Wild Highland Magic (The Celtic Legends Series Book 3)(66)

“But, you sacrificed everything.”

“I sacrificed nothing.” He took her hand and warmed it between his. “And I’ve gained exactly what I’ve always wanted.”

Those words sank deep into her, slipping past walls she didn’t even know she’d put up to guard her wary heart. They glided into her with the same ease that she’d always fallen into other people’s minds, except that she welcomed this openness, this sharing, with a heart that swelled with a hope that she thought she’d long buried.

“But,” she stuttered, “the betrothal to Leana—”

“Broken once again. Callum Ewing will likely have her married to Fingal before the year is out.”

“Poor Fingal,” she said, sensing the sulky impatience of the girl now pacing in an upper room of the castle. “But perhaps,” she added, reading the excitement in Fingal’s mind, “that final betrothal shall bring them both happiness.”

“Is that hope speaking? Or does your gift now roam so far and wide, and with such precision?”

“My gift is… clearer.”

The fuzziness and pain, the crackling and sizzling, all the force that had caused her so much pain was gone. The collective musing of the throngs camping upon the plain just outside Loch Fyfe came to her as naturally as if she’d just cocked her ear. Within the castle, she sensed the hurried anxiety of the women roasting meat, the single-minded focus of the blacksmith working in the smithy, the bored stable boys kicking hay in the stables, the guards taking their ease upon the ramparts. She discovered that she could mute the thoughts of one or another group by simply turning her mind away from them, as if she were turning her back on a conversation at a meal to focus on the talk of those on her other side.

Her heart did a little trip-dance. Touching the dolmen stones must have done this to her, though she couldn’t imagine why. Whatever the reason, it was as if a great flood had scoured through her head and left her vitally aware, her mind as clean and clear as a newborn babe.

Then she looked into Lachlan’s midnight-sky eyes and felt no resistance between them, no mist to shadow his brightest thoughts, nothing to dim the love that emanated from every corner of his vast and beautiful heart.

“I know your mind,” she said, a laugh rising, “yet I cannot really read your thoughts, not like others.”

“Lass, you’ve always known my heart.”

She did. She did.

“But since I don’t have your gift,” he added, brushing a strand of hair off her brow, “I have to ask you for what I most hope for.” He hesitated and took a breath. “Will you still have me, Cairenn, though now I’m naught but a lowly Scot who knows nothing except how to build bridges?”

With a slow, lazy smile she whispered yes. Lachlan lowered his head and pressed his warm, hungry lips against hers. She tasted honey-mead on his tongue. She combed her fingers through his thick hair and dreamed of the two of them standing upon Inishmaan with the sun on their faces and her hand lost in the wispy blond hair of a little boy who had eyes like the twilight, so full of stars.

And suddenly she knew the answer to a question she’d asked herself since she’d been a girl, about why any young woman would so willfully hand her heart to a man whose mind she could not possibly know. Love builds a bridge between a man and a woman. It’s built out of adoration and respect, and crossed over by trust.

He pulled away with reluctance. “You need to rest, mo chridhe. I would have you strong again.”

She didn’t have to read his thoughts to know he wanted to take her in his arms, run his hands over her skin, and slip his body against hers under the warmth of the blankets. Her heart lightened as if she were one of the birds singing just outside the tent. She felt a billowing joy unlike anything she’d felt since she’d been a child racing across the heights of Inishmaan.

All this thrumming delight felt wonderful, but it also felt oddly new. She gave him a look out of the side of her eyes. “What have you done, Lachlan?”

He grinned like a boy and reached back to pick up the lambskin he’d placed upon the floor. She did not have to see it to know what it was, for suddenly in her mind the mead-hall echoed with shouting men sweating in their braies as they yanked upon a tangle of pulleys and ropes.

She caught her breath. “You’re moving the stones.”





CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR


Once Lachlan announced that they would be returning to Inishmaan, Fingal ordered a banquet to be thrown in Lachlan’s honor.

Cairenn sat near the head of the trestle table, arranged in a different configuration now that the portal stones were already halfway up the slope to the council heights. At first, she felt very much out of place among so many grand people. She sat not far from Callum Ewing and the lion-maned Dermot MacGilchrist, whose newly-humble manner was that of a hound who stayed near his master though he’d been sorely beaten. Summoned from her safe exile with her Stuart cousins, Lachlan’s twelve-year-old half-sister Elspeth sat across from Cairenn, peppering her with questions about Inishmaan. At the head was Fingal, who Cairenn discovered to be a focused, intelligent, and surprisingly sensible young man, when his attention wasn’t drifting to Leana, his soon-to-be bride, who’d been relegated to the next table to avoid the awkwardness of sitting among two men to whom she’d been betrothed.