Annista did not hesitate. With her fingers wrapped around the handle of her knife, she pounded across the hall, traversed the place where Robena had died, and flew up the stairs.
One part of her mind registered that the physician had come out of the solar and stood pressed against the wall, staring. Another part noted someone came in the front door, downstairs.
He called to her. “Annista!”
Very nearly did that make her pause. But she tripped on, her one true focus—
Seumas and Evan struggled together like two bears wrestling for supremacy. Locked in one another’s grip, they grunted and strained and swore, each trying to take the other over. Evenly matched they were, had it not been for Evan’s madness, which Annista could see had his features strained into a rictus. Seumas was a big lad. The trouble was, he played fair.
Evan never had.
Annista tried to cry out when she saw the knife in Evan’s hand, but the sound caught in her throat. Seumas fell back suddenly with a yell. Evan dashed into his father’s room.
Annista followed.
The scene within the chamber impressed itself immediately on her mind. The bed directly across from the door with Earl MacKallan—still seemingly insensible—lying there. The light burning and Mistress MacKallan standing before her husband, her arms spread as if she would protect him with her life.
From her own son.
“Evan,” Mistress MacKallan sobbed, and Annista knew it had been she who’d screamed, alerting them all. Somehow unseen, Evan had made his way into the house, and at her first glimpse of him—
“Get out o’ the way, Mother.”
“Nay, Evan. Please!”
“I will hurt ye if I must.”
“Wha’ d’ye want wi’ your father? What—ha’ ye no’ done him harm enough?”
“He was never fair to me.” Evan’s broad back was directly in front of Annista and for an instant she thought his mother might talk him round. That the men might arrive in time.
She could hear them pounding up the stairs and glanced toward the door. Seumas lay collapsed in the hallway—dead? The physician knelt beside him. And there—
Alan. Chest heaving, face stark and white, his eyes reaching for her.
Come, she almost heard him say.Come away.
Then Evan bulled his way forward, and she lost track of everything behind her.
“Out o’ the way, Mother,” Evan said again.
“Nay!”
Evan reached out with filthy, bloodied hands, plucked his mother up, and more than half threw her aside. She gave a cry as she fell to the floor.
“Look at me, old man,” Evan thundered at his father. “Ye’ve blamed me for everything all my life long. A bane ye ha’ been to me. Now ye will look at me and see who I am.”
The earl did not stir or open his eyes. Incapable—in fact he appeared dead. Was he?
On the floor, Lady MacKallan sobbed.
From the doorway, low and steady, Alan said, “If ye’ve a quarrel here, brother, ye will tak’ it up wi’ me.”
Evan spun—he did it clumsily, and Annista sensed all was not well with him. A sickness of the body? Or of the mind?
He eyed his brother, who stood in the doorway with a sword in one hand, bright red blood showing above the bandages on his chest.
Evan sneered. “I do no’ think so.”
