Wild Highland Magic (The Celtic Legends Series Book 3)(36)

“Papa, look! It’s Dagdá!”

***


She woke up to the sound of a door closing.

She jolted up from the bed, disoriented in the dimness. Lachlan stood just inside the room, limned by the dying light of the hearth fire. She hadn’t really been sleeping, too tormented by doubts and concerns, but the sight of him made her entire body come prickly back to life.

“You’ve eaten,” he said.

She glanced where he gestured, to a tray with some crusts of bread and gravy leavings. She didn’t remember eating and she certainly hadn’t tasted a thing.

He said, “Feeling stronger?”

“I’m always strong when I’m alone,” she ventured. “It’s when there are many strangers around that I weaken.”

No more would she bother with lies or evasions, not after the terrible way he’d looked at her.

“Come by the fire,” he said, striding to the hearth and gesturing to the stool on the other side. “I can’t talk to you while you’re splayed in that bed.”

Her body tingled from scalp to toes. Staring at the great stretch of his shoulders, she became achingly conscious of the thinness of the linen shift she was wearing, and not a stitch of fabric beneath it.

She pulled the blanket off her knees and swung her legs over the side. She padded to the stool and sat. The fire gave off a strange smell, tarry and harsh, not at all like the fragrance of the peat her father shipped over from the mainland.

“How long,” he said, “have you been like this?”

The brush of his gaze made her heart trip and her blood ripple with a sudden heat.

“Since my thirteenth summer.” She wished she’d brought the cup of wine, ruby-red, from the bedside table. “My father used to take us to Galway, one or two children at a time, to give my mother some peace. He’d give us a coin and let us wander through the town. I intended to buy some dyed wool for a new tunic. That’s what was in my mind as we headed toward the wharf in my father’s coracle—until, suddenly, it was like my mind was full of angry bees.”

“Like yesterday,” he said.

A lot worse, to her reckoning, but she nodded anyway. “I was unconscious for nearly a week. None of Da’s medicines worked. When I finally woke up, I heard everyone’s secrets as clear as day. For a long time I thought everyone had gone mad, saying such terrible things out loud.”

Even now, when she cast her mind into the world, she heard secrets. The stable boy was staring up at the rafters and imagining sneaking into the maidservant’s room to slip his member into her from behind. Angus was musing about a widow in town he’d like to swive but not marry. The kitchen cook was growing ever more excited imagining a witch-burning in the square.

She winced at a sudden sharp pain in her hand. She glanced down and saw that she was leaving half-moon impressions in her palm.

“My mother finally guessed what had happened,” she said, rubbing at the angry pink marks. “She taught me how to distinguish between what someone says and what someone thinks. So often the two are not the same.”

“Tell me how it works.”

“I simply hear everything.” She wished he would look at her, instead of watching the fire consume the wood in the hearth. “I can hear the cook in the kitchen right now, kneading the bread for tomorrow. She’s thinking about her sick daughter.” And whether she should bring her to the burning. “I can hear three scullery maids in the mead-hall collecting the dishes and chattering about a fair that’s coming. The nursemaid is bone-tired and Angus’s son Tadgh is being fussy because he didn’t eat enough dinner. I can hear Angus worrying about you.”

And me.

A warmth blossomed on her cheeks, for Angus believed that she and Lachlan were lovers.

“If I stretch my mind,” she said, forging ahead, “I can even hear the people of Derry, every one of them. Most of the time I hear ordinary thoughts—whether they’re hungry or something hurts, or what work they must do before the sun goes down, or whether it’s going to rain and ruin the crops or whether the herring are running yet.” She took her lower lip between her teeth for a moment, debating whether she should tell him more. “Behind that are…other thoughts. I can hear who they are, and who they want to be. I sense their wishes and dreams. I know the things they don’t want anyone to know, the things they try to hide, and all their sins. The deeper I look into a man’s eyes, the more I see.”

Lachlan planted a forearm on the mantel, leaning in. “You say Angus is loyal to me.”

“When Angus and your father were young, they sailed on a ship past the Island of Skye during a storm, and your father saved him from drowning.”

“That’s the past.”

“Yes, but the memory is often at the front of Angus’s mind. He’s very aware that were it not for your father, he’d be long dead.”

The folds of Lachlan’s tunic shifted across his back in fascinating ways. She tried not to stare.

“My father,” he said, “told me that story about Skye just once, the night before I last saw him. He was about to send me to Derry to get men and arms to help fight those who were causing so much trouble. He told me that I needed to understand why he trusted his kinsman Angus though they hadn’t seen each other in years. He told me that he and Angus never spoke of that incident again—and no one else knew the tale.”