Page 1 of Promised to the Cursed Laird

CHAPTER ONE

She smelled the forest before she saw the stronghold.

Pine resin and damp earth and the particular cold of trees that had been standing long enough to change the quality of the air beneath them. Neilina Chisholm pulled her horse to a stop at the tree line, looked at what was waiting on the other side of the clearing and felt the knowledge hit her.

This was not right.

She looked at her brother.

Fearchar rode beside her with his eyes forward and his jaw set. He had the posture of a man who had been expecting this moment and had decided to ride through it rather than toward it, and the understanding of what he had done hit her with sudden clarity.

MacKinnon land looked nothing like this.

She had studied it. Of course she had studied it. When a woman is told by her king that she will marry a man whose clan her family has been fighting for the better part of a decade, she makes it her business to know every piece of ground between herself and the altar.

MacKinnon's stronghold sat on the northern edge of Skye, sea-facing, backed by basalt cliffs. What sat before her now was an inland keep, stone and timber, crowded by forest on three sides with the particular closed-in quality of a place that had been built to watch rather than to be seen.

MacRath, she thought.

The word arrived like a stone dropped into still water, and the rings spread outward.

MacRath. He's brought me tae MacRath.

"We've arrived," Fearchar said beside her.

She turned her head and looked at her brother.

At twenty-seven she had been looking at him her entire life and she knew every variation of his face, the genuine smile and the political one, the laughter he meant and the laughter he deployed, and the expression he was wearing right now was one she recognized with a cold precision that settled into her stomach like weather.

He was braced for her.

He knew, she thought. He knew the entire time.

"That isnae MacKinnon land," she said.

"Nae," Fearchar said. He had the decency not to reach for the pleasant version of his voice. "It isnae."

"Then where⁠—"

"MacRath." He looked at the keep rather than at her. "Cailleach MacRath is a man I trust. He's offered tae hold ye here while I⁠—"

"While ye what." It was not a question but a statement in the shape of one. The flatness she'd learned to use against him was sometimes the only thing that had any chance of reaching through the charm.

"While I determine whether this marriage should proceed."

The forest around them moved. The horses breathed. Somewhere above, a bird made a sound that chilled her to the bones.

"Fearchar." She kept her voice very level. "The King commanded this marriage. The Accord was sealed in Edinburgh before God and the royal council. There is nothing for ye tae determine."

"The King was nae in those glens in 1601," he said, and now his voice had found its edge, "watching MacKinnon men hold the pass while ours died in the mud because some alliance had broken before the ink was dry." He looked at her finally, amber eyes direct and hard. "He's our enemy, Neilina. He was our enemy before the Accord and the war didnae change that."

"The Accord was meant tae change it."

"The Accord," he said, "is a piece of paper a king wrote from a throne in Edinburgh that has never once been wet by Highland rain." He turned his horse toward the gate. "Ye'll stay here. Ye'll be safe. I'll send word when I've made a decision." He gestured for her to follow. "Marcas MacKinnon is nae a man ye should be bound tae, Neilina. What I saw of him in those glens…the things his men did…I'll nae send my sister intae that."

"Ye say that," she said, "and yet yer marriage tae Nandag Farquharson was through the Accord."

He went still on his horse.