not know your true name even then. And, for all I know now, events may have altered you beyond my ken.”
“I could say the same of you,” Fin said, glancing around to be sure that no one else had wandered near enough to hear what they said. In a lower tone, he added, “Would it not be better to talk in the yard or elsewhere?”
“We’ll go to my chamber,” Ivor said. “ ’Tis nobbut a hole in the wall. I shared a larger one with James before he married and that option vanished.”
“I should hope so,” Fin said, grinning. “Lead the way then.”
Despite Catriona’s relief that the meal had ended, she was annoyed to find herself relegated to the company of women and more so to see Ivor bear Fin off and up the stairs without as much as a word from either one of them to her.
She saw that Morag was just as peeved when James followed their father into the inner chamber but found no solace in that.
Although Catriona wanted to know what Rothesay sought from her kinsmen, she cared more about what Fin and Ivor were saying. Both having agreed to explain their relationship, she had hoped that they would do so together.
“I’m going to bed,” Morag stated to all generally. “If you see James, prithee be so kind as to tell him that I shall be eager to welcome him when he comes to me.”
Catriona nodded but had no intention of waiting for James to reappear.
Believing that Fin would seek her out later if Ivor did not, she tried to think how she could avoid spending the time until then stitching or tatting in the ladies’ solar with her mother and grandmother.
Should that be her fate, she knew that with so many more men at the castle, the older women would insist that she go to bed when they did.
Her excuse to evade that had to be plausible, though, and she dared not lie to them. It would be unwise, for example, to say that she was going to bed if she meant to slip out the postern door to gaze at stars as she frequently did. Not that doing so would be wise in any event that night. Her father had brought enough men with him to fill two lower-hall trestles at supper, and many would sleep in the yard.
After months of feeling nearly empty, the castle now felt full to overflowing.
Hawk was right. His chamber was too small, and it felt even smaller when he turned toward Fin after lighting a number of candles.
He still held the taper that he had taken from a box at the foot of the stairway and lit from a cresset in one of its niches. Extinguishing the taper now, he looked long and thoughtfully at Fin, and sternly, as if Fin were an errant squire.
Fin met the look silently until Hawk grabbed his shoulders and squeezed them hard, saying, “It is good to see you, Lion. I cannot describe how I felt when I saw the river Tay swallow you and sweep you off toward the sea. When you went under…”
He turned away and fiddled with the nearest candle as if it had sputtered.
Fin knew that it had not. “I let the current carry me for a time, lest someone pick up a bow and finish me off.”
“Sakes, you don’t think—!”
“Nay, nay, although you are the only man I know who could have made such a shot.” A sudden memory of Catriona, boasting, made him chuckle.
“What’s so funny?”
“Your sister told me that her brother Ivor was the finest archer in all Scotland, and I informed her stoutly that I knew a better one. Mayhap I should have suspected the truth then. After all, you were fighting with Clan Chattan against us.”
“I was, aye. But I don’t believe that either of us was thinking much by the end of that battle. A dreadful affair it was.”
“Aye, and all Albany’s doing, according to Rothesay,” Fin told him.
“Father suspected that from the outset, for all that his grace the King issued the command to trial by combat. Albany does not like us here in the north, especially Clan Chattan. We were allies of the last Lord of the North, after all. And we have refused to let Albany’s worthless son succeed him in place of his own son.”
“ ’Tis true, aye. No one in the north could want Murdoch Stewart to take Alex’s place at Lochindorb. By all accounts, Alex is