Wild Highland Magic (The Celtic Legends Series Book 3)

  Wild Highland Magic

  By

  Lisa Ann Verge

  She can read every mind…except his.

  Gifted with faery blood, Cairenn is blessed and cursed with the ability to read minds, until a naked, half-dead Highland warrior washes up on the shore of her remote island. Challenged by the wall between them, Cairenn nurses him back to life as she tries to pierce his thoughts without succumbing to his charm. For only a fool would fall in love with a man whose world she cannot inhabit, and whose heart she cannot know…

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  CHAPTER ONE

  Inishmaan, 1276

  The man lying upon the shore was as naked as the day he was born.

  Cairenn stood amid the boulders on the far edge of the beach, shading her eyes against the midday sun. When she’d first headed down the hillside, she’d thought the thing cast upon the shore was nothing but driftwood. As she came closer, what she’d assumed was a branch resolved into an arm, what she’d guessed was the trunk of some ship’s mast turned out to be his broad, muscled back.

  Now, standing only a dozen yards away, she no longer doubted that a full-grown man lay face down on the sand.

  Her young companion, Seamus, clambered down the rocks to stand beside her.

  “That man,” Seamus said, “he must be cold, don’t you think?”

  The boy blinked up at her with close-set eyes, all innocence.

  “I imagine he is, Seamus.”

  “Why is he out here like that?”

  She wondered that herself. Finding a body upon the shore wasn’t so rare a thing for Inishmaan, since the island felt the full brunt of the North Atlantic Ocean. But generally men washed up only after a gale, when ships sank beyond the horizon and the tides washed the bodies onto the nearest land they could find. There’d been no gale recently. She couldn’t imagine what tide had brought him here.

  “I think,” she said to her young friend, “that the sea just gave him up.”

  “Oh.”

  Cairenn knew he didn’t really understand. Seamus was a special boy, different from his brothers and sisters. Small in stature, and with a face that caved in a little by the bridge of his nose, everyone dismissed him as the village idiot. But she judged people by a different measure. Seamus’s mind was as pure as the ringing of a harp’s string. It worked in straight, simple lines, shrugged off tangled complications, and favored sunshine and laughter.

  Now she glanced back at the man exposed on the sand and, contemplating what she had to do, felt a strange mix of anticipation and unease. On this very strand, several years before, her own sister Aileen had been kidnapped by an outsider and swept away to Wales. It would be too much of a coincidence for such an event to happen twice—but she couldn’t ignore the possibility that this man might be sleeping or even playing dead.

  But no man could play dead around her, for she had the power to read minds.

  So she cast her thoughts out in the way that no one else could. In the next cove, she sensed a lone fisherman coming in with a haul of mackerel. Around the cut of the cliff, an O’Dunn boy felt grumpy because he’d been forced to haul seaweed up the cliff. She sensed anger in the caws of the birds and, just off shore, the curiosity of a herd of seals bobbing in the surf.

  But in the body of the naked man only yards away, no life flickered.

  “Seamus,” she said, drawing his attention away from the corpse on the strand, “I need you to tell my father about this.”

  “But we’re going on an adventure! I’m going to show you how I row my boat over the waves!”

  Her gaze drifted to a nook between two rocks where a little skin-covered boat was stowed. It was Seamus’s own coracle, gifted to him by his father when the boy finally learned how to navigate the dangerous surf. Seamus had been bursting with pride that he’d passed his test. She’d used his enthusiasm to convince him to show her this new trick, and to take her on an excursion, maybe as far as Galway.

  Now she wondered if the entire world conspired to keep her from ever stepping off the island.

  “We’ll do it another time, Seamus.” She reassured him with a smile. “For now, we have to take care of the man who washed up here.”

  His brow crumpled. “Will the doctor make the man better?”

  “No, but he’ll see that he’s tended to.” The islanders bore witness for any seamen who washed on shore, speaking a few words and then burying them above the high tide line. “I’ll keep watch over his body so that the sea doesn’t pull him back. Can you do this for me?”

  A bright light filled his mind, the joy of helping others. He was already halfway to the slope when he shouted, “I’ll run fast!”

  The sand sank beneath her leather boots as she headed for the body. The booming crash of the ocean echoed against the backdrop of the cliff. Spray misted her cheeks, caught in billows in this hollow carved out by the sea. As she came closer, she realized how big the man was, far bigger than he’d looked from afar. He had shoulders like a bull.

  Over the years, several bodies found on this strand had been of strange, different kinds of men. There were fantastical, lushly mustached people that Da had called Spaniards, heavily-bearded pale creatures he called Vikings, and once a tall, unnaturally thin man with skin the color of peat that Da had called a Nubian. Now as she looked upon this man’s water-slick hair, the wonder of his back, and the long, strong length of his legs plastered with seaweed, she thought he looked like a selkie who’d clawed himself up to land in order to take human form.

  She glanced around the cove in search of his black sealskin, realizing the moment she did so that she’d been listening to too many of her brother Niall’s stories.

  Foolishness.

  She leaned over to peek at the man’s face, but first she saw his wound. She dropped to one knee and plucked away a thick piece of seaweed that clung to his shoulder, revealing an angry, ragged slice and purple, mottled skin.

  She wasn’t a doctor’s daughter for nothing. She recognized a stabbing when she saw one.

  Murdered, then.

  A terrible chill shot through her. Da had always warned her that outsiders were a strange, violent folk. Proof frequently came by boat when men wounded by sword or mace or axe found their desperate way to his sickroom. Still, she couldn’t help but feel some sympathy for this outsider who’d had his life shortened before its natural time.

  For he was not an older man. She could see that in the smoothness of the skin around his eyes. To better see his face, she came around to his other side. She wondered what kind of strange work he’d done to have built a body such as this. She wondered if, somewhere far away, a young woman stood staring out at the sea, pining for him.

  Crouching down, she dared to slip her finger under a lock of hair that covered his brow, relieved to see that the rest of his face was untouched by the ravages of the sea. She pushed his hair aside to see his features better.

  For a breathless moment she gazed upon him. A snatch of her brother Niall’s poetry came to her, from the story of Deirdre of the Sorrows.

  I would have a man like that

  Hair like the raven

  Cheek like blood

  His body like snow

  As handsome a man as she’d ever seen lay before her. His brow was painted with salt-stains, his lashes sand-flecked.

  Then he opened his eyes.

  ***

  Lachlan thought he was still on the ship. He felt it rocking beneath him, tilted up at the bow at an alarming angle. Though the sun was too bright for his eyes, he heard a crew close around him, grunting and shouting at each other in garbled Gaelic. />
  His mind wasn’t working well, but he reasoned that if he was still on the ship, then he hadn’t been stabbed. He hadn’t been pushed overboard. He hadn’t felt the pressure of the ocean squeeze the air out of his lungs as he sank, watching the ship’s keel recede by the watery light of the moon.

  But he couldn’t still be on the ship, because after a time the rocking stopped and he was in a dark place. Some crew of brutes was pressing him down. He could barely breathe as someone stabbed him with sharp, thin knives. His head swam but the pallet beneath him didn’t, and the contrast confused him. The room he was in was too hot.

  He was pulled into a dream that was a memory. He heard seabirds. Sand tasted gritty in his mouth. Something warm and soft floated over him. The faint fragrance of spring flowers emanated from that warmth, reminding him of the verdant hills around Loch Fyfe. His mind grasped that memory, tried to draw closer to it though it was like pulling a hemp-line attached to an anchor without the gears to ease the lift. The warmth he sensed burrowed near him and brought comfort. He stretched for that with all his might and suddenly found himself blinking against a light so bright that it stung his eyes.

  He tried to focus on the creature leaning over him, haloed by the sun.

  I’m dead, he thought.

  I’m dead and this is heaven.

  “No, you’re not dead, young man. Though considering what you’ve been through, you should be.”

  Lachlan froze at the deep, unfamiliar voice. His sight cleared and he realized he wasn’t staring at the face of the creature of his dreams, but instead at the figure of a tall man towering over him, grinding something in a small bowl.

  Lachlan started to sit up but pain speared through his shoulder. He eased back down on the pallet.

  “A wise decision,” the man said, not pausing in his grinding. “After we brought you up from the strand, I had to pull pieces of linen out of your shoulder. You’ll be glad to have slept through that.”

  Shooting pains stole the air from his lungs. He slipped his good hand over his chest and felt rough linen bindings.

  “The wound is deep.” The man scraped around the inside of the bowl. “Fortunately for you, whoever wielded that blade missed the vital arteries.”

  A memory returned, of a trample of feet, a surprised shout, a blur of faces, a burn through his back, and then weightlessness until he hit the cold sea.

  “Do you understand me?” The man paused in his grinding. “Parlez-vous français? Do you speak English? Sprechen sie Deutsch? Hablas Español? Vôce fala Português?” A strange spark lit his eyes. “Türkçe biliyor musun?”

  Lachlan’s tongue was swollen and dry. “I understand you.”

  “Ah. A Scotsman.”

  The man sounded disappointed. Lachlan tried to take the measure of the stranger. The man wore the simple woolen tunic of a farmer or a sheep-keeper, but something about the way the man carried himself spoke of a more martial livelihood.

  “You’re on the island of Inishmaan, one of the Aran Islands,” the stranger said, anticipating his question. “I am Conor, the island’s surgeon, apothecary, and tooth-puller, when necessary.”

  Lachlan didn’t know the place, but he had cousins in Ulster. Even with his senses so addled he realized this man was Irish.

  The doctor said, “We found you washed up in a cove like a piece of flotsam. The fishermen brought you to me. Another hour upon the strand and you’d be dead.”

  He muscled up some spit to moisten his tongue. “How…long?”

  “We’ve been fighting to keep you alive for a week.”

  A week.

  Panic flashed through him. He struggled to sit up.

  “Don’t be foolish.” The doctor placed a solid hand on Lachlan’s good shoulder. “If you move too quickly, you’ll tear open the stitches again. I’ve had a devil of a time keeping that wound closed.”

  The wound pulled and tugged, a pain that made beads of sweat pop out on his forehead. A week gone already, and who knew how long it must have taken the ocean currents to drag him to this shore.

  He remembered the last time he saw home, riding out of the keep with his father’s hopes heavy in his heart.

  “I have to get back,” he said through gritted teeth. “My father will think I’m dead.”

  “If you don’t let that wound heal, you will be dead.” The doctor increased the pressure on his shoulder. “Trust me, your father will be elated at your resurrection.”

  The doctor’s grip was implacable, but it was the black scrim starting to wink before his eyes that felled Lachlan. He sank back on the pillow breathing as heavily as if he’d rowed the whole white-capped distance between Derry and Loch Fyfe.

  Damn it.

  “Not a simple sailor, are you?” The doctor released him and frowned. “A Scotsman builds shoulders like that by wielding a claymore.”

  Lachlan used the excuse of his weakness not to respond. He wasn’t so dazed as not to realize he had to be discreet. He didn’t know who this man was, or whose side in the conflict he might be on, or even if he knew anything at all about the clan war brewing.

  “Trouble then,” the doctor grunted at his silence. “Should I send men to watch the shore? Against the enemies who’ll return to finish the job?”

  Lachlan remembered the sound of the assassins laughing just before the ocean swallowed him up.

  “There’ll be no trouble.” His lips stuck to one another. “They think I’m dead.”

  He should be dead. He’d been stabbed, thrown overboard in the middle of a gale, yet woke to find himself alive in a room with a wary Irish physician. He struggled against the darkness, thinking I must get back.

  The assassins believed they’d murdered him.

  The next man they would murder would be his father.

  CHAPTER TWO

  Cairenn hesitated outside the stone outbuilding where her father tended his patients. He was the best doctor in all of Ireland. She knew this because it was always the sickest, most desperate people who found their way across Galway Bay in little coracles to hire donkeys to carry them to the heights of Dun Conor. People doubled in agony, cut apart by war, groaning under sicknesses no one could see, half-mad in the mind.

  She could always feel those minds, whether she wanted to or not. They roared in pain and anguish. Many a night she’d scurried away from the bed she shared with her sisters, fled the house, the courtyard, and the whole stone-walled fort. She’d rather shelter in the caves on the north of the island than sleep within mind-hearing distance of that bloody room.

  Now, standing in the white sun in the middle of the courtyard, she spread her thoughts into the sickroom. She sensed a pair of swallows nested in the thatch, warming a clutch of eggs. She sensed one of the house cats cleaning its paws in a patch of sunshine. Blocking out her father’s presence, she stretched her mind and probed every corner of the room until she could sense the buzzing of a bee just outside the window, the rustle of a mouse amid the straw in the corner, all the tiny tickles of life that made her head hurt. But for all her probing, she sensed no other human life in that room except her father.

  Not even the one she knew lay on the pallet inside, living and breathing when he shouldn’t.

  The emptiness disturbed her more than a hundred thousand bloody screams.

  “There you are, Cairenn.”

  Her father stood in the doorway. He’d been waiting for her help in the sickroom, but she’d dawdled while she helped Ma clean up the midday meal.

  “Why are you standing there?” he said. “Are you going to come in here and do your father’s bidding?”

  “I’m not my sister,” she said, feeling her chin pucker. “I’ve no gift of the healing hands.”

  “I know very well that Aileen is an ocean away.” As always, when he spoke her sister’s name, it came with equal measures of pride and melancholy. “And you know that I called you for other reasons. It’s not a healing that our patient needs now.”

  Her father slipped into the dimne
ss of the room, expecting her compliance. She swallowed the fear and made her way across the bare stone of the courtyard like the dutiful daughter she was supposed to be. She stepped into the cool shade of the building and grasped the doorjamb against the smell of the place—tart herbs and peat smoke and, underneath it all, the copper-tang of blood.

  She couldn’t help herself. The nothingness on that pallet was like a void she couldn’t stop peering into. But sending her mind toward the outsider was like tripping into thin air.

  “This man you found,” Da said, casting a hand toward the pallet, “is no wayward sailor caught up in a brawl, I can tell you that.”

  No, Da. No, he isn’t.

  “I didn’t want to talk about this over dinner and worry your Ma. Asking you to help me with his bindings was a pretext to get you in here.”

  “I can tell you nothing about his mind.” That, at least, wasn’t a lie. “He was so far gone when I found him on the strand, that I felt nothing but his pain.”

  “And now?”

  She hesitated. To tell her father that she sensed nothing in the body on the pallet was to speak of impossible things. Every creature had a life force, right down to the moth that just fluttered out of the folds of the cloak hanging on a hook by the door. Something was terribly wrong—either with this man or with her gift. In the agitated mood her da was in, she wasn’t ready to confess to either.

  “He’s just dreaming,” she said, tripping on the lie. “He’s having cold dreams of being in the ocean.”

  “Look deeper.”

  A knot tightened at the nape of her neck. She knew Da was just worried about the danger this man could bring into their home, but she couldn’t help thinking about other times when he got angry at her, mostly when she blurted truths best kept to herself. Once, she’d unwittingly mentioned in her father’s presence that Niall had been sneaking down to a crofter’s cottage to lay with a fisherman’s wife. Another time he was furious when she refused to blurt truths he demanded to know—like who broke a clay vessel of oil amid his medicines. So often she felt like either a stubborn keeper of secrets or a tattler of terrible truths.