Page 34 of Outlaw Ever After

“Ye shake the bowl and dump them out onto the board!” Gertrude crowed. “The letter they form will be the first letter of the man’s name to whom ye’re destined to wed.”

The ladies laughed with matronly amusement.

Peigi smiled, and blessedly, Aileana relented to the fun for now, when a draft wavered the torches ensconced around the great hall of the once-proud Comyn stronghold, as the front doors opened down the corridor. Had another contestant arrived? Nine of the ten places were already filled. Her stomach knotted as she looked out over the contestants already here, her nose curling in distaste at Laird Graham, who might be a wealthy lord, but was widowed twice, staunchly Protestant, and made no effort to hide his disdain of Catholics.

And has a brood of offspring for ye to inherit , a green-eyed warrior teased in the recesses of her mind.

Who was the new arrival yet to enter? Better than Graham, or worse?

She shook the apples and dumped them out, sensing him pushing his way down the center of the hall. Her skin littered with gooseflesh beneath her heavy velvets. The apples tumbled out in disarray, arching into a…

Chapter Eleven

Alexander tapped Faunus to cantering as wind lapped at his ears and face.

He’d found the chink in Seamus Grant’s indisputable charter of Castle Freuchie. The deputy comptroller had been given the reins to call Grant, in arrears of sixty pounds sterling, to appear at Court and be formally stripped of his charter.

The entire journey, he’d steeled himself. But as he traveled beneath an archway of spindly branches creaking on the wind, as brittle leaves swirled across the path like gamboling nymphs, he rose a hillock and Castle Freuchie hit his vision like a war hammer.

Memories rushed back, a deluge after a drought, washing away his thoughts like topsoil.

He hadn’t steeled himself nearly enough.

“I swear it on our clan oath! I will see ye vindicated…”

A vow he’d once screamed into the wind.

Somewhere, in one of the castle’s renovations, was certain to lie his sire’s skull. He carried a detailed list of exact locations where four and ten years ago, Seamus had requested borrowing royal money for specific repairs. After Alex resolved this discrepancy , the Earl of Arran himself had agreed to consider rechartering it to him as the new steward of the castle.

He’d known biding his time, using his mind over his muscle, would eventually pay off.

“I shall finally see ye buried, Da.”

He slowed to a halt to absorb the glow of the castle upon the River Spey like holy light shining on his atrophied soul. The magnificent castle, where his sire’s skull languished, hidden like a dirty secret.

It swarmed with celebration as visitors dotted the grounds with their encampments, a picture of happiness while the dormant need for retribution writhed within him.

“Home ,” he dared to whisper as if trying to find the truth in the word, because he’d never thought there’d be a chance to reclaim it, and without the figment of a lass with whom he’d once envisioned sharing it, the word hung hollow, leaving a rancidness on his tongue—

Nay go there.

Mayhap she’d never been real. Mayhap the songbird with the enchanting voice had been a tricky fairy , bewitching him, distracting him.

He was glad she’d disappeared. He might have foregone this retribution to placate his songbird begging a simple life. He only regretted that he’d wasted so much time searching for a lass who didn’t want to be found. He’d certainly not pined like a milksop for three pathetic months.

He held out his hands in supplication to the skies as if his sire were watching him. What better time to release a soul to heaven than during Samhain when the veil betwixt Christendom and the olden ways thinned?

Tapping his heels, Faunus lumbered into a trot, then a lope, as a lyre upon his thigh bounced.

He detoured off the high road, into the Tomvaich Wood, where he’d once gone a-mushrooming with the villagers and their pigs—a barefoot sprite, despite his mother scolding him to wear his boots.

Crimson leaves clung to the maples above, rustling on the breeze and promising winter. He reached up to skim his fingertips against them. They’d once seemed so looming to a laddie.

Singing rose and fell as he rode closer to Freuchie’s hamlet. Thatched roofs blinked between the trees as lassies cut oat stalks and placed them in a basket. He ignored the ruin of another cottage far in the distance, rising up to the sky:

“But lo behold our lovers dear whose worlds collide on three,

For only when the veil thins can their love be free.