Shona cast him a sidelong glance. His shoulders were stooped in dejection.
She could no more help the words that came out of her mouth than the love she felt for friends who had found her as unworthy of truth as her parents. “I told your sister not thirty minutes past, your father is a stupid, vain man, not worthy of either of you.”
Thomas jerked his head in acknowledgment but said nothing.
“We don’t know what it means to be Chrechte other than to keep our wolves the most closely of guarded secrets,” Audrey offered in a voice broken with emotion.
“Then it is a good thing you came to the Highlands where, apparently, others like you are abundant.” Shona’s tone sounded flat, even to her own ears.
With another oddly concerned glance at Shona, Caelis shrugged. “Not abundant, but there are packs in several of the clans.”
“Uven’s favored are many.”
“The MacLeod clan is an exception. The lairds of that clan have been focused on increasing the Faol population for generations, since the first pack joined the clan. Uven has taken that dedication even more seriously than his predecessors.”
“Why?” she asked, only vaguely interested in the reply.
They had reached the keep and the noise of the great hall prevented her hearing the reply, if indeed Caelis made one.
And Shona could not make herself care. Too many thoughts and emotions warred for supremacy inside her head and heart, the cacophony so great inside her, the bustling great hall seemed peaceful by comparison.
Looking around at banquet tables filled with soldiers and other clan members breaking their fast, Shona had no hope of distinguishing which were Chrechte, and which like her, were human. She hadn’t even known her son was one.
Was not even sure it mattered to her if any of the many seated here were humans who were something more. The ones who had mattered, the ones she might have expected to reveal this strange new world to her, had held back their knowledge.
Even her own son had known, through his dreams, what he was. He, at least, she understood fully holding back the knowledge. Shona had already unknowingly revealed her lack of belief in his dreams. And unlike his father, Eadan did not yet have the ability to prove the fantastical claims.
Part of her, that spark of mother love that never went out, was amazed by her son’s belief not only in the dreams, but in himself. Eadan had faith the likes of which Shona had lost the day Caelis repudiated her.
She hadn’t stopped believing in the goodness of others that day, but she’d stopped believing in herself. Shona could not trust her own judgment, nor could she be absolutely sure of her own value.
She wanted to believe she’d been worth more than to be used and discarded, but her own parents had made it clear she’d lessened herself in their eyes. And the one person she’d loved and trusted above all others had betrayed her completely.
Perhaps if theirs had been a new love affair, Shona would not have questioned her own worth so strongly. But she and Caelis had grown together in the same clan.
She’d fallen in love with him at such a young age, she could barely remember a time when just the sight of him did not make her heart take on a faster beat.
But he’d hidden this amazing side to himself from her that whole time. And her father, who had known of the Chrechte, had as well.
To discover the two people she had let into her heart, who were not her own children, in the last six years had also hidden this secret from her hurt so deeply, the wound resided in her soul.
All the people in her life she would have thought would consider her worth the confidence had judged her lacking.
Except her son. Shona would never fault her son for hiding from her the nature that despite his dreams would have been more mystery than comprehensible to the five-year-old boy.
But her friends were adults, her parents had had the wisdom of age and Caelis had been her beloved. Young yes, but not a child.
Not even as young as Thomas was now.
All three of them—Caelis, Audrey and Thomas—kept casting her sidelong glances. Looking for what, she did not know. She had naught to give them.
No words of wisdom, or even condemnation. Surely they were not seeking some kind of absolution?
They’d all proven beyond doubt that her regard meant less to them than their other concerns, whatever those particular concerns might be.
Ignoring the glances and even first Audrey’s and then Caelis’s attempt to take her hand, Shona walked through the great hall in a fog of pain that dulled everything around her.
There were places saved for all of them at the laird’s table and Caelis led them there through the noisy and boisterous soldiers.
“Is that the English lady?” someone called out. “She’s too pretty to be Sassenach.”
“Put her in clan colors and she’ll be pretty enough,” another said.
Normally such comments would cause her to blush hotly and mayhap even laugh. Today, they swirled around her with no more substance than the mist.
Laughter followed, until it was abruptly cut off and she looked to where Caelis stood, a low growl rumbling in his chest, his countenance like thunder. “Shona is mine,” he snarled.
One soldier, close enough to Shona to touch—only because they had paused near the bench where he sat—paled and jumped back, nearly falling off the bench to put distance between himself and her.
“You’re making a spectacle of yourself,” she hissed. “Stop.”
And suddenly that embarrassment she’d thought she was too preoccupied by emotional hurt to feel? It was right there, climbing up Shona’s cheeks and making her eyes sting, it was so acute.
“I am making the truth known.”
Did she truly need to spell it out for him? “You are embarrassing me.”
“It shames you to be acknowledged as my mate?” he demanded, sounding thoroughly offended.
She wanted to shout at him, to demand by what right did he have to be offended, even if that had been the case. Which it was not.
But the only thing she could imagine making the current situation even more untenable would be to allow this exchange to degenerate into a public row.
“I’m embarrassed to be the center of attention.” If that was not a good enough explanation for him, she feared she did not have the wherewithal to maintain civility. And ’twould not be Caelis bothered by that fact, she was sure.
She’d spent a little over five years as a baroness, having it drilled into her by her husband and parents that she must comport herself with decorum at all times.
The Scottish lass who grew up in the southernmost part of the Highlands would have laughed at the strictures she’d not only endured but embraced in the last five years. That lass had hidden deep in Shona’s heart when shame was cast upon her by her well-loved parents at the realization that Shona carried Caelis’s child.
Caelis glared at the soldiers closest to her and then turned that frown on Shona, though his features softened somewhat when his arresting blue eyes fell on her. “You are my mate.”
“I have never once denied it.” Which was more than he could say.
“Caelis!” the Sinclair laird bellowed. “Get you and yours over here. I’m hungry and Abigail has said I will wait to eat until my guests are seated.”
Lady Sinclair frowned. “I did not know how much bellowing I missed when I was deaf. It almost makes me wish for the days gone by.”
“You don’t mean it.” The laird lifted a now crying infant from her mother’s arms and cuddled the wee babe close. “There now, sweet girl. All is well. Your father’s voice isn’t sufficient reason for all this fuss, now is it?”
“It is when he uses it at such volume,” Lady Sinclair said with asperity.