Page 4 of My Scarred Laird
His father shut his eyes, “Bloody hell. Damnation. Oh Callum.”
Fiona put her hand on his father’s shoulder, “I will try me best ta keep him alive. Ta make certain he can grow like he should.”
He lay there, feeling his tears slide down his cheeks at the words, and hoped that he would live.
“Father, is mama coming?”
His father shook his head slowly, “Those bastards got ta her. I’m sorry me boy. She willna be. Her body was found by yers when we found ye. I tried ta get ta ye sooner, but the fire didna allow it.”
Callum sobbed, remembering seeing her body, blood on her chest, and his voice barely anything but a whisper, his throat hurt just as bad as his body, as did his lungs, and he cried on his father’s arm and had to lay back because of the pain radiating through his body.
Fiona held a cup to his lips, and he drank the concoction down, though he gagged a few times and slipped under.
* * *
Over the next few years,Callum did survive, but grew, but his body was twisted in places, scarred from the fire, and he had to learn to live with it.
The hand he grabbed the handle of the wardrobe with didn’t open well as his skin had practically melted off on the metal handle that it ruined his hand, and he had to force his fingers to learn to bend again.
That hurt. For the first few months, it took everything in him to get his hand to bend like it needed to, and the skin broke and bled more often than not.
Eventually, his hand did as he bid, and bent how he needed it to, but holding his sword took another few months to do.
He needed his hand to learn to fight.
To become the warrior, he was meant to be. Like his father before him, and his brother.
While Culloden was a fierce warrior, taught at their fathers' side, Callum knew he would have to try harder to be a great warrior, like his brother. Culloden never gave him grief when Callum dropped his sword, or stumbled, only helped him back up, and made certain that he knew he could do it.
With his limitations it hadn’t made life easy. One of his legs didn’t fully extend, no matter how he tried, and his skin was too tight in places, like the back of one of his knees, and didn’t stretch over his bones as it should.
He also had a fierce expression etched permanently on his face. And he hated it.
The clan got used to it, as much as they could anyway. Not everyone was kind to him though, some mocked him. Mocked his expressions, or his limitations.
The nobles, Baird’s brothers and sisters by law, Boyd and his wife Bessie, and Fingal and his wife Rebecca, along with their ladies in waiting, who lived in the castle were especially cruel to him when his father wasn’t around. Even his cousin, Angus, who was the same age, was rude to him. Some of the women, the ladies who were always by Bessie and Rebecca wouldn’t go near him, and they wouldn’t allow the children by him either.
He always felt horrible when one came upon him suddenly, and they acted as if he had something wrong with him. Mocking the way, he walked with his limp. As if it were something he could fix.
Even though he was the son of their Laird, his aunts and uncles had the ear of the people in the clan, and they too would say horrible things about him and mock him.
If Culloden was near, he didn’t ever let anyone mock Callum. Fighting endlessly with those men who dared to make fun of him. Culloden was very protective of him.
Callum struggled with letting Culloden fight his battles. Even though Culloden would fight anyone who even looked at him wrong.
Callum fought to get his body to obey him each day; wishing he and doing all he could to make his body do as he wanted.
He showed those that mocked him that he was more than capable of being their Laird one day. And the men who fought at his father’s side, and were warriors in their own right, respected him. They saw how hard he worked, how he fought to be just like them and not expect anything more than what he was given.
Callum would go for a run, and work with his sword, but not just a regular sword, he wanted to learn to wield his father’s battle sword. The clan’s claymore. It was such a massive sword to wield, and often he struggled at the beginning to learn the control he needed to heft it, but he did. And after a while, his body was laid with muscle under the scars.
He also learned to shoot with a bow and arrow and made Culloden spar with him as often as they could.
Their father tried to baby him at first, afraid he would get hurt, not wanting him to injure the newly healed scars on his body, and Callum would have none of it.
He refused to let anyone treat him any differently, though it wasn’t easy the first few years, as people either mocked him, looked at him with pity, or treated him as if he were nothing. And he cried often. Never in front of anyone, mind you, but when he was alone in his room, he cried for the pain that his body suffered daily, and for the loss of his mother.
He dreamed about her death for months after he was wounded, and they haunted him. Making him see just how she was killed and how she suffered.
