Wild Highland Magic (The Celtic Legends Series Book 3)(18)

Lachlan glanced up at her again and Cairenn felt for a moment like he’d heard Dairine’s thought—but of course he couldn’t have.

“My compliments to you, mistress,” Lachlan said, sliding a nod toward her mother. “I haven’t tasted such fine soup for years. I like the winkles.” He gave Dairine a wink. “I’ll have to remember that when I return to the sea.”

Dairine pressed close to the table. “So you’ll be going back, then?”

“I’ll be healed soon. Then this Scotsman will be gone from here and no more trouble to any of you.”

Cairenn heard her mother speaking kind words about how Lachlan was no trouble at all, words lost in the whip-crack of another burst of lightning.

But all Cairenn heard was I’ll be gone.

Her mother stood up. “Will you be having more, Lachlan?”

“I’d welcome it.”

Then her mother came to Lachlan’s side and did what her mother rarely did. She looked straight into Lachlan’s eyes.

Lachlan jolted in his seat. Her siblings went wide-eyed. Cairenn’s stomach tightened. What was her mother doing? He was an outsider. She tried to read her mother’s thoughts, but the idea had no sooner passed through her mind when Ma broke the spell by patting Lachlan on the arm and taking the bowl to the burbling pot on the hearth.

It had only been a moment, but Lachlan sat blinking, following her mother’s path with a confused gaze.

“Your bowl is empty, Niall.” Cairenn stood up and swiped his bowl. “I’ll get you more.”

She joined her mother at the hearth where they stood with their backs to the room. She held out Niall’s bowl as her mother began to ladle. Cairenn stretched out her thoughts to read her mother’s mind, but her mother spoke first.

“He’s a good man, daughter.”

Cairenn frowned because she didn’t know that—not for sure—and wasn’t that the root of all the trouble? “What did you see, Ma?”

“You know better than to ask me such a question—”

“Ma.” She gripped her wrist. “Tell me what you saw.”

Her mother had the gift of the Sight. With one look, her mother could read a man’s future—if the man could bear to stand strong under that swirling, unearthly gaze.

“I saw what he’ll suffer, my daughter,” her mother murmured, “if he persists in his path.”

“And?”

Her mother looked up at her and lifted the veil between their minds.

Cairenn heard one billowing word.

Death.





CHAPTER SEVEN


Lachlan stood in the courtyard squinting against the bright sky as he mentally measured the length of the cottage’s eaves against the pile of wood at his feet. Beside him, Niall rose up from his knees from where he’d been perusing Lachlan’s plans drawn in the dust—sketches for a sluice to capture the moisture dripping from the thatch and shuttle it into a rain barrel.

“We don’t have enough iron nails.” Niall rubbed the prickle on his jaw. “Can’t we tie the gutter to the thatch with rope?”

“Rope will rot in the salt air.” Lachlan lifted his bad arm to shield his face from the sun and felt a sharp pinch in his shoulder, where, after a long week of rest, his body’s weakness had narrowed and focused. “You’d have to change the rope whenever you changed the thatch. Wooden stakes will do.” He toed over a few pieces of the spare wood. “You say you can carve?”

“Six harps, yew and ash and oak.” The young man flashed a cocky smile. “Including the one you admired last night.”

Lachlan remembered that it had been a fine harp, chiseled with a precise hand. “Digging a channel in a stretch of wood will be cruder work than that.”

“It’s always crude work when you’ve got nothing but a block of wood in front of you. I can carve a channel as you direct, especially if it means Ma won’t have to lug as many pails of water from the spring.”

Lachlan’s mind shifted to the problem of the wooden stakes just when Cairenn walked into the courtyard through the cows’ shed door. The sight of her blasted all the numbers and sketches and plans right out of his head.

She walked right up to them, all wind-teased hair and rosy lips. “Should I ask what you two are doing?”

Trying to get you out of my mind.

Niall said, “We’re building a rainwater sluice.”

“Getting out from under chores, that’s what I think.” She turned her bright gaze upon Lachlan. “So the books in the sickroom weren’t enough to occupy you?”

His chest tightened. The dusty, dry tomes in the sickroom that she was referring to were no match for his growing restlessness this week, nor his heated thoughts about this woman. “Half of them are in Greek,” he said. “The others in languages I don’t recognize.”

Her gaze flittered back to her brother. “You know you shouldn’t be whittling away on all this wood without asking Da.”

“You know Da won’t mind after I tell him it’s for Ma’s good.”

“And you,” she said, turning back to Lachlan. “Do you think you’re healed enough to drive stakes into mortar?”

He knew he wasn’t, but how he itched for the feel of a mallet in his hand. At Loch Fyfe, when his family was besieged by cattle-raiders and highwaymen, worn down by the complaints of clansmen, the gray weather, or a blight upon the sheep, he used to build something in order to occupy his hands, his people, and his mind with something other than claymores and fruitless searches for sly enemies.