CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHT
Mingary Castle, Ardnamurchan, Scottish western coast, Scotland, 1232
“Fourteen south, six east along the ridge road. The rest I scattered through the fishing villages where the Norseman’s scouts willnae even ken they’re there.”
Niall stood in the doorway of the solar with his arms folded, delivering the report with the flat disinterest of a man recounting the weather. He was broad, scarred across the knuckles, and possessed the particular talent of never asking a question that wasn’t his business.
Douglas Graham didn’t look up from the map he was studying. “And?”
“Ragnar’s patrols watched ‘em go. Two scouts tracked our lads past the headland before turnin’ back.” A pause. “They think ye’re pullin’ out.”
“Aye.” Douglas traced the curve of Uist’s southern coastline with his thumbnail. “That’s the idea.”
Silence settled between them, filled only by the wind shouldering against Mingary’s seaward wall. The castle clung to its headland like a fist of dark stone, squat and graceless, its curtain walls angled to break the Atlantic gales that hammered the peninsula nine months out of twelve.
But it had not been built for a Graham.
Douglas had taken it through leverage and a well-timed loan to a lesser chief who’d drunk his way through three harvests—the kind of transaction that would never be found in a charter but held firmer than any royal seal.
Niall shifted his weight. “Some of the lads are wonderin’ when they can come back.”
“They’ve served their purpose well enough I’d say.” Douglas straightened from the table. “Half of ‘em dinnae ken why they were sent in the first place, Niall. The other half ken better than tae talk. Let ‘em scatter.”
Niall absorbed this the way he absorbed everything—without expression, without objection. It was why Douglas kept him around. He’d always believed that loyalty was cheap and silence expensive.
And Niall gave it freely.
“There’s the matter of the captain,” Niall said. “He’s been in the lower hall since before dawn. Nervous as a rabbit in a snare.”
“Good.” Douglas picked up the cup of wine he hadn’t touched yet and studied it without drinking. “Nervous men listen.”
“Want me tae bring him up?”
“Nay.” He set the cup down. Smoothed a crease in the map that didn’t need smoothing. “Let him sit in it a while longer.”
Niall’s mouth twitched—the closest he came to commentary. “Ye’ve been lettin’ a lot of things justsitlately, me laird.”
“I dinnae appreciate yer tone.” Douglas said, his hazel eyes flashing. “Six weeks isnae sittin’, Niall. ‘Tis buildin’.”
Douglas moved to the window. Beyond the headland, the sound stretched gray and restless toward Mull, and past that, the open water where the shipping lanes bent north toward Uist. He could see the route in his mind the way other men saw roads—every current, every blind approach, every stretch where a ship could change course without being spotted from shore. “The Stag of Uist is a disciplined man. And such men trust their own judgment. They watch, they weigh, they count.” He turned. “So I gave him somethin’ tae count. Withdrawals. Departures. Men leavin’ me service in numbers that tell a very specific story.”
“That ye’ve lost yer nerve.”
“That I’ve lost me resources. Me men. Me stomach fer the fight.” The corner of Douglas’s mouth curled. “After the village—after I lost Cormac and the others in that alley—he expects me tae cower in some obscure corner of Scotland tae lick me wounds. And the Stag has been watching me dae exactly that fer six weeks.”
“Have ye?” Niall asked, and it was the closest thing to a probing question he’d offered in months.
Douglas held his gaze. “What dae ye think?”
Niall said nothing. Which was, of course, the right answer.
The lower hall smelled of brine and tallow and stone that never fully dried. Mingary sat so close to the water that the sea found its way into everything—the mortar, the timber, the air itself.
Douglas descended the stone stairs with the measured stride of a man who understood that making someone wait was its own currency, and took the chair across from the cold hearth without offering so much as a greeting.
Rowan Taversham stood near the grate, grizzled and wind-beaten, with the leathery hands of a man who’d spent twenty years hauling rope and reading tide charts. He operated a merchant cog out of the Orkney routes—a vessel licensed to trade along Ragnar Ketilsson’s coastal waters under the Bergen compact.
He was also two hundred marks in debt to a moneylender in Kirkwall who had recently, and quite coincidentally, come under Douglas Graham’s patronage.
