Fia cast a quick glance at John Erly. His face was carefully blank. He was a stranger here, as she was, cautious about his place and his welcome. A maid let her gaze travel over Fia as she filled her glass with ruby wine. Fia ignored her, heard Meggie sigh with pleasure and ask Padraig Sinclair about the source of the wines he imported.
“How did you come to be injured, Mistress MacLeod?” Lord John asked as the soup was served and others seated near them were deep in their own conversations.
She swallowed a mouthful of soup too quickly and burned her tongue. She picked up her glass and took a gulp of wine. “Just Fia, please,” she reminded him when she could speak. He did not reply, waiting for an answer to his question. “I fell when I was a wee child. Apparently I was quite clumsy as a bairn.” She set her glass down on the handle of her spoon and sent it spinning across the table. Worse, the goblet toppled, and wine spilled across the white linen cloth like a bloodstain. Conversation stopped. She felt her stomach rise to her throat, and hot blood flooded her face.
“Your pardon, Mistress MacLeod—I must have hit your glass with my knife,” John said, and tossed a napkin over the stain. He summoned a servant. “More wine for the lady, if you please.”
“Thank you,” she murmured, both to the lass who refilled her cup and to English John. Again he had come to her rescue. It appeared to be a habit of his. “I suppose I’m still rather clumsy.”
He didn’t ask for further details. For a long moment he simply concentrated on his food. “It’s the most dreadful things that happen to us that shape us,” he said, and she wondered if he was talking to himself, until he turned to meet her eyes. “Some are hard to forget. They leave scars, both visible and invisible.”
She knew he was speaking of Alasdair Og.
“What happened to him?” she asked.
His brows rose. “Not ‘What’s wrong with him’? Do you honestly believe you can cure him?”
She looked down at her plate. “I have only just met him, and it was not . . .” She swallowed. “I also saw the portrait in the library. What was he like—before?”
John shrugged. “I don’t know. I met him in an English prison, after a fortnight of—shall we say rough treatment? This is hardly the place to speak of it.”
“Should I ask him instead?” Fia said.
He scanned her face, as if gauging whether she would dare to do so, if she could bear to hear the true tale, the unpleasant details. She held his gaze until he relented. “You could ask him, but he doesn’t talk about it. I know only what I saw, what I overheard. When they let us go, Dair was in no condition to make his way alone, so I brought him home. He cursed me for it.” He toyed with his glass. “He wished—well, as I said, it is not a subject for a lady, or for the dinner table.”
“I know what he wished,” she said. “I saw it in his eyes today.”
He looked surprised. “He relives that fortnight over and over again, by day, at night. He sees her, I think—his cousin Jean. Whatever they did to him in Coldburn, they did worse to her, and they did it before his eyes, while he was chained to the wall, unable to stop them or help her. They finally hanged her, and forced Dair to watch that too.”
Fia felt the blood drain from her face and imagined just what had occurred. She put her spoon down.
“Have I shocked you, mistress? Do you still believe you can heal him? A virgin who’s seen nothing of the world, a man who’s seen the very worst of it?” John demanded, his voice hard edged.
The desire to stay, totryto help, filled her breast. “I don’t know,” she admitted.
“Then why did you come? Did you expect he’d marry you?” he grated.
Fia stared at her hands. “I—no, of course not. No, I’ve no hope of that.” But shehadhoped, at least secretly, that if not Alasdair Og, then perhaps someone else . . . “I find injured creatures, you see—at Iolair. I bind their wounds, nurse them, and give them time to mend. Bel was one of those. I don’t expect them to remain with me forever, or even to be grateful. I am simply compelled to help if I can.”
“Dair isn’t an injured bird, Mistress MacLeod.”
Confusion brought tears to her eyes, and she blinked them away. “No, he most definitely is not. I’ve not tried to heal a person of anything so dire before. I do think healing comes from here.” She put her hand to her chest. “If a creature—or a man—doesn’t wish to heal, he won’t.”
“So you can make him want to live?” John demanded. “Be sure, Mistress MacLeod.”
She wasn’t sure. Not even a wee bit. She opened her mouth to say so. “I—”
“I see I’ve missed dinner. Am I in time for the dancing at least?” a loud voice asked. Fia looked up to find Alasdair Og standing at the foot of the stairs, leaning heavily on his walking stick. He wore a brocade jacket of dark red over his plaid. Like his father’s, Alasdair Og’s shoes also glittered with diamond buckles. There the elegant image ended. His hollow eyes glittered too—with drink. He needed sleep, and barbering, and, most likely, food. He looked like a ragged marauder, rough, brash, and bold enough to interrupt an elegant supper party. His neck cloth was missing, his throat and chest exposed by the open collar of his fine linen shirt. He met her eyes across the room and grinned, and Fia felt her breath catch in her throat. The drink had perhaps dulled his pain, but it had brought out the devil in Dair Sinclair.
The chief shot to his feet, but John was faster rising to his. He reached into his pocket and pulled out a flute, held it high. “If you’ve come to dance, I’m ready when you are,” he said. “Jock, Andrew—tune your instruments. Logan, perhaps you’ll lead Mistress Meggie out?” He began to blow a happy jig, and Fia saw Alasdair Og wince at the high-pitched notes.
Padraig Sinclair sank back into his chair and glowered at his son.
A piper and a fiddler joined English John, a lad beat time on a small drum, and more couples joined Meggie and Logan in the broad space before the hearth, spinning to the merry music.
No one invited Fia to dance, but she didn’t expect anyone would. Her foot tapped time under the table. She lost sight of Alasdair Og in the crowd.
He appeared again by her side and slid into John’s empty chair. “Well, mistress, shall we sit like two old people and talk of our glory days, when we could dance better than any of them?”
