Wild Highland Magic (The Celtic Legends Series Book 3)(62)

My daughter will be queen.

My daughter will be queen.

My daughter will be queen.

Cairenn saw the flagon tip and the cup filled. Then she saw the achingly familiar face of the man marked to die.

***


Lachlan watched in frozen horror as Cairenn touched the stone and then shuddered as if in the throes of death. Her head fell back as strange thunder shook the walls of the mead hall. Her eyes rolled up to show the whites.

He lunged and yanked her away. She pitched back against his chest. He gathered her so close that the ale in his tankard sloshed out of his cup. It spilled on her kirtle as he whispered, “Cairenn.”

He felt a force ripple through her. She wrenched herself from his arms and, swirling, knocked the tankard out of his grip. The shocked, sonorous silence that had settled in the wake of the booming thunder was broken by the clatter of his tankard upon the flagstones, spewing ale everywhere.

Then another sound could be heard, a terrible thrashing and grunting and rattling of claws. Gasps went up at the head table. People leapt up and cleared away. In the space left behind, a hound convulsed on the floor, white froth bubbling around his snout.

“Poison,” Cairenn blurted, weaving where she stood. “MacGilchrist’s wife.”

She pitched forward. Lachlan caught her in mid-fall, his heart stopping. He seized her jaw and raised her lolling head only to see her eyelids flutter closed. His throat tightened and his mind went blank with fear.

A shadow fell over them. He glanced up to see Angus with Callum at his side. The chieftain’s eyes widened. Only then did Lachlan become aware of a cool breeze against the back of his bare head, the weight of his woolen cowl upon his shoulders, and the shocked gasps arising in the hall.

The thought passed through his mind like a wisp: He’d been recognized.

He didn’t care.

All that mattered was the woman who sagged unconscious in his arms. With the pressure in his chest growing, he dipped down and swept an arm under her knees to lift her into his embrace. He had to get the woman he loved far away from these dolmen stones. He had to take her far from the assault of the thoughts of a thousand curious onlookers. He had to bring her to where she would be safe.

“My tent is in the field outside,” Angus said, his nostrils flaring. “I’ll send you a doctor.”

Lachlan barely nodded as he turned toward the trestle tables, seeking the straightest path out of the mead hall.

Before him, women clutched their hands close. Knights stared in wonder and placed their palms over their hearts. Servants lowered their gazes, pitched their heads forward, and bent their knees.

He took one step forward and the crowd parted. Bareheaded and barefaced, he carried Cairenn through a sea of bowed heads.





CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO


Gripping his head in his hands, Lachlan sat on a stool beside the pallet upon which Cairenn lay. Moments ago, Callum’s private doctor—a man Lachlan had never met—showed up at the tent with his bag of powders and nostrums. The doctor declared he could find nothing wrong with the woman, but took out his lance to bleed her.

At the sight of that flashing knife, Lachlan had thrown the man out of the tent. Whatever caused Cairenn to look so pale against the wool blankets, he knew the affliction was of the mind, not the body. No doctor except her own father knew anything about that kind of sickness, and that doctor was across a wide and frothing sea.

He dug his fingers deep into his scalp. By knocking the poisoned chalice out of his hands, she had saved his life. There was always a price to pay to change one’s fate, and that price might be too steep to bear.

Come back to me, Cairenn.

He gazed upon her lovely face and willed her to open her eyes.

I need you, mo chridhe.

He heard footsteps outside the tent. No matter how hard he willed it, they did not stop in their approach.

Angus swept the tent flap aside and bent his head as he entered. Callum Ewing followed, looking grave. When a third head emerged—with an all-too-familiar mane of salt-and-pepper hair—Lachlan shot up from the stool.

Rage boiled up inside him and made the edges of his sight go red. Everything around him became a blur of motion until he found himself holding The MacGilchrist up by the throat, pressing him against the center strut of the tent so that the wood shuddered with the force.

“You sent your wife to kill me,” Lachlan said between gritted teeth. “A coward’s way, Dermot.”

MacGilchrist sputtered, his eyes wide.

“The men who put a blade in my back,” Lachlan continued, the words like gravel in his throat, “and the men who threw my father off the cliff—will you deny that they were all Campbells?”

The MacGilchrist’s sharp fingernails clawed against Lachlan’s grip, but Lachlan didn’t loosen it to hear the answer he already knew.

“The question is,” he argued, “whether you sent your wife to do that too—”

“I sent those men myself,” interrupted another voice, “because my husband is a coward.”

Lachlan turned to see MacGilchrist’s wife standing just inside the tent. He stared at her fading blonde hair hanging straggly around her shoulders, at her mud-streaked tunic, at her bound hands. His fury became a wild, hot thing pounding in his chest. He had to dig deep to find what chivalry was left in him so he wouldn’t reach for the knife in his boot and take his revenge.