Page 62 of The Speed of Lightning
Her brows arched in distress, her face raw. “Týr.”
The familiar strangeness in the tales he’d read fell into place—the mission at the Aird of Sleat, the uncanny insight into his thoughts on the mission that night, the voice of someone who knew him well. His mouth went dry. “My father has been helping you write the stories?”
Tears seeped from her eyes, and she swiped her sleeve across her streaming nose. “Not write. He commissioned them long ago—just after you went to Mull.”
The room tilted and swayed. Calum grabbed for the crooked mantel, his ears stuffed with wool, his limbs heavy as stone. Uselessness washed over him and he stumbled forward.
Freya caught him, guiding him into the lumpy blue chair by the hearth. “Please—you must stay awake.”
He rubbed his face, struggling to focus. “I dinnae ken what’s come over me. I feel…muddled.”
She pressed his hands to the chair’s arms. “Hold on. Keep your eyes open. I’ll show you what I mean.”
She climbed the ladder to the loft and opened her trunk, shifting neatly folded clothes, shoes, and keepsakes aside.
Through drooping lids he watched her slide away a hidden panel. From it she withdrew a stack of papers, a bundle tied with red ribbon—and a green stocking.
His eyes shut. When he forced them open again, she was crouched before him, patting his cheek, clutching the items to her chest. “That’s it—stay with me.” She held out the stocking. “It began more than ten years ago, with this.”
He turned it in his hands, dazed. “A stocking?”
She nodded, draping it over the ladder’s rung. “Your father devised it as our signal. When I needed to speak to him, I hung it on a loose stone in my father’s fence. When he had something for me, he’d hang its mate from the hawthorn facing our house. We’d meet at Lealt Linn. Then give his signal.”
The memory flickered through Calum’s dimming mind. “A hooting owl?”
She nodded. “When he hoots back, I know it’s safe to meet. At first we only met when I was in trouble with Papa. If he lost his temper, or I grew afraid, I’d hang the stocking and Týr would help me find a way through it.”
“Go on.”
“Týr heard me spin many tales beside the fire when I stayed with them after you left. I suppose he enjoyed them, for he gaveme a dispatch at one of our meetings and asked if I could write him a ballad.”
“What did the dispatch say?”
Drawing a steadying breath, she slid a folded square from the ribboned stack. “This one.”
He opened it, eyes moving across the words. “The first raid at Perthshire. With the MacGregors.”
She nodded. “You were mentioned three times. You set yourself apart in that raid—you became Lachlan’s ensign.”
From the bottom of the pile, she drew two more pages. “And this is what I wrote.”
He took them and read the title aloud, his voice rough. “Cù Cogaidh of Jura.”
The ballad opened in the thick of the fight, his bravery laid bare, his thoughts of Jura woven into verse. She had even set down how he’d tried to save the young MacLean lad struck by a javelin. In her lines, the mud and blood of that day became something else—something beautiful, lifting him from horror into legend.
Realizing he had not spoken, Calum looked up. Freya brushed tears from her face, trying to smile. “You were the youngest ever appointed to leadership in the MacLean guard. Your father was so proud. It remains his favorite tale.”
He could only stare, words lost.
“Then came your time with Hector, when you took Lochbuie from the MacFadyens.” She handed him another dispatch, another tale. “Your appointment as commander of the Lochbuie guard.”
And then, after a pause, she withdrew a third. “One day your father hung the stocking. For the first time, the story he gave me wasn’t about you. It was Lochindorb—the MacFadyen plot, Hector’s mission to save his wife. I didnae want to write it, butyour father insisted.” She matched the tale with the dispatch. “So I wrote this.”
Calum took the thickest stack from her hands. The title struck him cold. The Beithir. The very tale the king had read. His voice rasped. “You made Hector’s legend. You gave him his war name.”
Freya sank into the mismatched chair beside him. “The name was your father’s, not mine. Týr said Hector once came to a meeting soaked to the skin, looking like a drowned beast. He heard Murdoch call him Beithir at the first meeting concerning the Wolf, and thought it apt.”
Emotion battled within him. “Freya—how could he, how could you, not see the danger if these tales were intercepted?”
