was my brother, my protector. And still, finding the Faolchú Chridhe was more important to him than anything else.” Her voice was husky with an old grief, but her eyes glittered with fresh fear.
“Talorc is nothing like your brother.”
“I know.”
“And still you have not told him of the wolves’ sacred stone?”
“I planned to.”
“When?”
“Soon.”
“Why wait?” He wanted her to admit it, her mistrust of her own father and laird.
“It has great power, temptation for even the most honorable Chrechte. It can call forth the conriocht, not just the wolf.”
A werewolf? They were myth.
Eirik almost laughed at his own arrogance. He shared nature with a dragon and he doubted the existence of the conriocht? A creature that was said to tower over other men and had the snout, fangs and claws of a wolf and the strength of ten men, the conriocht would be invincible to all but a dragon.
Though it could not fly.
“So, you would deny this power to your laird, to your fellow Faol.”
“Perhaps it was denied us for a reason. The Faolchú Chridhe disappeared and while my brother claimed it was stolen by the Éan, I am not so sure. Perhaps the leaders of our people saw the misuse of its power and hid it to stop such a thing from happening again.”
“’Tis all conjecture.”
She nodded. “It doesn’t matter. It wants to be found now and will give me no rest until it is.”
“Your dreams.”
“What do you know of my dreams?”
“Only that they keep you awake at night. You look as if you sleep less than a mother with twin babes and a new litter of pups to care for at once.”
Her shoulders drooped. “I am tired. So very tired.”
“Tonight you will sleep. Tomorrow, we speak to the Sinclair.”
Her mouth twisted as if she found something darkly funny, but she nodded. “Tomorrow.”
Eirik turned back to Lais and Mairi. “Is she well enough to be carried inside yet?”
“She is, though barely. She had many injuries…broken bones, bleeding inside, severe bruising in many places. I have healed what I could, but she needs more tending and sleep. I need rest before I can continue.” It was obvious Lais did not like admitting the last.
Eirik respected him all the more for doing so and nodded. “I will carry her into the keep.”
“No,” both his healer and that keeper of secrets, Ciara, said together.
He ignored Ciara to give Lais a questioning look.
“I have enough strength to carry her.”
Eirik took in the protective stance Lais had over the human, the way he held his body between her and the other two Chrechte. Even more telling was the fierce light in Lais’s brown gaze. The usually even-tempered man looked ready to throw down in battle over the right to transport the broken woman into the keep.
Eirik took a deliberate step backward. Think long and hard before you take a human woman as a mate, he said through their mental link. “Take her to Ciara’s room,” he said aloud.
Mairi would need watching and Ciara, for all her secrets, was the only logical choice. Talorc would not tolerate an unattached male sleeping in the same room as the female, human, or not. So, healer, or no—Lais was out.
That left Ciara.
Who, unsurprisingly, did not argue Eirik’s order to have Mairi carried to her room. For all her attempts to show herself otherwise, she had a caring nature she could not hide.
She followed them into the keep, the still quality of her silence bothering Eirik, though it should not.
She wanted none of him and he wanted nothing of such a deceitful Chrechte. Her reasons for not telling the Sinclair about the Faolchú Chridhe would imply Ciara did not share Galen’s view of the Éan, but that was only if Eirik accepted as truth those claims.
Her ability to mask her deceit and the secrets she kept meant that he could not accept anything she said so easily.
When they got to her bedchamber, Ciara quickly drew a traditional plaid in the Sinclair colors of blue and black around her. She made pleats with nimble fingers before wrapping the end over his shirt in a diagonal across her chest. She pulled a blanket of the same fabric back on the bed for Lais to lay Mairi down and then stepped back, allowing the healer room to care for his patient.
“I will awaken the laird and tell him of the night’s happenings,” she said in a subdued voice before quickly leaving the room.