Page 65 of Highland Sword
“Did you come to kill me?”
She lifted the dagger. The candlelight glinted along the polished blade. “I can give you no death as painful as the one that awaits you.”
Another cough wracked his body, and Morrigan slid her sgian dubh back into its sheath.
Suddenly, a feeling of calm descended over her. Looking at this sorry excuse for a human being, wasted and too weak even to raise himself in his bed, she realized he was finished. There was nothing this man could do to hurt her again. There was nothing she could do to make him suffer more. The desire for revenge she’d harbored for so long lifted.
“I’m only here because we had an agreement. You revealed a name. And youwilltestify at court if Mr. Grant calls on you. I’m here now, as I promised, and you will get this chance only once. Now speak.”
A fit, intense and painful, jolted him. He rolled weakly to the side, coughing up bloody phlegm. A cup of water sat on a table by his bed. He drank it down and waited for the attack to subside. He settled back, weak and exhausted.
“I’m dying,” he said finally, pushing out the words between gasps for air. “They offered to bring me a priest. But the forgiveness I seek cannot come from any churchman.”
“That’s nothing to me,” Morrigan replied, hearing the hardness in her own voice. She forced down the bile rising in her throat. This was what this man did to her. On that night, he robbed her of something soft, forgiving.
“I did you great wrong. I admit it. You were my sister’s child. And you trusted me. But I was young. That night, when I came in from the tavern…” Emotion took hold of him again and he squeezed his eyes shut. “I was lost. My parents had refused to help me any longer. They took back their offer to allow me to continue studying art, saying I wasn’t fit. They said I should enlist, fight the French, become a man. A lass I was courting heard about it. She shut the door in my face. I was drinking.”
“Stop!” Morrigan’s temper boiled over. She could take no more of his excuses. “Say what you did to me, to a girl not yet a woman. I want to hear you say it. Whatyoudid.You.Not your hard luck. Not your drinking. Not your failures.You.”
Her anger sparked in the air between them, hanging like a cloud of fire.
“Say what you did to me. The child of your dead sister. I want you to say it out loud. Admit what you did tome.”
He threw his arm over his eyes.
Morrigan waited. Tears of rage ran down her face, and she dashed them away. Finally, she could wait no more.
“Coward.”
She turned to leave, but he called after her.
His words came, weak and rasping, slowly at first. Tears streamed down his face, staining his pillow. He broke down several times as he spoke, gasping and coughing. Morrigan waited and listened until he said out loud everything that he’d done to her that night.
To hear it from his lips as he sobbed with shame had a calming effect on her. A blade slid out of her heart, slowly but steadily withdrawing from a painful, ever-present wound that had festered and never healed, no matter how hard she tried to ignore it.
Once he was done talking, she turned toward the door.
“I did you grievous wrong. But please… please forgive me,” he begged. “We’re family. Look at me. I’m dying. Give me peace in my final days.”
Morrigan shook her head. “You robbed me of my childhood, of my innocence. You stole my belief in goodness, in love of family. I did nothing to deserve what happened. You are the one responsible for this moment. When you held me down, when you hurt me, you felt no pity, no compassion. I was not your sister’s child, your own kin. I was nothing.Youtook away my ability to feel pity or compassion for you.”
Wemys gasped for air.
“What is forgivable is a sin one person commits toward another. But I was not a person to you that night. And I cannot forgive you because I may never be whole again. I’ll never forgive you.”
He started to say something, but a fit of coughing overtook him, and his wasted body shuddered. He reached a trembling hand for the cup by his bedside, but it was empty. He motioned toward a pitcher on the table across the room.
Morrigan ignored him and walked out. She couldn’t bring herself to lessen his misery. Not for a single moment.
CHAPTER20
AIDAN
“All rise for Lord Ruthven.”
The justice made his way to his seat on the elevated dais, and the courtroom settled in. Aidan looked over at the Chattan brothers, standing together in the dock. Desperate men, and the strain showed in their faces. The stakes could not be higher, and they knew it.
Edmund Chattan was twenty-two years old. A weaver in Elgin, he was short and dark and wore a constant demeanor of unsmiling earnestness that, Aidan was certain, marked him even in the best of times. His brother George was fierce and hotheaded, quick to fight and quick to forgive. The two young men were not complicated fellows, and he knew they were more worried about their aging father than their own future.
