Neither salt nor holy water stops me.” He shoved the man back against the wall and bounced his head against it. “What direction did Lady Bree and her sister take?” Tightening his hold on the cur’s throat, he lifted him until his feet were dangling. “And if ye value yer life, ye’ll speak of her with respect, ye ken?”
“I swear I dinna ken where she went,” he rasped, his round face reddening.
“Follow the coast!” shouted a heavy woman from behind the bar. “East, I’d say.” She shoved her disheveled mop of graying hair out of her eyes. “If’n it was me that got run out from here, I’d stay to the coast for food. Gull’s eggs. Fish washed up and such. I’d keep movin’ ’til I found folk who didna know ’bout me or what happened. I’d go east ’cause that way might be likelier to have a place with a kind soul who might help a woman breedin’. ’Specially if she lied and told’m she was widowed. I’d bet the finest ale we got that’s what her planned to do when she left here. East along the coast for certain, ye ken?” Her panicked gaze kept flitting to the chubby little man Magnus held aloft. “I swear it.” She crossed herself, then clasped her hands and shook them. “Please dinna kill us or curse us. We did her no harm. Surely, ye know we couldna give her shelter. If The Maxwell had found out, he wouldha run us out, too. We wouldha lost everything. Came close to losing it when Laird Red Caunich came through here.” She crossed herself again. “Only God saved us.”
Magnus turned loose of the fool and stepped back as the man hit the floor. What the woman said made sense, and Lady Bree would’ve been canny enough to do that. In fact, she had often told him of combing the beaches and cliffsides in search of nature’s treasures, as she had called them. The memory made his heart hurt. Such a sweet lass. What had she been forced to endure because he had chosen to take up another mercenary campaign rather than winter at Nithdane Keep? The thought weighed heavy on him as he strode to the door, tossed aside the ridiculous bar, and exited. He despised those who would stand idly by and watch while an innocent woman was stripped of the protection of both kith and kin. Out of the corner of his eye, he saw Evander skittering back to their mounts. The nosy lad had been eavesdropping at the window.
“I thought I told ye to tend the horses?” Magnus asked as he stepped up into the saddle.
“I could see them from where I stood,” Evander defended. “I canna believe ye didna kill that man.”
“I only kill when I must.” He nudged his beast with his knees and headed east.
“So, we ride the coast ’til we come across someone who knew her?” Evander edged his gray horse up beside Magnus. “Reckon they traveled on foot?”
“Probably.” The thought rankled him, stirring the rage simmering in his gut. He wondered if they had managed to escape with anything more than the clothes on their backs—if that. Bree’s father had been an arse of a chief, acting as though he ruled over the largest clan in all of Scotland rather than the wee cluster of folk he had claimed were descended from Somerled himself.
Magnus had no doubt the man had made banishing his daughter into quite the spectacle. The cur had always bemoaned how his wife had failed him by not giving him sons. He had treated all the women in the keep as though they were worthless chattel.
Evander nudged his horse to a faster pace, keeping it abreast with Magnus’s. “Would a chief really treat his own daughter so harshly?”
The worry in the boy’s tone warned Magnus this conversation had more to do with than just Clan Nithdane. “No good chief would treat his daughter so harshly. Most would just send them away. To a nunnery, most likely.”
“What about a lass who’s da isna so high in the clan?” Evander waved away the words as though they were midges. “Say…like the smithy’s daughter even.”
“Did ye bed Ellen? Is that why yer mother was fit to be tied and sent ye on this trip?” Gretna’s intense lecturing made sense now. While Evander might have the wants and needs of a man, he didn’t have the ways or the means to take care of any consequences should