“Aengus,” Lasrua announced when it seemed dragging her feet and dawdling would not suffice, “I think we’re lost.”
“Now, we cannot be lost,” he said. “We never crossed a bridge a second time, so we’re still on the island. And I’m certain we’ve never seen this street before.”
Gaethine awoke with the muddled sense that he needed to be alert for something and had been weak somehow. He blinked his blurry eyes and wondered why there was a light. Had he lost all notion of day and night?
Ethelmund Ashdown had not intended to take a midmorning nap. He’d only meant to lie down a moment and revel in the freedom to do just that. But he had not expected his wife would return home today, either.
Githa listened with only one ear to her parents’ conversation, caring little whether she appeared rude or distracted. She did not feel like an obedient daughter that day, nor gentle nor patient. Especially not patient.
The inner court of the Baron’s fort was almost empty at this sleepy hour of the afternoon, and Sigefrith—never one for after-dinner naps—had made it all of halfway from one tower to another before a voice boomed down from on high: “Oh, lord! Lord!”
“What is it?” Yusuf asked. “If this will take some time, I will return later, God willing. The sun is setting. It is time for my prayer.”
Aed suspected there was a little something unseelie in the mountain water this spring: something that had a peculiar effect upon ladies. Not since old Lord Donnchad of the Eochaids had taken his barbarian wife had Galloway seen such spectacles. Women riding at the head of mounted troops: young Sebdann in a gleaming helmet and mail, with her dark hair flying, and Lady Gorman in a bearskin cloak clasped with gold. And the both of them under the command of Lady Maire, who’d held court in her husband’s hall with an ancient sword strapped to her hip.
For her latest trick she’d crossed the Wilderness on horseback and shown up bright and early at Carn Liath, unannounced and unaccompanied. At least today she wasn’t wearing the sword.
Once, Maire ought to have been violently jealous of this woman. Yet even in the headiest of those days, Muirgel of the Colins had never merited more than the irritation generally inspired by inanimate things. She might have been an accident of geography: a rockfall or a steep-sided gorge separating Maire from her goal.
Malcolm had looked everywhere. So thoroughly that he’d even circled back around and started looking in the same places again.
“Be kind to him, Wynnie. He’s a good man, but soft. That sort of man is soon spoiled by a hard woman.”
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