain him the thing he wanted most. Angus stifled a laugh at the irony, then stopped dead still in his tracks.
The thing he wanted most? Shona? When had that happened? For months, the thing he had wanted most, besides the clan’s recovery, was to follow his brother’s footsteps and become laird. Chief of MacAnalen.
