Sue-Ellen Welfonder Read online

  “My apologies,” Madeline offered, lifting her hands. “We will pause here until you’ve caught your breath. A rest will surely favor us both.”

  “I am fine. ’Tis you causing me worry,” Nella panted, tugging off her calfskin brogans. “Grand or nay, my lady, a shrine holds naught but the dust of old bones,” she declared, rolling down her stockings.

  She turned a keen eye on Madeline. “Do you wish to speak of the reason for such an ignominious flight?”

  “Nay.” The swift denial drew a frown.

  And before Nella could read even more into her hasty retreat from St. Kentigern’s tomb and her wild dash down the sloping braeside, Madeline fixed her gaze on the thick growth of birch and juniper scrub edging the riverbank.

  Tendered explanations could wait until her heart ceased hammering and her blood cooled.

  If such were even possible.

  Another wave of frustration began heating its way up her neck, so she swatted at the little bits of twigs and bracken clinging to her cloak… tenacious flotsam to remind her of her foolhardy flight and the futility of expecting the tension thrumming inside her to ease.

  A thousand tomorrows wouldn’t suffice for such a wonder.

  Not unless her shadow man’s mellifluous voice relinquished its hold on her, ceased spooling its richly timbred warmth so seductively round her heart.

  “I’ faith!” She sniffed, her patience with herself near flown. Half-convinced some snag-toothed witch-wife had charmed her—and on his behalf—she gave her skirts a vigorous shake, but the twigs and bracken remained. They clung to her just as stubbornly as the tall, powerfully built pilgrim lingered in the periphery of her mind.

  Nay, lingered everywhere, for his darkly handsome face seemed to hover in the leafy green shadows of the burnside copse, his haunted eyes, a rich peaty brown, beguiling her from the shelter of the trees.

  Holding her fast in his golden-voiced spell, and as firmly as if he’d strode right up to her, closed strong fingers upon her chin, and simply let the smolder in his eyes compel her to his will.

  Madeline swallowed, a tingling cascade of shivers rippling her length. Seductively delicious tingles prickling every inch of her… including her most private places. Feeling almost besieged, she stared up at the cloud-fleeced sky, bit her lower lip until she tasted blood.

  Romanticizing about her shadow man had been… sweet.

  Proximity to the dark-eyed stranger outside the bounds of her dreams proved dangerously perilous.

  Even if she ignored the allure of his strapping build and great height, an inherent aura of power and depth simmered beneath his dark good looks, his intensity speaking to her, and calmly winding its magic around each uncharted corner of her femininity.

  Truth to tell, everything about him shouted loud contrast to the shuffle-gaited, staff-clutching pilgrims she’d grown accustomed to seeing on the road.

  Her braw shadow man—for he could be no other— proved unlike any man she’d e’er seen anywhere.

  Pilgrim, common man, or lordling.

  And that knowledge sank her heart, for ne’er had there been a darker hour for a man to stir her interest… make her burn to see him again.

  Closing her eyes, she took a deep, cleansing breath of the cool, damp air. And another and another, until she’d filled her lungs to bursting with the pungent scents of gorse, pine, and rushing water.

  But such measures helped not a whit.

  All the clean woodsy air in Scotland wouldn’t be enough to wash away the desperate yearning he’d ignited inside her. A profound need, deep beyond measure, raged through her like an all-consuming firestorm, and once awakened, she feared nothing would quell her thirst to taste the kind of fierce, undying love carved so indelibly into the walls of his heart.

  Her own heart twisted with impossible longing.

  She’d felt the boundless wealth of his emotion, its pounding intensity near bruising her ribs as, night after night, her accursed abilities delivered him into her dreams, revealing not just his pain but his never-to-besevered bond with one single woman.

  A faceless female he cherished beyond measure, and who now bore Madeline’s mounting resentment because for one cast-her-cares-to-the-wind moment she envied that woman.

  Wanted to be she.

  And so fervently her insides tightened with a winding, relentless ache, sheerest need spiraling from the top of her head to the tips of her toes and back again.

  “You’ve gone pale, my lady, and you tremble.” Nella’s concerned voice rose above the sound of the burn’s rushing waters. “A plague on moldy relics and mumbling monks if sharing the air with such exalteds taxes you so.”

  Madeline blinked, the pilgrim’s sway over her vanishing at once, his bonnie face fading from the shadows until only the hard thumping of her heart remained.

  A bruised heart turned topsy-turvy, and the unsettling sense of something infinitely dear and precious spinning out of reach.

  “I would not run from a whole phalanx of pasty-faced church worthies,” she huffed, dusting her skirts again, the true reason for her distress tucked securely in her heart. “Nor do moldering bones frighten me. Saintly or otherwise.”

  Nella looked skeptical. “Then did the pain of some piteously cursed miracle seeker drive you to flee the cathedral?” She peered at Madeline from the shallows of the burn, her skirts hitched above the white-foaming water, her hazel eyes alight with keen interest. “Surely Madeline of Abercairn would not—”

  “The Lady of Abercairn is no more,” Madeline said, examining her broken fingernails. “She was extirpated on the same blazing pyre that now holds my father’s ashes. His, and those of innocents whose sole crime was being too young to defend themselves against the killing swords of a turncoat Scotsman and the marauders who follow him.”

  A wholly different kind of passion—dark and roiling—swept her. But its heat strengthened her, too, allowing her to straighten her back and lock away her grief. Her anger. Clenching her hands to tight fists, she bolted every hurting ounce of pain into the most inaccessible corner of her mind.

  Her father’s honor, and her purpose, would be better served if delivered with a cooled temper and a steady hand.

  She opened her mouth to remind Nella—and herself— of the purpose of their journey, but a loudly trilling curlew swooped out of nowhere, near clipping her head in its swift ascent to the rowans lining the abbey hill.

  Almost a hedge, the red-berried trees flanked the buttressed wall of the Bishop’s Palace, while behind it, the cathedral’s bulk loomed proud and grand, its pointy spires piercing the sky, and soaring taller than the palace’s loftiest turrets.

  Madeline’s gut clenched at the sight.

  Had she truly burst through the palace gates, dodging the bishop’s own guardsmen, and giving poor Nella no choice but to tear after her? Had they really careened through orchards and herb gardens, sprinting past startled lay brothers, and clambering over walls and other obstacles like common riffraff?

  Like beggary thieves?

  Aye, they had, and the truth of it blasted heat onto her cheeks and lay like a cold, hard clump in the pit of her belly.

  Shuddering, she leveled her most resolute look at Nella. “Do not speak of ‘the Lady of Abercairn’ again.”

  Nella snorted, her brows shooting heavenward. “If the Lady of Abercairn is no more, then who was in such a fine ferment o’er a certain pinched-faced sacrist not so long ago?”

  “Oh, bother!” Madeline blew out a gusty breath and eyed the swift-moving burn. A wade in its icy waters would cool more than her aching feet. “Certes, I am still… me,” she capitulated, struggling to yank off her right boot. “I fled because.…” she paused to catch her balance. “It… it was him again.”

  Nella’s eyes rounded. “Your shadow man?”

  “Aye.” The boot came free. “And more powerful than e’er before,” she added, pleased when her left boot slipped off without a fight. “Between his emotions welling inside me and the
hawk-eyed sacrists crowding our every step, I could scarce draw breath.”

  “In mercy’s name,” Nella breathed, tucking a damp-frizzled lock of red-brown hair behind her ear. “Now I see, my lady.”

  I pray you do not, Madeline almost blurted.

  She didn’t want Nella to see, wasn’t quite ready to reveal she’d actually glimpsed the man.

  Or risk having her friend guess the smooth richness of his voice had spelled her… especially when the few words he’d uttered had been anything but flattering.

  For a very brief moment, other unflattering words, other masculine slurs echoed in her mind. Scornful voices expressing what they truly thought of her and why they’d come to Abercairn seeking her hand.

  Cruelties she’d suffered repeatedly o’er the years, hearing them not with her physical ear but with her heart, thanks to her unusual talent… a plaguey gift surely bestowed on her by the devil himself.

  The taunts, uttered by past suitors, still cut deep enough to send waves of emptiness and cold regret tearing through her.

  Breasts resembling the udders of a milk cow, one marriage candidate had scoffed.

  Hair so glaring a red, gazing upon it would blind a man, another insisted, incensing her further by declaring her curls too unruly for even an iron-tined comb to address its tangle-prone masses.

  Lips as wide as the River Tay.

  And most mortifying of all: passable enough to bed if a man simply dwelt on the depth of her sire’s pockets.

  One by one, they’d crushed her confidence and stomped without mercy over her femininity until she’d wanted naught but to be left alone… perhaps even to seek the solitude and blessed peace of a veiled life.

  And now, for good or nay, she must.

  Madeline blinked, furious at how deeply her shoulders had dipped upon recalling the slurs, discomfited more to discover Nella’s sharp, perceptive stare on her.

  “You were not meant for cloistered life, my lady,” the other woman commented with all the quiet confidence Madeline lacked, and so admired in her well-loved friend.

  “Nay, verily I was not,” Madeline agreed, her gaze on a long series of splashing rapids. “Nor is it even close to what I’d once wanted of life.”

  She sighed, wishing the cascading waters could carry away the remembered barbs.

  And her dreams, for recalling them hurt far worse.

  Especially now that she’d come face-to-face with the manifestation of those dreams.

  She turned back to Nella. “I ne’er wanted aught but to be loved, truly and passionately loved, and for myself,” she said, the admission an ache on her tongue. “Not falsely, and not for my father’s fine keep and plentiful coffers of gold.”

  “And you think to find such a man behind cloistered walls?”

  “You ken why I shall take the veil,” Madeline said, folding her arms tight against her ribs, hugging her waist as she spoke. “And it scarce matters, for a man capable of such loving does not exist except in the songs of bards.”

  Nella tilted her head. “Or in dreams, my lady?”

  “Aye, in dreams, too,” Madeline admitted, looking aside.

  In dreams… or at the sides of the privileged women who held their hearts.

  As her shadow man’s heart was held.

  Wholly and irrevocably, just as hers was inextricably bound to his.

  Tied to him by invisible cords of golden silk.

  The strange bond leaving her to suffer a dull, throbbing ache for what she intuitively knew could have been so dear if only they’d crossed paths in another time and place.

  Unfolding her arms, Madeline pressed her hands against the small of her aching back and heaved a great, weary sigh. Such disturbing notions were best examined later, when she was no longer quite so tired, hungry, and dispirited.

  Perhaps after she’d avenged herself on Silver Leg and whiled safe and secure behind the shielding walls of a suitably remote and obscure nunnery.

  But even as she shrugged off her cloak and gathered up her skirts to join Nella in the burn’s chill waters, a tiny voice somewhere deep inside her laughed aloud at the flimsiness of her intentions.

  In a different but not too distant corner of the same teeming bishop’s burgh, frustration gnawed on Iain’s dwindling patience with ever-increasing vigor. Gritting his teeth, he wished himself anywhere but in the midst of the noisome, tight-packed throng pressing through the arched pend of Glasgow’s busy Trongate.

  A stench of unidentifiable foulness clung to the crowd, the unpleasant odor rising up from the jostling wayfarers to hover beneath the low stone-vaulted ceiling. The rank smell soiled the air in the pend as thoroughly as the refuse-strewn cobbles paving its length posed hazards for even the most surefooted Highland garron.

  Iain coughed, near choking on the smoke of two pitchpine torches sputtering wildly in iron-bracketed holders in the middle of the tunnel-like passage. He blinked and dragged the back of his hand across his eyes, the biting sting of the acrid air making them water and burn.

  Swinging about, he glared at the shaggy-maned Islesman riding close behind him. “By the mercy of God,” he said through tight lips, “let us be far from here by nightfall.”

  The quintessence of calm, Gavin MacFie made no change of expression. “With His good grace, we shall be.”

  “Be warned, MacFie, for I cannot account for my actions if we are not. I have not the stomach for—” Iain broke off when his garron lost its footing, its iron-shod hooves slip-sliding on the muck-slicked paving.

  He should have iron-shod nerves!

  Biting back a litany of craven mumblings, he tamped down his vexation long enough to soothe the garron, but the moment the beast calmed, Iain swore.

  Just one quick oath, and muttered beneath his breath, but black enough to curl the devil’s own toes.

  Feeling a wee bit better for letting loose such a prime epithet—and trying not to inhale too deeply—he urged his steed around a large pothole brimming with a particularly vile-smelling liquid.

  Vile-smelling, and topped with slime.

  Iain grimaced. “Ne’er in all the four corners of the world can I imagine a fouler place,” he groused. “Forging a path across a well-slagged peat bog would prove less trying.”

  “A bairn’s work by any comparison,” Gavin agreed, his mild tone making subtle mockery of his supposed commiseration.

  Iain’s tightly held composure at grave risk of unraveling any moment, he drew a leather-wrapped wine sack from within his cloak and helped himself to a healthy swig… to wet his parched throat and, if only for a moment, camouflage the reek of the pend’s dank, grimesmeared walls.

  A blessedly short pend, praise the saints.

  But his eyes widened in dismay, his mood worsening the instant he rode through the gatehouse arch. Instead of lashing his mount’s sides and putting Glasgow’s stench and chaos far behind him, he was forced to rein in, an even greater swell of humanity effectively barring the way.

  Slack-jawed, he surveyed the open cobble-paved area abutting the gatehouse, and saw naught but shoving, shouting rabble, litter, and squalor.

  Pilgrims, badge- and potion-peddling hawkers, women and children, barking dogs and scurrying pigs hurried about, their incredible number overrunning the streets and clogging the narrow rutted road stretching away toward St. Thenew’s Well, a lesser shrine some miles distant, and dedicated to St. Kentigern’s mother.

  The next station on his journey of penance… as prescribed by his brother, and enforced by one Gavin Mac-Fie.

  A man who believed himself descended of the seal people, and now Iain’s own gaoler.

  Iain’s brows snapped together.

  Selkies!

  He had no time for such drivel and nonsense.

  Frowning, he shifted uncomfortably in the hard seat of his saddle and seriously considered the merits of throttling the bland-faced varlet.

  Sorely tempted, he slid MacFie his darkest glare, but the unfazed lout maintained his placid mien, returning
Iain’s stare as calmly as if he scarce noted the cacophonic chaos brewing all around them.

  Iain ground his teeth in irritation. If he didn’t know better, he’d swear the mild-mannered bastard practiced schooling his features into blank-faced expressions of neutrality.

  Without doubt, he swallowed broomsticks to keep his back so straight. Almost unconsciously, Iain squared his shoulders and began straightening his own spine… until he caught himself.

  Compressing his lips into a taut line, he stared at the pandemonium ahead of him, refusing to further acknowledge the annoyingly even-tempered churl.

  Aye, ridding the world of Gavin MacFie was tempting, but with innumerable lackwits, pilgrims, and scoundrels surrounding them, his chances of having done with Mac-Fie and breaking away before his brother’s brawnyarmed guardsmen set upon him were about as great as one such as he sprouting angel’s wings.

  Donall’s grim-faced henchmen sat their own mounts a scarce lance length away, and on his brother’s orders no doubt, the dastards ne’er took their eyes off him, even taking turns tagging along when he went about his most private affairs.

  So Iain MacLean, Master of Nothing, heaved a great sigh, swallowed his anger, and turned his mind to matters of more immediate import… such as the little silverlegged ex-voto resting in the small leather purse hanging from his waist belt.

  Her stolen treasure, plucked off the cathedral steps by the ever-observant MacFie after it had slipped from her fingers when she had bolted into the crowd.

  Resting a hand over the pouch, his fingers sought and found the hard outline formed by the votive. It pressed against the soft leather and, pray mercy be his, but his loins began to tighten and twitch even at that dubious connection to the large-eyed lass.

  Large-eyed postulant, a gleefully malicious voice from his darker side reminded him.

  Full-bosomed, sweet-lipped, and every fair inch of her, his… if he dared for once trust his instincts.

  Nay, his should-have-been, his MacLean heart amended.

  “The devil himself couldn’t brew a greater travesty,” he muttered, and loud enough for any who cared to turn an ear his way.