Page 84 of Sinbound to the Highlander
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As time crept toward Yuletide, Freya immersed herself in preparing for the season. When the piles of evergreen boughs were brought in, she helped to put them on every wall, lintel, and staircase. She assisted in the kitchen, baking the oat-bannock bread, soft cakes, and pannich perm, before darting up to attend to his mother’s knees and then to the healing hall to help there.
Evan loved that she was busy, and had put the distress about Elspeth behind her. What he loved most was spending the nights with her in his arms, even without coupling, he was content to have her in his bed. But then, two nights before Yuletide, some troubling news came. It was sometime in the early morning, and he felt the cold night air envelop him when he pulled the door open.
“Aye?” he asked the servant. “What is it?”
“Fisherfolk from the Lossiemouth River are here, Me Laird,” the man said hurriedly. “Fire destroyed a row of cottages where they stored their fishing materials, Sir, and they say everything is a blackened mess.”
Perplexed about it, Evan gave the order for them to have something warm to eat and blankets for them to rest on, promising to see to it at dawn.
At daybreak, as he had promised, Evan went to speak with the troubled people, who, like him, were at a loss as to how a fire could have started in the middle of winter, on a snowy night, no less. One man gave them the answer.
“It makes sense because I smelled oil on the charred boards. Someone set that fire, t’was nay a sudden strike of lightnin’.”
“And that raises the question, who would do such a thing?” Another person voiced their grievance. “And as far as I ken, nay raiders are roaming the borders.”
To Evan’s shock, Miss Helga’s grandson was in the mix, and after Evan gave him his heartfelt thanks, the young man offered to show him where the ruins were.
Riding back to the castle, three long hours after he had left, Evan could not dispel the blackened husks that the huts were, or the soot-filled snow, with some clumps that still clung to his boots. He had managed to assure them that he would cover all their materials to rebuild.
He rode back home, confused. Who would do such a thing? At home, he found Freya in the room, about to take a bath as she was splattered with flour.
“May I join ye?”
She laughed, “Like I could stop ye?”
Evan nearly ripped his clothes off and followed her into the bath tub, sinking into the warm water with a sigh of relief. His arms encircled her, instinctively drawing her close, and resting his chin on her shoulder. He reached for one of the washing cloths and, after dipping it in the water, gently bathed her slender body.
“Last night, a part of the Lossiemouth village where ye were found, was burned.”
Freya twisted her head to peer at him with a delicately crinkled brow, “Do ye ken who did it?”
“Nay,” Evan said. “I just hope this is an one-time thing.”
He was wrong. Every day after that, something horrible happened; a storehouse of wheat went aflame, stones were stuffed into a well, blocking the people from drawing water, and the other well that they did draw water from, rendered a child and older woman grievously ill. They found that the water had been poisoned. A day after that, a whole barn was filled with butchered cattle.
Evan was at his wits' end, trying to figure out what was going on. What he did know was that the incidents were creeping closer, village by village, closer to his castle. Freya was busy as well, with the full healing hall of poisoned people, and when she did come to bed—as there were nights that she tended to sleep in the hall—her body resting on his was the only comfort Evan had as he spent sleepless nights.
On Oath’s Night, the last night of Yuletide, Evan went to the Great Hall with dread filling his chest for what catastrophe would happen next. A bard was recounting the legendary battle between the youngOak King and the Holly King in the middle of the hall, while Evan waited for Freya to join him.
It was a long day, and he knew she would be resting before joining him. That was all right; they had a longer night before them. That was when his eye caught sight of something—or rather someone.
Elspeth’s old maid—the one she had sent off, slipping through the door to the kitchens. What was she doing there, and how had she slipped through the increased number of guards he had placed all around the property without notice?
Dropping his goblet, Evan left the dais and followed her, silently cursing himself that he had not ordered his guards to look out for her. He pushed into the kitchen’s long hall and spotted the back door, one used by the servants, swinging in the night breeze.
He ran out into the cold, snowy night and spotted the woman running toward the east curtain wall where he knew a gate led out into a road used to carry wood and coal into the castle.
“Halt!” Evan shouted, but that only made the woman run harder.
Swearing, Evan took off into a spring, a dangerous thing because of the wet snow under his feet, but managed to catch up with the woman, only because she had slipped a few times and had lost momentum. Just as she was going to move through the gate, he threw himself at her and tackled her to the ground.
Angrily, she cried out and began to thrash, the nails of her right hand slashing a cut just beneath his left eye. Incensed, Evan grabbed both of her hands and pinned them to the ground. A drop of blood fell to the snow beside her head, but he did not care about his injury.
“What the deuce are ye doing here?” he ordered.
Just as he expected her not to answer, she smiled nastily, “I came to deliver a present to yer Maither on behalf of me mistress.”
