The lad with the black hair tossed his head.They only tell ye that to keep ye from drowning.
I do no’ want to drown,said the lad with the brown hair.And ’tis a long way across.
Besides,protested the fair-haired lad,’tis dangerous o’er there. We could be kilt.
The lad with the black hair sneered.Ye maun learn no’ to be afraid. I will be chief one day. Wha’ I say goes.
The other two lads exchanged glances.
Someday, all o’ this will be ours.
It had been her first Vision. The first she ever received.
Subsequent Visions, dire ones, far more powerful ones, had thrust it from her mind. Over the years she’d remembered more the unexpectedness of the Seeing than what it had contained. The three lads whom she did not know meant nothing to her.
She’d come to herself, on that warm summer’s day, to the sound of her name being called.
Saerla?
Saerla!
Her sisters and her brother called her name, upset because they could not find her, and it had ceased to be a game. Theycould not find her because she hadn’t been there in the stone circle. She’d been on the far side of the glen. But how could she have forgotten?
She awoke now from the haze provided by Rhian’s draught to find herself lying flat on her back upon the bed in her prison. Just as she’d been lying in the stone circle that day, when her loved ones called for her.
On that day, the mist of light had surrounded her, borne her up, carried and perhaps consoled her. A curious thing to be there in one place and yet somewhere else in spirit. Able to See with the mind’s eye. Or perhaps the eye of the spirit.
She knew the three lads now, to be sure she did. They looked quite different from what they had but still, in a curious way, the same. Farlan with his brown mane and the somehow curious look in his eyes. Leith with a face made even then for laughter.
Rory MacLeod. Imperious. Handsome. With his world held securely in his two hands.
Why would she revisit that first experience with the Sight? And why See those lads again?
They’d been running and playing on the green turf just like she had with her brother and sisters. But it had turned dark at Rory’s direction. Had they ventured into the water? They might have drowned.
They had not.
She closed her eyes once more and drew a breath. They’d been close back then, the three lads. She’d been able to feel the bonds between them.
For Rory and Farlan, those bonds had now broken. A deep wound, that had to be. But Rory MacLeod was not an easy person—that was clear enough from her limited encounters with him. Perhaps the break had always been destined.
Perhaps it followed that she, Saerla, was here for a reason. To, as she’d told Rhian, kill Rory. But killing that lad she’d just Seen seemed a far cry from slaying the man.
The boy had been bossy and arrogant, aye, yet there had been something about him, a strength far beyond his years. An indomitable spirit. A—a dark sort of light.
She would not want to have harmed that boy, to still the blood that beat so wildly through him. The boy, surely, existed yet within the man.
Or perhaps not. Mayhap the boy had already died.
She sat up on the bed, trying to gather her scattered energies before climbing to her feet. Still unsteady, she walked to the chamber’s single window.
High and narrow, it would not afford even her slight body an escape. Indeed, it offered only a sliver of a view. This must indeed be a fine accommodation, for it faced out over the glen. She could see bright green turf, the blue glint of the loch, the hills beyond.
Home.
For an instant, she ached so that she did not think she could bear it. She caught herself up sharply. Just as Rory was no longer a lad, she was no longer a wee lass caught in her first Vision.
She was a Seer, aye. She was a woman also.
