Knight In My Bed (11 page)

"A poor lass drowned by her own husband's hand," the man mumbled as he inserted a large iron key into a rusted lock, then began easing the heavy-linked chain from around the bedpost.

Fury welling inside him, Donall cast a quick glance at Niels. The giant still glowered at the mussed bed-sheets. Seizing his advantage, Donall smiled maliciously and drew back his unbound left foot. The kneeling gaoler grumbled on, "We're hopeful our lady will come to see the folly of -"

"Folly indeed!" Donall roared, and sent him flying.

"Oopphhh!" The man landed facedown in the rushes, arms and legs sprawled wide.

Donall lunged at him, but the giant was upon him in a heartbeat. "Try that again," Niels hissed, pricking Donall's throat with the tip of his dirk, "and I'll pare you to bits an inch at a time."

Spitting out sprigs of dried meadowsweet, the second man scrambled to his feet, his mien murderous. "You just earned yourself new quarters, MacLean," he ground out, anger blazing in his eyes.

"Let's hie him to the sea tower," he suggested to the giant, then snatched up the end of the chain. Straightening, he leveled an icy stare at Donall. "The sea tower's dungeon is Dunmuir's oldest and well suited for your noble taste. 'Tis near the jakes, boasts a plentiful supply of water, and has all the comforts of hell."

The guard Donall now recognized as Rory gave the chain a jerk and headed for the opened bedchamber door. In perfect sync with his still-fuming cohort, the giant took his knife from beneath Donall's chin and gave him a rough shove forward.

At the door, Donall planted his feet far apart and spread his elbows wide, hoping to use sheer might against his two gaolers. "Have done with this nonsense and give me my blade," he challenged them. "Let us cross swords like warriors. One on one or two against one, I care not, but a fair fight.”

“Fair like your brother treated his lady wife?" Niels snarled behind him. "I think not." Without warning, he slammed the fiat of his foot into the back of one of Donall's knees. Before Donall's leg could even buckle, the whoreson jabbed a rock-hard elbow into Donall's lower back.

Sagging against the doorjamb, Donall pressed his lips together, stifling a moan rather than give voice to his pain. The giant shoved him into the dimly lit passage. "No more stall tactics, MacLean," he warned. "'Tis past lauds and we've orders to fetch you back to your quarters before the castle-folk stir."

Rory glanced over his shoulder with a leer of spiteful satisfaction. "
Your new quarters
. "

Careful to first scan the shadows for movement, Isolde slipped quietly from the fusty-aired oppression of Dunmuir's chapel. But, as so oft of late, the vaulted passage outside the small oratory loomed dark and empty.

At this silent hour, not long past lauds, and later on, well after cockcrow and even deep into the day, scarce few save herself and the priest ventured to this gloomy corner of the castle.

With less than a full month since her sister's burial, it was common knowledge Lileas's soul still lingered close to her dead body. Or mayhap whiled inside the chapel, hovering near where her corpse had last Ian, cold and black-shrouded, two fit tapers flickering near her head.

A light rustling, perhaps a stealthy footfall -- or the gliding passage of a ghost -- sounded in the darkness ahead of her, and Isolde flattened herself against the wall. Heart in her throat, she waited.

Her pulse racing, she held her breath. The noise came again, closer this time, and then a rat shot past her. The creature disappeared around a curve in the corridor, leaving silence in its wake. Shuddering, Isolde drew her woolen
arisaid
tighter about her shoulders and crossed herself.

A simple rat.

No bleary-eyed kinsman, unable to sleep, and so wandering Dunmuir's twisting passageways in lieu of a night spent tossing upon his pallet. Nor the restless shade of her sister, come to bemoan the pitifully low number of masses being said for her soul.

Isolde sighed. She understood why the elders avoided the chapel. With the demise of one so young and innocent as Lileas still permeating the oratory's very walls, she suspected the old men shunned the reminder of their mortality, their own nearing deaths.

She could not claim such a sound excuse for exiting the chapel so soon after entering its cloying confines. Her intentions pure, she'd hastened there, her heart set upon praying for Lileas's swift passage through purgatory.

But he'd followed her.

Even though she'd left him in her bedchamber, propped against her bedpost and snoring, he'd accompanied her every step of the way. Though many stone walls stood betwixt them as she'd knelt upon the chapel's cold stone floor, his accusing eyes damned her while his slow smiles, false or nay, quickened her pulse and warmed her flesh in ways it shamed her to admit.

Especially when she'd meant to be reciting paternosters for her sister's soul.

Disgracefully, she'd been unable to purge herself of his presence. He haunted her in a worse way than Lileas's ghost could hope to do, and she hated that ... as she hated him.

Her cares pressing on her, she fled down the corridor, pursued by guilt. Guilt and something else. A terrifying condition fearsome enough to steal her wits and crush every shred of good sense she possessed.

A sob tore from her throat and she pressed the back of her hand against her mouth to stave off the escape of yet another such unwanted admission of her plight. Running now, she reached the end of the passage and burst into the stair tower.

She took the curving stairs two at a time, making for an iron-studded door set deep in the gloom of the third landing. As if a pack of snarling hellhounds and not wee Bodo chased at her heels, she threw open the door and fled into the chill night air of the battlements.

Cold, damp air she'd hoped would be cleansing but proved anything but. The gusty drizzle underscored the bleak path she'd sworn to follow, while the salty taste of the brine-laden wind reminded her of the tears she didn't want to shed.

For several long minutes, she stood unmoving in the darkness. Her ears heard the familiar roar of breakers against the rocks far below and, closer, the soft pattering of rain on stone.

Her heart heard something else.

Something she wanted to blot out, but couldn't.

May the merciless hand of God smite her, but she heard his voice. Not his words, his mocking taunts, but the melodious tones of his richly timbred voice. Deeply masculine, yet smooth as the rarest silk, his voice fascinated her. And made her wonder what magic he could weave if ever he chose to speak words as bonnie as his face.

She shuddered at the thought.

Scooping Bodo into her arms, she clutched him tight and began pacing the deserted wall-walk. Even the stars, winking high above and so distant, seemed to chide her.

Chastise her.

As she deserved to be chastised.

"Oh, Bodo, what am I to do?" she whispered, shifting his weight in her arms, desperately seeking the solace his soft warmth usually afforded her.

But even Bodo, so precious and loved, could not save her now, for she'd committed the most grievous of sins. She was attracted to Donall MacLean.

Down, down, down, they pushed and pulled him.

A spiraling descent ever deeper into the dark, dank bowels of Dunmuir's ruinous sea tower. Repeatedly, Donall slipped on the slick stone steps, coated as they were with foul-smelling slime and so ancient they bore curves, rounded indentations worn smooth by countless pairs of trudging feet.

Each time he stumbled, his tormentors laughed. Especially at the base of the stairs when he nearly landed on his back in the thick muck covering the floor. Praise the saints he hadn't, for the oozing sludge glistened a most unappetizing shade of blackish-green and reeked of raw sewage.

Manhandling him roughly along the low-ceilinged passage, Niels and Rory gave him nary a moment to ponder the source of the smell. Not that contemplation was necessary to know where he was.

One whiff told the tale.

He'd been escorted to the equivalent of a cesspit.

Donall's skin crawled with revulsion. The dank passage through which they trudged served as receptacle for Dunmuir Castle's latrine chutes.

"I told you your new quarters were hard by the jakes." Rory guffawed behind him. "And, as you'll soon see, there'll be water a-plenty to freshen your fine self for your nightly visits to our chieftain."

A chill sea wind swept around a curve in the tunnel, but before Donall could draw in a deep breath of the tangy salt air, the giant halted him with an iron-fingered grip around his arm.

Tilting his head to the side, Niels appeared to be listening to the hollow-sounding drip-drip of water echoing from an opening in the tunnel wall to their left. Rory drew up beside the giant and cocked his head toward the crevice as well.

Little more than a vertical-running crack and scarce wide enough for a man to slip through, the gap cut deep and dark into the rock's slime-coated surface.

An ominously silent entrance to some hellhole.

Silent save for the ceaseless plop-plopping noise of dripping water and the light crunch of someone's hesitant footsteps over loose stones.

"Mother Mary preserve us," Rory muttered, and began backing away from the opening.

Donall suspected he feared being accosted by the vengeance-seeking ghost of some poor wretch whose bones had long since been picked clean. The giant showed no such qualms and, turning sideways, wiggled his bulk through the crevice, quickly disappearing into the darkness beyond.

"By the Rood, lad," came his bellow a moment later, his deep voice reverberating from within the hellhole to bounce eerily off the tunnel walls.

To Donall's amazement, Niels squeezed his way back out of the gap almost immediately. He dragged a thin, wide-eyed boy behind him. His meaty hand wrapped soundly around the lad's spindly arm, the giant fixed the boy with a stern glare. "How many times must I warn you to stay out of this pile o' rubble?" he scolded, his voice full of reproach.

"That devil's den contains an oubliette." He jerked his
 
head toward the dark crevice they'd just exited. "Do you ken what that is, Lugh?"

The dark-haired lad nodded, his gaze downcast, his hands clutching a grimed sack of ... something.

Small, writhing some things with wings, from the look of it.

Niels snatched the pouch and peered inside. Donall caught a quick glimpse of the sack's contents.

Bats.

The child had been gathering bats and his bag was stuffed full of the winged creatures. Displaying none of Donall's surprise, the giant closed the pouch and returned it to the boy with nary a raised brow. "Does old Devorgilla ken where you are?"

Lugh shrugged.

"'Tis a hellish place, an oubliette," Niels elaborated when the child began shuffling his feet instead of answering. "A jug-shaped hollow deep in the bowels of the earth. Evildoers are dropped through a long, narrow shaft into a place so small they can neither sit nor stand."

His nerves now recovered, Rory tousled Lugh's dark head. "You don't want to be a-poking around in there," he said with a sideways glance at Donall.

Lugh glanced at him, too. The boy's expression held curiosity. Rory's betold how fervently he'd enjoy plunging Donall into the dread chamber of little ease. A muscle in Donall's jaw twitched at the thought while outrage curled icy claws around his innards and squeezed.

Squeezed hard.

Hunched in such cramped confines, waiting for the release of a priest-less and un-absolved death, was not how he cared to end his days.

The giant patted the boy's shoulder. "Off with you now, ere you land in more mischief."

Lugh took his lower lip between his teeth and cast one last wide-eyed glance at Donall, then bolted away.

"Ho, lad!" Rory called after him when he tore off in the opposite direction from the stairs. "Where do you thi ---"

"Leave him be," Niels said, watching the boy disappear around the bend in the tunnel. "He'll be after a frog from the sacred well to go along with his bag o' bats. He'll hie his self out of here once he gets what he's after."

Rory shook his head. Mumbling to himself about stagnant wells, and frogs being more useful in one's belly than in a witch-wife's cauldron, he tightened his hold on Donall's chain and began slogging forward through the muck, Donall and the giant following hard in his wake.

The moment they rounded the curve, Donall's breath caught in his throat, for the vaulted tunnel vanished as if it'd never been and they stood upon a narrow skirt of rock jutting precariously above a choppy sea, its tossing surface gilt silver by a near full moon.

A wild wet wind blew, bracing and untamed, its ceaseless howl giving stiff competition to the thundering crash of the waves breaking against a mass of black, barnacle-encrusted boulders and a jumble of fallen masonry that could only be the tumbled walls of Dunmuir's ancient sea tower.

Stinging salt spray bit into Donall's wrists and ankles, cruelly searing skin rubbed raw from days of wearing manacles, but he scarce noticed.

Nor did he puzzle overlong about where young Lugh had taken himself off to. Though he'd come this way, the lad was nowhere to be seen.