Page 13 of The Highlander’s Untamed Lady

“This.” She repeated the word on a shuddered exhale. “What is ‘this?’ Is it a…a…child?”

“She’s my wife.” A masculine voice sounded behind her.

Diana spun around and found the man with twig legs standing with a plaid-wrapped form at his side. His face was as gaunt as that of the dead woman, his eyes large and haunted in his too thin face. He blinked his luminous eyes rapidly, but tears melted from the corners regardless. “She was giving her food to the lad. I dinna know she’d been doing it. She…” He swallowed. “She was too weak to go on.” His voice caught and pulled at Diana’s heart.

A slight green color tinged his lips.

“I don’t understand,” Diana whispered. “You don’t have enough food?”

The bundled form beside the man turned and a tiny, childlike living skeleton looked up at her with a bewildered gaze. “No one in Scotland does, lady.” His small teeth were green, like his father’s lips.

Diana staggered backward to the carriage and grabbed the velvet bag containing the food Evander had provided her that morning. She hadn’t touched it. Not when she’d been too ensconced in her inner turmoil to notice her empty stomach. The food was wasted on her.

So much food had been wasted on her. Plates of it molding on the floor during her hunger strikes to prove a point to her father, bowls of it spattered the walls, thrown in tantrum, bags of it hardening and growing stale at her side in the coach. And people were dying for want of it.

God, how selfish she’d been.

She ran back to the people with the bag extended, her hands shaking. “Please. Take this.”

The man’s nostrils flared and she knew he could smell the savory beef and cheese within as surely as any hound on a hunt. His eyes became impossibly wide in his face. “My lady?” He looked around at the Mackenzie men.

He and his son were clearly starving, and yet he did not reach for the food.

“Take it.” She pushed it toward him, accidentally hitting his thin chest.

He knocked back several steps and clutched the bag as if she’d given him all the gold in the land.

“Mind ye eat it slow.” Evander appeared at her side. “Bites at a time, aye? Otherwise ye’ll get sick and lose it all.”

The man curled his arms around the bag, glanced at his wife’s dead form, made the sign of a cross, and scuttled off with his son in tow. Neither one of them cried again for the woman who had died sacrificing for her own child.

Diana watched them leave, her heart throbbing with a new ache. Dazed, she turned her stare to Evander. A smear of dirt lined his brow, as if he’d wiped at sweat and replaced it with the filth of his labor. “What is happening in Scotland?” she asked in a trembling voice.

“Dinna ye know?” His green eyes met hers, as sorrowful as they’d been when he regarded her after she realized her father had abandoned her. “The winters are too long. The crops canna grow. The lad was right – no one in Scotland has enough food. Everyone is starving.”

“That’s why you need my dowry,” she surmised. “That’s why you went to such lengths to capture me.”

He nodded. “Please get in the carriage. The men will return soon with Hera and Zeus, and we will continue.” He glanced to the distance over her shoulder where the path lay ahead. “It willna be more than two days before we finally arrive. We’re almost home.”

He smiled at her, but it did not reach his eyes. What smile could after what they’d witnessed? When the grisly task of burying a mother still awaited him?

Home.

The word chilled her as sure as the merciless wind. Scotland would never be her home.

She had no home.

There had been several more stops along the way to the castle. On those occasions, Evander noticed Diana did not emerge from the carriage again. Apparently one such viewing was all she needed.

It was terrible work burying the dead – all the corpses so slight of weight they might as well be small animals rather than humans. But it was God’s work. Sending the spirits into Heaven before the fairies could claim them.

It was on the bleakest day after having to stop three times, when the wind blew harder than it had in the weeks they’d traveled and the sky was black with storms, it was then he caught the outline of Castle Leod rising in the distance. A beacon of everything warm and comforting and right in his life.

But his life was not right, and he was more keenly aware of it than any one person could be. When his father had been alive, the clan had been safe, well-fed. In this time of great need, the Mackenzies had stuck by Evander’s side, relying on him to see them cared for. Despite his own meager meals and his own sacrifices, he had lost twenty-three souls to the ravages of hunger. Twenty-three souls that would forever score his soul, including that of his own dear Emilia.

He climbed the final hill toward his home and hoped the number had not grown in his absence.

The servants awaited him in the courtyard, their cheeks red and shining with the same quiet pride with which they’d held for his father. Evander did not deserve such appreciation.