The main entrance all but glowed in moonlight, and he strained his senses for the slightest hint of a sound, until he was listening to the roar of his own blood. He expected the door to be barred at least, but it wasn’t. However, as he remembered too well, when he opened it, the hinges would groan like a mournful ghost. He tried not to push it very far, and slid through the narrow space, turned and aimed his bow at the main stairs. In this tomb-like castle, someone surely would have heard that door and would know there was no wind to push it tonight. But no one arrived. Something skittered across the floor. A rat or mouse.
He stood in place as long as he could make himself, just listening, then finally crept up the stone steps to the second floor, emerging into the corridor he’d last seen five years earlier.
The patriarch’s room hung open and unoccupied. It smelled of wet ashes. No fire had been laid on here in a long time. The frame of the huge bed stood devoid of any bedding, its curtains in shreds, as if no one had ever slept there.
Across from it, Innes’s door was closed. He turned the handle, then eased it open wider with his foot.
Her chamber, too, was empty. The bed here did contain a lumpy mattress, one stained with large dark patches that he guessed to be rusty blots of old blood. Your blood or theirs, he heard himself say. No Innes, no servant. The cradle where the grotesque “infant” of twigs and sticks had lain was still there, though of its inhuman occupant there was no trace. Would the glamour upon the room have lifted the moment Baldie died? He tried to imagine his sister and her nurse suddenly confronted with the leafy vegetative thing in the cradle where she had perceived a child only moments before. “He’s so good and never cries at night,” she’d told him. If the glamour had gone, then it was monstrously cruel, what he’d unintentionally done to her.
He retreated, searched along the corridor again, then back out and all the way to another door at the end. That opened twenty feet above the ground, an access for war, when the ground floor would be sealed up and only by ladder could anyone reach the upper floor. The entrance had never been used so far as he knew, but Onchu and Baldie had sometimes dangled him out it. He’d frustrated them by not reacting with proper terror, the same as with the tunnels and passages where they’d tried to lose him.
Finally he returned to the lower floor, the gallery, and great hall. The old moth-eaten tapestry still hung where he’d hid listening to Stroud and Baldie. The ashes against the wall were cold and clumped in his hand. Something fluttered overhead in the short chimney. Nesting birds most likely, or bats, coming in through the side opening. No screeching so it wasn’t another of those horrible little Yvag fae.
Innes was long gone. Probably she’d gone soon after Baldie’s demise. But what did it mean? Had they dispensed with her—had she become another of their tithes? Or had mother and father taken her back in? He tried to imagine how she would have reacted to the discovery that her baby had never been there. He was half certain he must have driven her mad. She would have fled from that room, from this whole malignant place, and if it had happened right away, then his father would still have been his father. But no doubt the skinwalker would want to keep an eye on her. Neither version of his father would leave her alone here, though for different reasons. Beyond that, he had no idea. His mother, his sister—would they have been inconveniences to dispense with? Baldie had killed his entire family, but they would have stood in the way of controlling the MacGillean landholdings. Not so his own mother nor Innes.
Whatever the truth of things, he would not get his answers tonight. He was so exhausted already from the strain of this fruitless quest that he had to fight off the temptation to go back up the steps and sleep on her mattress in that cursed room. He made himself slip out the door, go down the steps, across the courtyard and away. There was too much chance that, if he departed in the daylight, someone would see him. If not here, then on the corpse road.
Cautiously, he traveled across the moonlit countryside toward the river.
“You know this could all be trappings of treachery laid on just to snare you,” Waldroup’s ghost told him.
“They don’t even know I still exist.”
“So you hope. Innes could well be no more than bait. You’re so hell-bent on learning if she’s alive. I tell ye, you pursue this further and you only deliver yourself to them. Or one of those Yvag midges will bite you, probably infect you with something.”
Thomas laughed at the ghost. “Alpin, you don’t hold me in very high regard after all you’ve taught me.”
“Not I, it’s them what doesn’t. An’ you don’t know when this trap was set.”
“Think I’m going to hand myself over?”
“I think you’re obsessed and I think you’ll take unnecessary risks.”
“I’m obsessed. Which of us was it cut open the world time and again, and nearly delivered us both to the Yvag? Remind me.”
The ghost had nothing further to add after that. He mulled over its warnings as he walked. Of course there was a risk he would deliver himself to them. Already someone might be watching him. Though he’d encountered no one, somebody might have been placed hereabouts to surveil Baldie’s abandoned domicile—even, as Waldroup said, one of their “midges,” if they could be released like a falcon to hunt. Every question that needed answering came with risk, and he was forever calculating odds, questioning who could be trusted and with how much. More than anything he yearned for someone besides an errant and probably made-up spirit as his confidant, whose opinion he might lay reliably against his own. Alpin was hardly anything. He wasn’t even sure why he still heard Alpin at all, save that he couldn’t imagine letting him go.
For five years he had lived a rough life with intervals of soldiering and stonework. Sleeping was a matter of laying something upon the ground and then yourself atop it, and—if you were lucky—when it turned cold, something over yourself as well. He could just barely recall the soft wool-stuffed mattress of his childhood, but no longer what it had felt like beneath him.
In the small new house he’d built for himself, the bed comprised a roped-together linen bag stuffed full of bedstraw and overlaid with an elk skin. Given the mercenary’s life he’d grown used to, sleeping on bedstraw was like floating on clouds. Pure luxury. It had actually taken some effort to accustom himself to such indulgence. Tonight—and, more like, this morning—was going to take no effort at all. He prayed he would make it through his doorway and reach the bed.
That was how he stumbled into his house, discarding bow and quiver without hanging them on a peg, just dropping them upon the table, then stripping off his tunic and trousers as he went. He fell onto the bed, all but senseless, and the message that he was not alone (the scent of another filling his head) took an eternity to penetrate, to register, and at last to pry open his eyelids.
Fearfully alert, he lifted his head.
There in the darkness, he made out, atop the elk skin beside him, the very naked sleeping form of Janet Cardden—at which point he made a soft noise, almost a laugh. His exhausted mind wondered where she had shed her selkie skin. He lay his head down again, and the question chased him into oblivion.
XVI. Janet
From the first, she had denied that this errant knight could sway her in the slightest. Janet Cardden was still grieving the loss of her young love from Jedburgh whom everyone knew as Kenny. No doubt part of the continued grief stemmed from his death only being reported to them, an abstraction. There was no body, and no absolute certainty—only the word of a single returning soldier that Kenny had been cut down while besieging a castle in Lincoln far to the south. She had gone on believing for close on a year that he would return to her, just show up at their castle one day none the worse for war, while her father’s friend, the miller of Oakmill, Forbes, had made his own entreaties for her hand, politely rejected over her father’s protests.
The knight Tàmhas Lynn had ridden into the middle of that self-imposed exile from her feelings. He had struck her as impertinent but also guileless. For all that he had fought and traveled across places like Paesi Bassi and France, there was both an unworldliness and a sense of grief that seemed to run deep in him. It was to this latter aspect that she found herself attracted. He had suffered some sort of devastating loss that had worked its way down into the marrow of him. A pain the equal of her own.
Their conversations never touched upon this shared sense—she knew her father had told him of Kenny but he never asked, never pried, and never (unlike Forbes) swore that her pain would recede if only she would let him in. Instead, they teased and taunted, verbally jousting as if testing each other with every idle conversation so that no conversation proved to be idle. The interchanges left her strangely giddy. He spoke to her as an equal, as if it never occurred to him she could be anything else. The knight wasn’t courting her nor attempting to. It was just who he was.
Then she and her father went to inspect the work he was doing for Lusk, freely shoring up and rebuilding the husbandman’s house when he should have been plowing his own fields, tending his own sheep, and building his own abode. She watched him consider different stones, turning them both in his hands and his mind, discarding or chiseling them, tinkering, fitting, placing. He was a magician who saw a finished wall before it even existed. She found watching him to be captivating. And so without quite understanding what had happened, Janet Cardden gave Tàmhas Lynn access to her heart. He, of course, had no idea, which if anything simply increased the allure.
He stirred, opened his eyes, not yet truly awake but compelled by some force, which proved to be the pair of gray-green eyes considering him. Seeing them, he recalled collapsing on his bed. “Selkie,” he muttered.
Brown hair spilled around Janet’s prominent cheeks. Her jaw rested upon her hand as if she’d been watching him for so long that she had to prop her head up.
“I seem always to be waking up in your presence,” he said.
Her mouth spread into a smile. “A most terrible fate. I’ll go at once.”
He rolled onto his side, his body mirroring hers now. He stared, voiceless, at her breasts and the sheen of perspiration on her skin, the tuft of hair in her armpit. “No, not terrible. But . . . why were you in my bed this night?”
“And in reply, I might ask why you weren’t. Is there some secret love you visit past the Eildon Hills? For then I should truly leave.”
When he continued to look upon her in silent wonder, she answered, “I went for a swim in the river, and then thought to come and see more of your handiwork. Husbandman Lusk continues to regale my father and me with tales of your skill at framing and stone—this thing you call a cruck house. I knew you were handy, but I’d only seen what you did in shoring up their walls.” She gazed along the interior frame. “So you shape the uprights at each end like a pheasant’s wishbone.”
But he had stopped listening. “So I’m handy, is it?” He dared then to reach over and place one of his hands upon her shoulder.
For a moment, her eyes closed as if his touch filled her with seraphic bliss. She slid closer, glanced down between them where his stiffness poked at her thighs. Meeting his gaze again, she replied simply, “I trust you will be.”
Their first coupling was clumsy and quick. He was her first and she cried out, which made him pull back; but she clutched him hard against her as if welcoming the pain, and he lost control almost immediately and spent himself.
