“Oh.” Alea looked up. “So Colum had stolen Hiram’s daughter, then?”
“No, it was young Malcolm stole my daughter Sary!” the woman exclaimed. “Stole her away in the dead of night, he did, and right from out the midst of her kinfolk, too!”
“Laid a ladder against the side of the house and climbed up bold as brass to knock her on the head and carry her off,” another woman added.
“Slipped past the sentries and drugged the dogs,” the clansman said, glowering.
But Alea saw a teenaged girl sitting by the hearth staring rigidly into the fire, her fists clenched, and knew there was more to the story. “How do you know he knocked her on the head?”
“Know!” cried the mother. “Why, I daresay she wouldn’t have gone with him any other way, now would she?”
It sounded like quite a feat to Alea—impossible, in fact “And his kinfolk applauded him for this?”
“Applauded?” the woman cried, scandalized. “Not even a Gregor would let a man stay if he consorted with the enemy! No, they cast him out, right enough.”
“Then Sairy came back to you?”
“How could she, when she’d been with an enemy man?” the clansman demanded. “No, she was outcast too, of course.” For a moment, sorrow threatened to overwhelm the mother, but she forced it back, squaring her shoulders and holding her head high.
Alea watched the teenager in front of the fire out of the comer of her eye; the girl was biting her lip and fighting back tears. She changed the subject “Was that the first time a Gregor man had courted a Campbell woman?”
An uneasy silence fell, and the clansfolk glanced at one another. Then Grandma lifted her chin and said, “That was the third time.”
“When was the first?”
“Why, when Colum and Hiram both courted Esther Avenell, that’s when!”
“I see,” Alea said slowly. “And she married Colum?”
“That she did, the worthless trollop! That’s why Hiram went hunting—to be off by himself and alone with his grief.”
“At least he gave a good account of himself,” the clansman grunted. “His shot broke Colum’s shoulder. A little lower and he would have killed his killer.”
Or was it Colum who had died defending himself? Alea wondered if Hiram had tried to ambush Colum but found the Gregor a little faster than himself, a little more accurate. Certainly that would be the way the Gregors told it.
She felt very sorry for Esther Avenell Campbell, to be the cause of so much bloodshed and the beginning of a feud, but she felt glad for her, too, because she had married for love, from the sound of it, and her husband had lived. “I don’t suppose it could have been a hunting accident.”
“I suppose not indeed!” Sairy’s mother said indignantly. “But it wouldn’t matter if it had been.” Grandma leaned forward, locking gazes with Alea. “If one of your clan is slain, you have to take revenge, child. Otherwise there’s nothing to keep anyone from slaying every one of your kith and kin out of malice alone.”
“You speak of revenge,” Alea said. “What of justice?”
“Justice?” Grandma made the word a mockery. “Who’s going to give us justice, child? Who could we trust to see the truth and render judgment? Where could we find someone who wasn’t partial to the one clan or the other?”
And that, Alea realized, was the nub of the problem. With no impartial judge, no code of laws, no peace officers, there was no way to seek redress and be satisfied the dead had been fairly treated—or that the living would be protected.
“Great Uncle Hiram you called him,” Alea said to Grandma. “He was your father’s brother, then?”
“Heavens, no, child!” Grandma said. “More like a great-great-great-great-great … well, you get the idea.”
Sairy’s mother intervened. “This was ages and ages ago, Lady Healer—three hundred years and more.”
Alea stared at her, dumbstruck. For three centuries, clansmen had been killing each other over something that might have been a hunting accident or their own ancestor’s crime. “Three hundred years!” she gasped. “Hasn’t that crime grown cold yet? Can it still matter to you that Hiram was killed?”
“Yes it can!” the clansman said.
“But even if it didn’t, the death of two of my five sons does.” Grandma leaned forward, trying to make Alea understand. “It’s not the deaths that happened a hundred years ago that matter to us, child—it’s the ones that happened twenty years ago, and ten, and last year, and last month! It’s the wounds that our living kinfolk bear, the suffering they’ve lived through! It’s David’s limp and the pain his leg gives him whenever the weather gets damp; it’s Jael’s stump of an arm and the way she weeps whenever it thunders.” She leaned back, chin high. “Oh, yes, child, the past matters—the past and the present.”
“And the future,” Sairy’s mother said. “If we don’t take revenge for those who have died, those Gregors will feel free to kill off every last one of our children!”
“Can’t you see that the fighting is a greater danger still?” Moira burst out. “Can’t you see that your only chance for a long and happy life is peace?”
All the clansfolk turned frosty eyes to her. “No, we can’t see that, peace-lover.” The clansman made the word an obscenity. “We can’t believe in peace, for who’d see to it that it was just and lasting?”
“You’re right in this,” a woman told Alea, “that it doesn’t really matter any more whether Colum shot first, or Hiram did. There’s been too much blood shed since, too great a need for vengeance grown.”
“Aye,” said Sairy’s mother. “What do I care about some woman who lost her man fifty years ago? I care about my man that those Gregors killed when he wasn’t but twenty-six, and us married only eight years with five kids!”
“The past may be dead, Lady Healer,” said Grandma, “but the anger that it brought still lives.”
The clansfolk weren’t rude enough to let their anger make them turn guests away from the table, but Alea sensed that they needed some time to cool off, so she told one of the women that she and Moira would gather herbs until suppertime. The woman seemed glad to hear it, so the seer and the healer went out to hunt rue and rosemary.
They passed the barn and both women stopped, falling silent in respect as they saw the teenaged girl huddled on a bale by the corner, weeping quietly. She had escaped from her place by the fire and could let the tears fall. Alea and Moira exchanged a glance, then moved up to her. “Come now, lass,” Alea said gently, “it can’t be as bad as that.”
The girl looked up, startled, then blotted her face furiously with her apron. “Can’t a body have a quiet cry now and then? Isn’t there any place I can be alone?”
“Not that you can be sure of, from what your kinfolk were saying.” Moira knelt, holding out her hands. “Come now, I’m Moira, and this is Alea, and at least we feel as sorry for Malcolm and Sairy as you do.”
The girl stared. “How did you know I was weeping for them?”
“Because we could see through the nasty things people were saying about them.” Alea sat beside her. “Who are you?”
“Cicely,” the girl said, almost automatically. “How come you don’t believe what they said about Malcolm and Sairy?”
“You don’t really think one man alone could gag a woman, tie her up, and carry her struggling down a ladder by himself, do you?” Alea asked.
“Not without knocking over the ladder,” Moira said, “and his kinsmen certainly wouldn’t have helped him, since marriage with the enemy is forbidden.”
“They didn’t.” Cicely looked down at her lap, plucking at her apron. “It was just Malcolm alone, that’s certain.”
“I thought as much,” Alea said. “But they’re away and happy now, so why do you care so deeply what your kinsfolk say about them?”