Page 59 of The Highland Laird’s Hellion Bride

He did not stop to consider whether that was wise. There wasn’t time to consider much of anything beyond what needed doing next.

Mrs. McAulay had the frightened servants moving before he’d even thought to send anyone to fetch her, herding them out of the sheds nearest the blaze. Elspeth was beside her.

He hadn’t ordered that. He hadn’t ordered anything of the sort, and when he caught sight of her—skirts knotted up out of the mud, hauling a squalling goat by its lead rope while a stable girl half her age wept into the animal’s neck—his first instinct was to shout her back toward the keep where it was safe.

He didn’t. There wasn’t a spare breath to waste on an argument he already knew he’d lose, and the goat at least seemed to trust her more than it trusted anyone else currently attempting to move it.

“Water’s short at the south line!” someone called.

Magnus turned toward it and found his eyes had gone to Elspeth first anyway, checking the distance between her and the worst of the flame, before he let himself look at anything the man calling for water actually needed.

She was fine. She was thirty feet clear of the fire, hauling a second goat now, Mrs. McAulay shouting instructions at her that she seemed, against all odds, to be following.

Magnus turned back to the water line and did not look at her again for the better part of ten minutes, which cost him considerably more effort than carrying the beams had.

The bucket lines held. That was the only mercy of it. The rain from the earlier storm had left the ground sodden enough that the fire had nowhere easy to run once they’d wet down the walls on either side.

By the time the sky started going grey at the edges instead of merely orange, the flames had dropped to smoke and hissing embers, and men stood knee-deep in ash arguing about whose boots were ruined worse.

Magnus stood in the wreckage of the furnace shed with his hands blackened to the wrists and found himself, for the first time since the pounding had started at the armory door, with nothing left that urgently needed doing.

He looked for Elspeth again. She was sitting on an overturned water barrel near the sheds, a blanket someone had produced from somewhere draped around her shoulders, Mrs. McAulay beside her doing something practical with a cup of something hot.

She looked up and spotted him across the yard at nearly the same moment, and neither of them moved toward the other.

“Me Laird.” Duncan’s voice, low, close, meant for him alone.

Magnus turned and found his cousin crouched near the base of the closest wall, where the stone had gone black and slick in a way the rest of it hadn’t.

“What?”

“Come and look at this.”

He crossed to him.

Duncan didn’t point at anything, only tilted his chin toward the ground, where a dark stain ran along the base of the stones in a line too straight, too deliberate, to belong to anything that had burned.

Magnus crouched and touched two fingers to it. They came away slick, and when he lifted them to his nose, the smell was unmistakable even under the char.

“Oil.”

“Aye.”

“Thunderstorms daenae pour oil onto stones,” Magnus murmured.

Duncan said nothing to that. He didn’t need to.

“Someone wanted this to burn hotter and faster than it should have.” Magnus stood up, wiping his fingers on his already ruined shirt, his eyes moving along the length of the wall, tracing where the oil-line ran, how far it reached, how carefully it had been laid before ever a spark touched it. “Someone wanted fear, Duncan. Nae just a fire, but fear.”

“Ye think it’s him.”

Magnus didn’t answer that directly. “Whoever it was kent this castle well enough to find the furnaces in the dark, in a storm, and lay a line straight enough that it caught the whole wall at once. That’s nae a stranger’s work.”

“And they kent the timing.” Duncan’s voice had gone quieter still. “The whole clan’s been talking about nothing but the handfasting for a fortnight. Word of that travels. If someone wanted the castle looking the other way, celebrating a—” He stopped.

Magnus looked at him.

“Celebrating an heir,” Duncan finished.