Glenna went first to the kitchen and gave instructions for a meal to be sent to her father’s room, and during the return trip through the courtyard, she kept watch for Tavish. He was in none of the craft buildings, and so she came back to the hold. The handful of servants she questioned didn’t know his whereabouts, although the last—a heavyset washerwoman—said she thought she’d seen the laird heading up the path away from the Tower.
Glenna stood on the threshold of the main door for a pair of moments, her eyes flicking between the eastern tower corridor and the village. She impulsively grabbed a basket from a peg near the door and set off across the bridge.
She took the path through the center of the village, more crowded with folk than Glenna could ever recall, and though everyone seemed to know who she was, not one face was familiar to her. She kept a tight smile on her lips and answered the openly curious greetings, and by the time she found herself on the far side of the settlement at the base of the cliff path, she felt quite uneasy.
Who were all these people? And where was Tavish?
Glenna started up the path to the doocot, glad for the shaded quiet and the familiar rounded roof that came into view around the bend. Her slippers crunched the twigs and leaves from the chestnuts and oaks overhead, each step sending forth the smell of fresh green. She looked down as she neared the stone threshold of the doocot and stopped.
Splotches of dull red marred the verdant forest carpet, in a line leading directly to the aviary. She gathered her skirts in one hand before following the splattered trail farther up the cliff amidst the disturbed detritus of the path, as if something had been dragged. Glenna walked back to the stone dwelling; the splotches started just before the door.
They could only be blood.
She looked up the path once more. Could Dubhán be injured?
She recalled Frang Roy’s suggestion that the elimination of the monk could only be to their mutual benefit. Could the rough farmer be even now lurking in the wood, watching her?
Could he be the reason Tavish had not returned?
Glenna left the basket on the stone threshold and then used both hands to hold her hems from the menacing splotches as she hurried up the track. The gravestones rose up from the crest of the clearing like ancient and curious sentries from a long-forgotten dream. She weaved through the plots quickly toward the small, vined hermitage when a flash of swaying color at the cliff edge caught her eye.
She glanced to the right, gasped, then stumbled on her feet and fell behind a wide obelisk whose markings had been scrubbed smooth by the salty air. Glenna crouched there for a moment on her hands and knees, heart pounding, telling herself that what she had seen had been nothing more than a trick of the shadows, a flash of water and tree bark through wind-tossed boughs.
She gathered her feet beneath her and rose up slowly, cold perspiration breaking out at her hairline as she looked across the gravestones toward the firth. It was no trick of the light.
The upper half of Frang Roy’s body was visible in the dappled shadows over the edge of the cliff, hanging from a thick, ropy vine around his neck. His face was purple-black.
Glenna screamed.
* * * *
Tavish had just finished searching the last of the cottages when Alec rushed around the corner of the path.
“Have you found her?” Tavish asked in a low voice.
Alec shook his head. “But you’d best come quickly, laird; there’s been screams heard from the cliff. A woman’s.”
Tavish didn’t question Alec further but broke into a run toward the snaking path. His boots flew over the gravel and ruts as his strides lengthened to climbing lunges. He heard it then himself, a woman’s sobs in the graveyard ahead.
“Audrey!”
He burst into the small clearing and saw her there, standing among the stones. But it wasn’t Audrey, it was Glenna—her hands covering her mouth to stifle her cries.
And there was the dark hermit monk, Dubhán, his face pivoting, seeming unsure as to whether he should fly to Glenna’s side or to the cliff. But why…?
“Tavish,” Glenna gasped, seeing his arrival. She pointed toward the firth, where Frang Roy hung dead from a tree.
Tavish went to her, wrapping his arms about her and turning her away from the corpse. “Glenna, what’s happened? What are you doing here?”
“I came to the—I was looking for you and…and I saw blood on the path,” she breathed into his shoulder. Her body trembled against his. “I thought Frang had hurt someone. Then I saw…I saw…”
“Shh,” Tavish said. “All right. You’re safe.”
“I thought perhaps he had harmed you, like he said he would. He never left Roscraig. He wanted me to poison you. He said—”
“Poison?” Tavish repeated, but then running footsteps sounded behind him, and Tavish looked over his shoulder at the man at arms.
“Is it her, la—good lord!”
