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  To our loyal May McGoldrick readers Resurrectionists all!

  CHAPTER 1

  CINAED

  Dalmigavie Castle, the Highlands

  September 1820

  The afternoon sun cast a golden glow over the high-walled garden beside the keep. The scents of autumn—rich and earthy—hung in the air, filling Cinaed’s senses. His mother paused before a pair of rose bushes. The leaves were beginning to grow spotted and yellow, but a few red blooms lingered steadfastly in the protected space.

  Caroline of Brunswick, Queen of England and Ireland, turned her gaze to him. Cinaed could see she was trying to keep up a cheerful façade, but her smile had been growing dimmer, her eyes mistier. She was leaving in the morning, and they both knew the likelihood of them ever meeting again was slight.

  “If I could do it over, live my life over, I wouldn’t make the mistake of letting you go. I would have been smarter. Fought harder.”

  Regrets almost always came too late, Cinaed mused. But he couldn’t help his feelings. She’d made choices that didn’t involve a four-year-old boy she’d sent off to be raised by strangers. All those years left their scars.

  Growing up, he’d simply been Cinaed Mackintosh, orphaned son of a sailor and Anne, the laird’s sister. At the age of nine years, he’d been cast out by the only family he knew to become a ship’s boy. No home. Unwanted. For years, he’d blamed Lachlan Mackintosh. No longer. The laird of Dalmigavie had a lad thrown at his feet. A boy who brought danger to his door.

  Cinaed now knew why the Mackintosh clan protected him. He was the grandson of Teàrlach, the Bonnie Prince. He was the son of Scotland.

  Caroline took his arm, and they walked in silence between the beds of flowers. The purples and yellows and reds were fading. Any night now, a killing frost would lay them all to waste.

  “Family can inflict the deepest cuts and the sharpest pain. Disloyalty. Jealousy. Vindictiveness. The marks they leave rarely show to those on the outside. If you can survive, you become hardened to the world perhaps, but stronger.”

  He had become stronger, but she had no idea of what it cost him.

  “I’ve survived,” she continued. “As you have. I’m queen of a great land. You’ve made yourself into the man you are today. Master and commander of the seas. A hero to your people.”

  Cinaed thought about his lost ship, the Highland Crown. Of the men lost in that wreck. Not long ago, he thought he would be returning to the sea. Taking Isabella to Halifax. Building a life with her. All those plans, however, were now swept away by an ever-changing tide.

  “For so many in the Highlands and throughout all of Scotland,” she said, her voice growing stronger, “you are the future. You are the promise of a new rising. You embody the hope of a better world.”

  It was no secret a radical war of change was upon them. Passions were running high. From the streets of Glasgow and Edinburgh to the docks and manufactories of Inverness. From the rolling farms of the Borders to the rocky coasts of the Northern Isles. Every week, protestors were assembling in the face of armed dragoons and being cut down by them.

  “The time is now,” she asserted. “You are the Highland prince emerging from the mists of the past with the royal blood of the Stuarts flowing in your veins. You are the warrior king who will set to rights the villainy of—”

  He held up a hand and stopped her. “I have no desire to be king.”

  “Everything lies ready before you. We have important friends, both here and abroad. In coming here, I have affirmed who you are, who your father and grandfather were. Your time is now. Your people and your kingdom await. It is your destiny.”

  “I shall decide my own destiny. No one else.”

  “Not a fortnight ago, I watched powerful clan chieftains gather here at Dalmigavie to swear their allegiance to you. They’re ready to go into battle for you against their English overlords.”

  “I’ll not sacrifice Scottish blood in a futile campaign like the one that ended on Culloden Moor. I’ll not blithely lead these Highlanders on a doomed, romantic quest that will crush us for another hundred years. War alone will not free Scotland from the oppressive yoke of England.”

  “Nations need leaders. Scotland needs a king to follow. They need you. A symbol to believe in. With you as their king, they will avenge the spilt blood of their ancestors, their fathers and mothers, their brothers and sisters.”

  Vengeance. This is what it came down to for Caroline. It was woven into the fabric of her soul. Vengeance for what her family did to her. Vengeance for the public venom of her husband. Vengeance for all those loveless years in exile.

  “They have a king, despicable as he is. But no matter how desperate you are to see him gone, King George and his henchmen will never be ousted by a Highland revolt.”

  “Revolutions move earth and heaven. They pull down dynasties. But people can’t rule themselves. They need a ruler.”

  “Not a ruler but a leader,” Cinaed corrected. “What I want is justice for Scotland. I wish for a free and independent voice for its people. But to do this, we need a path that will unite the Highlanders of the north with the Lowlanders of the south. We need to become one Scotland.”

  Cinaed gazed at the silent figure standing before him. His earliest memory of her was of a young woman dancing with him in a garden like this one. The warm sunlight enveloped them as she sang a lilting French song and held him to her. She lived in a fairy tale.

  She wanted reparation for what she’d lost. Caroline wanted her son to be king. She believed it was his by right. This was the world she had always lived in. It was all she’d ever known. Kings and courts. Power and conflict. Blood and passion. Thrust and parry. And revenge.

  “I know who I am. And I know the path I must follow. I am the son of Scotland, and I’ll do what I must, but I’ll do it in the way that is best for the people.”

  CHAPTER 2

  MORRIGAN

  Inverness, the Scottish Highlands

  October 1820

  Morrigan Drummond stared at the half-dozen flyers posted to the wall of the abandoned malt house. Caricatures of Cinaed Mackintosh. Here in Inverness, within view of Maggot Green, where he heroically fought English dragoons trying to set the town on fire. She studied each unflattering depiction before peeling it off the bricks.

  Unflattering was not the right term. Ruthless and false were closer to it.

  One flyer showed Cinaed with a filthy boot pressed on the neck of a bairn. In front of him, ragged, starving people waited in a line to hand him their last ha’pennies from moth-eaten purses. Another showed what was supposed to be the son of Scotland’s head on the body of a spider and a score of frightened poor folk caught in his web, about to be devoured. One more, depicting him, fat and drunken, with two Highland maidens on his lap as he leered lecherously at a third. Each sketch was worse than the last. All offensive. In every picture, he wore a tarnished and dented crown.

 
Morrigan had seen caricatures similar to these the last two times she came to Inverness. While Searc Mackintosh and the fighters who escorted them from Dalmigavie Castle were off seeing to their business—she’d collected copies of the flyers. She found them pasted on walls throughout the town, and the same thought nagged at her. There was something more in this series of colored etchings than the obvious insults. Shadow figures lurked in the backgrounds of each one.

  Back in Edinburgh, she was a fan of political caricatures. For her, they were a kind of puzzle. They nearly all conveyed an obvious insult, but the better ones also contained subtle messages crying out to be discovered. The best artists used their platform to go beyond what he was ordered to draw.

  This artist was talented, in many ways as good as those who worked for newspapers and publishers in Edinburgh and Glasgow. But Morrigan still needed to study his work more carefully.

  A tall shadow blocked the late morning sun, and Morrigan stepped aside to make room for Blair Mackintosh. The leader of the fighters from Dalmigavie glowered at the flyers. “I’m looking forward to stuffing these down the throats of the bastards behind them.”

  With a scornful glance at the busy street, he ripped what was left of the caricatures off the wall.

  “Not bastards. One bastard,” Morrigan corrected, folding the ones she’d peeled off and tucking them into her jacket. “This is the artwork of one person.”

  This much she’d deciphered. The use of curved lines to indicate motion, a similarity in certain faces, the somewhat grotesque exaggeration of older figures all supported her contention.

  “Aye, but it takes more than one to print them.” With the battered face of a brawler, Blair looked dangerous even when he wasn’t angry. The fierce expression darkening his features now threatened violence. “And to pay for them.”

  The Highlander didn’t care about details. He wasn’t interested in subtle messages. On their last trip to Inverness, he’d called on every printing house in town. Whether the proprietors were being handsomely paid or were simply too afraid, no one was admitting anything. No one would confess they’d had anything to do with the scurrilous caricatures, though each of them was quick to point the finger at someone else.

  Morrigan wasn’t surprised when one shop owner suggested the flyers weren’t even being printed in Inverness. Searc Mackintosh, the little bulldog of a man who had a piece of every illicit business transaction on the east coast of the Highlands, had his men questioning printers in other cities. The more Cinaed’s name and popularity spread through the northern lands, the more virulent the campaign against him would become.

  Morrigan was no politician. Still, she knew that while one person was drawing the caricatures, many stood to profit from planting the seeds of distrust regarding the son of Scotland. And not just the English military commands at Fort George and Fort William. The bloody aristocrats who were evicting thousands of families week after week, month after month, burning whole villages … they too had much to gain.

  Perhaps not today, but someone would eventually pay the price. Of that, she was certain. It wasn’t only the Mackintosh clan that were ready to defend their beloved native son. Many others in clans across the Highlands believed in Cinaed. In what he stood for.

  “Searc wants to leave no later than noon. I need to help the men load up the carts. Stay close, lass.”

  Morrigan understood what the Highlander was telling her. He wanted her within a stone’s throw of Searc’s house. Coming to Inverness with the Mackintosh fighters was a privilege that she’d earned, and she wasn’t about to jeopardize it. She was smart, capable, and strong. And too restless to remain cooped up within the stout walls of Dalmigavie Castle.

  She gestured down the crowded street toward the center of town. “I’ll not go farther than the bookseller’s shop.”

  Blair gave her a final nod and turned away.

  As she watched him stride off toward Searc’s house through the bustling throng of carters, vendors, and ragged, tired refugees, Morrigan thought of how much her life had changed in these recent months. She was fortunate to be standing here. The outwardly quiet life she’d been living in Edinburgh had been destroyed in a single afternoon’s attack. A hussar’s bullet had killed her father as he tried to protect his patients in his own surgery, and then they’d fled north.

  Her stepmother Isabella was now married to Cinaed, and a bounty was being offered for the two of them. As a result, anyone connected to them was at risk of being taken by the British authorities.

  Morrigan bent down and picked up one of the torn flyers. This one showed Cinaed, again as a fat king with his crown askew, seated in a throne that was being carried through a crowd of people by clan chiefs with the faces of wolves. Ahead of them, a passage toward a distant palace was being cleared by club-wielding brutes. On all sides, scores of people were looking on in fear and anguish. She felt her frustration rising as she looked from the sheet to the poor, harried Highland folk passing by this side street in the Maggot. They were trying to turn the people against Cinaed … those who needed him most.

  “Sparrow?” the deep voice of a man called from a few paces off. “Robert Sparrow.”

  Morrigan didn’t turn, but as she slid the flyer into her jacket, the reply came from someone closer to her.

  “Aye, by my auld heart.”

  She stiffened.

  “You two are a welcome sight to these sore eyes.”

  A trap door in her stomach opened, and her heart fell through it.

  The name was strange to her, but she’d have known the voice if he’d whispered from the very gates of hell. She shot a quick glance over her shoulder. He was older, worn by the years, but she recognized him. Hell was where he belonged, with the rest of Satan’s legions.

  An old, painful sensation swept through her, a knife sliding between her ribs and into her chest. Cold lethargy slithered like an oily liquid through her body, seeping into spaces between her bones and her flesh. Numbness oozed into every joint, and pooled chill and dark in her belly. Then came fear. Her heart raced with the onset of memories. She forced herself to breathe.

  “I was about to give up hope of you ever coming.”

  Anger sparked, quickly rising like a wildfire into her face, consuming her fear. Her breaths quickened, scorching her chest as they forced their way from her body.

  Morrigan turned her head slowly in his direction. He stood with two other men by the brick wall. Gentlemen, by the way they were dressed. One was tall and broad-shouldered. The other stood half a head taller than his companion. They were speaking in low voices now.

  The old myths told of swords and bows and spears that sang when the time came for vengeance. Hidden inside her boot, the keen-edged sgian dubh, forged by the smith at Dalmigavie Castle, pressed against her calf.

  Morrigan heard its song. She heard the call to act. It was time.

  CHAPTER 3

  AIDAN

  The Maggot, a tough and nasty-smelling neighborhood in Inverness, was little more than a rabbit warren of crumbling cottages, deserted warehouses, and ruined malt houses. On one side of the flat, muddy green used for drying wash, the blackened skeleton of a recently burned distillery stared with vacant eyes at the River Ness.

  And everywhere, the poor milled about, crowded into shacks and decrepit houses and filthy alleyways. Mangy dogs and ragged children scavenged for anything of value on the riverbank. All of these Highland folk were victims of the clearances and of the lingering effects of the fateful Jacobite rebellion that had ended here, on a bloody field outside of Inverness, decades ago.

  “You’re my only chance, Mr. Grant. The only one I trust to keep me safe. You must keep me safe.”

  “I must do nothing,” Aidan retorted sharply. “To be frank, I’d as soon feed you to a pack of hungry dogs, but I’m afraid they’d sicken and die from the effects of you.”

  Robert Sparrow, as he was calling himself at the moment, had good reason to fear for his life. So many people wanted him dead t
hat likenesses of him had been circulating among the societies of reformers in cities to the south. But that hadn’t stopped him from moving north and continuing his work in the employment of the British authorities, assisting them in their spying and entrapment operations.

  Many Scots, including the throng of poor folk trudging by them now, would certainly relish the prospect of killing this collaborator. Aidan didn’t particularly blame them.

  “Beg pardon, sir. I misspoke. I … I’m pleading with you. I’m desperate. I’m trying to make amends for my mistakes.”

  Aidan thought of those who’d already been transported or hanged in the cities south of here. It was too late for them. But two more still waited to stand in the dock. It was for their sake alone that he listened.

  “You’re the only one I know with a shred of honor. You’re the only one able to get me out of this trouble I’m in.” A wracking cough from deep in his chest shook the man’s body, leaving him gasping.

  “What trouble?”

  Sparrow was somewhat unsteady on his feet, and he leaned heavily on an ivory-headed cane. Middle of height and build, he was pale, almost ashen, and he was sweating profusely beneath his old-fashioned wig and tall beaver hat. Under the sturdy travel cloak, Aidan caught sight of a suit of forest green and a gold brocade waistcoat. A thistle pin held a stock and cravat in place. He dressed well, courtesy of the blood money received from the hands of his British masters, but not so well as to attract unwanted attention. He held a soiled handkerchief in one hand that he used constantly, dabbing at the pinched corners of his mouth.

  “I’ve only just arrived in Inverness, and I can see all their eyes on me. They know who I am.”

  A group of young dockworkers coming up from the waterfront passed them, and the informer shrank away, using the tall figure of Aidan’s brother Sebastian as a shield.