Read Sue-Ellen Welfonder - [MacLean 02] for Free Online Page B

fisher cottages and sailing over any impediments daring to rise in his path.
And still the shame of his banishment held pace with him, its black portent pounding through him in macabre rhythm with the drumming clatter of his horse’s hooves on the pebbled beach.
Ne’er again set foot . . .
Iain frowned, a fresh tide of anger washing over him, his fiercest scowl powerless against the pursuing words. They tore after him with the persistence of sleuth-hounds fast on a scent.
Equally persistent, and even more troubling, came the uneasy sensation of being watched.
Observed by unseen eyes, his progress along the moon-silvered beach more than well noted and not by the auburn-headed lout riding so annoyingly close beside him.
Blinking against the lashing wind, Iain risked a glance at his brother’s friend—now his guardian—half-expecting, nay, hoping, to find the knave’s hazel-eyed perusal fixed on him.
But Gavin MacFie appeared wholly concentrated on matching Iain’s reckless pace whilst skirting, or jumping his own garron over the many upturned skiffs and coracles scattered about the narrow, crescent-shaped beach.
If anything, the easy-mannered oaf seemed intent on not looking at him.
But someone—or something—was. He could feel it in the chills rippling up and down his spine, the ill ease seeping into his bones.
And whoe’er, or whate’er it was, probed relentlessly.
The sensation sent a maelstrom of icy shivers speeding over his nerve endings and deeper: unholy tingles twisting through him in search of a chink in his armor, a way past his barriers for a glimpse at his soul.
His heart.
An organ so withered and forsaken, even he didn’t care to examine its depths.
Warier by the moment, Iain shot a quick look at the wind-tossed sweep of the curving bay where full two score of MacLean galleys rocked at their moorings.
Their sails neatly furled, the single masts and upthrusting sterns and prows made black silhouettes against the pearl gray sky. Each warship banked twenty-six oars, though a few boasted forty, and one or two only had sixteen.
Swift and feared at sea, this clear and windy night the galleys lay impotent and silent, their rocking slumber guarded by the enclosing headlands, the lot of them at peace . . . save one.
His brother’s prized birlinn, a sleek twenty-six-oared beauty, the pearl of the fleet, waited patiently for Iain. Already drawn halfway onto the strand, seamen swarmed all over and around it, busily preparing for a hasty departure.
A knot of dark-frowning crewmen struggled with two packhorses, their attempts at cajoling the poor beasts into stepping over the vessel’s low-slung side reaping little more from the frightened animals than white-eyed snorts of protest.
Humblies, full-bearded and naked of chest, stood waist deep in the foaming surf, the open sea behind them, each man ready to hurl his all into pushing the birlinn into the deeper, wider waters. Others, seasoned MacLean seamen, bustled about on board, clearly eager for the shipmaster’s order to raise the great square sail.
But Iain scarce noticed the scrambling men, hardly heard their shouts and chants . . . and took even less heed of someone’s repetitive beating on a metal-studded targe. His gut clenching, he focused on the ship’s long row of vacant-eyed oarports.
Every last one of them seemed to bore holes straight into him.
Disquieting stares, accusing and cold, but by no means penetrating.
Nay, that particular nuisance came from a much greater distance than the soon-to-be-launched birlinn.
That much he knew.
Cursing beneath his breath, he dug in his heels, urging his mount into a full gallop, but the instant his beast obliged, surging forward in a great burst of speed, it found the sought-after chink.
A wee but patently vulnerable fissure in his heart, a crack narrower than a hairbreadth, but a weak spot all the same, and so well hidden he would’ve ne’er believed it existed.
But it did, and all his senses roared with the knowledge, the impact