Beyond the Highland Mist

Page 40

“I wondered why she’d sent that to me.” Hawk rubbed his jaw thoughtfully.
“Lady Comyn said she thought it might become important later. She said that she thinks the chess piece is somehow bewitched.”
“If so, that would be how she traveled through”—he broke off, unable to complete the thought. He’d seen many wonders in his life, and was not a man to completely discount the possibility of magic—what good Scotsman raised to believe in the wee folk would? But still…
“How she traveled through time,” Grimm finished for him.
The two men stared at each other.
Hawk shook his head. “Do you believe …?”
“Do you?”
They looked at each other. They looked at the fire.
“No,” they both scoffed at the same time, studying the fire intently.
“She doesn’t seem quite usual though, does she?” Grimm finally said. “I mean, she’s unnaturally bright. Beautiful. And witty, ah, the stories she told me on the way back here from the Comyn keep. She’s strong for a lass. And she does have odd sayings. Sometimes—I don’t know if you’ve noticed—her brogue seems to fade in and out.”
Hawk snorted. He had noticed. Her brogue had virtually disappeared when she’d lain ill from the poison, and she’d spoken in an odd accent he’d never heard before.
Grimm continued, almost to himself, “A lass like that could keep a man—” He broke off and looked sharply at the Hawk. Cleared his throat. “Lady Comyn knows who her daughter was, Hawk. Was is the key word there. Several of the maids confirmed Lydia’s story that the real Janet is dead. The gossip is that she’s dead by her father’s hand. He had to marry someone to you. Lady Comyn said their clan will never breathe a word of the truth.”
“I guess not,” Hawk snorted. If any of this is true, and I’m not saying it is, the Comyn knows James would destroy us both for it.” The Hawk pondered that bitter thought a long moment, then discarded it as an unnecessary concern. The Comyn would assuredly swear Adrienne was Janet, as would every last man of the Douglas, if word of this ever got to the king in Edinburgh, for the existence of both their clans depended upon it. The Hawk could count on at least that much fealty from the self-serving Comyn.
“What did the laird himself have to say, Grimm?”
“Not a word. He would neither confirm she was his daughter, nor deny it. But I spoke with the Comyn’s priest, who told me the same story as Lady Comyn. By the way, he was lighting the fat white praying candles for the soul of the late Janet,” he added grimly. “So if there are delusions at the Comyn keep, they are mass and uniformly detailed, my friend.”
The Hawk crossed swiftly to his desk. He opened a carved wooden box and extracted the chess piece. He rolled it in his fingers, studying it carefully.
When he raised his eyes again they were blacker than midnight, deeper than a loch and just as unfathomable. “The Lady Comyn believes it brought her here?”
Grimm nodded.
“Then it could take her away?”
Grimm shrugged. “Lady Comyn said Adrienne didn’t seem to remember it. Has she ever mentioned it to you?”
Hawk shook his head and looked thoughtfully, first at the black queen, then at his brightly burning fire.
Grimm met Hawk’s gaze levelly, and Hawk knew there would never be words of reproach or even a whisper of the deed, if he chose to do it.
“Do you believe?” Grimm asked softly.
The Hawk sat before the fire for a long time after Grimm left, alternating between belief and disbelief. Although he was a creative man, he was also a logical man. Time travel simply didn’t fit into his understanding of the natural world. He could believe in the banshee, who warned of pending death and destruction. He could even believe in the Druids as alchemists and practitioners of strange arts. He’d been raised on childhood warnings of the kelpie, who lived in deep lochs and lured unsuspecting and unruly children to their watery graves.
But traveling through time?
Besides, he told himself as he stuffed the chess piece into his sporran for later consideration, there were other more pressing problems to address. Like the smithy. And his willful wife, upon whose lips the smithy’s name sat far too often.
The future would allow plenty of time to unravel all of Adrienne’s secrets, and make sense of the mass delusions at the Comyn keep. But first, he had to truly make her his wife. Once that was accomplished, he could begin to worry about other details. Thus resolved, he stuffed away the unsettling news Grimm had brought him, much as he had stuffed away the chess piece.