Page 47

T he only plant that didn’t seem to be growing on the pathway that wound around the side of the hill leading to Castle Varrich was jewelweed.

Cat meandered along, poking into the patches of green things lining the path and hidden among the outcroppings of rocks, searching for the familiar oval leaves of Impatiens capensis .

She couldn’t stir a step without stumbling over patches of mountain heath, and there was enough maidenhair fern to make dozens of bottles of cough syrup, but nothing for a nettle sting.

There wasn’t even an obliging bit of dock plant to be found.

Poor Hamish. The nettles wouldn’t do him any real harm. Indeed, stinging nettle tea did wonders for painful joints, but for such a humble plant, their sting was surprisingly painful. Those angry red bumps on his hand were likely to get worse before they got better.

She really shouldn’t have laughed at him.

It hadn’t been kind of her, but there’d been something comical about his shocked expression when the stinging nettle had “bit” him.

His eyes had popped so wide they’d nearly rolled out of his head.

He had the most expressive eyes, and that blue .

. . well, it wasn’t every day a lady came across eyes as blue as his.

A man’s eyes reveal the best and the worst of him . . .

She couldn’t look into Hamish’s eyes without her mother’s words coming back to her. It would have been easier if she hadn’t been able to see so much in those beautiful blue depths. If she hadn’t been able to read him so well, perhaps she wouldn’t have noticed how exhausted he was.

Exhausted, and dejected.

This morning, before he woke, she’d spent a humiliating amount of time gazing at him, guilt piercing her chest at the disheveled tangle of dark waves atop his head and the violet circles under his eyes. But then that was what came of her banishing him to the floor every night, wasn’t it?

He’d been so refined when he’d first come to Dunvegan, too!

It had taken her just over three weeks to ruin a perfectly good marquess.

Yet for all his fashionable elegance, his glossy boots and costly coat, there was nothing false about Hamish—no shadows in those clear blue eyes.

Everything he thought, everything he felt, everything he was , was right there in his eyes.

He didn’t hide anything. Not like she did. Since her father had died, there’d been a small, secret chamber inside her heart no one could touch, and it had been growing closer and tighter with every day that passed.

Grief had made her smaller than she’d been before.

Smaller, and angrier, her shoulders hunched to keep her anger close, clutching it against her heart the way a miser hoarded gold.

It was no way to live a life.

If she’d noticed it, she may have been able to put a stop to it, but it had come on so slowly, she hadn’t realized it was happening until she woke up one day with nothing but anger and grief in her heart.

She’d been so furious with Rory for so long, she couldn’t remember how to be anything else anymore.

He’d left them. He’d been there one day, then gone the next, all her pleas and protests falling on deaf ears, as if she and her sisters didn’t exist. He’d abandoned them when they’d most needed him, and then he’d gone and died , leaving them at the mercy of every villain in Scotland.

At least, that was what she’d told herself these past few months.

But time was the ultimate truth-teller, wasn’t it? As the days passed, the layers of anger had started to peel away, leaving only an aching, empty abyss inside her chest, with nothing to fill it but her memories of him.

And when those memories faded? What then?

Had he ever thought of that? Had he thought of them even once, when he’d been out on that last adventure? Had he ever wondered how they were faring without him, or worried about what would become of them if he never returned? How they’d struggle without him?

How terribly they’d miss him?

So many questions, yet she’d lied to Hamish when she’d told him she didn’t think she’d ever truly understood her father.

For all her helpless fury at him, nothing could ever change the fact that she’d known him, inside and out.

She, Freya, and Sorcha knew Rory better than anyone aside from their mother.

You’re his daughter, Catriona. You tell me where he hid the treasure.

Hamish was right. If anyone could guess where he’d hidden the treasure, it should have been her.

Should have been, but wasn’t , because here she was, all these months later, as much in the dark as she’d ever been. She didn’t have the faintest idea where to begin to search.

Where, of all the potential hiding places in Tongue, had Rory secreted away the treasure? If ever there was a question without an obvious answer, it was that one. She’d mulled it over until her head was spinning, but the threads refused to come untangled.

If Rory had been a simple man, perhaps it wouldn’t have been so difficult, but the inside of her father’s mind had been a complicated place. One only needed to attempt to read his papers to see that.

She’d do well to forget about it now and concentrate on finding the jewelweed. It was the least she could do for Hamish, after banishing him to the floor for the past six nights because she was too cowardly to sleep beside him.

She continued to follow the pathway as it wound down the side of the hill, prodding half-heartedly at the clumps of greenery as she passed. For pity’s sake, how could there not be a single bit of jewelweed? There was a never-ending supply of it in the woods at home.

She wandered on, lost in her thoughts until at last she came to a stop and glanced back up the hill. Oh, dear. She hadn’t meant to come so far. Hamish would be wondering where she’d gotten to by now.

She wrapped his coat more tightly around her as she turned and began to make her way back up the hill. It had grown much colder as she’d been wandering, and it was a miracle the dark clouds scudding across the white sky hadn’t opened yet.

They’d simply have to do without the jewelweed for the moment. Perhaps Mrs. Geddes would know where they could find—

She came to an abrupt stop in the middle of the pathway, every thought of the dock plant and jewelweed forgotten.

In front of her, half-hidden underneath a thick slab of moss-covered rock that hung over the edge of the downward slope of a hill was a collection of dark stones, one stacked atop the next in a neat pile.

How strange. How had she not noticed that when they’d climbed up the pathway earlier? Or perhaps the better question was, why had she noticed it now?

She drew closer, her heart quickening in her chest.

Yet there was no reason she should find herself so breathless. It was only a cairn, much like thousands of other cairns one could find in every corner of Scotland. It wasn’t even a grand one. She’d seen cairns that were thrice her own height with enormous slabs of rock at their base.

This was a paltry little thing in comparison, no higher than her hip, and not remarkable in any way, aside from its being nearly obscured by the stone ledge hanging over it, and just far enough off the pathway one risked a tumble down the hill if they got too close to it.

Yet she drew closer anyway, oddly mesmerized by the sight of it.

There was a tangle of weeds and grasses creeping up the side of it, but here at the edge of the pathway she could see the stones were an unusual color, much darker than any of the others scattered nearby, but there were stones of every description to be found in Tongue.

Still, something about it tugged at her memory, as if she’d seen the stones somewhere before . . .

Well, how absurd. Of course, she hadn’t seen it before. How could she have when this was her first visit to Castle Varrich?

She shook the foolish thought away. She’d kept Hamish waiting long enough, and the wind had picked up as the sun moved behind the dark bank of clouds to the east of the castle ruins.

She turned her back on the cairn and began once again to climb up the hill, but she hadn’t gone more than half a dozen steps before she was turning around again and hurrying back down.

It wouldn’t do any harm to take a closer look, just to satisfy her curiosity. Once she found there was nothing remarkable in it, she’d be on her way.

Yet as she got closer, the odd feeling of familiarity intensified. It was as if she’d been on this pathway before, approaching the castle ruins from this direction, with the Kyle of Tongue just beyond the next rise, and the misty outlines of Ben Loyal and Ben Hope in the distance.

With every step she took, the stacked dark stones loomed larger in her vision, until it was impossible not to see it, until it all became clear in a single flash, like a lightning strike over Loch Dunvegan—a single streak of light that illuminated everything for miles around it.

Rory’s papers. She sucked in a breath, her heart fluttering.

He’d made a drawing of that cairn. There was no mistaking the height and shape of it, or the outline of the mountains in the distance. He’d even shaded the stones with heavy strokes of a pencil to indicate their darker color.

And that ledge above the cairn. Hadn’t she seen something like that in his drawings, as well? Or was she simply imagining it?

Rory’s papers were as cryptic as they could be. There was no denying that. She’d gone back to look at his notes several times after she and Hamish had given it up that first time, and had even made some notes of her own, but so much had happened since then it was all a blur in her mind.

Dash it, she had to think !

There’d been piles of maps, of course. Rory had always loved maps. But they’d mostly been of various locations on the Scottish coastline. There hadn’t been one of either Eilean nan Ron or Tongue.