Page 16 of The Warrior
“I don’t mind a wee bit of weather,” Niall shouted back with a grin.
Niall was a good lad, though a mite too cheerful. Duncan did not mind the foul weather, either. Navigating through rough seas diverted his thoughts. Once they passed through the squall and the sailing became easy, he could not keep himself from thinking about seeing Moira for the first time after all these years of longing.
If God had any mercy, she would have grown plump and lost her looks.
Yet it would make no difference. Moira was imprinted on his soul, and there would never be another woman he wanted in the way he wanted her.
That did not mean he would let her make a fool of him again. Not that she would bother trying. Despite the old seer’s vision, Duncan expected to find Moira living happily in her fine castle with her chieftain husband.
“I see it,” Niall called out and pointed to where a castle sat high on the red cliffs emerging from the clouds.
“We’ll stow our boat out of sight up the shore and walk back to the castle,” Duncan said.
Niall cast him a questioning look. “Ye don’t trust this clan?”
“I don’t trust any clan but ours,” Duncan said. “And I don’t trust all of our own clansmen, either.”
Duncan steered the boat into a small cove, and they hauled it up the shore and into the brush.
“I suppose you’ll have us sleeping out here in the cold and wet,” Niall said, “when we could be sleeping beside the roaring hearth inside their keep.”
“A cautious man lives longer.”
Ach, he sounded like an old man. But castle walls only protected those who belonged within, and Duncan generally avoided being closed in with men he did not trust. Besides, he could not bear to sleep in the castle’s hall knowing Moira was in bed with her husband on one of the floors above him.
A cold drizzle was falling in the bleak winter afternoon as he and Niall trudged up the path that ran along the top of the red cliffs. Ahead of them, the MacQuillan castle looked dark and ominous sitting on an outcrop that jutted out to sea.
“We’ve come on behalf of our chieftain, Connor MacDonald of Sleat,” Duncan told the guards when they reached the gate. “Take us to your chieftain.”
The guards reeked of whiskey, a sure sign of a lax leader. As they escorted Duncan and Niall across the bailey yard to the keep, Duncan steeled himself to see Moira with her husband and the children she and Duncan should have had together.
“’Tis a dreary hall,” Niall said in a low voice as they entered the keep. “It could use the flowers and such your sister puts about at Dunscaith.”
Flowers? God save him. “Keep your hand near your dirk, Niall.”
Duncan scanned the warriors who were gathered in small groups at the long tables or by the roaring fire in the hearth.
“Which one is Moira’s husband?” Niall asked in a low voice.
One of the guards who had brought them from the gate spoke to a tall, dark-haired warrior who stood with his back to them.
“That’s him,” Duncan said when the man turned around and fixed cold gray eyes on them.
This was the handsome chieftain’s son Moira had sat with at supper on their last night together. The memory of her laughing and flirting while this man stared at her breasts would never leave him.
Moira’s husband was chieftain now, which must please her. As their host crossed the hall to greet them, Duncan noted that his face was harder and his body more heavily muscled than seven years ago.
“A thousand welcomes to you,” the man said, though there was nothing welcoming in his expression. “I am Sean, son of Owen, and chieftain of the MacQuillans.”
“This is Niall. He is cousin to your wife and to our chieftain, Connor MacDonald of Sleat,” Duncan said, dispensing with the usual useless greetings. “I am Duncan Ruadh MacDonald, captain of our chieftain’s guard.”
“Not much good to your chieftain here, are ye, Captain?” Sean said.
The man was drunk—not swaying, slobbering drunk, but obstreperous, fighting drunk. And Duncan was tempted to wipe the sneer off the Irishman’s face with his fist.
“Ye look familiar,” Sean continued, narrowing his cold, gray eyes at Duncan. “Did I meet ye when Moira and I wed at Dunscaith?”
“No,” Duncan said. “We carry a message from our chieftain for his sister.”
