“That is o’ nay matter. Alan, d’ye promise?”
He closed his eyes for a moment. Had he been a praying man, he might have uttered some imprecation. But all prayers had long ago flown from him.
“Does she ken, this young woman, that she’ll be marrying wi’ me and no’ Evan?”
The remainder of Ma’s breath left her in a whoosh. “Nay. She’ll find out when she arrives.”
“God help her,” Alan said.
Chapter Three
“I need for ye to make me a promise.” Mother whispered the words to Annista under the guise of leaning close and drawing her cloak up around her neck. The morning held a stark chill, spring having yet only barely tiptoed into these northern hills and glens. Indeed, snow still lay on the tops of the distant mountains.
Annista would have a chilly journey, if not a lengthy one. Kallan lay no great distance from home.
It might as well be half of Scotland away. Robena had come home but once, and they had visited her there only the once also.
“What is it?” She met her mother’s gaze in the uncertain light, the gloom that boded either rain or snow.
Ma leaned still closer. “Promise me ye will kill him.”
Annista clamped down hard on her rampant emotions. She’d run a whole gamut of them from doubt to anger to terror, and had settled—so she thought—into a measure of hard resolve. But now, at her mother’s words, her stomach churned with something close to panic.
She was going away to marry a man she did not want. One she was convinced had killed her sister.
She went with but one purpose.
Unflinching, she held her mother’s gaze. “Aye, I do so promise.”
“Good, good.” The words were little more than breaths in Mother’s throat, but her eyes—och, her eyes burned with near-maniacal fervor. “And here’s an extra bit o’ encouragement for ye. Once ye’ve killed him—and mind ye, I do no’ care how so long as ’tis bloody—ye will be a widow and can come home. Unless,” the fervor backed off a step, “there’s a bairn ye will no’ leave behind.”
“There will be nay bairns,” Annista said with grim resolve. “If ye suppose I will let that monster touch me—”
“Ye may have to. Sacrifices ha’ to be made on behalf o’ justice.”
“Wha’ are ye two blathering about?” Father stepped up to them, looking bored rather than curious. He would be accompanying Annista, along with a contingent of guards—times were dangerous even this far north—and Annista’s maid, Bonnie. To make sure Annista went through with it, no doubt, though he said he went only to bear witness and visit his old friend.
“I ha’ just been telling Annista how grateful we are to her for going to tak’ her dear sister’s place.”
For an instant, a great grief showed in Robert MacRowan’s eyes. He was not an unfeeling man at his best and, presumably, cared for his daughters if not so much as for himself.
Had he truly known what Evan MacKallan was when he’d sent Robena to him? Perhaps not the full of it. But, she reminded herself, he certainly knew what the man was now. Yet to assure his own position, he sent Annista, regardless.
Her heart hardened. She looked at her father with clear eyes in the cold morning light.
Brown hair like her own, only thinning and creeping back across his head, a truth now hidden by his bonnet. His eyes, also like hers, were hazel. Had she inherited his stubborn jaw and strong nose? She hoped not.
“Let us go.” He dismissed Annista’s feelings and his own. “Before the accursed rain starts.”
Mother embraced Annista and under cover of a supposed farewell whispered a final question. “Ye ha’ the knife?”
“Aye.”
To Annista’s great surprise and mild horror, Mother had produced the dagger, one small enough to be carried secreted around a woman’s person. It had been given during the moments Mother had supposedly been telling Annista precisely what happened between a man and a woman in the privacy of the marriage bed.
Naught Annista did not already know. She and Robena used to laugh about it—
Robena.
