His mother, the woman who had borne him and loved him and trusted him to ensure her safety—was dead. Because of him.
He roared in anguish. The power of it tore the knot from his throat and left it ragged with raw pain.
When at last his torment ceased to ring out, only the rasping breath of the dying lady’s maid remained. Finally, he shifted his attention to her and found her staring at his mother. Blue veins stood out like rivers against the sorceress’s thin, wet lids of her eyes. When she cut her gaze to Duncan, there was no color within – only an empty white.
“Yer spell can be broken, but only by the love of a daughter of Morrigan.” The bag the old woman had carried shuddered and a rusty spearhead lifted, unaided, from the folded leather. “Only she will be cut by the Spear of Assal, but ye’ll have to add the safety of twelve mattresses between the spear and her.”
Duncan shook his head, not understanding. The spearhead hovered in the air.
“Take it, ye wretch,” the old woman snarled.
Duncan grabbed it with numb fingers. The metal sat heavy and hot in his hand.
Her teeth had gone red with blood and a stream of it trailed from the corner of her mouth. “A daughter of Morrigan must love ye before the rowan tree is left bare.” The wide white eyes remained unblinking. “If ye canna find such love, and the last leaf falls on yer thirtieth year of life, ye will perish.”
Her eyes dimmed from white to empty black and she dropped, like a puppet whose strings had been cut.
The rattle of her struggled breathing ceased, leaving only the heavy silence of death and curses.
Duncan looked down at the spearhead in his hand. The thing was rusted, pitted with holes, and its edges worn smooth. It wouldn’t scratch a babe.
He jammed it in his sporran and set to bringing his mother home for burial. The accursed witch could stay where she lay, and taint the dirt with her hatred.
He put the curse from his mind, and focused instead on the love he’d held for his mother as he trudged the last miles home. He recalled her laugh, her smiles, the gentle hugs and the wonderful floral perfume of her surrounding him and making his world right. All of it would be lost to him forever.
Even with her dying breath, she had sought to save his life. He’d thrown everything away to save a foolish girl.
Anger lit his soul with the desire to avenge his mother’s death. He clung to the memory of the girl he’d saved, the one he’d imprudently given his father’s ring to in an act of soft-hearted pity.
He crested the final hill to his home and managed to hold his mother to his chest as he fell to his knees. There, beside the magnificence of Duart, standing as tall as the castle itself, was a newly grown rowan tree, bright with waxy green leaves and berries the color of blood.
He gently set his mother down, and went to the tree on legs almost too weak to carry him. To his horror, one leaf fell from a branch too high for him to see. The leaf floated down softly, like a feather caught on a light breeze, taunting him with his own mortality.
It landed in his palm and promptly withered to ash.
And so it would go for the next fifteen years.
Unless, of course, he found a true daughter of Morrigan and made her fall in love with him. He’d have no problem wooing any woman, of that he was certain. Already he’d had many women, many prospects for a wife. But where did one find the daughter of a goddess?
As if in answer, another leaf loosed and fell, bringing with it all of Duncan’s hopes. He watched it in horror, unable to move from the weighted certainty of his impending death.
CHAPTER 1
January 1375
Isle of Mull, Scotland
EVINA MACGREGOR’S companions were all dead. Mercenaries lost in a battle they had no claim to aside from the weight of winner’s coin at their belt. Yet Evina had survived. Again.
The wind clawed at her, ripping her cloak open to thrust icy fingers into the heat she attempted to preserve in the huddle of her crossed arms. She staggered on through the snow on feet she could no longer feel. There would be no frostbite later. Just like there’d been no wounds sustained in the battle – or the one before that, or any others she’d fought.
She could not be harmed. It was an uncanny skill for a woman who wished for nothing more than to die.
Evina wanted to curl into the embrace of a snowbank, to let her stiff limbs cease their tremble with the false promise of warmth while winter stole her life from the shell of her body. And then she would be no more.
She would be free of the burden of loss, of her internal scream of desire to learn who she was. What she was. For surely abilities such as hers rendered her unnatural.
The wild snow storm blew in a frantic swirl of chipped ice. The flurries bit at her cheeks and stung her eyes. She felt the pain of it to be sure, but never to the point of physical injury. Many would consider her lucky for her immunity to damage and death. But she was not lucky.
She was damned.
Condemned to a wandering life of loneliness and suffering.
Her steps slowed with the temptation to lay in the snowbank. But the flame of life within her blazed brighter and shoved her onward, the same as it always did when death beckoned. It drove her away where others were unintentionally drawn. She trudged on, hating the endless life she lived.
Her ravenous stomach gnawed on nothing. Yet no beast alive was out in such a storm to hunt.
The scent of roasting meat enveloped her and turned the ache of her
