Wild Highland Magic (The Celtic Legends Series Book 3)(57)
“I told you,” she stuttered, “that the dolmens are a portal between this world and the Otherworld. Your father moved that door.”
“A door,” he said, his voice full of musing. “Thus the two upright stones, a capstone, and a space in-between.”
“There may be other stones on a sacred height,” she said, “but the source of power is always the portal—”
A shout came from the crowd. The council was beginning.
He said, “I must go.”
“No,” she said. “You mustn’t.”
She seized him, crushing two handfuls of his cleric’s cloak in her fists. The crowd was a shifting menace atop the defiled hill. The gleam of so much chain mail was like a thousand light-daggers stabbing her eyes. Any or all of those men could be his enemies, planning to kill him the moment he threw off his hood.
“Don’t go.” She pressed her forehead against his chest. “Stay hidden.”
His fingers flexed on her shoulders. “The time has come, lass,” he said. “I have strong men all around me—”
“And so many enemies you don’t know.” She concentrated harder, trying to pierce the rattling din for some insight. “Perhaps, if I could just approach the portal stones—”
“Impossible.”
“But you said the portal stones were moved to the castle—”
“—to my father’s castle,” he interrupted, “where every man and woman within will recognize me the moment I cross the threshold.” He set her apart a space, forcing her attention to his face. “I cannot turn back from this path, lass.”
Words surged to her throat but he leaned forward and pressed his forehead against hers. Swathed in the darkness under his hood, breathing his breath, smelling the scent of wet wool and leather and man, she suddenly found herself in the white mind-place they shared in the most intimate moments of their loving.
“Long before I knew you,” Lachlan whispered, and she couldn’t be sure whether she heard him with her ears or her mind, “I put my life in the hands of men I considered friends. Today I must rely, as all men must, on faith and trust.”
Then, like a light snuffing out, he was gone.
***
Lachlan strode up the hill, pushing away his worries about Cairenn to concentrate on the danger before him. Her gift could not have failed at a worse time, but he couldn’t let himself be distracted by the capriciousness of supernatural abilities or her distress. In this moment, he had to concentrate on what he’d come here to do.
Keeping his gaze down and his head covered, he circled the outer edge of the crowd until he caught a glimpse of Angus, pacing with impatience. Without disturbing any other men, Lachlan found an unobtrusive spot in the outer circle, one that gave him a good vantage point of the proceedings.
Dermot, the chieftain of the MacGilchrist clan, paced in the open space. A short man with a lion’s head of salt-and-pepper hair, The MacGilchrist was the eldest under-chieftain of the three septs, beating Callum Ewing by only a few months. Thus it was his right to be the first to pace around the white rod of kingship lying in the center of the circle, just as it was his right to be the first to speak at council.
“These six weeks and more,” The MacGilchrist said, splaying a hand on his chest as he projected his voice over the crowd, “have been trying times for all of us. We’ve seen a king fallen off a horse, dead in his prime. An heir lost in the depths of the sea. Our lands raided, and our people murdered, all for no reason.”
Suspicion curled like a knot beneath Lachlan’s ribs. MacGilchrist had always been an ambitious man. Now, scanning the guards standing under the MacGilchrist banner, Lachlan could identify more than one Campbell among them, probably relatives of Dermot’s wife. Yet the chieftain’s aligning with such a rising clan was a dangerous game, for the Campbells could swallow the MacGilchrist’s smaller sept right up, leaving Dermot little chance to ever hold the white rod of overlordship.
Yet many men would be drawn to such strength—even if it subsumed them.
“You men know,” MacGilchrist continued, “that I did not always agree with Fergus MacEgan. His plan to have the chieftaincy handed down through only one family line smacked of selfish ambition. Of plain greed.”
A few shouts went up among the men. Lachlan’s chest tightened. He found himself reaching for a sword he wasn’t wearing, his fist closing on air.
“But Fergus MacEgan,” MacGilchrist continued, “was right.”
The words echoed on the hilltop. Lachlan waited, surprised but wary, for MacGilchrist’s next words.
“Already,” the chieftain continued, “Wales has succumbed to the might of King Edward. Our Welsh brothers are conquered. What more proof do we need that the English devour those who make themselves weak?”
The men around Lachlan shuffled and murmured. Few of these men had ever traveled farther than Derry or Galway Bay. What went on in the lands beyond the Highlands rarely concerned them.
“Why did the Welsh lose?” the chieftain asked. “Because the Welsh are divided as we are divided. They parcel their holdings among their sons, making those fiefdoms smaller, weaker, and impossible to defend. And we Scots argue with the death of every chieftain, dividing our clans with bitterness, splintering our loyalties.”