The name cut Adaira to the quick, and her gaze shifted upwards. Her brother was already staring at her, waiting for her to look at him. As soon as their eyes met, he removed the dirk from Jack’s throat and gave him a slight shove forward.
“Don’t look at me like that, Cora,” Moray said. “I wasn’t going to hurt him.”
Adaira strode across the room before she could gather her thoughts. She grasped Jack’s arm, drawing him protectively behind her. But her relief did not soften her. There was lightning in her blood, and she was one breath away from tearing into Moray. With her words and her hands, with anything that she could pick up and hurl, when Innes came between them.
“What are you doing here?”
“That’s how you greet your heir? Your only son?” Moray asked. He still held the dirk in his hand, waving it about carelessly. “I thought you’d at least be happy to see me, Innes. I’ve come a long way.”
Innes’s jaw clenched. “You’re currently under the Tamerlaines’ watch. If you are here, then they have permission to come and hunt you.”
Moray laughed. “They aren’t capable of such a feat, I assure you.”
“I don’t think you understand the full extent of what you’ve done, Moray,” Innes said, “and what the ramifications will be.”
Moray was quiet, but he didn’t appear repentant or worried. He looked beyond Innes again, his eyes tracing Adaira.
“I’ll ask you again,” Innes said, stepping aside to block Moray’s view. “What are you doing here?”
“You’d come between me and my sister?” Moray asked. “If not for me, you’d still think she was part of the wind! You’d be fooling yourself into believing she was blowing her wings through your hair when you rode the wilds. You wouldn’t be standing here with her, filling her up with all the poison you make, weaving those blue jewels into her hair and—”
Innes struck him across the face.
“Enough,” she said. “You’ve committed your crimes and have now run from your punishment. There is no greater shame, and I now have no choice but to shackle you until the Tamerlaine laird can be informed of your location.”
Moray touched his lip. It was beginning to bleed, cut open from the edge of her vambrace, but he only chuckled. “You would fight to keep her, but not me?”
Innes was silent for a long moment. Adaira’s fingers twitched at her sides as she listened to her mother’s slow, steady breathing.
“She doesn’t shame me as you do,” Innes finally said.
Moray lunged forward with startling speed.
Innes was anticipating his assault, but she was still a beat too slow. She reached out to catch his arm and bend it back at a painful angle, but he cut her palm first. Her blood bloomed, bright as a rose, as she took him to the ground.
Moray kicked out his leg, overturning a side table. The bottle of gra and a bowl of blue jewels—jewels that were most likely poisoned blood Innes had wrung from an enemy—broke and scattered across the floor. The air suddenly smelled like mist-damp heather, like a cold northern wind, as the gra seeped into the rug.
Adaira had to step back. She felt Jack, solid and warm behind her, as he took hold of her waist, drawing her farther away. But she was stunned, watching Innes and Moray wrestle and strike and wound each other. She hadn’t given much thought to the nature of her mother’s relationship with her brother, but never would she have imagined this. A laird who didn’t trust or respect their heir. A mother who had no choice but to twist her only son’s arm until he was facedown on the floor.
Moray finally stilled, unable to free himself. His eyes found Adaira’s again, but there was no defiance in his gaze, only sadness.
“I’ll ask you one more time, Moray,” Innes said, her knee pressed into his back. “Why are you here?”
“I’m not going to waste away for ten years in the Tamerlaine dungeons,” he rasped. “I’m not going to let myself fade into dust, shackled by them while you and David live happily ever after with Cora.”
“It is your penance.”
“I want justice. Let me fight in the arena. Let the sword speak for me.”
Chills swept through Adaira. He wanted to face the culling, and she wasn’t certain how she felt about it. Would it be best if Moray had the chance to fight and potentially die? Or should he be returned to the Tamerlaine dungeons, to live ten more years in the dark?
Innes also seemed uncertain. Her expression wavered for a moment, just as the guards arrived, encircling them.
“If you go quietly to the dungeons,” Innes said, “I’ll consider your request.”
Moray nodded.
She eased off of him and the guards took her place, clapping the shackles to Moray’s wrists and hauling him up to his feet. Adaira couldn’t see his face, but she saw a glimpse of his hair as he was escorted away.
The room fell painfully silent.
David began to gather up the blue jewels from the floor. Innes flexed her hand, blood dripping from her fingers.
“Leave us please, Cora,” she said, turning her back to Adaira.
There seemed to be far too much that needed to be said. And yet Adaira couldn’t find a single word to utter.
She took Jack’s hand and led him away.
Torin remained behind in the laird’s wing. He hadn’t known what he expected to happen when he followed Moray and Jack, but it hadn’t been a tense altercation between the western laird and her son.
He hadn’t expected to feel not only a pang of respect for Innes Breccan, but also a quiet sense of awe as she handled Moray. She had held him down with no blades, only with her bare hands, one of which was bleeding.
He watched as David gathered up the jewels forming from Innes’s shed blood on the floor. Torin was so fascinated by the sight—what was this magic in her veins?—that he nearly missed Innes’s words.
“What am I going to do about Moray?” she asked in a weary tone. “Where did I go wrong with him?”
“We have all night to think of our options,” David said gently. “But for now? Sit and let me tend to you.”
Innes lowered herself to a chair, cradling her bleeding hand. She waited, her eyes glazed with distant thoughts, as David stepped into the adjacent room. He returned a moment later with a roll of linen and an earthenware bowl brimming with salve, then knelt before her.
“Take them off,” Innes whispered roughly.
David paused, but he set down his materials. He began to pull off his gloves, finger by finger, until they dropped to the floor with a whisper.
Torin’s breath snagged in his throat.
David’s entire left hand was blighted. His skin was dappled blue and violet as if badly bruised. His veins were illuminated in gold.
Innes stared down at her husband’s hand, her face carved with both fear and anguish. She was so entirely unguarded in that moment that Torin felt he should glance away as she traced David’s fingers. As her hand trailed up his arm, then caressed his face. She leaned forward and pressed her brow to his, and they breathed the same air, the same worries.