Page 110 of Promised to the Forbidden Laird

Worse, she believed Roy would come. That certainty had remained in her eyes even when smoke filled the room.

Cormac once thought fear would teach her dependence. Instead, every hand he laid upon her drove her more firmly toward MacIver.

Another abduction would accomplish the same. Roy would rescue her. Donaldina would trust him more deeply. Dun Ard would see devotion where Cormac intended weakness. Each blade raised against them forged their alliance more securely.

The realization tasted bitterer than defeat.

“We willnae take her again,” he said.

Several men looked up.

“Then what remains?” asked Finlay, the youngest among them. “MacIver holds Dun Ard. The MacNicols stand beside him now.”

“They stand beside a royal decree.”

Cormac turned from the window. There lay the weakness. It was not in Roy’s sword, nor in Donaldina’s stubborn heart. It was not even in Dun Ard’s walls. It was the damn paper.

The King’s accord granted Roy MacIver access to the MacNicol lands, establishing him as a legitimate authority and turning an outsider into a husband the clan was obliged to follow. Without it, he was just a foreign laird holding another clan’s fortress, and Donaldina was simply a woman who had chosen him.

Choice could be called seduction. Loyalty could be named betrayal. Peace could be made to resemble surrender, provided enough frightened men repeated the accusation.

“The marriage is the foundation,” Cormac continued. “Remove it, and MacIver’s claim falls with it.”

“The King sealed the agreement.”

“Eight years ago, before war altered every house named within it, before Lachlan died.”

The men listened more closely now. Cormac felt the room changing. Defeat loosened its grip as resentment took its place.

There were minor clans all along the western coast who received nothing from the accord. There were men whose fathers lost grazing land to MacNicol expansion, younger sons who would never inherit while Roy united two strongholds beneath one name, and chiefs who feared that peace between MacIver and MacNicol would leave smaller houses without influence, tribute or useful enemies.

Such men did not require truth. They required permission to call ambition justice.

Cormac moved toward the broken altar. Upon it lay a strip of dry parchment, an ink horn and a list of names gathered during years spent listening in council chambers: MacAulay, MacRae. Gunn families still bitter over lands absorbed by Lachlan’s father, two MacNicol cousins who believed blood placed them nearer the lairdship than Donaldina’s marriage ever could.

He dipped the quill.

“Send word tae each of them,” he ordered. “Tell them MacIver means tae use the accord tae swallow every lesser clan between Dun Ard and Black Craig.”

“And what dae we offer?”

Cormac looked down at the map spread beneath the parchment. Boundaries crossed the coast in fading ink. Forest, pasture and fishing coves waited beneath his hand.

“Land,” he replied. “Council seats. MacIver holdings when he is removed.”

They were not yet his to grant, but that scarcely mattered. A promise only required ownership after men had bled for it.

Cormac began the first letter. He would not strike Dun Ard’s walls again. He would make those walls meaningless. He would turn neighboring clans against Roy, force the council to question Donaldina and place the King’s neglected agreement before every priest, chief and ambitious second son willing to condemn it.

Roy MacIver had won the woman.

Cormac would ensure that choosing him cost her the clan.

Donaldina went to the hives because bees required no explanation. They did not ask why she had awakened with the memory of Roy’s arms around her, or why the sound of his voice outside her chamber had remained with her long after he left.

The bees required steadiness. That, at least, she could give them.

Morning mist clung low over the garden, silvering the rosemary and dampening the hem of her gown as she crossed between the hives. The air smelled of wet earth, crushed herbs and beeswax warmed slowly by the pale sun. Beyond the garden wall, the sea moved against the cliffs with a low, ceaseless murmur.