Journey to Bongary Spring by Kasey Stockton
Chapter One
Castle Moraigh
Southwest Inverness-shire
Scotland, 1743
The haar rolled in from the loch, slipping up over the jagged, rocky bank and curling around Isobel McEwan’s bare feet. It was difficult to see through the dense fog that hovered over the still water, but that didn’t stop her from searching the horizon for any sign of movement in the distance. The threat of Clan Duncan loomed on the other side of the loch, and she had been taught from the day she’d first stepped foot on Alexander McEwan’s property that she must always remain vigilant. One brief moment of carelessness was all it would take to amplify the discontent lying dormant between the families.
The empty egg basket swung from Isobel’s fingers as she picked her way through the tall grass that skirted the majestic castle, grateful when she rounded the building and put the loch behind her. She wasn’t certain when the task had wholly fallen on her shoulders, but she didn’t mind rising with the sun. She’d offered to fetch eggs so often in her youth that no one questioned who left the filled basket on the counter for Mrs. Crabb any longer. Isobel only hoped they didn’t realize that it wasn’t just the chickens which drew Isobel outside in the wee hours of the morning.
Swallows chirped, breaking the silence from their nests high in the castle eaves overhead. Their calls volleyed, amplifying as more birds woke from the sunlight peeking over the edge of the distant hills. Castle Moraigh was snugly nestled in the valley, cushioned on one side by the rolling hills and made vulnerable on the other by the wide, open loch. It resembled the egg in the palm of her cupped hand, cocooned in the safety of her fingers.
It was the work of a few minutes to reach into the packed hay and slip the remaining still-warm eggs from their nesting places, filling her basket for Mrs. Crabb. Isobel too often allowed her mind to wander, and if she wasn’t careful, she would miss the very thing she came out here for each morning: a brief sighting of the man in the stables.
Only, this morning, he was nowhere to be seen. Isobel stepped back, craning her neck around the corner of the chicken coop for a sight of his familiar dark hair. Fog reached over the castle like long claws, drifting into the air and disappearing with help from the rising sun. Perhaps if she pretended to hunt for eggs a few minutes longer, the fog would be gone, and she could better see.
“Watch for the—” a deep voice said, sounding out of nowhere like a stray kelpie and sending a wash of shivers over Isobel’s skin. “Manure,” the voice finished dryly as her foot landed squarely in a pile of the beastly stuff.
Isobel’s heart raced. Kieran Buchanan’s strong hands gripped her elbows, guiding her toward the grass just behind the chicken coop, her foot squelching with each step as warm manure squished between her toes. She avoided Kieran’s pitying look as she wiped her foot through the long grass.
His gaze fell to her bare feet. “Och, lass. I did try to warn ye.”
Her cheeks warmed. “My mind was high above the clouds, I fear.” She looked to the ground, absently spinning her silver ring with her thumb. She’d been walking to fetch the eggs for years and had never before stepped in coo excrement. “This hasna happened before.”
Kieran towered above her. His dark eyebrows hitched up, and his mouth twitched beneath his shadowed jaw. Och, did he think she was trying to lay the blame at his feet? She hurried to reassure him. “No’ that I believe ye are at fault, of course. I ken better than that.”
“Rupert took the coos up Glen Ellen this morning, and they passed through here. Ye dinna need ta worry about a repeat tomorrow.” Kieran sent her a wink before he turned to go, their conversation at a close. He lifted a shovel from the side of the chicken coop and proceeded to remove the manure from the walking path, his broad shoulders working under the thick tartan plaid wrapped over his shoulder and secured with a pin.
The interaction had been brief, but it was enough for her. Isobel would take those precious few minutes and tuck them away in her heart. Any time with Kieran was time well spent, and it even made her muck-covered foot worth it. Grimacing, she hitched the basket up her forearm and lifted her hem, turning away before he could catch her staring.
“Ye’ll want ta wash that before it dries,” Kieran called over his shoulder. “’Tis much harder ta remove later.”
He sounded as though he knew this from experience.
He glanced down at her foot, and Isobel’s cheeks heated further. She brushed a loose lock of straw-colored hair out of her eyes. Perhaps not every minute of their conversation was time well spent, not when it secured her in Kieran’s mind as a young, foolish woman who couldn’t even watch where she’d been stepping. It mattered not how old she actually was, she would always lose her ability to speak when facing the most handsome man in all of Scotland.
She lifted her hand in recognition before scurrying back around the castle, hoping the haar would sweep up and envelop her in its mist. Though, getting lost in fog would hardly paint her in a better light. What Highland man desired a helpless lass? None she knew of.
The sun drifted higher on the horizon, burning away the final wisps of fog that still licked the ground and climbed the edges of Moraigh’s imposing, gray stone walls. A shadowed sentinel walked the upper perimeter of the castle, forever keeping watch.
Eight years under the protection of her father’s cousin, and the castle still had yet to fill the missing pieces of Isobel’s heart—the places left hollow from the deaths of her parents and the destruction of her family home just a few miles from where she now lived. She was separated from her home by the impassable chunk of land sold to the Duncans a hundred years before, but it felt longer—the miles stretched in her soul to an impossible distance. It hardly mattered that she could travel the space easily in a day. Home would forever remain unreachable.
Isobel planted her basket on the ground and perched on a smooth rock at the edge of the loch. She dipped her foot into the icy water, gasping lightly at the cold, and wiped away the grime. She cringed at the state in which she’d squelched away from Kieran. Could she have possibly looked more inept to the man?
Likely not. He would not have been so quick to dismiss her if he found her worthy of notice. No, she was far from winning his heart.
The chirping above warred with the sounds of the waking world for precedence as Isobel moved toward the castle. Doors opened and closed, and the distant hum of people going about their morning rituals grew louder with each passing step.
“Took ye long enough,” Mrs. Crabb said, taking the basket from Isobel the moment she stepped into the bustling kitchen. “Parritch on the stove. Best hurry. Ye’re needed upstairs.”
Isobel spooned a glob of thick porridge into her bowl and carried it to the bench set against the far wall. She ate breakfast while she watched Mrs. Crabb remove the eggs from her basket and fill it with oatcakes.
The consistent activity within and around the castle walls was comforting in its familiarity. People came and went from the kitchen as they moved about their morning chores, and Mrs. Crabb was at the center of it all. Isobel watched with interest as the woman set the basket at the edge of the counter and looked about the room—likely for a free pair of hands.
“Jenny,” Mrs. Crabb called, lifting the basket and causing a young woman to halt in her steps. “I need these taken to the stables.”
Jenny rearranged the bundle of garments in her arms and reached for the basket. She was likely on her way to wash them and didn’t appear as though she could manage balancing another thing.
Isobel stood. If she could take Kieran the mens’ breakfast, she would have the chance to replace the image of her dirty foot with something much better. “I can take it. Jenny’s hands look full.”
Mrs. Crabb’s wiry gray eyebrows knit together as she slid the basket handle over Jenny’s arm. “Ye’ve no time. Remember? Ye’re needed upstairs.”
“Marion willna be waking yet,” Isobel argued futilely. Jenny was already heading for the door.
“It’s no’ Marion who wishes ta see ye.” Mrs. Crabb returned to the stove and spooned out porridge for a newly arrived group of small boys. She lifted her gaze, sending Isobel a meaningful look. “’Tis yer uncle.”
“My father’s cousin,” Isobel corrected quietly to herself. She’d been grateful when the chief of Clan McEwan had agreed to take her in and give her a roof and a place to sleep after the deaths of her parents, but that did not change their relationship—regardless of what people believed. It was easy to imagine she was Marion’s cousin with how close they were, but it wasn’t the truth. Isobel was kin, a daughter of the chief’s close cousin whom he’d greatly esteemed, but she was not greatly esteemed in her own right, and that was the reason for her uncertain standing in his house.
Isobel was a woman sturdily between worlds—neither a descendant of the chief nor a servant. She drifted comfortably between the kitchens and the great hall, mingling with all but close to few.
She stared at the porridge in her bowl as it thickened into tacky oats and stood to dispose of it, her stomach hardening around the breakfast congealing within it. If McEwan wanted to see her, something must be wrong.
“When did he send for me?” she asked, cleaning her bowl. She replaced it on the shelf set against the far wall and wiped her hands down her skirt.
“While ye were out gathering eggs. Ye’d better hurry.”
Isobel slipped from the kitchen and hurried up the curved staircase, smoothing back loose strands of flaxen hair and tucking them into her simple coiffure. McEwan’s door was open, and Hugh stood just outside, forever in his place guarding the entrance to the chief’s rooms. He ushered her inside, and she swallowed. They’d been waiting for her.
Alexander McEwan dwarfed the large desk he sat behind, his stature of a height and breadth that would easily silence most men into submission. His steely blue gaze was every bit as intimidating, and it settled on Isobel now, watching her closely as she bent into a curtsy.
“Sit,” he commanded, his quiet voice belying the power it held.
Isobel obeyed, folding her hands in her lap and doing her best to appear confident, though she felt anything but. Marion might claim that her father had a soft, gentle side, but Isobel had yet to see it. He was no brute, but neither was he a man who exuded warmth. He caused her alarm, and she rather believed he intended for that to be the case.
McEwan looked her over, analyzing Isobel to the point of discomfort. She fought the urge to squirm under his gaze. The chief’s scrutiny was far more uncomfortable than the manure she’d stepped in that morning.
His calculating gaze never left her face. “Ye’re a bonny lass.”
She curbed her surprise. Kieran didn’t think so.
Isobel swallowed, maintaining the silence she knew he expected from her.
“Ye’re ages with Marion, aye?” he asked.
“She is one year my junior. I’m four and twenty.”
McEwan nodded, rubbing a hand over his bearded jaw. His dark hair was liberally sprinkled with gray, his beard fading with each passing year. “Ye’ve heard of the feast to welcome the McEwans of Kilgannon?”
“Aye.”
McEwan rose, crossing to the window and clasping his hands behind his back. He gazed out over the shimmering loch. The fog was cleared now in the morning light, though the birds had only grown louder. “The laird of Dulnain died six months ago, and they’ve replaced him with Miles Duncan, brother-in-law to the chief of Clan Duncan.”
Isobel’s shoulders tightened. What use had she of this information? If he thought to remind her of the impossibility of passing through Duncan lands to return to the home of her childhood, she was well aware of it. Dulnain sat squarely on the other side of the loch, faintly visible from the highest reaches of the castle and very much the barrier between this home and the ancestral McEwan lands on the other side of it. To travel around Duncan lands to get there would take days.
“It has reached my attention that the new laird of Dulnain is in need of a wife.”
Isobel sat rigid in the uncomfortable wooden chair, the decorative ladder-back digging into her shoulder blades. She had a few ideas for where this conversation could be leading, and none of them were good.
McEwan turned his back on the window, crossing his arms over his broad chest and looking down at her. “Ye will marry him.”
Fighting the urge to flee, Isobel swallowed the bile rising in her throat. He wanted her to marry the man who’d taken residence at the house across the loch, who was a brother-in-law to the chief of the Duncans? “The new laird of Dulnain?” she clarified.
“Aye. He’ll be attending Kilgannon’s feast, and I expect ye to make yerself up to him. Convince the wretch that ye’re a sensible choice.”
Not only was he commanding her to marry the man, but it was also her task to see the match made? “It is my responsibility to attract his attention?”
McEwan’s dark eyebrows pulled together. “Och, nay. He’s agreed to it. But I dinna want ye to give him any reason to change his mind.”
“He’s a Duncan,” Isobel said. Memories assaulted her of acrid smoke filling her lungs, of the way her chest shook from coughing fits for days, and how she’d burned her clothes because they couldn’t shake the stench of fire and destruction that clung to them. She shoved those thoughts away just as she had many times before. “His people…what they did to my home…”
“D’ye think I’ve no’ labored long over this decision?” McEwan crossed slowly back to the desk, but he did not sit, instead towering over her. “It’s been eight long years since I lost yer father, and I remember every minute of them. We canna bring the Duncans to justice without a step forward, and with Angus dead, the new laird will be called to see reason. His willingness to attend the feast is proof enough of that.”
“But why must I wed the man? Can we not strive to find another solution to mending the discord between our people and theirs?”
McEwan slammed his hand on the desk. “Did I no’ take ye in, raise ye as one of my own?”
“Aye, ye did,” Isobel said softly.
His eyes narrowed. “D’ye no’ think ye owe me yer fealty?”
She nodded, unable to say anything else. She had no love for the Duncans, but it was more than that. If she married the new laird of Dulnain, she was forever sacrificing her McEwan name for the name of those who burned her house to the ground, killing her parents in the process. She had forgiven them long ago, allowed the anger to leave her heart, but forgiveness hadn’t erased her memories. This was different than forgiveness. This was sacrificing her clan. Her parents’ clan.
And she could never be with Kieran.
“Ye’ve less than a fortnight to prepare,” McEwan said, skirting his desk and retaking his seat. It was a dismissal, but rising would be futile. Isobel needed to stop her head from spinning.
“Is not a month more sufficient?” she asked.
“The date for the feast is set.” McEwan glanced up, looking at her as though to ask why she remained within his sanctuary when he was finished with her.
Standing, Isobel pressed her hand to her stomach to stop the rising bile and left the room.
Hugh, McEwan’s ever-present sentinel, grabbed her arm and pulled her flush against his chest as she stepped from the chief’s chamber. Her heart racing, Isobel removed herself from his grasp and flattened against the wall while a stream of men passed carrying large trunks. When the group had cleared, she stepped back.
Hugh dipped his head slightly. “Didna want ta see ye trampled.”
Isobel quirked her lips into a semblance of a smile, the barest wisp being all she could muster. “Thank ye.”
If only her chief felt the same.