Bride for a Knight (11 page)

Whether or not the stone was a true remnant of the Na Clachan Breugach, the handsomely carved relic didn’t need the rowan’s protection.

The monolith held magic of its own.

And so far back as he could remember, deference alone would have kept any Macpherson from even touching a finger to such a sacred relic of the clan’s dimmest, haziest past.

“Thunder of heaven,” he breathed, his heart drumming against his ribs.

He flashed another glance at the chapel door’s rowan-draped lintel. In keeping with old Devorgilla’s erstwhile instructions, he could see bright red ribbon winding through the berry-rich branches.

Like as not, he’d find the interior of the church equally festooned; the whole wee chapel brimming with charms and foolery designed to scare away his brothers’ souls.

Jamie’s jaw tightened. He kicked at a clump of rain-speckled, knee-high deer grass. Then he stooped to snatch up a small rock, hurling it into the moon-glinting waters of a nearby burn. Only Aveline’s presence and his damned knight’s spurs kept him from muttering an oath that would’ve blistered the night’s chill.

An oath that would’ve made his brothers roar with laughter and jab each other with their elbows as they wriggled their brows at him, challenging him to do better.

But he couldn’t.

Not this night.

Not standing in the wind and rain, heart-stricken, and knowing he’d still be missing them even after he’d drawn his last breath.

Then make me proud and prove you have at least a bit o’ my charm by seeing your lady out o’ the rain. Now, before it’s her last breath that concerns you
.

Kendrick!

Jamie started, glancing around.

The words still shimmered in the darkness. They’d come from nowhere and everywhere, yet echoed in his ears so real as if his brother stood right beside him. Glowing with vitality and strength, too handsome by a stretch, and ready as ever to boast about how easily he turned female heads.

Make haste
. The voice came again, more urgent but fainter.
Do you not see how the lass shivers?

But to Jamie’s mind, he was the one shivering.

His Fairmaiden bride graced the night composed as always, even if she was staring at the Na Clachan Breugach stone with eyes as wide as if she’d not only heard Kendrick, but seen him as well.

Not that he was going to ask her.

He did coil a quick arm around her and sweep her up against his chest, flipping his plaid over her to shield her from the gusting wind.

But as he strode toward the chapel, a rash of shivers spilled through him. And just when he nudged open the narrow, rowan-bedecked door, he thought he caught a glimpse of something flitting through the trees.

A faintly luminous something, moving away from the cairns and aglow with soft iridescent light.

Until he blinked and nothing but mist-wraiths and empty wind curled through the wood and the only glow in sight proved the glimmer of the moon, peering down at him through the clouds.

The strange light was gone.

And for that reason, he left the chapel door open, preferring a clear view of the churchyard and the surrounding wood of birches and oaks. But he did not fear his brothers’ bogles. Truth be told, he’d be keen to see them. But he trusted his instincts.

With all respect to his bride, Fairmaiden Castle was known to attract unsavory men. Broken, clanless caterans well adept at hiding in bracken and heather. Brigands he’d trust to skulk through the gusty night, swinging lanterns and rattling chains, whate’er their nefarious purpose.

A possibility he wasn’t about to share with Alan Mor’s daughter.

But cold chills such as the ones still slithering down his spine were the only reason he’d come away whole from the slaughter at Neville’s Cross. He doubted there was any danger of an English arrow storm descending upon his family’s tiny chapel and churchyard, but something equally unpleasant lurked in the nearby wood.

He was sure of it.

And whatever it was, it wasn’t his brothers.

They rested quietly beneath their mounded stones. The only sign of life within the dank, incense-steeped chapel squirmed and wriggled in his arms. Soft, warm, and far too tempting for his current mood. Impatient, too, for she shoved back the hood of her cloak and looked up at him the moment he set her on her feet on the rough, stone-flagged floor.

“You needn’t peer about with such caution,” she said, watching him scan the church’s dim interior. “They aren’t here. Not now.”

“Not now?” He arched a brow at her.

Aveline shook her head.

Jamie folded his arms. “‘Not now implies no longer,’” he said, uncomfortably aware of the many recumbent effigies of his long-dead ancestors.

Proud Macpherson knights, their tombs lined the chapel walls and crowded the deeper shadows. Colorful paint gleamed on their armor and shields, making their stone helms and swords look startlingly real and bringing their cold, chiseled features to such vivid life that he crossed himself.

“And ‘no longer’ implies they once were here,” he finished, trying not to feel his ancestors’ stony-eyed stares.

Trying especially to forget that farther back in the chapel, his mother slept as well. She slumbered deeply, hidden away behind the high altar, well beyond his sword-swinging, shield-carrying forebears, her beautiful marble tomb tucked deliberately out of sight.

As if secreting her sculpted likeness from view might undo its reason for being.

“They were here, aye.” His bride’s words echoed in the half-dark of the chapel, bringing his thoughts back to the present.

She looked down, flicked a raindrop from her cloak. “Leastways, two of them.”

“‘Two of them’?” Jamie could feel the back of his neck heating. “Which two?”

“Neill and Kendrick.”

Jamie put back his shoulders, looking at her. “See you, lass, since I’m fairly certain my father would rather roll naked in a patch of stinging nettles before he’d set foot in this chapel, I canna believe he’s seen any of my brothers here. Not Neill, not Kend—”

“He didn’t. I saw them here.” She lifted her chin, her sapphire gaze challenging him.

“You saw Neill and Kendrick?”

She nodded. “Here, and other places, as I told you. But it was outside, in the churchyard where I first saw them. I told your father and he ordered your cousins to bring the rowan charms.”

“Then my cousins are as addled as my da.”

She looked at him for a moment. “They are devoted to him. And, like me, only sought to ease his cares.”

Jamie opened his mouth, but no words came out.

Reminding her that there were some who had good reason to doubt Munro Macpherson had a caring bone in his body struck him as sounding too unchivalrous to risk.

But his temples throbbed at the thought of his wild and unruly cousins descending on the clan chapel, their burly arms filled with rowan and red ribbon; his family’s cattle charms.

But he didn’t want to think on such buffoonery or his cousins just now.

Not when he’d just learned that this was where Aveline had seen his brothers. His two favorite brothers.

Especially Kendrick.

Kendrick.
The name alone gutted him and he glanced aside, his gaze falling on the holy water stoup set into the chapel wall. He jerked, but before he could look away he felt his jaw slide down and his eyes widen as the pathetic layer of stone dust lining the empty basin suddenly vanished beneath clear, sparkling water.

Holy water teeming with a black mass of squiggly tadpoles, the whole gelatinous lot swimming in the sacred stoup.

A boyish prank Kendrick once played on Morag—much to the amusement of his brothers.

And Jamie as well.

But he wasn’t amused now. He was frightened; worried his brain was going as soft as his da’s.

A notion that instantly banished the tadpoles.

All saints be praised!

“Kendrick and Neill,” he began, studying his bride’s face. “Were they . . . did they . . .” He let the words tail off, unable to voice what he burned to know.

Just thinking of them dead undid him.

Talking about their ghosts was beyond his strength.

Saints, he still couldn’t quite believe in . . . bogles.

But he did have questions.

He began to pace, rubbing the back of his neck as he went. “Were you not afraid? When you saw them?” he asked, shooting her a glance. “Not afeared to come here tonight?”

“Afeared? Of your brothers?” Aveline smiled before she could catch herself. “Och, nay, they do not frighten me. I feel blessed to have seen them.”

So soon as the admission left her lips, he stopped beside one of the narrow window slits. “My father doesn’t feel blessed when he sees them,” he said, looking skeptical. And so handsome in the moonlight streaming in through the window, that her breath caught.

His coppery hair shimmered like burnished gold against the cold wall, the raindrops caught in the glossy strands gilded silver and glittering like diamonds. And with his great height and size, he made the tiny, vaulted chapel seem even smaller. Almost insignificant, with its dank stone and shadows, while throbbing vitality and rich, glowing warmth seemed to pour off him.

She started forward, then hesitated, not certain she trusted herself not to blush if she stepped too close to him.

Even standing where she was, she could breathe in his scent, a heady masculine blend of clean leather and linen. Chill blustery winds and the freshness of rain.

A heady mixture she inhaled with pleasure, especially when she recalled the more unsavory smells that had swirled around some of her less appealing suitors in the past.

Shuddering, she rubbed her arms. Truth was, she’d always known her husband would be chosen for her, but she’d never expected him to be so dashing.

Or so valiant, she admitted, remembering how he’d sheltered her from curious stares in her father’s hall. How he’d leaned close and lowered his voice, whispering soothing words to reassure her.

She swallowed, half-afraid to trust the emotions he kindled inside her.

The hope that he might be the answer to her most secret dreams, her deepest longings.

The kind of things she shouldn’t be thinking about now. Not here in his family’s chapel with him peering into the gloom, his jaw clenched and a frown creasing his brow.

Almost as if he expected one of his stone-hewn ancestors to leap up and challenge him for daring to intrude on their eternal slumber.

But then his gaze snapped back to her, his eyes narrowed and assessing. “How can you be so at ease about having seen my brothers when my father—a man many times your size and strength—cowers in his bed at the mere mention of their names?”

She lifted her chin. “He has reason to fear them. They are angry when they appear to him.”

“So I have heard.” He folded his arms, eyeing her. “Yet they were not wroth with you when you saw them?”

“They did not visit me,” Aveline explained. “I simply happened to see them. There is a difference.”

She moved to one of the tombs, tracing the sculpted edge of the effigy knight’s sword.

She wanted to speak of her dreams.

Her hopes for a harmonious future, one filled with family and sharing. Mutual respect and, if they were blessed, love.

Love and passion. Those were the things she burned to explore with him. Not talk of bogles and things neither one of them could change.

But he was striding around the chapel again, clearly bent on a lengthy discourse. “My brothers did not appear ill-humored when you saw them?” he asked, proving it.

Aveline sighed.

“I have seen Neill and Kendrick twice,” she admitted, drawing her cloak tighter about her. “Once near the Garbh Uisge, but at such a distance I canna say whether they looked grieved or nay. And the time I saw them here, in the churchyard, they were anything but angry.”

She paused to look at him. “If you would know the truth of it, they were dancing.”

“Dancing?” Jamie halted abruptly. “You saw Neill and Kendrick dancing? In the churchyard?”

She nodded. “Aye, in the churchyard. With Hughie Mac.”

Jamie stared at her, his astonishment complete. “But Hughie isn’t dead. I’ve not yet seen him, but I asked of his health as soon as I arrived. Morag swore he’s fit as his fiddle strings.”

She shrugged. “I can only tell you what I saw.”

“And what exactly did you see?”

She went to one of the windows, looked out at the rainy night. “I told you. They were in good cheer and dancing. And Hughie Mac, he was standing in the moonlight, playing his fiddle.”

“But Hughie—”

“Och, he’s fine,” she confirmed. “I went to look in on him the next day. He said naught of your brothers, so I didn’t ask. It was enough to know him hale and well.”

Jamie shook his head. “You must’ve been dream-walking.”

“Like as not,” she agreed. “But whether I dreamed your brothers or nay, I am glad I saw them happy. I was able to share the tale with your father and I believe it comforted him to know I’d seen them in good heart.”

But Jamie only made a noncommittal
humph
and started walking away from her, his entire attention on one of his stone-cast ancestors.

A particularly lifelike ancestor, for even in the chapel’s dimness, the vibrant paint decorating the carved stone effigy made him appear jauntily swathed in plaid.

“Ach—for guidsakes!” He stopped before the tomb, his eyes rounding.

His knightly ancestor
was
wearing plaid.

In all his days and a lifetime of Highland weather, he’d ne’er seen a Macpherson plaid as sopping wet and dripping as this one.

“What in the name of glory?” He stared down at it, blinking, but there could be no mistaking.

It was definitely a dripping wet Macpherson plaid.

And on a closer inspection, the thing wasn’t draped artfully over the effigy as he’d surmised.

It’d been carelessly flung there.

Half the plaid hung down the side of the tomb, its end pooling in a soggy heap on the chapel floor.

An insult to his name even his wild-eyed and rowdy cousins wouldn’t allow themselves.

Anger swelling in his breast, Jamie stared at the puddle of water spreading away from the base of the tomb. He clenched his fists, unable to think who would do such a thing.