Most lads are proud to have something to show for a fight, but Seamus’s head sunk even lower into his shoulders.
“Come now, what happened to your eye?” When Seamus pressed his lips together and shook his head, Alex put his hand on the lad’s shoulder. “I’ll do what I can to help, whatever it is.”
Seamus ventured a sideways glance at Alex. “In private,” he whispered. “No one can know. Ye must promise me.”
“Ye have my word,” Alex said. “Here, take my shield, and we’ll go into the armory.”
Once they were alone in the armory, Alex sat beside the boy on a low wooden bench. He pretended to study the axes and other weapons hanging on the stone wall in front of him while he waited for Seamus to speak.
“’Tis about my sister,” Seamus choked out.
Ach, family troubles, the worst kind. “What about Una?”
“My da…my da…” Seamus couldn’t get the words out, and various thoughts whirled in Alex’s head, none of them pleasant.
“Has your father hurt her?” he asked.
Seamus nodded without looking up.
Alex forced himself to keep his voice calm. “I suppose ye got that black eye trying to protect her?”
When the lad nodded again, Alex clenched his teeth against the blinding rage that roared through him. Seamus’s father was a foot taller and twice the lad’s weight. Alex wanted to murder the man.
“I know what it’s like to be angry with your father,” Alex said, though his own father only laid a hand on him when it was well deserved, and then it was always measured. “How has your father hurt your sister?”
Alex pretended not to see the tears that started spilling down the lad’s face and took a deep breath. This was even worse than he’d first thought.
“You’re a brave lad, but ye don’t have the size or the years to handle this problem yourself,” Alex said. “When our chieftain made me keeper of Dunfaileag Castle, he made the safety of every member of our clan here on North Uist my responsibility—that includes you and your sister. Ye must tell me what the trouble is so I can do my duty.”
“I don’t know exactly,” Seamus said, fidgeting. “But he gets drunk and sends me out of the cottage. He bars the door so I can’t get back in, but I can hear my sister screaming.”
Alex’s stomach turned sour. Oh, God, there was evil in this world.
“When he lets me back in,” Seamus said, his voice barely above a whisper, “Una is on the bed weeping. Da tells her to keep her mouth shut, or he’ll do it again.”
The man should go straight to hell, and Alex wanted to hurry him on his journey.
“Ye did well to tell me,” Alex said, and the lad’s shoulders relaxed as if a weight had been taken from them. “I’m going to pay a visit on your father.”
“He’s gone fishing in deep waters,” Seamus said. “We don’t expect him back for a few days.”
“The two of ye will stay at the castle until I can sort this out with your father,” Alex said. “We’ll go get Una and your things now.”
“I don’t know if she’ll come,” Seamus said. “Men frighten her. Best let me talk with her first.”
“I’ll bring my wife,” Alex said. “She’ll be able to persuade Una.”
“But ye promised ye would tell no one!” Seamus’s eyes were panicked. “Ye gave me your word.”
“All right, I won’t tell my wife just yet,” Alex said, putting his hand up to calm the lad. “Go home and talk to Una, and I’ll come get the two of ye after supper.”
With their father out to sea, waiting a couple of hours should make no difference.
CHAPTER 42
I must see to a matter with one of the tenants,” Alex said at the end of supper. He got up and kissed his wife’s forehead. “It shouldn’t take long, but don’t wait up.”
The wind swept over the tall grass, making it move like an amber sea, as Alex crossed through it in the growing darkness. Ahead of him, weak candlelight shone through the window of the small cottage at the edge of the sea. Sadness seemed to weigh down its sagging thatched roof.
Alex knocked on the cottage’s weathered door. When his knock was met by silence, he knocked again. “Seamus, it’s me, open up.”
Silence again. Unease settled in Alex’s gut. He gave them another moment, and then he opened the door.
Alex was a warrior, and he’d fought since he was almost as young as Seamus. And yet, he stood staring for a long moment at the chaos in the one-room cottage before he could take it in. Questions flooded his mind as his gaze traveled over the broken crockery strewn across the floor, the broken table and overturned benches, before coming to rest on the body.
Seamus’s father lay on his back in a pool of blood with a knife stuck in the middle of his chest.
The smell of burning herring finally penetrated Alex’s thoughts. As he crossed the small room to the hearth, he wrapped his shirt around his hand, then lifted the flaming pan from its hook over the fire and set it on the dirt floor. The pan hissed and smoked as he doused the flame with a jug of water that had miraculously survived the maelstrom.
Alex waved the smoke away from his face and looked about the cottage again. Mother, Mary of God, where
