Page 16 of Reviving Her Highland Spirit

She beamed. “That’s wonderful. Can we start tomorrow morning?”

His smile faltered. “I’ll not be here tomorrow morning.”

“Why not?”

He cleared his throat. “I have tae go into town.”

“Ah, of course,” Maggie felt a little silly. Did she think that his life began and ended here? Of course he had a life outside the keep walls. “Are ye visiting family?”

The smile was gone now. “Something like that. I’m visiting the man who raised me.”

Maggie wondered whether she’d been too inquisitive. Just because Callum worked here didn’t give her the right to demand information about his personal life.

Rein it in, Maggie, she told herself firmly.

“Of course. What about the day after, then?”

Callum swallowed hard, dropping his gaze to inspect his nails. His hands were rough and dirty, wet from the filthy water he’d been using to scrub the cobbles. It was unfair that Robert had given him such a pointless, ridiculous task. Maggie had to fight down a surge of annoyance.

“Aye, the day after would be fine. At dawn?”

Maggie nodded. “Dawn is good.”

Going out at dawn wouldn’t give her any time to waste the day and change her mind. She’d wake up and go straight out, with no time to lose her nerve. She smiled down at Callum.

“I’ll see ye then,” he said, flashing a smile up at her. Something warm fluttered in Maggie’s chest.

“Aye, ye will,” she replied.

7

Callum left well before dawn. He hated having to give up a few precious hours of sleep, but he didn’t dare risk being followed or questioned about where he was going. As always, he’d burned the letter once he’d read it - the message as blunt and terse as he’d expected - and peeled off the wax to give it back later.

Wax wasn’t cheap. However, it was the best way to make a letter look important, and to make it obvious if it had been opened and read. With the hard lump of wax shoved into the depths of his pocket, Callum crept out of the keep in the gray dark before dawn, feeling like a criminal.

Once he was away from the long shadow of the keep, he began to feel better. The sun rose as Callum took a sharp turn off the well-trodden path into the depths forest.

The forest sprawled over countless miles of land between McAlister and Murray land, mostly unmapped and unknown. There were a few well-known paths, but Callum wouldn’t be following them today. The forests were safer than they’d ever been these days, but it still wasn’t really recommended to go walking in the woods alone. At the very least, you could risk running into a wolf, or just getting lost.

But Callum knew where he was going. Soon enough, the narrow, thin path faded altogether, and Callum relied on the scratches and marks he’d made on tree trunks to guide his way. He stumbled on the cottage quite abruptly. One moment, Callum was fighting his way through a tangle of undergrowth, and the next he was standing in a small clearing. Almost all of the space in the clearing was taken up by a gray, squat cottage.

The cottage was in bad condition. The woods hemmed in on all sides, the forest trying to take back what belonged to it. Trees loomed overhead, foliage brushing the roof. Callum could see fresh patches of thatch, but they were far more thin, holey patches, through which water would certainly leak when it rained.

Vines and weeds crowded around the base of the cottage, creeping up the crumbling stone, trying to make their way inside. There were the remnants of a fence around the cottage, long rotten. Where there should be a cottage garden, were only twisted thorns and a few bramble bushes. A rough path was cut through the tangle of weeds, leading to a lopsided door, hanging off its hinges. Callum stepped carefully through, and knocked on the door.

Only two knocks. Never more than two.

After a few heartbeats, a rusty key grated in the lock, and the door opened.

The man with the brightest red hair Callum had ever seen stood there. His hair was threaded with gray now, long before his time.

They hadn’t called him Red Rufus for nothing, back when he was Laird McAlister, in James McAlister’s place.

“I thought ye weren’t coming,” he said briskly. “Did ye bring back the wax?”

Callum silently held out the hunk of red wax. “Aye, and some food from the keep’s kitchens.”

“Not too much, I hope. They’ll dismiss ye for stealing, ye hear me?”