Padraig watched her delicate, precise movements with something akin to wonder.
“How’d you come to learn all this?” he asked without much forethought. The balmy weather, the sunshine, the company of the beautiful woman had all combined to make him rather relaxed and perhaps a bit more reckless than he should have been.
“All what, Master Boyd?” she asked airily.
“All the things you’re teachin’ me.”
She looked up at him then. “They’re generally taught to everyone raised in a noble home.”
“You were raised in one, then.”
“Well,” she stammered, “yes. Of course. I…I spent quite a bit of time at the abbey, though. They are known as bastions of education, after all.”
Padraig’s eyes narrowed. She hadn’t told him anything really.
“What about your home?” she parried, pulling a loaf of bread in half and handing him a piece. “Caedmaray.”
He liked the sound of it on her tongue.
“It’s certainly nae Darlyrede,” Padraig allowed. “Nae lords nor soldiers. Just the sea and the sky.” He chuckled. “And the sheep.”
“It sounds quite primitive,” Beryl allowed.
“Beautiful,” Padraig countered. “Wild.”
“How did Sir Lucan find you?”
Padraig chewed and looked down the valley toward the trees that only just hid the bend of the river. “He found my father. In Thurso, on the mainland. A man from our island—he’d borne Tommy a grudge since he came to Caedmaray. Last fall, they were on the mainland together getting supplies, and Dragan had heard rumor of a man wanted by the English king. He thought it might be my da, and so he left word with the sheriff. Lucan was waiting on Tommy at Thurso when the boat went over in the spring.”
“And Thomas simply…left with Sir Lucan?”
Padraig nodded. “Aye. He’s an old man, Beryl. Likely he was tired of running.”
“He’s certainly put up quite a chase since his capture for an old man who has tired of running,” she quipped.
Padraig could only chuckle, for he knew she was right.
“Where were you?” she pressed. “When he was taken?”
“Home,” Padraig said, and he wondered if Beryl could hear the regret in his voice. “One of our ewes fell ill, heavy with lambs, and I needed to stay with her.” He tried to avoid the memory of the sheep’s clouding eyes, her last hot breaths and whining sounds as she lay dying. Tried to block the images of his blade, taking the small creatures from its mother’s dying body. It had been an omen of things to come, only he hadn’t known it at the time.
Thankfully, Beryl’s voice interrupted his macabre reminiscing. “How did you know what happened then? To your father?”
“Lucan came back to Caedmaray himself. In April.”
“You spent the entire winter not knowing where your father was?”
“Aye.”
They were quiet for several moments, and Beryl didn’t press him, but for some reason, he wanted her to know.
“Lucan told me who my father really was—is. What he’d been accused of. He was kind to me, in his way.” Padraig vividly remembered sitting outside his own fishing hut that day in the frigid April wind, mending the net in his lap as if his life depended upon its completion in that moment, while the strange, proper, black-clad English knight had detailed the thing to him in a crisp, English tongue. Padraig remembered his shock. His anger. His initial resentment toward his father.
“And then Sir Lucan told me that, because me da and mam had married, I was Tommy’s only legitimate heir. That if anyone had a chance of winning Darlyrede from Vaughn Hargrave, ’twas I.”
“I can’t believe he would encourage you to come on your own into such a foreign, dangerous situation.” She seemed almost angered on Padraig’s behalf.
Padraig laughed. “Och, he didna. He told me to wait until he notified the king of my coming.”
Beryl gave him that brief, rueful smile she held in reserve for when Padraig was doing something purposefully incorrect to serve his own amusement.
“All your life, you had no idea,” she mused, “that your father was the third Baron Annesley.”
“Nae in a mad dream,” he said. “My father was Tommy Boyd, the hardiest Caedmaray man. He lived his life there as if he’d been born to it. Spoke the old tongue better than me grandda.”
“What happened to the man who turned him in? Dragan, I think you called him?”
“Aye, Dragan. He died that winter of the sweating sickness,” Padraig said, his jaw clenched. “I think he much have died happy, that he’d had his revenge on my da at last. Dragan’d been set on marrying me mother before Da came to Caedmaray.”
“I’m sorry,” Beryl said.
He looked over at her. “None of your doing, lass.”
She was watching him closely now, almost as if she had something else to say, and so Padraig waited.
“Why did you come, though, Padraig? Really? Is it because you hope to inherit your father’s title?”
Now Padraig did look away, to the bare company of trees standing sentinel across the rushing brook. He barely noticed the white mass that was Satin, making his way stealthily across the boulders to explore that wooded darkness.
He spoke aloud his own deepest fear. “Do you think I’m nae capable of it? Of Darlyrede?”
“That’s not for me to say.”
“My father has been wronged,” Padraig murmured at last. “He is a good man—I wish you knew him. If he never returns to Northumberland, if he has nae wish to, he doesna deserve to be remembered as a murderer.” He spat the absurdity from his lips. Then he looked at Beryl. “I’ll do whatever I must to bring him justice.”
She met his gaze evenly. “I understand.”
“Perhaps I’m a fool,” he said, suddenly self-conscious. He looked over at the ground near them and spied a bold red leaf tumbled there on the stiff breeze, leathery and moist from the rain. He picked it up and spun the
