“Get back to work,” Rory told him, “if ye ha’ the backbone for it.”
Leith flexed the fingers of his right hand. He’d been working hard and could now hold a sword, though without much authority. Doing so caused him pain. Rory did not, at the moment, feel sympathetic.
“Ye be in a vile mood this morning, cousin.” Leith’s blue-gray eyes watched him carefully. “D’ye mean to work us till we drop?”
Rory sneered. “Will ye behave like men and no’ wains? We ha’ no long before we will be at war in earnest. I wish to end it then.” He would deal no more with MacBeith. With mercy.
“I thought, perhaps”—Leith lowered his voice to a rumble—“ye were upset about the child.”
The child, the heir with which Leith’s treacherous woman would supposedly present him. Rory tossed his head and said savagely, “I care naught for the MacBeith brat. It may no’ survive by any road. Many bairns do no’.”
Leith’s eyes widened, and he took a step backward. “Is this what it has come to, cousin? That ye wish my child ill?” Ire bloomed in his eyes. “Mayhap I should tak’ Rhian and go.”
“To MacBeith? So ye might harbor the heir to MacLeod there? Aye, and would ye turn yer coat like Farlan?” Rory had no one he could trust. No one.
He rarely saw Leith suffused with rage. It happened seldom, but it happened now. He drew himself up and regarded Rory as he might a stranger. “At least there at MacBeith we might feel welcome.”
“Aye, they will tak’ ye in with open arms, these fine, upstanding MacBeith clansmen, who want ye dead.”
“As do ye, cousin?”
“I do no’ want ye dead.” Rory wanted Leith back. His loyalty, his laughter, the times that used to be when they fought and ran and played together. When loyalty was not a gnarled tangle, and he knew without doubt who cared for him.
“Only my son?” Leith threw the words at him and began to turn away. Rory snagged his arm.
“One thing before ye go,” he snarled. “That woman o’ yours, Rhian, will no’ see her sister again.”
“Eh? Why no’?”
Because they scheme together. They scheme against me. Rory did not say that. Leith might not know that Saerla plannedto kill him. The scheme might have been hatched between the two women.
He hoped so.
“Saerla MacBeith is a prisoner. She has forfeited any and all privileges.”
Leith’s eyes narrowed. “Rhian is tending her. That wound on her head—”
“No more. The prisoner shall have no visitors.”
“Rhian—Rhian will no’ like it.”
Rory spat, “I do no’ care what Rhian likes.”
“Wha’ has happened? Rory?”
“Ask yer woman.”
“I am asking ye, cousin.”
“I went to see the prisoner last evening, to tell her that her fate and her life lay in her sister Moira’s hands. When I did, she drew a weapon on me.”
“A weapon!”
“Aye.” Rory bared his teeth. “She could have come by it only one way. Talk to yer bitch o’ a woman.”
He stalked away before Leith could reply, or strike him for the slur. But not before he saw the desire to do so in his cousin’s eyes.
*
