It was well known that music was fickle on the isle. A small number of people could handle instruments at all, and even then, only a bard and a harp could draw the spirits. For as long as Torin could remember, the east had always had a bard to sing lore and historic ballads, save for those few years between Lorna’s death and Jack’s return. But music had been woven into their isle life, long before the clan line was ever formed.
Torin met Jack’s stare.
The bard’s eyes glistened as his jaw clenched. He was first to break their gaze, casting his attention to examine the harp. Torin took that moment to look over the bookshelves, then withdrew a few tomes while giving Jack the privacy he needed.
What other secrets did you hold, Adi? Torin wondered as he surveyed the shelves. His gaze eventually was caught by a book with loose parchment between the leaves. He pulled the volume from the shelf and was surprised to find that the paper tucked within was a child’s sketch. He knew instantly that this was one of Adaira’s old drawings.
She had depicted three sticklike humans, but Torin recognized them. Adaira had drawn herself, standing between Alastair and Lorna and holding their hands. A horse hovered in the sky above them, as only a child could imagine happening. Thistles claimed one corner of the paper, and stars another. Beneath the illustration was her name, written with the R backwards, and Torin smiled until it felt like his chest had cracked open.
It all happened so quickly, he thought. When the truth about Adaira’s origins had come to light, Torin had scarcely had time to think about how that news affected her, so absorbed had he been in trying to sort through his own emotions. And then it had simply been easier to wallow in the denial. It was easier to suffocate the memory of her last days in the east.
But now he imagined it.
He wondered what Adaira had felt when she realized that she had grown up under a lie: that she wasn’t the blood-born daughter of the parents she had loved, as Alastair and Lorna had led everyone to believe, but the offspring of the western laird, their greatest enemy. That she had been stolen over the clan line and secretly laid in Lorna Tamerlaine’s arms as a bairn. What had she felt when the clan that had once adored her turned on her, relieved when she exchanged herself for Moray?
Torin shut the book, unable to look at her drawing a moment longer. Before he could stop himself, he said, “Do you think she’ll return to the east, Jack?”
“I don’t see it happening.” Jack plucked another sad note from the harp. “Not until she believes Moray has paid his penance in our holding.”
That would be a decade. Adaira’s twin brother had committed a terrible crime against the Tamerlaines, stealing their daughters away in a cruel act of vengeance. That the east had withheld Adaira from her blood family justified Moray’s actions—in his mind—as he kidnapped Tamerlaine daughters, again and again. All in the hope that the kidnappings would spur Alastair to reveal the truth about his daughter—a revelation that would give Adaira the chance to return to the west on her own.
“Has Adaira ever said anything to you in her letters that gives you a sense of alarm?” Torin asked next.
“No,” Jack replied, but his eyes narrowed. “Why? Has she written something to you that makes you think she’s in trouble?”
Torin traced the gilded spines of the books on the shelf. “She’s hardly written to me at all. Just one letter, shortly after she departed, to let me know she had settled in and was doing well. Same to Sidra.” He paused, wiping the dust from his fingertips. “But she hasn’t responded to any of the letters I’ve sent to her since. Sidra believes it’s only because Adi is trying to bond with her parents and needs the distance from us to do so. But I wonder if they’re intercepting her letters and my words are never reaching her to begin with.”
“I’m currently waiting for her next reply,” Jack said, rising with the harp tucked beneath his arm. “But she’s given me no reason to believe she’s in danger. I think Sidra is right, and Adaira is choosing to put distance between us. I have a hard time imagining Innes Breccan wanting to harm her, not when her heir is shackled in our dungeons. But neither would I be surprised if Innes still regards us as threats—to both Moray and Adaira—and so maybe the western laird finds your letters unsettling. Maybe she feels she has no choice but to interfere, as you say. And yet what can we do about it?”
Nothing.
They could do absolutely nothing, short of starting a war with the Breccans, which Torin did not want to do.