Free Bride for a Knight by Sue-Ellen Welfonder

the skeletal birches rimming the Rough Waters.
    The dread Garbh Uisge.
    The cataract-filled gorge where his sons had lost their lives.
    Sons he could see now, their broken bodies shooting over the rapids, their death cries carried on the wind. Some of them already bobbed lifelessly in deeper, more quiet pools near the gorge’s end.
    But others still suffered, their battered bodies crashing against the rocks, their flailing arms splashing him with icy, deadly water.
    Munro groaned in his sleep, his fingers digging into the bedcovers as his heart began to race. Sweat beaded his forehead, damping his pillow.
    The tangled sheets and plaiding of his bed.
    Mist and spray surrounded him, its chill wetness making him shiver and quake. And then the rushing water surged across him, carrying him ever closer to his sons’ reaching arms. The facedown, floating bodies of the ones already claimed by their watery fates.
    “No-o-o!” Munro cried, his eyes snapping open.
    He pulled in a great gulp of air, noticing at once the pool of water he’d been wallowing in.
    How wet he was.
    And that someone had ripped open the bed curtains.
    “Of a mercy!” He sat up, dashing his streaming wet hair from his eyes.
    He swiped a hand across his water-speckled beard, peering into the gloom and shadows. Sodden or nay, he wasn’t about to throw off the covers. Only a spirit could’ve brought the Garbh Uisge into his room and experience warned him he’d soon see that ghost.
    And he did, recognizing Neill despite the dripping wet cloak he wore, the dark cowl pulled low over his white, hollow-eyed face.
    An accusing face, filled with recrimination.
    “You did this,” his eldest son decried, pointing at him. “You and your insatiable greed.”
    Munro scrabbled backward on the bed. “Begone, I beg you!” he wailed, his teeth chattering. “I had naught to do with—”
    “Aye, you did naught. But you could have repaired the bridge.” Neill backed into the shadows, his tall form already beginning to waver and fade. “Now it is too late.”
    And then the shadows closed around him just as the rushing waters of Munro’s fearing dream had swirled around and over him, pulling him ever deeper into the horrors he couldn’t flee even in sleep.
    Trembling uncontrollably, he somehow crawled from his bed and tapped his way across the chamber, making for his chair. Hard-backed and sturdy as befitted a Highland laird’s dignity, the chair was anything but comfortable.
    But with a dry plaid draped around him and another spread over his knees, it would suffice as a resting place until his bedding dried.
    Loud as he’d roared at Morag the last time she’d poked her grizzled head around his door, she wouldn’t be coming abovestairs to see to his comforts for a while. A good long while, like as not. And his pride kept him from calling out for her.
    So he dropped down onto his chair, tucked himself into his plaids as best he could, and frowned, in especial at the pile of Alan Mor’s strongboxes blocking his door. Weak-kneed as he was at the moment, he doubted he could move them even if he did wish to go seeking a sympathetic ear.
    Truth be told, there was only one soul he knew whose strength could push open his barricaded door. Munro’s brows snapped together. Och, aye, unnerved as he was just now, he might even be glad to see his youngest son.
    Infuriated by the notion, he sat back and turned his face toward the fire.
    Then he did his lairdly best to pretend such a fool thought had ne’er entered his mind.

 
    Chapter Four
    J amie stood before the arched windows of Alan Mor’s hall, for all intents and purposes legally bound to the Fairmaiden laird’s faery-like daughter and about to perform his first act as her personal champion.
    Once the jostling buffoons crowding around her drew her away from the high table, he’d have words with Alan Mor. Words that needn’t reach her gentle ears.
    Some things were best kept between men.
    A muscle twitched in