get you and Knock Castle in exchange for killing his nephew Connor.”
A well of anger rose up from deep inside her. With it came words she did not know were there.
“In the name of my mother, I curse ye, Murdoc MacKinnon,” she shouted, stretching out her arm and pointing at Murdoc. Then she turned slowly and swung her arm in a wide circle. “I curse every one of ye! Ye shall suffer for snatching me from my husband and for taking what belongs to me and my clan. Every one of ye shall suffer!”
The hall went quiet. Every man’s eyes were upon her, and a few crossed themselves.
“Angus!” Murdoc’s deep voice broke the silence, filling the hall and reverberating in her chest. “Take her upstairs.”
Panic flooded through her when Angus picked her up with one arm and tossed her over his shoulder. With her head hanging down, blood pounded in her ears as she screamed and beat her fists on his back. The men’s laughter faded as he climbed the enclosed spiral staircase that led to the family’s private rooms above.
When Angus carried her into the bedchamber that had been her mother’s, true hysteria took her. It blinded her to everything but the image in her mind of her mother lying on the bed with blood soaking her shift and the sheets beneath her. Sileas saw the tiny droplets that fell from the bed to the floor as her mother died.
Sileas clawed and screeched like a wild animal. When she sank her teeth into Angus’s hand, he let go long enough for her to scramble off the bed and sprint for the door.
She ran headlong into Murdoc in the doorway. He held her fast.
“No, not here,” she pleaded, flailing her arms and legs. “Please, not here, not where she died.”
Murdoc did not heed her pleading any more than he had her mother’s.
How many times had she stood on the other side of the door and heard her mother weeping? Her mother had suffered the attentions of two husbands who wanted an heir to this castle and did not care if they killed her in the process.
For years, Sileas had pushed the memories of her mother’s suffering to the far recesses of her mind. Her mother had seemed so unlike her—beautiful, frail, compliant. In truth, Sileas had blamed her mother for the choices that had led to their misery. Now she realized her mother must have felt as trapped as she did now.
As Murdoc dragged her back to the bed, she saw her mother’s strawberry blond hair fanned out on the pillow, its beauty a stark contrast to the dark blood on the sheets. The smell of blood and the sweat of illness filled her nose. She saw the deathly pale skin and limp arms of a woman too weak to weep anymore.
When Murdoc dropped her on her back on the bed, Sileas felt her body sink into the mattress, heavy with the weight of her grief. She saw her mother as she had the very last time, with her eyes open but unseeing, and one thin arm stretched out across the bed, as if she were still hoping someone would take her hand and rescue her from the nightmare that was her life.
In the end, it was God who had mercy and took her to join her dead babes.
Sileas lay unblinking, her gaze fixed on the beams of the ceiling. She felt immune to the men now, drenched in grief for her mother, grief that she had denied until now.
CHAPTER 37
The darkening sky increased Ian’s sense of urgency as he scanned the top of the walls of Knock Castle.
“Only two men on the wall,” his father said beside him.
Ian nodded. “Are ye ready, Father Brian?”
“Aye.”
Ian climbed into the handcart and crouched down next to the barrel of wine. God’s bones, what was he doing?
“We should have used the horse cart, so da and I could go in with ye,” Niall complained, not for the first time.
“The guards would be more suspicious of a large cart,” Ian said. “I’ll open the gate for ye to join us as soon as I can.”
The truth was that Ian did not know if there were two men or forty waiting on the other side of the gate, and there was no point in all of them being killed.
“God be with ye,” Father Brian said, and flung the tarp over Ian as if he were spreading a cloth over an altar. Then he tucked it around Ian and made sure it didn’t cover the wine barrel.
Their trick was as old as the ancient Greeks. It seemed unlikely, however, that Murdoc or Angus had studied the classics.
Father Brian grunted as he picked up the handles and pushed the cart forward. ’Twas a good thing the priest was a strong man, for it was a hundred yards from the trees to the castle out on the headland.
With the wine barrel sloshing next to his head, Ian wondered if the Trojans had been as cramped in their wooden horse. He held on to the edges of the tarp to keep it in place as the cart bumped over the boards of the drawbridge. When Father Brian brought the cart to a jerking halt and dropped the handles to the ground, Ian had to brace his feet against the sides to keep from sliding out the back.
Through a hole he poked in the tarp with the point of his dirk, he watched the priest bang on the wooden gate. A voice responded from the other side, but Ian couldn’t distinguish the words.
“I am making my rounds of Skye, as I do every year,” Father Brian said in his deep, rumbling voice. He gestured toward the cart. “I’ve a barrel of wine from the monastery on Iona I was bringing to my bishop, but it’s too far to carry. I’m willing to sell it to ye.”
The gate creaked open. Ian gripped the hilt of his dirk as Father Brian picked up the cart handles and pushed it forward.
“Since we’re celebrating a wedding, I’m sure ye will be wanting to make a gift of that wine,” a guard said.
The blood in Ian’s veins turned to ice at the mention of a wedding, and he prayed he was not too late to save
