The Falconer's Daughter - Liz Lyles Page 0,7

sit on the pot. Get on with you while I make us some breakfast.”

Cordaella walked towards the corner and he bent to push her mattress against the wall. Breakfast was nothing more than a slice of flat dark bread and some soft goat cheese, but it was food, and the best he could do. Bread wasn’t easy to make and he had struggled for months to learn how to produce even this modest loaf.

Suddenly the goat, tethered at the back of the croft, cried plaintively and Kirk looked away from the slicing of the bread to see twenty-month-old Cordaella attempting to suckle from one teat. “God in Heaven,” he swore, his face contorting. What next? What didn’t she do?

“Cory, no!” His sharp tone stopped her and she sat back heavily on her bare bottom, peeing all over the packed dirt floor. “Cordaella…” he groaned, dropping the loaf onto the rustic table. “What would the Macleods think of that?”

*

THE YEARS PASSED, one after another, and it never grew much easier. The falconer struggled in winter to keep them warm enough. He worried each autumn about the cold and the scarcity of food. He whittled all winter. And spring arrived as it had every year, slowly, timidly.

At three, and still at four, Cordaella was as inquisitive as ever, afraid of nothing, not fire, not water, not wildlife. She trusted her father implicitly, and treated everything in nature the same. Kirk would watch as the toddler, wandered away from the croft across the flower-streaked meadow towards the distant wood. He would call after her and she’d nod, but did she listen to anything he said? Repeatedly he warned her about being caught alone in the woods, the edge of cliffs, and the unstable footing on the granite slope of Nevis. When he caught her walking into the stream beds swollen with the runoff from melting snow, he’d pull her away with a smart spank on her bottom. She never cried. Instead she stared at him, her expression serious until his glower eased, and then, rocking back on her heels, her hands caught in midair for balance, she’d smile.

Her smile, that triumphant expression which lifted her eyebrows and dimpled her mouth, where did she get it from? It wasn’t his smile. And it wasn’t her mother’s. Then whose? Which of the powerful Macleods had left this? Her smile didn’t erase his worry and yet it reminded him that she was someone else, someone other than him. She would grow up and then what? Who would she be?

Just before summer, in mid-May, a stranger climbed the steep slope from Inverness to the lower meadow of Ben Nevis. The monk had made the trek to meet the falconer and attempt to persuade him that the Duke Macleod could offer the child more. “You must send her to a proper school.”

Kirk stiffened. His face was gaunt, high hard cheekbones pressing against his dusky complexion, black eyebrows nearly one thick line above his eyes. “She is but four.”

“You fail to bring her up according to the laws of our dear Lord Jesus Christ! You have a duty to your daughter—”

“Cory is my daughter. I will choose for her.”

“Are you a Christian, Brother Buchanan? How will she learn of her heavenly Father here? What have these mountains to teach her about charity, godliness, purity?”

He could hear the wind blow across the meadow grasses, the low soft rustle that made it seem as if the entire field was moving. He knew that the soft summer wind would give way in a number of weeks to clouds and rain. The summer season was always short here, but it was fair and good. Kirk cleared his throat.

“You use big words, Brother. You ask me to prove things I cannot. But I tell you that these mountains are more godly than your Glasgow and Edinburgh and Aberdeen. God is here in this cottage. He is in each meadow flower and in every season. My daughter learns of Him when the winter comes and the spring follows, snow melting in the sun.”

The monk could also hear the wind ripple the grass and yet, to him, it sounded mournful, almost frightening with the low throb and constant movement. “But do you not teach her about sages? About pagan fairy folk and ignorant fairy faith?”

“I am a Christian, Brother.” Kirk wanted to smile when he heard the brother talk of fairies and sages. Of course Kirk told Cordaella about magic. There was always magic in the