Michael looked up and saw his mother. Tears flowed freely down his face.
He was so like his father—
In that moment, Fenella’s legs gave out beneath her. She fell to the cold stone floor.
Nainwas wrong. Grief could not be contained. It started as a small flame that grew larger and stronger until it consumed her.
There was no doubt Rose of Loch Awe had taken her life because of Charles Chattan’s perfidy, no saving her memory from the disgrace of suicide.
Fenella longed for the magic to reverse time and bring her daughter back to life.
For the next three days she poured over hernain’sbook. Certainly in all these receipts and spells for healing, for fortune, for doubts and fears, there must be one to cast off Death.
The handwriting on those yellowed pages was cramped and in many places faded. Fenella had signed the front of the book but not referred to it often, at least not once she’d memorized the cures for fevers and agues that plagued children and concerned mothers.
She’d been surprised to discover Rose had also been reading the book. She’d found where Rose had written the nameCharlesbeside a spell to find true love. It called for a rose thorn to be embedded in the wax of a candle and burned on the night of a full moon.
They found a piece of the burned candle, the thorn still intact, its tip charred, beneath Rose’s pillow.
Fenella held the wax in the palm of her hand. Slowly, she closed her fingers around it into a fist and set aside mourning.
In its place rose anger.
’Twas said the Chattan kin had run for England. The rest had scattered to other clans. They feared Fenella of the Macnachtan, and well they should. Grief made her mad.
They thought themselves safe. They were not.
There was no sacred ground for a suicide, but Fenella had no need of the church. She ordered a funeral pyre to be built for her daughter along the green banks of Loch Awe directly beneath a stony crag that looked down upon the shore.
On the day of Rose’s burial, Fenella stood upon that crag, waiting for the sun to set. She wore the Macnachtan tartan around her shoulders. The evening wind toyed her gray hair held in place by a circlet of gold, gray hair that had once been as fair as Rose’s.
At Fenella’s signal, her sons set ablaze a ring of bonfires she’d ordered constructed around Rose’s pyre. The flames leaped to life.
“Rose.” Her name was sweet upon her mother’s lips.
Did Chattan think he could hide in London? Did his father believe his son could jilt Rose without penalty? That her life had no meaning?
That Macnachtan honor was a small thing?
“I want him to feel my pain,” Fenella whispered.
Ilona and Aislin stood by her side. They nodded.
“He will not escape me,” Fenella vowed.
“But he is gone,” Ilona said. “He has become a fine lord while we are left to weep.”
Feeling the heat of the bonfires. She knew better.
At last the moon was high in the sky. The time was right.Nainhad said a witch knows when the hour is nigh. Tonight would be a night no one would forget. Ever.
Especially Charles Chattan.
The fires had drawn the curious from all over the kirk. They stood on the shore watching her. Fenella raised her hand. Her clansmen and her kin on the shore below fell silent. Michael picked up the torch and held it ready.
She brought her hand down and her oldest lit his sister’s funeral pyre as instructed.
’Twas the ancient ways. There was no priest here, no clergy to call her out—and even if there was, Fenella’s power in this moment was too strong to be swayed. It coursed through her. It was the beating of her heart, the pulsing in the blood in her veins, the very fiber of her being.