Page 43 of Highland Storm

“Yours included?”

“You are my brother, after all.”

Keane attempted to laugh, but the sound came out bitter. “A lot of sway that won me at your gates.”

Lael’s face fell. She gripped the bars with both hands. “Dinna make light of this, Keane. This is a serious matter, and ye dinna catch the king in a forgiving mood.”

“Is he ever?”

Lael gave him another impatient look, clearly in a less jovial mood than even Keane—which was saying quite a lot. “Aye,” she said quickly. “I have come to know the man and he is not the villain I once feared.”

“So says the woman who once cuffed him in the face?”

His sister’s cheeks blossomed with color. But she was being sincere, he realized, and she was defending the man whom she’d once sworn to kill—the very man who’d stolen their sister Catrìona from her bed in the middle of the night and then carried her south to barter in marriage to a fat, greasy-haired English earl. “So now ye tell me ye’ve a fondness for the eejit?”

“Shhhh!” Lael demanded, turning her head to be certain the guards did not overhear. “Dinna say such things! ’Tis no time for jests, brother.”

“Apparently not. It appears to me ye lost your good humor, right along with your desire for vengeance.”

“Aye, well, at least I do not wear his livery and then break his faith with every other word!”

Leave it to his sister not to mince words. Keane said naught in response, for it was the truth she spoke, and despite that he was innocent of whatever charges he had been accused of, he was indeed being a hypocrite, for he’d accepted a post he was loyal to in action, but not in spirit. He served a king he did not believe in.

Lael released the prison bars, crossing her arms, stepping back to survey his cell. “If they dinna release ye soon, I will send blankets and food.”

Keane nodded a bit more soberly, realizing his sister was tormented. He didn’t wish to give her any more grief.

She pointed to the cell beside him. “Even after all these years, I canna come here and not think of her. This is where they found her, ye ken.”

Aveline of Teviotdale.

Even without her speaking the name, Keane knew instinctively that it was who Lael was referring to. Aveline had been Rogan MacLaren’s mistress, sent to spy upon Lìli in Dubhtolargg. Though instead of counting her good fortune to be away from Rogan, the lass begged Aidan to return her to Keppenach to bear Rogan’s babe. And then she’d vanished, just as simply as that. Apparently Rogan buried her alive. When they discovered her body, her mouth had been stuffed with a wad of cloth, her hands were gnarled, her fingers bent to claws, as though she’d taken her last breath while attempting to scratch her way out of the casket she’d been buried in. There were claw marks along the ceiling of her tomb, bloodstains marking the splintered wood and splinters beneath her black nails.

Lael pulled her cloak together against the damp chill of the gaols. “They locked me in the cell with her. I found her only by chance, digging to pass the time.”

Rogan MacLaren was long dead, but the stories of his terror lived on. Keane could still spy the agony of it writ upon Lael’s face. “Rogan was a bastard,” he said.

“Tell me about it,” she agreed. “And while you’re at it, tell me ye dinna know that she was a daughter of Moray.”

Keane’s gaze must have registered his shock.

“You did not know?” his sister asked breathlessly, clearly relieved to discover it was so. She exhaled a long breath and her shoulders rested, a bit more relaxed.

“Lianae?”

Lael nodded. “’Tis true,” she said. “She confessed as much before the king, and I heard it with my own two ears.”

“A daughter of Óengus?” Keane said, just to be sure he did not misunderstand.

Lael nodded. “The very one.”

Closing his eyes and leaning his forehead against the bars, Keane processed the new information. For a long, long moment, he didn’t know how to respond. He thought about the bruises on Lianae’s legs, and realized what it meant: The man she would have been promised to would be a man of consequence… the Earl of Moray came to mind—a rightful claimant to the throne. Despite that fitz Duncan should have inherited the crown as King Duncan’s eldest son, he took a bribe instead, settling for the title of Mormaer. The man’s temper was renown. He was a cruel bastard on the field, to be sure. Clearly, he was in his bedroom as well. It was said he, himself, had felled Óengus of Moray on the field during the battle at Stracathro in Forfarshire…

Fitz Duncan killed Lianae’s father.

Had they already spoken their vows?

The pit of Keane’s stomach turned at the thought.