Sophia James - Ashblane's Lady

Two hours later she was summoned back to the clearing where the Laird of Ullyot sat.

‘Quinlan says ye to be a witch.’ His voice was deep but tired. ‘My men believe it, too,’ he added. ‘They say ye charmed the sickness from me.’

‘Given the limited skills of your own physician, their superstitions do not surprise me.’

She frowned as he tipped back his head and laughed, though the humour did not touch his eyes—rather it shadowed them in an unspoken distance. ‘And yet you were not afraid?’

He faced her directly now, his irises catching the red light of a setting sun. Not quite silver, more the burnished hue of the wings of the moth that lived in the glens. And angry. Feeling his censure, she returned crisply, ‘Once I touched you I knew that you would not die. If I had thought you to be unsavable, I could have stood back and pleaded ignorance, leaving your physician to finish the bad job he had started.’

‘But by then ye had cursed me out loud. Nobody would have forgotten that.’

She did not answer and he swore softly, shifting his position as if to better accommodate his shoulder.

‘Quinlan says you closed your eyes and read my blood with your fingertips. He said you asked for silence so that you could hear the sound of my bones. Like a witch would listen. Hale, my physician, says the same.’

‘Your men speak nonsense, Laird Ullyot.’ She noticed his eyes up close were beaded with a dark blue. They disconcerted her with their directness and she struggled for normalcy. ‘I need to see if your fever is lessened,’ she explained as she placed her hand on his forehead.

‘It has gone.’ His voice was quiet and disengaged.

‘Your wounds, then. Does the pain increase?’

‘No.’

‘I need to look.’ Feeling him stiffen, she leaned forward to take his bandaged arm in her hands. The appendage was hotter than she would have liked, though the flesh beneath when she unravelled the cloth had the look of a wound knitting nicely. When she checked his back it was the same. Reaching for the last of her powders, she added only a few drops of water.

‘This one will cool your flesh,’ she explained as she rubbed in the salve, though he caught at her hand when she went to apply more.

‘Enough, Lady Randwick. You have cured me.’ Strong fingers closed around her own and a guarded irony laced his words. ‘The tales of your accomplishments are not without foundation, I see.’

Tensing, Madeleine pulled away. Dangerous ground this, given the widespread knowledge of the de Cargne sorcery. Tempering her answer accordingly, she met his gaze. ‘And now you wish to thank me?’ She sought to remove as much emotion as she could from her voice.

He laughed loudly, the sound bringing his retainers close, swords at the ready. Waving them off, he turned again to look at her.

‘Do men often thank you, Lady Randwick?’

The insult was implicit and she braced herself. So many men had looked at her the way he was doing now and for one fleeting moment she was sorry that it was him. Before she had a chance to answer, however, he got to his feet and she noticed him wince as the arm lowered with the pull of gravity. ‘I could fasten a bandage,’ she offered from the ground, the healer within overcoming her woman’s chagrin.

‘Nay, I have this.’ Pulling straps of leather from his pocket he brought the arm into his side and wrapped the binding around his wrist before looping it over his neck and moving the two or three steps needed to bring him right beside her. Sensing his intent for further conversation, she stood and waited.

‘I am indebted to you for your help,’ he said at length, the utterance dragged from his mouth as though it pained him to say it. ‘And if you’ve a request ye wish to voice as reparation, I will try my best to see that it is done.’

‘Bring my uncle to your keep from Heathwater.’

Surprise ran freely across his face.

‘Why?’

‘Because Noel will hurt him.’ She could barely get the words out.

‘And that would matter to you?’

‘Yes.’

He watched her closely. ‘Do you know how it is you are called in the court of Scotland, Lady Randwick?’

She didn’t answer.

‘They call you the Black Widow.’

The Black Widow. Lucien. She felt her world tilt.

‘Rumour holds it, you see, that love for the chatelaine of Heathwater is conducive to neither a man’s heart nor health. Lucien Randwick was eighteen when you married him and not twenty-six when he died. And when the body of an English Baron was found five miles from your castle before Yuletide last year, an entry in his journal named you as his lover. The pattern has been noted, Lady Randwick, though I’m wondering where I fit into the scheme of things. You could just as easily have said nothing today and left me to die.’

‘I could have.’ She said the words quietly, schooling her emotions in the way she had perfected across the many years of living with her brother. Alexander Ullyot could believe what he liked of her. People always had. She was surprised, though, by the thin band of pain that wrapped itself around her throat, and the tears that threatened. Looking away, she dashed the evidence against her sleeve. She never cried. Not ever. She forced a smile.

Jesus, Alex thought as the truth hit him. She had not murdered Lucien at all. A lifetime of soldiering easily told him that. Relief and anger were strangely mixed. He wanted to hate her, he wanted to hate her as much as he hated her brother. But he couldn’t. And that thought made him even more furious.

‘It was Noel, wasn’t it?’

‘Pardon?’

‘It was Noel who killed them,’ he repeated, louder this time and with more authority. ‘Lucien and the others. It makes more sense, damn it. He used you as his excuse?’

For a second every single fibre in her body longed to lie, but the hilt of her knife in Lucien’s neck was too real, too recent, and too tangible. She recalled in minutiae the way his eyes had glazed in shock as he had fallen, the light stubble on his cheeks strangely out of place against the harsher face of death. She remembered knocking his pleading hands away from her ankles and standing there until she was absolutely certain that his lifeblood had flowed away. Lucien Randwick, the golden-haired, laughing son of the Earl of Dromorne. Dead and not yet twenty-six.

Visibly she blanched. ‘Nay, I killed Lucien.’

‘But not the others?’

‘No.’

The hardness in her voice was palpable, but Alexander saw the flare of fear in her eyes before she hid it. And sorrow. Madeleine Randwick was good at hiding things, he thought suddenly. Her healing magic, for one—now, even hours after she had touched him, the skin at his back still tingled. No simple task for all she said of it.

Magic. And now, murder. Baldly confessed. The knuckles of her hands were white with tension and her whole body shook.

‘Randwick was a friend of mine.’ His voice was soft.

‘Lucien?’

‘No. Malcolm, his father. He killed himself last year.’

He saw her grip the skirt of her dress. ‘Malcolm Randwick. Dead? I had not heard. He brought me a bunch of snowdrops once and a pendant fashioned in gold. And when Lucien would not see him—’ She stopped and caught her words. ‘He was a kind man, a gentleman.’

‘Unlike his son?’

The question was so unexpected she could not trust herself to speak. Instead she nodded, and the instant bolt of anger in icy, pale eyes stunned her.

Belief.

Belief in her. For the first time in two years the white-hot shame of murder waned and the reality of her brother’s complicity crystallised. It was not her fault. Not all her fault. She could barely take it in.

Alex looked away, not trusting himself to speak. Had the Randwick bastard physically hurt her? His eyes scanned the cream-smooth skin at her throat and arms and his quietly voiced expletive held a wealth of meaning as the night drew in on them both, black and close, the secrets of state binding them into fragile harmony.