Janet shook her head. “He endured another two years or so after I returned here. Father had installed the Lusks in our house by then. I was forever fearful I would encounter him somewhere and he would remember me. I would be found out. But we never crossed paths. Then a distant cousin of yours arrived in Ercildoun, and shortly after that a story traveled to us that your father had stumbled into a well and drowned. A story trickled out that a rope had brought up bones to which the flesh barely clung any longer, as if he’d been down in the well for years.”
“Same convenient way Baldie’s father died,” he said, fairly incredulous. “They are fond of wells.”
Janet replied, “Your convenient cousin, who just happened to be on hand, took over all your family’s holdings and the MacGilleans’ as well. One ‘Ainsley Rimor of Alwich.’”
He thought, Alpin, you had it just about right. “I have no such cousin. We’ve no family in Alwich. So, that’s one skinwalker we can be certain of. You’ve spied others at Old Melrose?”
“Yes. Alderman Threave of Jedburgh. The widow Mac an Fleisdeir of Selkirk, who’s still grossly alive. And the assistant to Abbot Waltheof of Melrose. He’s called Ranulf—named, I am told, after Ranulf de Soulis, a friend of the king’s.”
“By Melrose you mean St. Mary’s. The abbey I helped build.”
She nodded.
“The assistant, of course, not the abbot himself. Always behind the tapestry,” he muttered grimly. With him out of the way, the crypt was secure again for the Yvagvoja.
“Filib and I have watched Ranulf twice assisting when people were taken through that terrible fiery hole they cut open,” Janet said. “And Kester and he witnessed another. I didn’t know it was Ranulf until I attended a Christes Maesse at the abbey last year and saw him.”
They had repopulated, of course they had. It was safe to do so once he was gone. Nobody remained who knew about them. And Ranulf was in the perfect position to keep everyone out of the crypts. His spell would be as strong at the very least as the one Thomas had encountered before, turning aside anyone who thought about descending those steps. All the walkers would be there—five tombs if he recalled right. His blood surged with a hunger for revenge upon them all; it came upon him so intensely that, for a moment, he ceased to see Janet or Cardden’s keep around him.
“Tàmhas?” Her voice seemed to come to him from a great distance.
“Tom!” Waldroup’s shout rang as if from the balcony above.
He came back to himself on his feet, one stone-gray long-fingered hand reaching as if to clutch at something. Janet had backed away from him.
It was a roaring, impotent rage, the kind of madness that overtook some mercenaries in the field—he and Waldroup had witnessed instances of it. Berserkers. Men who lost themselves in a lust for carnage, and though they usually managed to achieve plenty of it, they were invariably struck down by some enemy who kept his wits about him, if not one of their own protecting himself. In the end, madness lost every time.
He glanced at his hand; it was his own again. Without asking what she had seen, he apologized: “They took so much from me. I’ve lost twenty years with you and Morven. It’s them I want to . . .” He finally gave up, unable to find a word to contain all the vengeance he wanted to deliver. With huge effort, he swallowed it. This rage would neither disappear nor be hard to find again. His soul was wedded to it.
Knowing that, he banished it all, took her hand.
“Forgive me,” he said, “I am here with you, and I won’t waste another moment of this precious time being somewhere else in my head. I’ve been somewhere else for far too long.”
He held her close, his head bowed over hers. Whatever monster’s face she had seen upon him, it wasn’t enough to make her fear him, but he would remain on his knees so as not to terrify her further. Clearly, he did have some sort of ungovernable power now. It was not his imagination, and it hadn’t ended with his escape from Yvagddu.
She closed his fingers in hers, then drew him after her. They left the hall to the servants and retired to bed. The bed had been warmed with a stoneware pig, and multiple furs lay piled upon the linens.
He knew her, knew every inch of her, but even so she was undiscovered country to him. He was tender and cautious, holding back until she was clearly enflamed before he let himself fall away as well. It was perhaps a little clumsy, but far better than their first time together had been. They still remembered each other in bed.
“You know how you first sneaked into my bed and then I didn’t turn up till morning?” he asked her when they were lying together, entwined.
“I did not sneak. You weren’t home, so you’ve no right to characterize it as such. I was quite brazen, if you want to know, undressing beside the fire in the middle of your house when you could have opened the door at any moment.”
“I might have been with friends.”
“You really didn’t have any,” she said. Her gentle eyes bored into his. “Oh, the Lusks, perhaps. But you were strange and isolated. I knew something had happened to you, something had marked you.”
“And yet you climbed into my bed,” he teased.
“Oh, ho, that something had marked you just made you that much more alluring. You were a great mystery to me, Master Lynn. You’d experienced more of the world than anyone I know e’en now. No one hereabouts travels much farther than Selkirk their whole lives. You were such an adventurer, like someone out of a story.”
“Like the one about Thomas the Rhymer?”
She grinned. “Especially that one.” She pulled his face to her so she could kiss him again.
This time they spent themselves slowly, savoring the moments. At the same time, he noticed throughout that there were instances where she winced or made a tiny gasp, and it seemed to have to do with where his hands touched her. There was a spot on her left side that caused her a discomfort of which she was not speaking; he knew her well enough not to ask. She had no mind to tell him, nor at least to let it interfere with the joy of their reunion. But he would not forget, either.
Finally, lying wrapped around her a second time, he decided to trade one line of inquiry for another.
“What did you see,” he asked cautiously, “when I was seething with rage downstairs?”
She stiffened in his arms, drew her head back to look him in the eyes. “You don’t know?”
“My anger misplaced me. I only glimpsed—”
“Is that how it was at the portal, where you came through?”
He thought about that. “I know that I rode the beast out from Italia, but not much else. It was like when the riddles come. I know I’m speaking but hardly ever what I’m saying. I could sense how I was changing but not what I changed into. As with the riddles, I’m left with the echo of it all and no more.”
“Well, I recognized your profile in the moonlight,” she said. “When you rode through, you had your back to me, but you turned about. Even with those many thorns or whatever they be, I could see you in that face. My jumping must have terrified you awfully. You thought it was them hunting you.”
“I’m sure it must have been just as you say.”
“You turned into such creatures, monstrous things, but I knew it was you still and I clung on. I don’t know when I finally called your name, but you became yourself. It took such a toll that you collapsed.”
Glamouring—the word echoed again in his thoughts. But this wasn’t glamouring; it was the more complicated process, the Queen’s reshaping. She’d said it took far more energy. It wasn’t masking, throwing up an illusion; it was transforming, and it exhausted Yvags and him alike—the reason they needed skinwalkers for long-term impersonations. Transformations exhausted even Nicnevin.
He sighed deeply. “Well, at least I didn’t become a ram.”
