The Chieftain's Curse Read online

  Around them, the dark grey walls sparkled like gemstones as light splashed across them. She latched onto the sight, used it as an aid to bring her down to earth and dampen her tumbling thoughts while she followed Callum through the bailey. On another day, the stone walls might have intrigued her. She’d spent most of her life behind wooden palisades. Tonight, she was blind to it, numb to all thoughts but one. Euan might be about to lose another wife. A third.

  However much she had once loved him, her pity was all for his wife. “It seems I got here just in time. Show me the way, then make sure my brother Rob gets some food, it has been a long journey, and fourteen-year-olds are always starving.” Every time she spoke the lie, her insides curled, as if she had somehow disowned him, though Rob didn’t seem at all bothered.

  The storm chased her indoors on the heels of a turbulence that invaded her heart and her head while she followed Callum’s directions to the keep and the cries of pain. Swirling draughts on the stairs of the tower set her shadow swaying back and forth as she passed beneath the pitch-coated torches clutched in iron brackets round the curved stone walls.

  She hadn’t climbed even halfway up the winding stone stairs that led to the Chieftain’s apartments, when the screaming stopped and she was struck a sense of inevitability. With knees turned to liquid, she braced her weight against the rough stone wall, steadying her balance, her emotions.

  The lengthening silence shortened the cords at the back of her neck as she felt success—nay safety—slip from her grasp. Taking a deep breath, she kneaded the small of her back as she straightened her spine before continuing the climb.

  With soft quiet footsteps Morag crossed the empty solar. On the edge of her vision, she noticed a heap of rags piled in the corner. “Hmm,” her lips twisted. What had happened to the cozening young man she had known if he couldn’t charm a maid to venture this far? Surely a castle this size had more than one old woman brave enough to help his wife—another black mark against the ones in charge.

  A tapestry blocked her view of the bedchamber beyond. Its folds muffled the voices, but couldn’t prevent them sliding around the edges. Her heart beat rapidly. Taking that frantic organ in her hands she fought past the weight of the tapestry, to peep through the opening into the McArthur’s chamber. Her eyes widened and she let out a sigh of relief. A woman lay atop the bed in a pool of candlelight. Her expression was tired, but obviously the worst was over. She thanked God that they had managed without her assistance.

  Euan’s wife was a beauty, so different. Her red-gold hair fascinated Morag. Inevitably, a pang of envy washed over her. She did not need a looking glass to know that her own dull hair suffered badly by comparison. A high chieftain was raised to expect the best, and Euan, it seemed, had succeeded.

  His wife’s bright gold tresses flowed across the translucent white shift covering her shoulders and spilled over the side of the bed. Newly born, the baby sprawled across its mother’s belly below her breasts. Though the storm had dimmed the light in the corners of the room, by the candle glow, Morag caught a gleam of red in the damp hair covering the baby’s scalp.

  The relief in her breast spiked for less than a heartbeat then her jaw dropped. Open-mouthed with astonishment, she realised neither baby nor mother had moved, not a hint of indrawn breath.

  Caught in a fraught silence, as unwieldy as the tapestry she held back, Morag felt she had lost her hearing as he moved out of the gloom. Euan look down at his wife and baby. His expression softened his features. She saw his emotions, his failures, stripped bare like a man who has given up his control to drink, except not a whiff of whisky assailed the air.

  Her presence was an imposition on an occasion that should be private. The McArthur lifted his head and trapped her within a narrow gaze silvered with tears or, worse, the icy sheen of anger.

  She wanted to bolt, needed to escape a room where the atmosphere had grown thick enough to slice with a knife. Then it was too late. A roar of pain, a keening agony, unexpected and shocking, slapped at her, backhanded her. Shocking, because Morag recognised the agony of feeling that left one oblivious and unashamed of reactions normally kept hidden.

  Euan turned away as though unaware he was observed, while his face twisted with pain. She had faced danger many times before. Life was filled with risk. Few people in these times could claim never to have experienced an icy shiver like the one sliding down Morag’s already cold spine. Not for the first time, her life teetered on a dagger’s edge. She had entered Castle Cragenlaw under false pretences as the midwife whose delay had killed both Euan’s wife and baby.

  A deep-throated groan drew her nervous gaze.

  Before they had reached Cragenlaw, she’d been fearful of discovering the damage time and war had done to the handsome Scottish youth. The knowledge that Euan was unarmed should have conquered her fears. Not so. Muscles encased his tall, long-legged frame as a Norman might wear golden armour. Euan was completely naked and, to her mind, presented a bigger danger. Head flung back, his long hair flayed about his shoulders as he shook his blood-stained fists at the heavens and roared, “Will this bloody curse never end?”

  Tears welled in Morag’s eyes as his pain enveloped her in a rush of unwanted memories. She didn’t want to feel this way, didn’t want to empathise with a man who had betrayed three women, four if she included herself. The knowledge was enough to remind her she hadn’t come to Cragenlaw for the McArthur’s sake. He was nothing to her now. Rob was the only one she cared for and, if necessary, she was certain Euan could be persuaded to help him, to keep him safe. A hard heart was vital to their survival.

  Her only recourse was retreat inside the safety of the solar, then Morag heard, “Aye, that’s it, back away afore he catches sight of you. As you can see we’re well past needing a midwife.”

  Despite warning her off, the crone grabbed her wrist and pushed her face close to Morag’s, hissing like a cat. Only the truth, or at least a measure of honesty, could save her now.

  “I’m not the midwife, and sorry I am for it, but when I heard of the poor lady’s plight I … I wanted to offer m-my help,” she stammered, caught off guard, without thinking to mention the fallen tree blocking the causeway.

  Euan turned his back to them as if they were invisible, but he wasn’t. From where she stood, Morag could see the scar on his shoulder left by the crossbow bolt. He never turned his head to look. Not even a stranger’s voice could interrupt his grief. For him, no one else in the room existed.

  Morag was glad of it.

  In a voice drawn thin with age and cracked with emotion the crone told her, “Take your self off. We have no need of your help.”

  The crone released her wrist, pushed her away until Morag was on the other side of the tapestry before she had time to protest, trying to catch her breath.

  From the far corner, the rags unfolded and spoke. “Don’t let her abruptness trouble you, lass.”

  She clenched her hands over her breasts, holding tight as if her heart might leap from her chest. “Good heavens, you startled me.”

  The little man rose to his feet. The face, creased from where it had rested on his folded arms, was streaked with tears and crumpled by a melancholy that was offset by the tinkle of bells on sleeves and cap. A Fool was the last thing Morag had expected to discover in the McArthur’s Keep.

  Knuckling the tears away from his eyes, he said, “I’m Nhaimeth, Lady Astrid’s Fool, though old Mhairi likes to pretend I don’t exist. I’m fair used to being ignored but inexperienced at making her excuses. To be truthful, she’s been worried from the day she knew Lady Astrid was carrying.”

  The words were hardly out of his mouth when another rage-filled roar rent the air. The little man cringed and turned away, revealing the misshapen curve in his spine. Morag schooled her face not to show pity, saying only, “I’m a stranger to the castle, but I thought to help and offered my assistance as soon as Callum told me the sorry tale. I wish I could have done more.” Curious, she asked, “Was Mhairi La
dy Astrid’s maid?”

  His full lips curled in a sneer. “Och. Mhairi’s anxiety is not for Astrid. Euan was her baby. She feared for his heir.”

  “The crone is Euan’s—the McArthur’s—mother?” Morag clapped a hand over her mouth for fear they might hear in the next room.

  “Hah! I’m the one who’s supposed to make jest. The crone was his nurse. Her fears are all for Euan. Euan the Cursed.”

  “Callum told me as much, but … cursed? How? When…” she let her demand dwindle. Too much interest might give her away. She must not dare show too much interest or arouse the slightest skerrick of curiosity about her secret. That didn’t prevent her saying, “Callum said Lady Astrid was the McArthur’s third wife,” and prodding for more information.

  Keeping his eyes downcast, Nhaimeth studied the floor as if he saw something of more interest than her worn boots. The drooping corners of his mouth told another tale. “The others both died in childbirth. He wants an heir. Everyone knows the truth of the curse, but not even this fool can find a particle of optimism that it will ever come to pass. My lady should never have wed him.”

  The little man’s finger curled in a childlike fist that pounded the granite wall in anger ignoring the blood the pounding drew. “It was all her father’s doing. The hunger for power drives him as naught else can.”

  “Who is the Lady Astrid’s father?”

  He lifted an eyebrow that remarked on her ignorance. “Have you ever heard of Erik the Bear?”

  “Aye, many a tale, and been scared out of my wits by threats that he might get me if I didn’t behave. Is it true he can break a man in two with his bare arms?”

  “Once maybe, aye. Erik Comlyn’s well named, but think on, the whole clan have a reputation for being throng.” That said, Nhaimeth rubbed his palms over his old-young face and turned away, arm braced against the wall, making a rest for a head that looked too big for his body.

  Morag had learned more than she wanted to know. Whilst her body was merely tired from her travels, her spirits had sunk as low as on the day her father was brought home, slung across his mount’s neck. She could envisage no quick, easy end to the day for Euan, nor for herself.

  The gods were probably laughing up their sleeves that she had thought to ignore the dire portents thrown at her. A warning no man could forefend. She couldn’t shake off the memory of a sky wiped clean of light, wrapping Cragenlaw in a heavy blanket designed to depress hope. Or the screams of a woman, blood curdling and so loud it was a wonder the castle walls didn’t topple. Fall. Destroyed in the way they said Joshua’s trumpets had brought down those of Jericho.

  Chapter 2

  Arms dripping, Euan stepped away from the stained water in the basin. Turning, he pulled back his anguish and in silence bid farewell to his wife and son. With the door slammed on his emotions, he at last grasped the linen Mhairi’s gnarled hands kept pushing under his nose. “Oh, for pity’s sake, stop snivelling, woman,” he growled, exasperated.

  It was all well and fine for Mhairi to put on a fine display of the kind of weakness he dared not show the world. He gritted his teeth. In these troubled times, a clan chieftain in his precarious position, a man with no heir, needed an iron fist and a heart of stone.

  He rode to every battle fought in defence of his lands, knowing that should his life falter, rabid wolves, human as well as animal, would be circling his castle within hours. Beasts all of them, waiting to pounce, to lay waste to every inch of McArthur land. Land won by the ancestors who brought their kin north to the east coast, and Cragenlaw.

  Vikings had put paid to the previous tenants of the crags—Picts who, until Norse long-ships appeared on the horizon had, from behind wooden palisades, survived the worst thrown at them. After the McArthur clan sent the Norsemen scurrying for their dragon boats, they had rebuilt in local stone, not only plentiful but hard as iron.

  The nor-east coast had suited his Celtic ancestors well. They had flourished here until the moment Euan had made one simple mistake. His father had been clan chieftain in those days but the blame lay at Euan’s feet.

  Rubbing his arms and hands dry on the linen, Euan finished by roughly wiping the cloth across the splashes of ruddy water that dripped from his chest and abdomen. “Send the seneschal for my wife’s cowardly priest. The sooner he’s gone from this place the better. Not, of course, before he says prayers over the lass and the baby and gives them absolution.”

  Whichever gods existed among these hills owed Astrid clemency, for hadn’t she and the baby been the only innocents in this marriage?

  Aye, the biggest share of guilt was his own, but the priest and Brodwyn, Astrid’s cousin, who had ridden off on the pretext of carrying the news to Comlyn, had their own consciences to search. Add to them, all those in the castle who had turned their backs on his wife, their chieftain’s wife, needed to do the same.

  A pulse beat a lament in his temple, tightening the cords in his throat until he could hardly speak the words. Clenching down hard on his jaw to conceal any outward sign of his distress, he continued, “However, Mhairi, before you let that purveyor of hellfire and brimstone near her, have some of the maids tend to my wife and son. And, mind you, bide by Astrid’s side all the time the priest is with her.”

  Perhaps he had never loved Astrid, but she had been his.

  The wife of a Scottish Chieftain.

  Astrid had deserved better than the life he and her father had designed for her. Her father, through an excess of ambition, and Euan, in his never-ending quest to extend his line in posterity, were both responsible for what happened in this room tonight.

  The irony drew an imperceptible shrug of his powerful shoulders, for he knew it was a crime he would repeat.

  He saw no other way to fulfil the promise he had made to his father. Through clenched teeth, he glanced at Mhairi and ground out another order, “I want them both buried as soon as this accursed storm is over.”

  Turning his back on his old nurse, he grabbed his breacan-an-feile off the ironbound chest—the sandalwood-lined one where Astrid had stored the baby’s cloths, dresses and wee bonnets. He remembered the expression on her face as she folded them away.

  Pure love.

  Though the baby had yet to be born, she had poured her heart into the wee things she had made for him. Astrid had been like her mother. Her Norse ancestry had made her confident she would succeed where the others had failed. She had been determined to be the one who successfully bore him an heir. “Look at the size of him,” she’d, say rubbing her round belly. “Come, feel how hard he kicks. This son of yours will be as strong as his father.”

  He’d felt his son kick, felt the strength behind it and, for the first time since he’d married Astrid, became certain she was the one he had waited for. The mother of the McArthur heir.

  The fine worsted plaid in his hands felt afire against his skin. He wrapped it tight around his knuckles, feeling the pain, needing the pain to assuage the guilt.

  Astrid had woven the plaid. She had been proud of her skills, and rightly so. She’d spun the wool from sheep that grazed the fields beyond the castle. The dyes Astrid used, she had made from bark and plants found in the Cragenlaw valley. The patterns she wove were always complicated, but she’d put her heart into the weaving, had put her whole heart into loving him, which had been amazing, for he no longer expected love. He had reached a place in his life where he did not want to love anyone in return.

  Yet he couldn’t escape the guilt. And because he knew there was no escape he would have to live with the truth of his life: he was cursed.

  That did not mean he had given up looking for a way to nullify the blight on his life. He had consulted wise women, priests, and old men who thought they were wizards.

  Mhairi always kept her ears open to the tales of travellers, tinkers, of minstrels, rumours floating on the wind. She listened to them all and reported the tales to Euan, who had searched for the truth in them only to find they had as little substance as the scent of
pines on the breeze.

  Being cursed didn’t mean giving up at the first hurdle.

  Pushing his thoughts aside, he glanced over his shoulder and saw, to his annoyance that Mhairi hadn’t moved from her place by the bed. She watched him through narrowed eyes, red-rimmed and raw.

  The reminder of his grief roughened the edges of his voice. “What? Are you still here, woman? Surely ye wiped my arse often enough as a baby for it to hold little mystery for you, so what’s bothering you?”

  He made his demand while pleating the edge of his plaid in one fist then fitting the cloth around his middle with a practiced swirl of his narrow hips. Clamping the worsted length round his waist with a wide leather belt buckled in silver, he finished off by tossing the remaining fringed length over his shoulder and tucking it into the belt.

  Mhairi wasn’t in a mood for taking any of his nonsense. “Aye, I did, and gave it a fine skelp as well, for weren’t you a right wee devil? I only wanted to say I’m heart sore for ye, Euan, and it pains me to mention that I doubt any of the maids will relish the task of…”

  He felt the burn of anger rise in the gorge of his throat. It pained him to swallow, so he let it build on the premise that the solution was in their hands. And, should they dare give this final insult to his poor, dead wife and innocent son, well… The damn on his anger broke. “And why the hell not, might I ask?”

  “Some silly biddy has set it about that the curse is contagious. Having listened to Astrid’s screams, the seneschal told me the maids are all in a huddle, whispering and crying. Fearing they will die in childbirth if they as much as touch Lady Astrid.” She sighed and her slight shoulders sank, curving forward over her thin chest. “The only one to come to your rooms was some lass I’d never seen before, offering help. And too late, she was.”

  “A strange lass, you say. I never saw hide nor hair of her.”