Page 87 of The Speed of Lightning
Another breaker slapped the bow, spraying them. He shook his head. “That was the thing I missed most about home. So many of these isles are bare of them.”
Her voice rose through the wind. “What was it like?”
“What was what like?”
“Beginning a new life outside Jura.” She ruffled Bog’s wiry head and kissed between his ears.
No one had ever asked him that. “You’ve been telling my stories all these years. Do you no’ ken?”
“I read the dispatches, the reports. I followed your story, but I wondered what it felt like—leaving Jura, knowing you couldnae return. Was it difficult? Wonderful? I suppose I wondered what I was missing out on.”
He stuffed his hands under his arms for warmth. “Guard work. Drills. Same thing every day.”
“So… I missed nothing.”
He almost left it at that, but her question gnawed at him. Memories surfaced: the shameful nights he wept in Duart, the small kindnesses that steadied him, the first time he saw a friend cut down in battle and felt a savagery he hadn’t known lived inside him. The loneliness of being different, and yet the relief of freely practicing his faith. Part of both worlds, belonging to neither. In truth, he still felt as lost as he did then.
“It was like waking up with no sense of who I was at all.”
Her head snapped up, one green eye drawing him in, the blue piercing.
“My father’s rejection—it was like living in a world without color. My whole life I’d lived for Da, for the clan. Suddenly I didnae know what I liked, or what I hated. Did I eat lentils and fish because I wanted them, or because Da said they’d make me strong? Did I speak, dress, and act as myself, or only as Jura expected? The only thing I knew as mine was my faith. It’s the only thing that’s ever felt real to me.”
He cleared his throat. “When I reached Duart, the guard took one look at me—half-naked, freshly marked with the wolfhound—and called me Balor.?1 They’d never seen hair shaved and knotted, a hound’s bone in it. Without your coin to pay the toll, I’d have been turned away. You saved me.”
Snow dotted the long strands of golden hair peeking from her hood. Her foxlike gaze held him—vulnerable, attentive, as if she truly understood. He had never studied a woman with such painstaking care.
When he didn’t go on, she brushed a snowflake from her cheek. “I thought the MacLean guards were more restrained than that. All that talk of virtue and honor. Hypocrites.” She grinned. “Maybe that’s the MacSorley in me.”
“This one wasnae a MacLean but a MacDonald—fostering from Ardtornish.”
Her brows creased. “You dinnae mean…Rory?”
“Aye.”
She burst into laughter, covering her face. “Rory challengedyou?”
“Aye.”
“That must’ve ended quickly.”
“It did.”
“Poor laddie.”
His smile faded. “He never forgot the humiliation. From then on he mocked me, rallied others to it. Doc and Iain were my only friends—at first.”
“What did you do?”
He rowed them closer to the slip. “What could I do? Bought clothes like theirs. Gauntlets to hide my hands, a cap until my hair grew, a beard to cover my neck.” He chuckled at the memory. “Took years for that to come in properly.”
He leapt into the frigid water with an oath, hauling the skiff onto the shore. Bog bounded past, leaping through the drifts.Freya rose and took his outstretched hand. He meant to release her once she stood on dry land, but she held on, her small gloved fingers swallowed by his grip.
“You shouldnae be ashamed of what you are.”
He clutched her hand, uneasy. “And what am I?”
“Juran.”
