Free Parris Afton Bonds by The Captive Page B

celebrating a victory of sorts. Ranald’s men trounced a small English search party.”
    Her pewter tankard of ale stopped midway to her mouth, but the sudden wail of the bagpipe postponed her obvious question.
    There was a quality to this music unlike any of her Lowland childhood experience. Until the English banned the bagpipe as a weapon of war because it had led the clans to battle at Culloden, many Lowland towns had employed a town piper. An honored citizen with a special uniform, the town piper’s duty had been to pipe the town awake in the morning and pipe it to sleep at night.
    This was no simple tune. It opened with a theme that de veloped over a sequence of variations into an eerie musical scheme of soulful depth. This music, once heard, was not to be forgotten. The instrument’s piercing, haunting tone emerged from the sound of the drones like a needle sewing silver thread through coarse linen.
    She shivered. Her gaze scrutinized with aroused interest the man responsible —for both the music and her captivity.
    His head was slightly tilted and lowered so that she got a glimpse of his queue, tied at his muscular nape by a leather thong. H is hair was the color of hot tea marbled with cream.
    He took a momentary breath, releasing the blow-pipe, and lifted his head. In that instant, she saw that, while not handsome, his face was arresting.
    She couldn’t take her eyes from it. The brow was broad, the light-colored eyes impassioned. High, craggy cheekbones created steep, bronzed walls into which a pleat had been carved at either side of a mouth etched with purpose.
    There was nothing soft about his countenance. Shrewdness, determination, and a cert ain recklessness glinted there.
    For a moment his gaze clashed with hers. Beneath the sharply angled brows, his eyes challenged her. She realized he wanted her to try to escape. He wanted an excuse to make her life more difficult than it already was.
    His gaze relinquished hers, and she let out a breath she had not known she had been holding. He replaced his mouth over the blow-pipe. Nearby, his uncle leaned his head back against the great chair and closed his eyes. The tormented expression of his old-prophet’s face eased into repose.
    Between Ian and Ranald Kincairn ’s empty chair sat a young woman Enya had not noticed in the great hall the first time. Clad in men’s trews and a too-large cambric shirt, she appeared to be approximately the same age as herself but of a diminutive build. The young woman’s hair, unbound in the style of a maiden, reminded Enya of a lioness’s tawny mane. In the heart-shaped face, her blue eyes had that look of the wild. She was definitely striking, but too gaunt to be considered attractive.
    Enya realized the young woman was staring back at her. Such hate filled those ice-blue eyes that Enya had to steel herself against flinching. At last, the woman looked away, but not without first flicking her a smile that promised pain.
    "The young woman there," she said to Jamie, “is she the laird’s?”
    "Ranald ’s wife? No, he has none. Mhorag is his sister."
    Enya could almost have sworn she had heard the young woman snarl at her. Perhaps it was the final drone of the bagpipe.
    Ranald Kincairn passed his sheepskin bag to a waiting lackey and resumed his seat at the head table. She watched him prop his high leather boots on the table and light his pipe. Such was her desire to smoke, that for one mad moment she thought about stealing his pipe the next time he deserted the table to play his bagpipe.
    A fiddler put an end to the lull in music, if the screeching noise could be called such. Several couples in rustic homespun, most likely from the hamlet of Lochaber, forsook their tankards to dance to a reel. Ente rtained, she watched while her foot tapped—until she realized the name of the song, "Old Stewart’s Back Again."
    The elbow at her ribs recalled her attention. She followed Jamie ’s nod. Ranald Kincairn, pipe stem between his