Page 1 of Outlaw Ever After (Highland Handfasts #3)

“The first brush is a blessing made with veils betwixt us thin.”

–A Song of Samhain Nights

“Get the bairns to their chambers,” demanded Seamus Grant. Commotion spiraled within Urquhart’s fortified walls. Horses grunted. Weaponry jingled. “The murderer is being brought in.”

Peigi Grant froze at her brother’s words as she disembarked the caravan into the chaos of the yard. Seamus scooped her up and whisked her to the door as he thrust it open. Her mother hurried inside, dragging her wee sister, Aileana, all of them still in their wedding finery.

“Who’s the murderer?” Peigi whispered, clinging to Seamus’s neck. The tang of blood upon his riding leathers was strong. He, so brave a squire for his four and ten years. “The MacDonald?”

The MacDonalds were always reaving their cattle.

“Nay this time. The Comyn heir,” Seamus spat, and Peigi swore she saw her brother coming of age before her eyes. “Go upstairs with Aileana and nay come down.” He deposited her beside their mother, who dabbed a kerchief on her eyes.

Laird Rubus Grant was jostled through the door, lifeless upon a litter.

“Come, sister.” Aileana tugged on her, but Peigi couldn’t move.

One moment they’d been dancing around a bonfire on that bonny isle with Michaelmas daisies woven in crowns, celebrating her aunt’s elopement to Richard MacGregor. The next moment, a mighty laird atop a horse was shouting, Ye were told to leave these lands…

There’d been arguments.

Blades had been drawn.

Her father’s men and MacGregor’s men had met the threat. Fury had erupted. Seamus had ferried the women and bairns into a cottage her aunt had thought to make her home. But her pup Mildred had run away and Peigi had chased her across the river, through the woods…

She shouldn’t have been spying. She couldn’t unsee—

She pinched her wee eyes closed now.

What kind of monster was this “Comyn heir” on the lips of these men? The dark-haired man who’d brandished that signet ring of the rose who’d wounded her father? A new enemy? She gripped Seamus’s surcoat as he turned to leave.

“He must be a-a monster,” she whimpered. Her brother tried to shrug her off, urgency tugging him in other directions. “Surely he’ll come for us, too.”

Seamus softened, squatted, and brushed the hair from her face, scooting her aside to make way for soldiers hastening into the hall and the head woman running for medicinals.

“Fear nay, sweet Pegs,” he lamented—speaking in deeper tones of a man without yet the rich resonance that came with filling into his breadth. “Ye’re safe.”

“Seamus!” boomed their sire’s first-in-command. Seamus snapped upright. “Send for the priest in Drumnadrochit! These Hallowtide winds spin their magic weel tonight.”

Ashen-faced, Seamus bolted to the yard and threw himself onto the saddle of his destrier, still lathered in sweat from their race home. Servants and soldiers alike crossed themselves.

Priests.

Peigi shivered. They were only summoned when someone’s soul was departing. Today was

Soul Mass…

Her sire wasn’t just injured. Rubus Grant wasn’t going to survive this

time.

A sob tore from their mother’s throat. Peigi and her sister’s nursemaid hurried them upstairs and shut them in their chamber.

Aileana, two years younger, snatched Peigi’s hand and pulled her behind the tapestry that blanketed the draft through the shutters, where they huddled and wrapped their arms about each other.

“Sing a song,” Aileana whispered. “‘Samhain Nights’? ’Tis my favorite.”

“Sing we now to fae folk, sing we now to Sidh,”

Peigi began the song they’d danced to at the celebration, the tune popular at Allhallowtide. “The mantle ’twixt our world and yours is open for to see.”

The breeze rattled the shutters. More commotion filled the yard. Cursing rose upon the din. “It’s him! That Comyn bastard! Let him hang…”

Were they bringing the prisoner in? The murderer who was thrusting Seamus into the lairdship before he’d fully ripened into a man?

“When blessings made and curses cast are open to the Sight, can the souls lost through the years be found on Samhain night.”

Peigi crooned, soothing Aileana.

“…toss him in the loch with rocks about his ankles!”

“Throw away the key! Fie, fie, murdering bastard…”

Shuffling and grunting scraped in the yard. Always a conflict, always a skirmish surrounding them. Never peace. Trembling but singing still, Peigi couldn’t resist unhooking the shutters to glimpse the man who was widowing their mother.

“The first spell is a blessing made with veils betwixt us thin,”

she sang.

The shutters flew open and a chilly breeze soothed her damp cheeks.

Peigi strained on her tiptoes, looking over the sill.

She peered down at the undulating sea of soldiers, weapons, horses.

“…forced to walk the whole way, he was… Nay enough punishment. He deserves worse…”

Kendrew MacGregor, Richard MacGregor’s son, was dragging someone behind his horse. The prisoner? Desperation clawed at Peigi to see.

The door to the granary in the bailey was thrust open. Peigi continued smoothing a hand over Aileana’s hair, even though she only had nine years to her name. A roar rose up among soldier and servant alike as MacGregor shoved…a laddie

into the granary?

Her hand on Aileana’s hair stilled. That wasn’t the man whom she’d seen with the ring.

That was the boy who’d run to the fray, screaming for his da, the laird who’d tried to run them off, who had been slain.

Her own da had lain on the ground, mortally wounded, beside Kendrew’s sire. Why had they captured him

***

“Sister?”

Peigi glanced down to see Aileana staring wide-eyed up at her.

“What is it?” Peigi whispered.

“Ye stopped singing.”

…

Incense choked her sire’s chamber. The priest burned oils and chanted Latin over his supine form.

Menfolk gathered in the corners and argued of retaliations, debated ownership of a new castle seized.

Freuchie, it was called? Peigi fretted. This wasn’t right.

The boy wasn’t guilty, and everyone was saying he was.

Now they were going to take the lad’s castle?

Her mother pulled her against her breast, her eyes swollen, still wearing her Michaelmas flowers. Peigi wiped her mother’s eye, pressing a kiss to her cheek as the priest continued his incessant chanting.

“Ma wee Peigi, always kenning when others need ye,” her mother spoke in her soft, lilting Irish weighted down with the world’s burdens. “The gift of Sight, ye have. A fine lady ye’ll make.”

“Maw,” she breathed. “The laddie nay did it.”

Disappointment sank deeper in the hollows of the woman’s cheeks. Her gaze shifted toward Seamus. “I fear there’s no turning these men from their anger. Seamus is so much like yer faither

… So single-minded. But ye, I beg ye use that Sight within ye that kens right from wrong. Sometimes what is right… is

wrong, but ye must stand firm anyway.”

Thinking on that, Peigi bit her lip, crawled down, and crept to Seamus. Always shy, she never interrupted the menfolk, but she tugged on Seamus’s doublet now.

He squatted down and forced a smile as the intimidating faces continued arguing above her. She leaned into his ear, cupping her hand, and whispered.

“Ye’re wrong.”

Seamus frowned. “Peigi. Nay interfere.”

“But that lad is nay the one, I—”

“Go back to Mither, lass.”

“Seamus—”

“ Enough

.” His face turned to stone. “Ye couldna possibly ken. Ye nay saw it happen.”

But she had. But to admit that meant admitting she’d disobeyed… It was a small price to pay to free an innocent boy.

At supper, again she tugged his claes. Again, she whispered that he was wrong, and she wished to tell him why. Same that eve as again, they sat vigil with their mother. Again

, he silenced her. Her heartache grew.

She waited for darkness to thicken outside like the priest’s cloying incense had thickened the air. She strummed her lyre and sang the Samhain song, her shutters open to the chill to watch the granary, upon which her mother had taught her to play the songs of Irish Sidh

and wood nymphs. And when a horrible dream awakened her, knotting distress in her belly, she could bear the anguish no more.

She had to do something

in the face of her family’s grief and this injustice.

In her sleeping gown, she crept down the corridor, past the solar where arguments still raged between Seamus and others. A voice spoke beyond the key hole.

“The Comyn heir should be hung at first light.” Kendrew MacGregor? “Then we can decide who commandeers his castle.” She’d once thought him so handsome, long locks of dark hair and cool green eyes, until she’d seen him dragging the prisoner today.

Now he was ugly.

“Aye, but my mither is right. He should at least be given a trial. He is but a lad.” Seamus’s voice.

“Nay! He should hang!” chorused others.

“ Ye

are the heir who should make decisions in yer sire’s stead, nay yer mither.” A man’s voice she didn’t recognize.

The lad was to die

? She froze on those damning words. Seamus argued that the new castle should be his while Kendrew, eight and ten and freshly spurred, argued that it should be his

.

Swallowing, she cracked open the door.

Seamus’s eyes flicked to her. She motioned to him to come to her. On an exasperated exhale and a rub of his eyes, he did, as the chamber fell into debates in his distraction.

“Pegs, sweeting.” He forced the words through gritted teeth. “Nay more of yer begging that I’m wrong, eh?”

“But Seamus, ye canna hang him. He’s innocent.”

“Why do ye keep saying this? Why are ye nay on Da’s side?” Seamus growled.

“

Seamus

,” she gasped.

So dismissive. So eager to blame. He’d always looked up to their sire, and as their parents’ only son to survive infancy, he’d always felt it his duty to become as mighty.

He squatted, gentling, and reached for her with a pained brow, but this time, she backed away. He hung his head.

“Ye were nowhere near it, Peigi. None of this Sight nonsense, either.”