A chill settled into her marrow, and Adaira shivered.
Despite the interior’s dimness, she could see that the deceased was a thin man with white-streaked hair and threadbare garments. His arms had been caught at crooked angles, and the enchanted blue plaid knotted at his shoulder had protected his heart but not his neck. The blood that had spilled from his sliced throat had long since dried into a circle beneath him, the shade of wine in midwinter light.
Adaira longed to look away. Look away, her heart whispered, and yet her gaze remained fixed on the man. She had seen dire wounds as well as death before, but she had never stood in a room where murder had been committed.
Innes Breccan was saying something at Adaira’s side, her voice deep and raspy, like a blade trying to saw through damp wood. The western laird was never one to let her emotions melt through her guard—she was a cold, calculating enigma—but after four weeks of living with her, Adaira could hear two things in her mother’s voice: Innes was exhausted, as if she hadn’t slept in a long time, and she wasn’t at all surprised to find a man slain on her lands.
“Was it an enchanted weapon, Rab?” Innes asked. “And if so, can you tell me what kind?”
That was not the first question Adaira expected her mother to voice. But Adaira had grown up in a place where enchanted weapons were scarce. Only a few Tamerlaine smiths were willing to take on the cost of forging them. In the west, nearly every Breccan of age carried one.
Rab Pierce crouched down to examine the body more closely. His leather armor creaked with his movement, the blue plaid wrinkling over his chest as he stretched out his hand. He had just turned five-and-twenty, and while he had a muscular frame, his face was still round with youth. His straw-colored hair was cropped short, and he always looked sunburnt. Adaira surmised that was from all the hours Rab spent riding against the wind and rain, since the clouds hung thick and low in the west.
She watched as Rab examined the man’s neck. Eventually he shook his head.
“It looks to have been done with an ordinary blade,” Rab said, glancing up at Innes. “A dirk most likely, Laird. I also noticed the cottage and the storehouse are both empty, as are the paddocks. This man was one of my mother’s most reliable shepherds.”
“Are you saying someone killed him to steal his food and livestock?” Adaira asked. She didn’t want to sound shocked, but neither could she ignore the cold trickle of suspicion at the nape of her neck.
This dead man’s croft wasn’t far from the clan line, and she wondered if his sheep had originally been stolen from the Tamerlaines. Had he profited off Breccan raids of the past, taking Tamerlaine goods and livestock as his own?
Adaira’s compassion for the murdered man began to wane. She remembered the winter nights laced with worry and terror when she was a child. She remembered being woken by the sound of feet rushing down corridors and voices slipping through cracked doors. She remembered Alastair and Lorna giving orders and mustering the guard to defend and aid the Tamerlaines who suffered from the Breccans’ pilfering.
In those days, Adaira hadn’t fully understood why the raids happened. All she knew came from the opinions that had been passed down to her: The Breccans were their enemies. Their clan was bloodthirsty and callous, greedy and coldhearted. They preyed upon the innocent people of the east.
As Adaira had gotten older, though, she had learned the power of biases, and she had longed for truth. For facts that weren’t relayed with a certain slant that made one clan look better than the other. She had delved into the lore of the isle and discovered that the Breccans had raided even before Cadence was divided by magic. Descendants of a fierce and proud people, Breccans were born with swords in their hands and hot tempers and possessive bonds.
But when the clan line had been created by the doomed marriage and deaths of Joan Tamerlaine and Fingal Breccan, the western side of Cadence had truly started to falter. What good was magic in your hands if your kail yard couldn’t feed you through the winter? What good was an endless supply of enchanted swords and plaids if your sheep had no grass to graze upon? If your water was murky and the wind blew so harshly from the north that you had to rebuild your homes and outbuildings with south-facing doors?
Adaira still hadn’t grasped how it was for the Breccans until she had lived in the west and seen for herself the haggardness of their land, the lack of sunshine, the constant threat of the northern wind. She saw that they rationed their food in the summer, hoping it would last through the winter, but it inevitably didn’t. She saw how much easier it was for them to steal from the Tamerlaines than from their own clan.