Highland Fire (Guardians of the Stone) (33 page)

M
eara died in the wee hours of the morning.

Fergus did not come to retrieve them, for he and his son had fallen asleep, exhausted by their vigil. By the time the poor man had awakened, his daughter was already gone. With somber hearts, they burned the lass upon a pyre the following day, along with the family dog, who also fell ill within hours of Meara’s parting. Fergus believed the animal had perished of heartbreak, but Lìli felt a twinge of hope at the discovery, for while she felt terrible over the dog’s death, she had an idea burgeoning in her head.

Not wishing to stir a father’s grief, or evoke thoughts of regret, she made quiet inquiries into where the family had acquired their water. If she was correct, she thought she knew from where the illness might have come. Their home was far enough from the village well, and so they had gathered it instead from a nearby stream—the same stream where Lìli had gotten the water for her blessing. Apparently, Glenna too sometimes used that stream, whenever she could not go herself for water at the well. Sometimes Duncan was too lazy to go all the way. And when Lìli inquired further, she discovered that the others who had perished had also used the stream for their supply of water as well. Once the funeral was over, she set out alone to inspect the area, to see if her suspicions could be true.

She discovered that the stream ended in a tiny little pool that settled between Glenna and Fergus’ cottages. Fed by a trickling of water from the hillside above, she followed the path uphill, where she discovered the culprit. In a small basin fed by the hill itself, there sat enormous piles of human dung. She remembered that after the guarderobe in her father’s donjon had been created, so that offal was discarded down the walls into the motte, thereafter some folks in the village had grown ill, until they realized that the motte was no longer safe to draw water from.

Lìli sighed, and sat upon a boulder, remembering Keane’s first words to her:
If ye should need tae piss... I can show ye where tae go, lest ye find yourself with an arse full of nettles.

Keane’s heart was broken. The poor lad’s eyes were now swollen once more, only this time with grief. With this news, Keane could well blame himself, she knew, so she considered how best to tell everyone what she had discovered. She couldn’t keep it to herself; she must tell them so no one else would become ill. Poor Meara! Poor Keane! Poor Fergus!

As she sat contemplating what she would say, her gaze was drawn toward a pile of stones, from whence a thin ribbon of mist seemed to billow from the ground below. She made her way over to it, kicking a few stones from the top.

Suddenly, without warning the ground beneath her gave way, crumbling like old cake beneath her feet and she was cast down into a cold, dank dark hole in the ground.

Thinking that his wife needed a bit of rest, Aidan searched her medicine chest. It might as well be a medicine chest, for it bore little else, and it surprised him still that she had brought so little with her from Keppenach. As small as the coffers were, they contained almost primarily herbs. Luckily, of her many small pouches, he recalled which bag she had used when she’d given Keane a draught to help him sleep through his most painful nights, so he searched for that one, and found it, but he also encountered another bag that contained a hard lump. Since she had naught but three dresses and a comb—for the most part—he was curious about the contents of the pouch. He lifted it out from between her gowns, and squeezed it.

A ring perhaps? Did she harbor a trinket from Stuart?

Driven by curiosity now, He opened the bag, turning it over so the contents fell into his hand: a single vial of powder and an ugly ring. He turned the ring over in his palm and spied the hole built into one side and blinked, peering down at it, somehow knowing what it was for, despite that he’d never seen anything like it. Inspecting it closer, he lifted it up and shook it. Traces of powder sprinkled into his palm.

Did she mean to poison him?

There could be no other explanation for such a device. And yet she had not used it. What stopped her? She might have seen her task done by now and slipped away with no one the wiser. But she had saved Duncan, and then Keane… ach, was she saving her treachery for him?

He thought of the look of adoration in her eyes when they made love and the very notion turned his gut—and his heart, for he had grown to love his bartered bride.

Accept the things to which fate binds you,
his mother had said just before her death. After his father’s funeral, he had railed against the will of the world, and despite that she had carried another man’s babe in her belly, forced upon her in an act of cruelty, she had caressed her growing belly with such love that Aidan had only been able to love Sorcha once she was born.

Accept the things to which fate binds you
, her voice said to him now. Only then could one be certain that the things that came to pass were meant to be, completely free from the will of men. So it was that the stone should come to rest in rightful hands some day.

But at least he knew… so that he could avoid ingesting anything Lìli’s hands had touched. Thank God Lael was still in charge of the kitchens. Though for the moment, he would not tell his sister, for Lael would skewer Lìli in defense of him.

In fact, he was reluctant to tell anyone at all, for Lìli had clearly not harmed any of his kin as yet. He could not blame her for the strange malady plaguing them, for it had begun before her arrival. Since she’d come, she had saved lives.

Mayhap she never intended to use the ring …

But he must know where her heart lay.

He
must
know what she intended to do with it.

Placing the ring back in the pouch, he tightened the drawstring, and then shoved the bag back down into her chest, leaving it approximately where he had discovered it.

At least he knew… and from this moment forward, he would be certain to watch his cups… along with every last move his wife made.

The ground beneath the fissure was hollow. Like a roof thinned with age, it merely collapsed, throwing Lìli into the depths of a small cavern. She scraped her arms and legs on the way down, but otherwise she was unharmed, except that there was no way back up, it seemed.

Her arisaid was left hanging from the edge, and she had a glimmer of hope, but when she tugged it, it came free and tumbled down into her face, raining dust and tiny pebbles onto her head. She spat dust from her mouth, and inspected the cave better now.

A cold mist coiled about her feet. Like the inside of a hollowed orb, the sides rounded up and around, so that the walls were flat like a ceiling at the opening of the fissure and the sides were concave and too far away, impossible to climb—except for one tiny spot where the cave wall jutted outward so that if she could reach that shelf, she might be able to use it for support and pull herself up. Except that side of the cavern was damp with water trickling down from the basin above. It left a dark greenish stain on the stone. Nevertheless, Lìli tried and found the shelf slippery to the touch. Besides, the scent of the water up close was not unlike a sewer. The thought nearly made her wretch. She wiped her fingers on the cave wall on the other side, not wanting to spoil her dress. And then she wiped them again in the dry dirt at her feet, brushing it then on the hem of her gown. In essence they had been using the basin above for a guarderobe for a very long time, she believed. Some of the water trickled down to the rocks below, and some seemed to have been carried to the tiny pool near Glenna’s home.

Peering down at her gown, where she had wiped her hands, she found the hem torn, and frowned. Glenna was quite skilled with a needle she reassured herself; she could fix it. For now she simply needed to find a way out and warn everyone about the basin and the pool.

Dark as it was, there was the faintest light emanating through another crack in the wall, where cold mist poured through, like a warm breath on a cold day. She eyed the crack in the wall warily, and shouted up for help to no avail. She was alone on the hillside today. Everyone was attending poor Meara’s funeral.

Feeling the cold rising around her, she retrieved her cloak from the ground, and shook it out, then cast it about her shoulders, cursing herself now for not having told someone where she was off to. Without much choice in the matter, she decided to explore the crack in the wall.

The cave walls, aside from the ceiling from whence she’d fallen, seemed sturdy enough and she could always retrace her steps if there was nowhere to go, but the faint light shining through the wall made her feel there was another exit somewhere else. Twilight was coming and she did not wish to be caught in a hole in the ground in the black of night.

However, the crack in the wall was barely wide enough for her to fit through. She had to work free a few loose stones, but finally she squeezed through. It led to yet another cavern, this one bigger than the last. Light entered here from both the way she had come and another hole that led up… only that one had a rope ladder descending from it.
Odd to find a ladder in a hole in the ground.
Feeling much less panicked now at the sight of the stairs, she lingered to inspect the room a moment, curious now.

In the center of the cave, there was a large oblong block of stone, mayhap a little longer than the length of her arm. Smooth, as though polished, the top surface had a bit of sheen. In the back of her mind, she thought of the Stone at Scone… where kings were crowned. She had never seen that stone, and yet this one put her in mind of it.

Could it be?

But nay…

She ran her hands along the top of the stone, wondering why a stone like this would be lain as though upon an altar.

As she circled the stone, she found a plaque, but she could barely make it out in the dim light of the cavern. Curiosity made her turn the stone so that it faced the rays of light coming from the crack in the wall from whence she’d come.

Unless the fates be faulty grown

And prophet’s voice be vain

Where’er is found this sacred stone

The blood of Alba reigns.

She blinked, staring at the words on the stone plaque—carved long ago, she realized, for the etchings were not fresh. Her fingers traced the ancient markings. There were more on the stone itself. She recognized the markings from the sword of the
Righ Art
—the intricately carved weapon Broc Ceannfhionn had placed upon Aidan’s table. And then below the stone, upon the altar, there were three words written in the Latin tongue:
Sola Virtus Nobilitat
.

A prickling erupted upon her flesh—a prickling that would not stop, for the import of the discovery was not lost upon her. She knew of only one stone whereupon kings were crowned… but this was not it… was it? That Stone was at Scone. David too had been crowned upon it. She knew that because Rogan had gone to witness the coronation last year and he had bragged that he too had sat upon that stone, and then joked that it had not made him a king.

Her skin tingled strangely—a sensation that had naught to do with the cold, and she shivered fiercely. As though she had conjured it with the thought, a cold mist spilled down from the hole in the ceiling above, and suddenly Lìli was unnerved, wanting nothing more than to be away from this tomb for a stone.

Climbing the ladder quickly, she realized that she had discovered something Aidan did not wish her to see, and she felt clammy and sweaty despite the cool air.

But then little might have prepared her for what she emerged into, for if the cavern below seemed forgotten over the ages, this one was well lived in. Misty and dank though it was, it was lit by a fat candle braced upon the far wall. In the center of the room sat a small table, along with a smaller crystal about the size of Lìli’s head. Mortar and pestle sat to one side and the remnants of powder peppered the surface, along with notches from the pounding of a pestle. Lìli recognized the marks for she had her own worktable at Keppenach where she ground her herbs.