If that was his plan, he’d do well to look for an easier target. Her eagle screeched in denial at the thought, but Una ignored her bird.
“He plans to come live in the forest, does he?” Una’s father asked aggressively.
But Bryant did not rise to the bait. He merely took a bite of his stew and complimented Una’s mother’s cooking.
“I’ve taught Una all I know of preparing food,” her mother said in reply, and apropos of nothing, Una thought. “Not that she has much use for the knowledge living alone as she does in our former home.”
“Why does she live alone?” Donnach asked. “A Balmoral daughter would never be allowed to live on her own as Una does.”
“She is safer high in the trees than she would be here in the village with us,” her father said, voicing a sentiment she knew well.
And agreed with.
“Surely other families keep their children with them.” Bryant sounded confused.
“If Una had stayed in the trees, the horror of five years past would never have happened.”
Una felt the horrible weight in her stomach that truth always brought.
Bryant looked far from impressed, or convinced. “If coming out of the trees caused such hardship, your entire village would have horror stories.”
“They know better than to venture beyond the depths of the forest.”
“You went exploring?” Bryant asked her directly.
She liked the way he refused to talk around and about her. Like the heat of his wolf at her side, it warmed her. “I found the humans of the clans and their ways infinitely fascinating. I liked to watch them in my eagle form.”
Una hated admitting her failings out loud, but she would not deny them, either. No matter how much she might like to.
“But you were not caught as eagle,” Bryant guessed with far too much astuteness.
“No.” She’d been in her human form, swimming in the loch and playing in the falls that fed it as she’d seen the clan’s children do.
“What happened? Why didn’t you shift and fly away?”
Una rubbed at her wrists where the iron spikes had been driven to hold her to the tree.
Bryant noticed the small telltale gesture and put his hand out. “May I see?”
She should tell him no, absolutely not, as she would if anyone else had requested thus. But Una found herself offering her wrists.
He tugged up the sleeves of her blouse, a growl echoing in the otherwise silent hut as his eyes fell on the scars that could not be misinterpreted.
“They did this to you?”
“They found sport in hurting and terrifying me,” she admitted, not really understanding why she did so. Only that her eagle insisted on it.
Bryant lifted his head, his grey gaze boring into her father. “And did you kill them?”
“Those we caught, we killed, but not easily and not without cost.”
“There were nearly a dozen of them. They performed some strange ritual, not of the Chrechte, I don’t think.”
“Any women?” Donnach asked, his voice filled with revulsion.
“No. Only men. One of them was being initiated into the group. He drove the spikes in, to prove his commitment to their cause.”
“He is not dead,” her father said with frustrated venom. “But I have been in no condition to hunt him.”