Bride For A Knight

Prologue

BALDREAGAN CASTLE

THE WESTERN HIGHLANDS, 1325

"Devil take your tsk-tsks and head-shakings." Munro Macpherson, a lesser Highland chieftain of scarce renown, clenched his fists and glowered at Morag the midwife. He refused to look at the wraith on his bed, focusing his fury on the bloody-handed old woman. "Dinna think to tell me she's dying. No-o-o, I willna hear it!"

He took two steps forward, another when the midwife cast him a sorrow-filled stare. The same kind she'd been sending his way ever since he'd burst into the birthing chamber.

A stare that said more than words.

Told him things he didn't want to accept.

Shuddering, he glared denial at her, willed the sympathy off her lined, age-pitted face. "'Tis you and no other who'll be meeting your Maker this night if you do not soon restore my wife's vigor!"

"'Tis God's will, sir." Morag sighed, made the sign of the cross.

"Then call on the old gods!" Munro shouted, his mouth twisting. "All in these hills know you're familiar with 'em!"

The old woman pressed her lips together and rubbed more herbed oil onto her hands. "Your own eyes saw the piece of cold iron I laid in her bed. And I told you the water my niece is using to blot the sweat from her brow comes from St. Bride's own well."

"Then use devilry!" Munro all but choked. "Try anything!"

He narrowed a scorching stare on Morag's timid-faced niece, the dripping rag clutched in her hand. Rage scalded him that such a pale wee mouse of a female could live and breathe while his lady, so lush, golden, and until yestereve, so alive, could lay dying.

Consumed by fever, already long out of her senses.

Unable to bear it, he whirled away from the two women, the pathetic shadow that was his life. All that remained of her were incoherent moans and the tangled spill of her glorious hair across the soiled bedsheets. A magnificent cascade of rippling bronze, but already matted and losing its luster. Just as her creamy, rose-tinged skin, always her pride, had drained of all color.

Haggard and spent, she no longer even thrashed when the birth pangs gripped her. She simply lay there, her sunken eyes and the waxy sheen of death signaling her fate.

Her destiny, and Munro's doom.

Entirely too aware of his inability to do aught about it, he planted himself before an unshuttered window and frowned out on the bleak autumn night. Hot tears rolled down his cheeks, but he fought them, drew in a great breath of the chill, damp air.

But no matter how hard he stared into the rain-washed darkness, or welcomed the furious thunder cracking in the distance, he felt impotent. Small and inept, as if he were no longer the tall, powerfully built man who strode so boldly across the hills, but a quivering nithling ready to drop to his knees if only pleading might help.

Instead, his blood iced and his entire body went so taut he wondered it didn't crack and shatter into thousands of tiny ne'er to be retrieved pieces. Tight-lipped, he kept his gaze riveted on the dark of the hills, his hands curled around his sword belt. "Hear me, Morag," he said, his tone as humble as one such as he could make it, "for all my moods and rantings, I love my wife. I canna bear to lose her."

The words spoken, he turned, his gut knotting to see the old woman peering beneath his wife's red-splotched skirts, her wizened face drawn into a worse scowl than his own.

Munro swallowed, tightened his fingers on his belt. "Name your price if you save her. Whate'er it is. I will be ever in your debt, and gladly."

But the midwife only shook her head again. "The babe is too big," she said, easing his lady's thighs farther apart. "And she's lost too much blood."

"Meaning?" Munro's temper resurfaced, his eyes began to bulge. "Speak the truth, woman, lest I pitch you and your sniveling niece out the window!"

"Your wife will die, sir," Morag answered him, "but there's a chance the bairn will live. His head is already emerging. Strong shoulders, too. Be thankful - "

"Thankful?" Munro thrust out an enraged hand, yanking up his wife's blooddrenched skirts in time to see a large, coppery-haired man-child slip from between her lifeless thighs.

"Thankful for a tenth son?" he roared, glaring at the wailing babe. "The child who killed my Iona?"

"He is your son, my lord." Morag cradled the babe against her chest, splayed gnarled fingers across his wet-glistening back. "And a fine, strapping