Page 84 of Bride of Fire
The hall had fallen so silent by the time he reached her that he could have heard a spider reeling down to the flagstones.
“Alicia?” he managed to croak out.
At the sound of his voice, her pale arm flailed out, and she whispered, “Morgan? Is it you?”
The familiar voice, her subtle Catalonian accent, made him fall to his knees beside her.
“’Tis me, my love,” he whispered back. “But what trickery is this? How can this be? Are ye…?”
He meant to ask if she was hurt. But the sight of her face was answer enough. She looked as if she’d dug herself out of her own grave. Perhaps she had. Perhaps she hadn’t been dead when…
The thought was too terrible to consider.
“I’m…alive,” she said, clutching at his sleeve and trying to smile.
Her black braid was matted. Her lip was crusted with blood. One eye was swollen shut. And there was an ugly lump on her brow.
“What…? How…?”
Bethac intervened. “There will be time to talk later, m’laird. The physician should be summoned. Her hurts need to be seen to.”
“Nay,” Alicia gasped out. “First, I need to tell you what happened. You deserve to know.”
It sickened him to see her like this—scraped, scabbed, her face bloated with her injuries. But she was alive.Alive.He couldn’t fathom how that could possibly be.
He bent down to her. The clan kept a respectful distance, their voices hushed. Every ear strained to hear the explanation of how Alicia had come back from the dead.
“I was taken,” she softly explained, “from childbed.”
“But the midwife said ye…ye died.”
She shook her head. “She deceived you.”
Morgan creased his brow. The midwife’s forlorn expression, delivering the sad news of Alicia’s death, flashed through his memory. Had she only been feigning sorrow?
“But I buried…”
“An empty box,” she told him.
Was it possible? Ofcourseit was possible. The proof lay before him on the flagstones.
“Godit was a spy,” she said. “She was working…for the English.”
The word “English” started a soft rumble of disapproval among the clansfolk. Morgan was half English himself, but he had no love for the land his own mother had fled.
“An English lord…desired me,” she continued, wincing and pressing the back of her hand to her bloodied lip.
Morgan clenched his jaw tightly enough to crack walnuts. If some foreign swine had not only beaten Alicia, butbeddedher…
“Godit was working for him,” she rasped out. “After our infant was born, she helped him to abduct me.”
A dozen curses perched on Morgan’s lips.Him. Who? Who had stolen her? What English brute had put filthy hands on his wife?
But he kept his fury in check. He didn’t wish to upset Alicia any more than she already was.
Still it was guilt, not anger, that pressed like a heavy yoke on his shoulders. How could he have let his guard down? How could such a thing have happened on his watch? Right under his nose?
He silently swore he’d see the Englishman and that betraying shrew of a midwife dead before another sunset.
