Highland Sword (Royal Highlander #3) - May McGoldrick Page 0,1

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