Free Highlander Avenged by Laurin Wittig - Guardians Of The Targe 02 - Highlander Avenged Page A

have required Malcolm to wed her, though his leniency with Scotia’s trysting made that unlikely. But, still, for the first time, she realized that no longer would the man she wed be required to renounce his own clan and become the Guardian’s Protector. No longer would the man she wed be required to become the chief of the MacAlpins.
    Jeanette looked out over the broken curtain wall toward the dark loch that reflected the starlight. For the first time, she considered that her future might not be here in Dunlairig after all.

CHAPTER FIVE
    J EANETTE ALTERNATED BETWEEN sitting and dozing, and pacing the bailey, as she waited her turn to set out from the castle. The first group should have arrived at the caves by now, and three more groups had followed since, each taking a different route to their sanctuary. Only the final group was left and it was not long before they, too, would abandon their home. She had delayed one last task as long as she could but the time was short and she could put it off no longer.
    Malcolm looked her way from his perch on one of the stones that were still strewn through the bailey from the crumbled wall. She smiled at him, remembering the joy and abandon she had felt in his arms when they kissed, and tried to pull those feelings around her as if they could shield her from what she must do now.
    She took up a lantern that burned nearby and made her way to the tower. She trudged up the stair, passing the landing that would lead her to Rowan and Nicholas’s chamber. Was it really just this morning that she and Rowan had argued there? It seemed much longer. She continued to the top floor, where she shared a chamber with her sister. But that was not her destination.
    Jeanette turned to her right and stood before the closed door of her mother’s solar, a sunny room with windows that looked east and west. A room that had held such happy memories until it had been turned into a bedchamber when her mother took ill last fall. A room that now held only the memory of her mother’s murder at the hands of a spy for the English king.
    She hadn’t set foot in it, or even looked into it, since her mother’s body was taken for burial. She did not wish to go in now.
    But she must. The scrolls that held the chronicles of the Guardians of the Targe, the collected lore of a long line of women, all Guardians in their own time, could not be left behind. Some were so old, the chronicles were pictures only. And there were many gaps in the lore. She did not know if there were missing scrolls, or if there was simply no one from those periods who knew how to write. Her mother’s own tenure as Guardian would have gone unrecorded if Jeanette had not begged her father to find a tutor to teach her reading and writing.
    And the end of her mother’s years as Guardian had yet to be added. Neither had the beginnings of the newest Guardian, Rowan.
    Shame slithered in Jeanette’s belly. Grief stole her breath. But she could not make herself reach out and lift the latch.
    “Angel?”
    Jeanette jumped. Malcolm stood next to her, looking down upon her with concern and questions in his hazel eyes. He reached out and ran a hand down her upper arm, a soothing motion like that of a mum quieting a bairn.
    “We are ready to leave as soon as you are,” he said, his voice as gentle as his touch.
    “I have to get something.”
    “From within this chamber?”
    “Aye.” But still she did not reach for the latch.
    “What is this chamber?” he asked.
    She swallowed, started to answer, and then had to swallow again, her throat suddenly clogged with tears she would not shed. She gripped her hands together, hoping he did not notice their trembling. He did not press and at last she thought she could speak.
    “ ’Tis . . . ’twas my mum’s chamber.”
    He was silent for another moment, then sighed. “She died here?”
    “She was murdered here. Aye.”
    She waited for him to say something, but he simply pulled her into his embrace