Tavish emerged just as she reached the doorway, and the sweet smell that always surrounded the dark man bloomed from the cottage. Tavish caught her by the shoulders.
“Glenna, no,” he said. “Don’t.”
She pulled away from him and entered. But then she staggered back with a strangled shriek.
Frang Roy’s body was tied to a chair at a table, where a meal had been laid; over the hearth hung a crucifix, its corpus defiled. And along the stones of the chimney were laid row after row of human bones, the corners topped with grinning skulls and decorated with bundles of dried roots and herbs, pouches like the one still hidden behind Glenna’s wardrobe.
Before the edifice, a square in the floor was shifted slightly off angle. Tavish reached down and pulled the square away, revealing a dark tunnel and ladder, and the hush of waves whispered from the blackness.
He looked up at her, and she knew what he was thinking, but all she could say was, “Tavish, Dubhán is with my father.”
* * * *
Dubhán walked on silent feet into Iain Douglas’s chamber. He hadn’t been inside this room in the daylight for nearly thirty years. The old man lay on his bed, a pretty maid and the fat Harriet at his side.
“Oh, Dubhán,” the old woman cried, “thank God you’ve come.”
He smiled at them all. “I should always come when duty to my lord calls me. Will you give the laird privacy to confess his sins?”
They left so easily. So mildly. He slid the bolt after them, without a whisper of sound. He had the gift of silence, after so many years being surrounded by bones and ghosts.
It gave one a greater appreciation for the screams.
He approached the bed, his hands already outstretched. He had waited so long to fulfill this, his final duty. Then his debt would be paid. It must be paid.
Iain’s eyes opened. “Dubhán,” he slurred.
“Hello, old friend,” he said in a singsong. “You called for me and I came.”
“Tell,” Iain said. “Meck.”
“Meg?” Dubhán repeated with interest. “Of course. Meg. So lovely. My favorite.” He smoothed the blankets over Iain’s thin form, creased them, caressed the dying man’s hairless head. “I kept her the longest, you know. I made her last. Her skull—ah! So finely turned! It has a place of honor. The lord has used my talents well.”
“Har-cray.”
“Aye. He was my savior from the slave market. The white men would have used me as a tool; Lord Hargrave taught me how to make tools. And poison. Poison that can be masked as a sacrament; sickness that can be blamed on plague.” He caressed Iain’s head again. “I was supposed to have killed you long ago. But I wanted you to come to me. I knew you had to know. And I knew that, if I was very patient, you would ask. Now I can tell you.”
Dubhán leaned down to Iain’s ear. “She lived for almost a year after the lord gave her to me,” he whispered, his words so quiet he could barely hear them himself. “Meg. Meg. Meg. I love her name. I love saying it. Sometimes I would chain her to the gravestone that bears her name and let her watch the Towe—”
Dubhán felt a hot pinch in his diaphragm, and he leaned back to look down.
The time-worn hilt of an old dagger was protruding from his abdomen.
Iain Douglas was looking directly into his eyes.
Dubhán tasted the blood filling his mouth, but it wasn’t unpleasant to him, and so he relished it for a moment longer.
Yes, now at last he would be free.
* * * *
Tavish rushed ahead to open the door to Iain’s chamber. But it was bolted from the inside. He threw his shoulder against it twice until the door burst inward and Glenna ran past him.
The floor was covered in blood, and Dubhán was sprawled atop Iain. Glenna screamed and ripped the monk away without a glance for him, and Dubhán tumbled to the floor easily, his eyes wide, the hilt of a blade like a mast in the evil hulk of him.
“Da!” Glenna sobbed, her hands going to Iain’s face. “Da.” She turned her head to look at Tavish, and the pain in her face pierced him. “Dubhán killed him. All these years, he never would see him, and now I know why, and he killed him.”
Tavish went to his wife’s side and turned her into his embrace while she wept, but he looked at Iain Douglas’s face and knew the truth right away.
