“Aye, but Isobel is alone with Malcolm and we daenae ken why. What could he want with her, Sarah?” Alasdair stared at his sister, hoping someone, perhaps she, could provide answers.
Sarah shook her head stoutly. “Go. Find Isobel. Bring her back home..”
“Aye,” he said. “I will.”
He glanced at Jane, who remained on the floor with Lady Branwen’s hands on her face. Euan stayed close, wide-eyed and silent, embodying the quiet stillness of a child letting adults take charge.
He turned and went into the passage without a lantern to illuminate the path.
The ceiling was low, and he ducked his head to avoid bumping it. Alasdair moved fast, with one hand on the wall. At the first bend, the stone was disturbed, a fresh scrape where someone had gone down on one knee and come back up fast. He crouched over it for a second. The scrape was from a bare foot.
Isobel must have stumbled on purpose, or she was forced down and fought her way back up. Either way, she marked what she could.
He kept moving. He counted the turns the way he had counted them every time he had walked these passages since boyhood. Left, the long right curve, the floor shifting from stone to packed earth. The cold deepened as the air changed. Alasdair could smell the heather and the night before he reached the door. Then the wooden door at the far end swung loose in the wind with the latch broken where Malcolm, or someone else, maybe Isobel, had destroyed it.
He came through it into the night and dropped to one knee immediately, allowing the silvery moon overhead to light the path.
Two sets of footprints in the frost heading east off the path. One large. One smaller and uneven, scuffing the frost to the side, the prints of someone being moved against their will.
A few feet from the door, a lantern was on its side with the glass cracked and dark. Beside it was a dark smear on the pale stone.
He touched it with two fingers. Blood. Not much.
He thought about Isobel picking up the stone in the passage. She would have held it tight, braced herself, then struck at just the right moment.
Good, he thought.Good.
He stood.
She had marked the floor in the passage. She had hit Malcolm with something before they got out the door. She had been thinking the whole way through.
Or at least he hoped and prayed that was what happened.
Alasdair took the lantern but then set it down again because a light would show him coming. He did not want to show himself. Unencumbered, he ran east into the dark, following the footprints by starlight as far as they showed, and then by instinct when they disappeared into the heather.
* * *
“Alasdair.”
The voice came from the north, and he pulled up. A shape came out of the dark at a dead run and slowed ten feet away before manifesting into Hamish, breathing hard, hands on his knees.
“Tell me,” Alasdair said.
Hamish straightened. His face was set in a way Alasdair had not seen before, jaw locked, a muscle working in his cheek, and he did not speak for a second. Hamish was a man who could absorb bad news and keep walking. He was absorbing something now.
“Tell me,” Alasdair ordered in a sharper tone.
“Three men in a hollow on the north hillside,” Hamish reported. “Been there a while, keepin’ low. I recognized the plaid from the old clan records—exiles, after Culloden. Yer father had them scattered. They’ve been out here ever since, waitin’.” He paused. “I made them talk.”
“How long did that take?”
“Nae long. They’ve been waitin’ a long time, and Malcolm hasnae come good on what he promised them. They werenae hard to move.”
“And?”
“Malcolm’s father didnae just fight at Culloden and die there. He was taken alive after the battle and executed. Yer father ordered it. There was evidence of double allegiance—the man had been passin’ information to the Crown while fightin’ under the Jacobite banner. Both sides used him, and neither side trusted him. When it came out, yer father did what the law required.”
“I ken that part,” Alasdair said. “What I didnae ken is the rest of it. Tell me the whole of the story.”