Page 16 of Beyond Dreams

Aunt, Holly guessed she was saying—lying, such as it was.

While the heavily made-up woman and Sidheag continued to silently stare down each other, and while Hugh and Wedast were now becoming vocal again, none of which Holly could understand but whom the preacher and the guy who she’d thought might be her groom tried to pacify, Holly could scarcely tear her gaze from Duncan MacQuillan, nor he from her. While chaos ensued all around them, they only stood and stared at each other.

His immediate and prickliest anger seemed to have diminished—she knew from experience that it was never far from the surface—and his pupils shrank a bit, just enough that his eyes were once again more green than black. While so many men she’d seen here in this time, including many that had come today with her groom, wore long beards or days’ worth of stubble, Duncan MacQuillan was clean shaven, his very hard and chiseled jaw without even one whisker. She wondered if he had done that as a courtesy to his bride, for her.

Because she felt it, and because she thought they’d had rather a bad beginning here, and most importantly because she really wanted and needed to get away from these wacky MacHeths and this creepy Hewgill House, Holly let the smile expand, the one that was a by-product of her near giddiness for finding him, the man of her dreams, a familiar face in her ongoing nightmare.

“You have no idea how happy I am to see you,” she said, a bit breathlessly for how fantastic all of this truly was, “even as I don’t understand how this is all happening. Or why.”

You are promised to me now, he’d said to her at the broch.

So even as he stared at her as if shehadjust told him the ridiculous truth that she came from another time, his scowl returning, Holly let her smile grow. The world as she knew it was gone, or had gone mad, but she was about to, quite literally, marry the man of her dreams.

***

You have no idea howhappy I am to see you.

The lass made no sense, not her strangely accented English—the likes of which he’d never heard before—or for simply looking as she did, entirely too bonny to be kin to any MacHeth, and then for how she was lookingathim, as if she were indeed rather pleased to see him.

As if she knew him.

Oh, thank God it’s you.

Dismissing the fog that wanted to grab hold of him and shroud him in the glory of her smile, Duncan cleared his head and faced Black Hugh once more, meaning to get down to the business of the wedding. From inside his tunic, he produced his copy of their original betrothal agreement, and held up the tightly knotted scroll to Hugh.

“This stands then? You declare that she is nae beholden to another by any other claim, that the thieving and abuses will cease now, and that fifty men will now fight under the MacQuillan banner, for a term of five years.” Or to be expired at their death, which in all likelihood, would come first.

“Aye, and what do I get out of it?” Hugh grumbled. “Naught but—”

“You have your life, Black Hugh, and Hewgill House will remain unassailed,” Duncan reminded him. “This was only ever coming to a head, you and yours and me and mine. You dinna want to come up against me.”

Graeme spoke up as well. “We ken you’ve orders from the mormaer on Skye, Hugh. To continue with your contentious ways, you only invite consequences from him as well, and you put the safety and security of your own sister at risk.”

“So it’s nae to your liking,” Duncan assumed. “And we’ll nae sit at any feast and bury our hatchets with a banquet of food and your sister aligned properly?”

Hugh scoffed at this.

“Verra well.” He took Ceri’s hand and pulled her forward to stand before the cleric with him. “Get on with it then,” he instructed the dough-faced man, all this posturing and belligerence too much for a gentle man of the cloth, no doubt. “Say the vows and we’ll be off.” He understood fairly quickly, and not only by the brothers’ mistreatment and rough handling of their sister, that neither Hugh nor Wedast MacHeth cared a fig about Ceri, about her preferences or these nuptials. They were satisfying the terms of the betrothal, as laid out by the mormaer from Skye, that was all.

Duncan knew little about his bride, save that she was remarkable in appearance but then curious for how she spoke and what she said to him, but he already imagined she’d be better off with him, at Thallane, one of the MacQuillans from this day forward.

Not that he particularly cared. Like Hugh, he was nearly under orders, his from Sir John de Soules. Whether Hugh personally desired peace in the Highlands, in this old stretch of land, Duncan could not say, but he knew he did. He did enough fighting against the English at Wallace’s side these days, he didn’t need to be wrangling and wrestling with men who couldn’t see the forest for the trees, couldn’t see beyond their own greed and aggression to the greater picture, Scotland in turmoil.

“Get on with it,” he advised the beleaguered cleric, who blinked and nodded rapidly, fumbling with his psalter to find the pages with the wedding rite.

Duncan was fully aware that his bride watched him, still breathlessly said her heaving chest, yet feverishly and with some...expectation that he was sure might be related to her puzzling statement thanking God that it was him, which still baffled him but which he chose not to entertain at the moment.

Realizing that he held her hand yet, finding it soft and warm and gripping his with as much firmness as he did hers, Duncan scowled anew and released her. He folded his hands in front of him and gave all his attention to the cleric, ignoring the quizzical glance she sent his way. He would begin as he meant to proceed with his bride. He didn’t intend to coddle or indulge her or her obvious apprehension. Presently, the nuptials were all that mattered; her apparent anxiety was not his problem.

Duncan didn’t turn his attention to Ceri again until the cleric was forced to ask a second time for her response.

“Ahem,” said the cleric, “art thou here today in pledged troth of thy own free will and choice?”

When still she did not respond, Duncan gritted his teeth and turned to his bride. “The man is waiting on your answer.”

“To what?” She asked. “I can’t understand what he’s saying.”

“Do you nae ken your own language? Have nae memory at all of it?” She may not have spoken it in years, but surely all was not foreign to her.

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