Released (8 page)

The frightened scream she produced could have put every one of the Banshees to shame. 

“
Haud yer Wheesht,
” Katriona ordered.  “You’ll wake my mother.” 

Bridget’s scream cut off immediately, but her mouth dropped open and clamped shut a few times, reminding Katriona of a daft lake trout.  “D-don’t kill me,” she begged.  “Katriona… I had nothing to do with—anything.  I’m just taking care of Elspeth.”  She gestured to the bundle. 

“Why do you leave this here?” Katriona demanded.  “I’ve heard you murmur against my mother in the village.”

“I meant no harm by it!”  Unflattering wrinkles appeared as her face crumpled, proving her older than the eight and twenty years she claimed to her dwindling number of male admirers.  “I just do as I’m bade to do.  Please don’t hurt me, I have family in Keoldale-upon-the-Kyle who depend on me.  I walk this road home every night and bring the package I’m paid to deliver.  I’ve been doing it for nigh on a year now.”

“Paid by
whom?
”  Katriona’s heart sank as she’d already guessed the answer.

“By the Laird, Rory MacKay.”

Katriona barely registered the astonished gasps of her sisters.  They’d never known. 
She’d
never known who’d shown their mother this mercy.  They’d only ever been grateful.  It made sense.  Bridget generally walked home earlier, during the witching hour.   

This changed everything. 

“Laird, I wouldna believed if I didna see it for meself!”  Carraig MacKay was a gnarled fisherman with a flair for the dramatic, yet his words still carried a heavy weight.  “I stayed out until the tempest drove me to shore, and every time I pulled in my net, I’d caught nothing but dead fish.”

The murmurs of the gathering MacKays swelled within the hall and Rory caught words not swallowed by the thick tapestries. 
Curse.  Witch. 
And
Banshee. 

Such news always traveled with astonishing speed through the Highlands.

“Aye, and now what has stricken the sheep, spread to the cattle!”  Hugh MacKay called. 

“Forget about the cattle.” Saoirse MacKay, the butcher’s wife, swatted a chubby hand at Hugh.  “The olde and the bairns are sick with a mysterious fever.”

Rory surveyed his clan council with a grim sense of urgency.  In truth, he’d given anything to trade places with Lorne.  All his steward had to do was cross the wide and icy Kyle and ride hard through the sea gale to the west until he hit the Faerie mound called
Cearbhaig.
  Then, he’d angle around it to the right until he found the golden sands where the
allt dubh
or “The River Black” met with the ocean.  Then he’d have to paddle a span around treacherous black rock cliffs until he reached the “Black Caves” wherein lived the most feared and reviled man in all the Highlands. 

Easier than facing the expectant stares of his clan.

Checking the time, Rory calculated that Lorne had been gone all of twenty four hours.  It now neared midnight, and if he survived the journey and never rested, Lorne still couldn’t be expected back with the Druid for at least another five hours at the very least. 

That was if the arrogant bastard agreed to be summoned at all. 

“Is it true ye have a Banshee?”  Carraig lifted a brow that had never quite separated into two. 

Rory sat back in his tall chair and pinched the bridge of his nose.  He keenly felt the presence of Kathryn Fraser and her father standing close behind him.  Not Albert, though he kept the man in his line of sight.  One didn’t put such a man behind him and expect to keep his head.

Seeing no reason to deny Carraig’s question, he answered, “Aye, I’ve a Banshee, but I’ve sent for someone to take care of it.”

“How is it that yer no’ dead?”  Saoirse demanded. 

Carraig bristled.  “Ye daft woman,
this
is Rory MacKay.  His knack for survival is
legendary
.”  Sweeping his arm to address all assembled, he lifted his salt-roughened voice.  “First he returned from the brink o’ death when he was but a lad.  Then, he led the charge in the skirmishes wi’ the Sutherlands at a mere twenty and three, a war that lasted seven grueling years.  He returned from each battle with nary a scratch, bathed in the blood of our enemies.”

Rory rolled his eyes; the man should have been a bard instead of a common fisherman. 

“And now!” the old man continued, rushing forward and clapping him on the shoulder.  “Through a stroke of luck for him and our clan, he’s the second-born-son-turned-Laird who survived a Banshee.”

“What about the rest of
us
?” Saoirse cried.  “
We
might not survive yer Banshee.”

Rory ignored the
stroke of luck
comment.  He was fair certain neither Connor nor Roderick MacLauchlan’s sword arm was named “luck.”

“I canna be certain the clan’s difficulties are caused by the Banshee,” he assured the crowd.   “Even so, I’m taking measures to be rid of them.”

“Them?” Hugh bellowed.  “Ye mean there’s more than one?”

“Aye.”  Saoirse swung at Hugh’s burly arm as though she gripped a meat cleaver.  “Didn’t ye hear Bridget’s tale when she came into town this morning?  She saw them, the Washerwoman sisters, lurking in the ruins with their bedeviled old mother.  She barely escaped with her life.”

“That’s not exactly how she told it,” Carraig corrected her.  And if
he
cried an embellishment, then something must be rotten.

“I always thought Elspeth MacKay was a witch,” Saoirse mumbled. 

“Yer just sayin’ that because yer husband asked for her hand first, but she refused him for Diarmudh, the braw smithy,” Hugh laughed.  “He had to settle for you instead.”  His bright orange hair flashed as he ducked her fist again.

“What’s yer plan to fix this, Laird?”  Carraig prompted him, a supportive smile on his face.  “Ye said ye’d sent for someone?”

Rory loved and resented the kind old fisherman for the devotion and trust he read in his eyes.  What if his plan failed?  He found himself equally conflicted regarding Katriona and her sisters.  They had every right to be what they were, but why did they insist on taking their anger out on their entire clan?  What if the bairns started to die of the fever?  What kind of woman would allow such a thing?

“I summoned the Druid.”

Rory’s announcement was met with shocked silence.

“Do you think that wise?” Fraser stepped forward.  “Shouldn’t you send for a proper cleric to get rid of the Demons?”

Rory bristled a bit at the man’s calling Katriona names.  He wasn’t a part of this.  He didn’t get a say in how it was handled.  And, as soon as he and Kathryn were married on the morn, Fraser would be off toward MacLauchlan country to collect his thousand men.

The betrothal contract between him and Kathryn had been signed after a long discussion and a little more bartering over the dowry.  What with the Banshee troubles, Laird Fraser seemed to think that affected the price of grain. 

Miserly old bugger. 

“They’re not demons,” Rory corrected.  “They’re creatures of the Fae now.  Souls yet to be laid to rest.”

The tall doors to the hall burst open with all the force of the storm raging outside. 

Rory surged to his feet as a timely flash of lightning silhouetted three black shadows against the silver-streaked sky.  The most astonishing sight wasn’t the Druid himself but his unlikely companions. 

Flanked on either side by a magnificent red stag and a light-footed she-wolf, Daroch MacLeod didn’t just step into the dry, torch-lit hall, he advanced upon it. 

As was their custom, many of the five gathered elders of the clan council made various signs of protection against him.  Some olde, some new.

A mocking sneer twisted Daroch’s sinister features into something jarring and unseemly. 

Unease tightened in Rory’s gut, but he was a desperate man. 

“Ye’re all fools if ye think that those signs ye make protect ye from anything.”  His words were lent a spectacular darkness by his harsh voice.  “Most especially me.”

The silver wolf at his side let out a low, threatening growl. 

“MacLeod.”  Unwilling to be intimidated, Rory stepped out of his place at the head of the council table by way of greeting.

The Druid’s eyes were an unsettling color, too light to be called brown, too dark to be called green.  They were like him, situated in some abandoned, unthinkable in-between.  They became lost behind the shocking array of tattoos claiming the left side of his face and reaching across the boundaries of his strong nose and cruel brow as though to portray the inevitability of their accessing his right side eventually. 

Rory had only laid eyes on the man twice before in his adult life, and he’d known him to darken his flesh with the black silt of the
Allt Dubh.
  He valiantly tried not to stare at the markings now, likely uncovered by the violent storm from the looks of the smudged streaks on his right cheek.  He couldn’t tell if the man’s long, snarled hair was truly black or made so by the same means. 

“My God, MacKay,”  Fraser sputtered from behind him.  “What is the meaning of this—this profane sacrilege?”

“Calm down, Father,” Kathryn’s soft voice sounded closer and Rory turned to see her glide forward to rest an elegant hand on her father’s arm.  “’Tis how things are done here in the Highlands still.  Not everyone’s ways are your own.”

Bestowing his intended with a warm and grateful smile, Rory turned his attention back to the Druid. 

Daroch MacLeod regarded Kathryn with an intensity that Rory didn’t appreciate.

“I had not expected ye for some hours, yet, but I thank ye for coming.”

The Druid stared at Kathryn for a moment longer than was appropriate before turning his startling attention back to Rory.  “I had some companions to aid me with swiftness.”  MacLeod turned to the wolf first and bent to it, touching it firmly beneath the throat and motioning to the door with his eyes. 

The wolf’s golden glare touched upon every soul within the room before turning and padding back the way it had entered, and fading into the stormy darkness. 

Next, the Druid turned to the stag.  Pressing his forehead to that of the powerful animal and pushing it back one step toward the door. 

The stag looked like it would argue, but in one dexterous bound, he leapt away from Daroch and also plunged into the night, leaving a departing pile of scat at the top of the entry stairs. 

Saoirse huffed, as though the animal had made a personal remark.

Maybe it had.

“Where’s Lorne?” Rory asked. 

“What did ye do to him?” Saoirse demanded. 

The Druid silenced her with a shrewd look tinged with wildness.  “Ye’ll be dead within two years.”  The dispassionate tone of his voice directly contrasted with his demeanor.

Saoirse gasped, “Ye just cursed me!  Everyone heard it.  I’ll see ye burned for that!”

Daroch sighed.  “Yer hands tell me ye’re a butcher’s woman, but the condition of yer skin and eyes and the ingredients on yer collar prove ye’re too often at the Baker’s.  Due to yer sheer size, it’s obvious that ye visit the pastries rather than the man who makes them, but I predict that if ye do not stop gorging yerself, yer pancreas will give out and ye’ll be dead within two years.”

Saoirse paled, then reddened.  “My—what?”

“Pancreas,” The Druid’s lip curled.  “Likely that wrapped foot will rot first and poison yer blood, but either way, yer fate remains the same.”

Her chins doubled as her mouth dropped open in silent protest.  Closed.  Then opened again. 

“Yes, eat more fish.  That should help.”  Twin strings of swansea, whelk and eigg shells clinked together from the knotted braids at Daroch’s temple as he dismissed Saoirse and surveyed the assembled council, his swiftly moving regard leaving no detail uncalculated.

“You just cursed her!” Fraser thrust his stubby finger at the Druid.

“I just
warned
her.”  Daroch’s eyes flashed as they collided not with Fraser’s but his daughter, Kathryn’s.  “She has it within her power to change her fate by eating fibrous tubers, vegetables, and fresh meats, though I doubt she’ll do it.”