Jack had been with her. His fingers had been laced through her own.
You’re lonely . . . I can see it in your eyes. I can see it in the way you walk.
Rab’s voice was the last one Adaira wanted to hear, but his words reverberated through her, striking her weak points. She drew her knees to her chest, wondering who she was becoming. She tried to see herself in a month, in a year. Through springs and summers, autumns and winters. Through rain, drought, famine, plenty. Would she grow old here, living out her days as a hollow shell of who she had been? What was her true place among the Breccans?
As hard as she tried, she couldn’t see the path she wanted to forge.
But perhaps that was because she still didn’t know where she belonged.
“Cora?”
She gingerly rose to answer the knock on the door and found Innes waiting in the corridor.
Adaira must have looked worse than she realized, because her mother stepped inside and shut the door, concern shining in her eyes.
“Don’t worry,” Adaira said in a strange tone. A voice that sounded old and defeated. One she didn’t recognize. “I held it down.”
Innes was silent for a moment, but then she reached out her hand, caressing the damp waves of Adaira’s hair.
“Come sit,” the laird said.
Wearily, Adaira sat in a plush chair by the hearth. She was astonished when Innes began to gently remove the remaining jewels from her hair, setting them in the wooden box they had been delivered in earlier that day. They weren’t sapphires, but they were beautiful all the same. Small yet fierce stones, glittering like ice. Adaira was wondering where they came from—if the jewels hid in western mines—when the laird began to brush the tangles from her hair.
It made her think of Lorna and all the evenings she had done the very same.
Adaira clenched her eyes shut, forcing the tears to dissolve beneath her lashes. She hoped Innes didn’t notice.
“You said the other doses will get easier?” she whispered as a distraction.
“Yes. Do you want to keep taking them?”
Adaira was quiet as Innes continued to brush her hair into silk. She thought it very possible that Innes would have blessed a raid if Adaira hadn’t been present at dinner. There were many facets of her blood mother that she didn’t fully understand, and Adaira sighed.
“Yes.” She fell quiet, listening to the storm. Then she asked, “How old was my sister when she died?”
Innes paused. When she spoke, her voice was raspy. “Skye was twelve.”
Adaira envisioned her sister—long blond hair and bright blue eyes, a girl who was on the verge of becoming a woman—writhing on the floor as she succumbed to a slow, painful death. Innes on her knees, helplessly watching and holding her until the end came.
Another peal of thunder shook the walls.
“Will the nobles be able to hunt tomorrow if it’s storming?” Adaira asked.
“It will make things very difficult.” Innes set down the brush. “And it cannot happen again, Cora.”
Adaira stiffened. “You heard him play?”
“Yes. His music has provoked this storm, and there is no telling how long it will now last.” Innes walked across the room, opening the wardrobe to find a clean chemise. She laid it over the foot of the bed.
“I don’t understand why the west is suffering if Jack was playing in the east,” Adaira said. “It was a mere play of the wind that brought the notes here.”
“I’ll tell you what my grandmother once told me,” Innes replied. “Music in the west upsets the northern wind. The spirits are drawn to a harp when it’s in the right hands, and the songs can make them stronger or weaker, depending on the intent behind the bard’s ballad. A bard could sing them to sleep or compel them to war against themselves. Given the curse of the clan line, I imagine there is a steep cost to a bard when they sing for the spirits in the east, but in the west it makes a bard incredibly powerful. There are no checks upon the bard, and so the northern wind has become that boundary, driven by the fear that the spirits could be controlled by a mortal.”
Adaira was quiet, but she thought about all the times Jack had suffered when he sang for the folk. The aches and pains he felt. The blood that often flowed from his nose, the way his fingernails would split and his voice would turn hoarse. He could play for only so long before the magic debilitated him.
But after listening to Innes’s explanation, Adaira couldn’t resist imagining Jack singing in the west. Hearing him play to the spirits at no cost to his body.