Leith could notkeep still. His body told him he needed to rest, as did Rory’s healers. But keeping to his bedchamber felt far too much like being confined back at MacBeith, and it allowed his thoughts to beset him.
Thoughts likely to drive him mad.
Rory wanted him to grow hearty and strong, to regain the use of his arm so he could march out to battle. Wage an attack in which Rory’s main objective would be to slay Moira. Rhian’s adored sister. Farlan’s precious love.
He was not sure whether, if he delayed, Rory would march out without him. Pushed for time, Rory wanted to launch his attack before Alasdair could once more take the field.
Leith could not imagine how to dissuade him. He knew only that he must.
So he paced the settlement, even though it drained what strength he managed to harbor. He spoke to his fellow warriors, all happy to see him returned, and all curious about what had happened to him at MacBeith.
He dared not say. Unbearable pain, and unimaginable joy also. Lying in Rhian’s arms, tasting her lips and her skin. Being inside her. When he thought about it, his body tightened, and the bonds between them also. He felt both wretched and more fortunate than he’d ever imagined being. Because if only for a time, he’d had that. His merciful angel in his arms.
The weather proved soft and kind, a particular irony. White clouds sailed down the glen on a sea of blue, the color lighter than Rhian’s eyes, and peered at their reflections in the loch. The warm scents of summer filled the air, thyme from the hills and the peaty smell of the water.
It came to him—it would be the easiest of things to walk out across the green sward, cross the loch, and return to MacBeith. Once the thought occurred, he could not banish it.
If he chose to go, could Rory stop him? He remembered that terrible scene with Farlan only weeks ago—Rory’s face black with rage as he denounced his best friend. As he stripped him of even the right to wear his own tartan, and sent him, nearly naked, to the woman he loved.
Leith knew how Farlan had suffered for that, and how Rory had.
Rory would never let that happen again.
Besides, Leith was Rory’s heir, at least for the time being. How could Rory let him go?
So he paced and pondered and thought about impossibilities. At night he lay aching, and tried to imagine Rhian there with him. He recalled when they had lain so close, so connected, that they could catch one another’s thoughts, and tried to catch them again. But the distance proved too great.
Surely, surely she thought of him as he thought of her. With his child inside her, surely she did. Did the child grow well? What best might he do for his son, and his son’s mother?
He wanted to tell his own mother the truth, confess how he’d fallen in love at MacBeith, with the old chief’s daughter. How he’d left the better part of his heart behind. He wanted to tell his sister, but he felt reluctant to involve her in his tangle.
He tramped the grounds to tire himself out, and worked his hand when no one could see. He’d never been a man suited to strategy or weighty problems. Now he dared not speak a word or take a wrong action.
“I am ill-suited for this,” he muttered to himself as he walked out to watch the men drilling in the bright morning sunlight.
Rory was there and at practice, as he should not be, with that wound in his back. How did he endure it?
The scowl on Rory’s face denoted he did not endure without pain. If there was a more stubborn man in all Scotland than Rory MacLeod, Leith did not know his name.
The men worked nearly silently, with none of the customary banter or teasing insults, which in itself was telling. Rory had been in a permanent bad mood since Leith had returned. No one wanted to cross him.
Leith stood to one side, arms crossed upon his chest, watching the men work and sweat.
But his gaze wandered up and away. Across the loch and through the distances, till it found the stronghold situated halfway up the rise on the far side of the glen. Visible in the clear air, MacBeith’s keep looked almost like a place of dreams.
A sword point dug into the turf beside him and made him jump.
“There,” a hard voice said. “Take it up.”
Leith eyed the weapon. Rory’s sword, with the copper-inlaid pommel, still aquiver from the power of Rory’s thrust.
“I will no’ use your sword.” And he had lost his own, leaving it somewhere on the bloodied field the night of his capture. When the angel had found him.
He focused on the face of Rory, who stood beside him, aggression in his every line. It came to Leith that his friend did not look well. Beneath the sweat of exertion, his face had turned sickly pale, and those new lines, the ones that had appeared since Farlan left, bit deep.
Rory missed his friend. And he thrust that pain away from him by force, just like the pain in his back.
“Then fetch another,” he growled, no mercy at all in his eyes. “There are plenty in the armory. I ha’ the smiths working day and night.”
