The Firebrand Read Online Free PDF Page A

wooden chest on the table, Alan headed for the door. “I’ll leave you two. I want to be ready to sail at first light.”
    “Ian, wait outside for the abbess,” the knight ordered. “Our business here shall be quick. My guess is the abbess has no desire to sail with us.”
    The woman snorted and sat with a sigh on the chair as the door closed behind the departing men. “Have you found her?”
    “We have, Aunt. She is resting comfortably in one of the empty water barrels we’ll be refilling when we reach Mull.”
    “I knew it.” She reached inside the neck of her woolen dress and produced a heavy key hanging on a chain. “You might not think six months is enough time to get to know someone well, but I tell you, having witnessed this young woman’s antics, having observed how determined she can be, I knew in my bones that she had already found her way to this ship.”
    “But why the ship?” Wyntoun asked, watching the nun’s long fingers as they put the key into the lock of the wooden chest. “What made you so certain that she would come here, rather than hiding in the keep...or in some crofter’s hut on the island?”
    The lock clicked dully and the abbess pushed open the top of the chest. “I knew she’d come here. From the first week that she arrived on Barra, she has been trying to leave. To escape this island.”
    “But where did she want to go? From what you’ve told me, she has no one else near.”
    “To her two older sisters,” the abbess announced, taking a thick leather packet out of the wooden chest. “She has been determined to leave Barra and find her sisters. They, too—from what she told me, were sent to the Highlands by their mother after Edmund Percy was murdered in the Tower of London.”
    “Do you know where the others are?”
    “Nay. If I had any information on their whereabouts, I would have sent word to come and remove the vixen months ago.” The abbess laid the packet on the table and placed a protective hand over it. “With your connections, Wyn, I am certain you can find Nichola Percy in no time. I can only tell you that in her original correspondence, she wrote that she was taking shelter in the Borders...with some of the families that had close ties to her father, Thomas Erskine.”
    “Finding the mother should not be too difficult,” Wyntoun assured her.
    “Now, in returning the daughter to her, you must also return this package—sealed as ‘tis—to Lady Nichola.”
    The abbess picked up the packet and held it out. Wyntoun took the packet from her hand. “What does it contain, Aunt?”
    “In truth, I do not know. But Lady Nichola’s instructions were clear when she sent it to me.” Her sharp green eyes met and held the Highlander’s. “I was to hide this wooden casket and its contents. I was to protect it as if the key to the very Gates of Heaven lay within it.”
    “And?”
    “And I was to continue the watch over it until such time as Adrianne was secure in her place of safety.”
    “You could have given this to her on Barra.” Wyntoun turned the packet over in his hand. The wax seal showed the Percy and Erskine coats of arms linked. “She was safe there.”
    The nun snorted with disgust. “But she was never secure. The greatest danger that young woman faces comes not from those pursuing her as it does from herself.” She shook her head. “Nay! She was certainly not ready to receive this packet at any time that she has been on Barra. So as it came to me, I want you to return it to Lady Nichola...along with her daughter. Let the woman make other arrangements.”
    Wyntoun casually tossed the packet back into the wooden chest and nodded reassuringly to the old woman. “I shall take care of everything, Aunt.”
    “Very well!” The abbess rose to her feet and stepped toward the door. “And you will look after her?”
    “I will.”
    “You will be patient with her. She is, after all, quite young.”
    “I can assure you, Aunt, no discipline I come up