Page 42 of Promised to the Cursed Laird

She sighed, turned into the pillow, and settled further into sleep.

He stood over her a long moment, the candle at her bedside throwing soft light across her face. He thought of the kerchief still sitting untouched in his study drawer, of the coldness he'd shown her over it, and of how suddenly he wanted to let her into the part of himself he’d never allowed anyone close enough to ask about properly.

I'll tell her, he thought. Nae tonight. But I'll tell her.

He drew the furs up over her shoulder, left the room quietly behind him, and did not examine why walking away from that bed cost him rather more than it should have.

Cailleach MacRath had learned, over four decades of surviving men considerably more ambitious than himself, that the difference between a defeat and a delay was almost entirely a matter of patience.

His scout returned at a hard gallop just past the second watch, and Cailleach read the trouble in the man's face before he'd even drawn breath to speak.

"MacKinnon's men," the scout said. "Two of them, tracking our line from the ridge above the river crossing. They'd found the ash from our fire, laird. Another day and they'd have had our numbers, maybe our direction."

Cailleach absorbed that without any alarm. Alarm was for men who hadn't already assumed, from the moment the arrow flew wide of Neilina Chisholm's shoulder, that Marcas MacKinnon would come looking with everything he had.

"Move the camp before dawn," he said. "West, into the high ground past the old MacRae holding. Nae fires until we're two days clear of here."

"Aye, laird." The scout hesitated. "And the girl. The men are asking whether we're tae try for her again, now the road's kent tae be watched."

The men are asking the wrong question, Cailleach thought, and his thought settled into pleasant and cold, into a plan considerably better than the one that had just failed.

"Nae," he said. "We'll nae try the road again. It gained me naething but MacKinnon's suspicion, and I'll nae throw good men at a door he's now standing guard over."

"Then what, laird?"

Cailleach smiled, and it was not a warm expression, though it had fooled a great many people into believing it might be.

"We go around the door entirely," he said, "and we let her own brother open it for us."

He rode the rest of that night turning the shape of it over, refining it patiently, without heat, the way another man might sharpen a blade. He had, after all, lost nothing irreplaceable in the ambush.

He'd lost the element of surprise, and that was simply the cost of a first attempt that had never truly needed to succeed on its own.

The failure was inconvenient, but not useless. It was loud enough and clumsy enough that word of it would travel, and word, he knew from long practice, traveled fastest and least accurately through frightened men repeating half of what they'd seen to anyone who'd listen.

Fearchar loves his sister, Cailleach thought, watching the dark treeline slide past. That's his one great weakness, and I intend tae make full use of it. He's nae a cruel man. He's nae even, truly, a foolish one. He's only a man who's spent his whole life believing he kens what's best for her, and a man like that doesnae need convincing that Marcas MacKinnon is dangerous. He only needs convincing that Marcas is dangerous tae her.

He called for parchment at the next halt, he chose every word with the unhurried care of a man who understood that the most effective lies were built almost entirely from true things, arranged to point somewhere false.

Fearchar, he began, in his own hand, because a letter in his own hand carried a weight no messenger's spoken word ever could. I write with a heavy heart and graver news than I'd hoped tae ever send ye. Ye entrusted yer sister tae my protection when MacKinnon's men came for her, and I failed tae hold that trust. MacKinnon's raid cost me good men and near cost me my own life, and yer sister was taken from my walls by force in the night, exactly as we both feared he might attempt.

Since then. I've had word from within his own household. She's held under guard, Fearchar, nae guest, nae bride treated with honor, but a woman watched day and night, her every movement reported tae her captor, her attempts tae leave met with locked doors and armed men at her chamber. His council speaks openly of using the Accord tae claim rights over Chisholm land that were never his tae claim, and I fear, verra gravely, that he means tae use yer sister as the lever tae pry it loose from ye, whatever gentle face he shows her tae keep her compliant in the meantime.

I dinnae ken how much longer she has before whatever patience he's showing runs out. I write tae ye now because I believe, whatever quarrel ye and I have had in years past, that neither of us wants tae see her paying the price of it. Come tae the river crossing at Aldwick, three days hence, and I'll tell ye everything I've learned, and we'll decide together what's tae be done.

He read it back once, satisfied. Every sentence in it was, technically, defensible. She was, after all, watched and there had, after all, been a raid. The council had, also argued fiercely about the Accord's terms in a room Cailleach had a man positioned near enough to hear secondhand rumor of. He had simply arranged each true, small fact to cast a shadow considerably larger and darker than the fact itself could rightly claim.

A man doesnae need tae be lied tae outright, he thought, sealing the letter with his own mark, tae be led somewhere false. He only needs tae be handed true things in the wrong order, and left tae draw the conclusion himself. Fearchar will draw it. He loves her too well nae tae.

"Ride hard," he told the messenger who came to take it, "and dinnae stop until it's in Fearchar Chisholm's own hand. Tell him only that it's urgent, and that it concerns his sister. Naething more. Let the letter do the rest."

The messenger rode east into the dark, and Cailleach watched him go with intense satisfaction. He had learned, over a long and careful life, that the surest way to burn down another man's house was never to strike the match yourself.

Let Marcas keep his walls, he thought, turning his own horse back toward the high ground. I've nae further need of breaking them. I'll have her brother do that for me, and Marcas will never even see the blade coming until it's already turned in his own kinsman's hand.

Neilina and Marcas sat together at the small writing table in her chamber, the letter to Fearchar spread between them, three false starts already crumpled and cast into the fire, because every draft she'd attempted so far had come out either too cold or too desperate, and neither felt true to what she actually wanted her brother to understand.

"Try this," Marcas said, leaning over her shoulder to look at the page, close enough that she caught the low woodsmoke scent of him even over the ink. "Nae I was taken against my will and held. That'll have him riding for my walls with every man he owns before he's finished reading the sentence. Try instead…I am safe, and treated with more honor than I expected, though I didnae choose this path myself. It's the truth, and it leaves him room tae hear the rest of it before he decides tae do something ye'll both regret."