Her screams woke him from a deep, hard sleep. Lyall leapt to his feet, crouched in an attack stance, ready, with his sword drawn, his eyes darting in all directions. But she lay sleeping. Other than the glow from the fire, the room was dark and he sensed, empty.

Her dog was sitting up and at her side, alert and growling lowly.

Sheathing his sword, he straightened. There was no one else was in the room. “Down, Fergus!” he said. But her dog’s instant reaction confirmed he had not merely dreamed her screams.

With his free hand he grabbed an unlit rush torch from a nearby iron holder and stuck it in the embers of the banked fire, then moved across the room to where she lay. She was whimpering softly when he squatted down beside her. He cupped her face with his palm.

Her face was flamingly hot and feverish. Within a few moments she began to thrash, turning her head from side to side. He put a hand on her shoulder and said her name.

She opened her eyes and looked at him, unseeing. “Al? Applecross, Dingwall, Suddy, Cromarty, Plockton, Garve, Kyle, Avoch, Knockbain, and Wester! There, Alastair. See? I know them by heart. I swear I shall never show myself there again. I promise Al. I promise….” Her voice faded off.

Clearly she was delirious. Her brow was on fire to the touch. He rose and placed the torch in the wall, retrieved another towel and filled a wooden laver with water, then pressed the damp towel to her face and neck, trying to cool her down.

When one of the knights had been injured and then grew fevered after a winter tourney, they had bled him with cups and packed him in snow to freeze out his fever. The cure advice had come from a manservant from the East, who was attached to the great English knight Sabin Fitzwilliam. Both he and his manservant claimed Eastern medicine was most successful.

The fevered knight recovered in a single day.

There came a sudden but quiet knock on the door and it opened. Pater Bancho and three other monks came inside. One carried a sword, raised high, two were carrying cudgels and the other had a quarterstaff, their eyes darting and wide as new pages at a tourney.

And they knocked first? Lyall thought, looking at their weapons and shaking his head.

“You heard her screams.” He drove his hand through his hair. “She woke me screaming. She’s in a fever,” he said flatly. “The ride was too hard on her today. I…”

“We were at Matins,” Pater Bancho interrupted him. “Brother…fetch Pater Magoon. Hurry.” He faced Lyall. “Pater Magoon is the barber and runs the infirmary. And Brother Leviticus, the gardener.“

“The gardener?” Lyall questioned.

“Herbs,” was all Pater Bancho said.

She was crying now, weakly and pitifully, and each sob almost broke his heart. He swiftly moved back by her side and put more cool cloths on her face.

Pater Magoon, the barber, was a tall man and he came in prepared, carrying a wooden box, which he opened and began to examine her, pulling back the blankets to her waist. “There are no lesions, no rashes, which is good.” He pressed his wide thumbs on her belly and below her ribs, in the small of her throat and arm pits. He lay his hand on her brow for a long time. “Her fevers are strong and high. Her humours must be balanced.”

He removed his bleeding cup and a small lancet. He lay her arm straight at her side and then looked at Lyall. “Come hold her hand into a fist, hold it tightly.”

Lyall did what the monk asked, his grip tight on her fisted hand, so small his covered it. He watched closely as the barber monk made a small slice in the thin blue vein of Glenna’s arm and used a flint to light small torch so he could heat the cup, which he placed on her bleeding cut and then he turned her arm, so her blood slowly filled the cup.

“Now the left side,” he told Lyall. “Do the same with her other fist.” He then repeated the cupping on her other arm. Pater Magoon filled the cups twice on each side, then demanded that they bring a metal tub. A bath would break the fevers, he had said, But it seemed to Lyall as if the bath made her even worse.

In came a plump little man with a face as red as an apple with a wooden tray of steaming bowls. Brother Leviticus said they must make her drink the brews, sip by sip.

“I shall do it,” Lyall insisted to the men.

Brother Leviticus nodded and Pater Magoon left with the promise to come back between each prayer hour to check her humours.

She seemed to calm after the teas and when Lyall put cold towels on her, but soon her teeth began to chatter again and she twisted and fought him when he tried to calm her. At one point, he pinned her down with his body to keep her arms down and her fists from fighting him.

“I am not a brood mare!” she shouted in her delirium.

“Glenna. ‘Tis me, Lyall.”

“Kiss me, Montrose.” She linked her arms around his neck and jerked his head down to hers before she stilled suddenly.

He pulled himself back from her. “Calm yourself. Please, sweeting,” he urged softly.

Then she was crying again, her head twisting back and forth, repeating things she had said to him, and Fergus sat up on his haunches, watching her closely.

“I am stealing your horse! I have no brothers! I hate the king… Oh El! My dog comes or I do not go. Stop dawdling! Why are you begging forgiveness? I will not marry a Viking! I will not!”

Her fever raged on and Brother Leviticus tried every remedy he had from cold licorice water to a mint rub on her brow. The prior visited twice to pray over her and the gardener brought willow bark tea, meat broth, and finally vinegar with which to bathe her burning skin.

She finally became silent, her delirium seemingly controlled, but she was almost too quiet and Lyall checked twice to see if she were breathing. He sat by her side for so long his legs grew stiff. But his mind was filled with thoughts of guilt. Time passed with him watching her and asking himself he was a completely lost soul.

Later in the day, she had grown so quiet that he leaned over her, listening for her breath. She was dying or almost dead because of him, and he thought he had fallen so low that he deserved to be beaten. The warmth of her breath on his face made him take a long breath and close his eyes in relief, thanking a God he had long ago stopped believing in.

Then she punched him hard in the mouth.

He grunted, cursed, then tasted the salt of blood. Though she might appear to be weak and in delirium, there was plenty of strength in her cursed fist. She tossed and turned again and he held her until she finally quieted, and he sat there for a long, long time, holding her in his arms and watching her, wondering if each breath would be her last.

“Glenna…I’m a fool,” he finally admitted to her and adjusted the blanket back over her again. He rose and crossed the room, wrung out another towel, and came back to place on her brow.

She moved as fast as a snake, and grabbed fistfuls of his clothes, then pulled hard. He fell on top of her with a grunt, and quickly tried to push up, afraid he was crushing her. Then she fought him, again, screaming and kicking, him atop her.

The prior came rushing in again, followed by three monks, while Lyall was holding Glenna down. They stood in the doorway, lined up watching, their faces serious, the prior giving him a strong, judgmental look.

He looked down, at his position, at her still fighting him. It had to look as if he were ravishing her. Lyall scrambled back, embarrassed, then stood and drove his hands through his hair as he apologized. “She’s no better. “

“Women are not like knights, my lord. They cannot ride for hours through the pouring rain,” the prior said, giving him a direct look. He crossed the room and stared down at Glenna, who was quiet again.

“We shall pray again, my lord, for your poor sick wife,” one of the monks said kindly, his prayer beads in his hand as he began reciting prayers.

“I am not his wife!” Glenna shouted so loud they could have heard her in Inverness.

The prior who had joined the praying, stopped and immediately stepped back. “What is this?”

“’Tis the fever talking, Father,” Lyall said, quickly kneeling down and fighting with her suddenly flailing hands.

“I am naught but a whore,” she said clearly and sadly, her eyes suddenly open, but Lyall could tell she could not see him. She was still not lucid. “I am a whore.”

The prior was clearly rethinking his prayer. “Is what she says true?”

“I am a whore!” she screamed again.

“She knows not what she says,” Lyall said tightly.

“This is a place of God,” the prior warned. “Is she your wife?”

“As I told you….‘tis the fever talking.”

“You did not answer me, my lord. Did you not claim to Pater Bancho that this woman is your wife?”

“Aye,” Lyall said, trying to avoid the truth, or worse yet, the lie that could cause more trouble than the truth would. He could tell no one who she was. “She is my Lady Montrose,” he lied slyly.

The prior stepped closer, frowning. “Yet your wife wears no ring as proof of the bond between you.”

“She lost her ring,” Lyall lied again, grabbing her fists as she tried to hit him.

“Why was she wearing the clothing of a boy when you both arrived here? Would not your true wife travel freely with you…without any need to hide who she is? And why stay you both, here, in the priory, and not at one of the manors where you, my lord, and your lady wife would be welcomed?”

Lyall felt himself sinking deeper into the hole he had dug. “You question my word when I am trying to keep her alive?” Lyall bellowed, going for noise and intimidation.

“You travel without guard or servants, my lord,” the prior said to him calmly, clearly determined to find the truth. “It is my duty as prior here at Beauly and as God’s servant to question you.”

Lyall gave in. “She is my wife!” As long as I declare by title, that I am Baron Montrose, Lyall thought, there can be no legal bond. There can be no binding handfast. “I, Baron Montrose, declare to all here that she is my wife.”

The prior wisely turned to another monk. “Go fetch your pens and parchments, Pater. You will scribe the documents immediately and my lord can mark them as proof. I see he wears his signet ring.”

Lyall wanted to groan aloud. ‘Twas his own ring he wore, not Montrose’s.

By the time the scribe had returned, Glenna’s feverish movements and shouts had stopped and she slept calmly on the pallet. The prior had been busy himself, gathering all thirty five monks in the room.

Lyall had to make his declaration. “I ,Baron Montrose of Rossie—“

“Lyall Robertson,” Pater Bancho volunteered cheerily. “Your family names will be best, my lord. You stated who you were at the gates. Do you have more names, my lord?”

Never in his life had he wanted to kill a man of God…until that moment.

Lined up like draughts on a game board, they were all looking at him expectantly, a room full of monks, with their neatly shaven tonsures and wearing their plain dark habits, wide cowls, and rope belts with prayer beads, some of them with large metal crosses on chains hanging from around their necks and their hands clasped before them, except the scribe who was bent over an trestle oaken table, writing swiftly, his ink quill making scratching noises on the parchment. He looked up, quill in the air.

“We are waiting, my lord,” the prior said.

“I, Lyall Ewane Donnald Robertson, Baron Montrose,” he told them his names but lied about the title, so he still had the hope that that one more lie might keep the document from binding him to Glenna. “Declare my wife Glenna, my lady Montrose.”

“What is her surname?” the scribe asked him without looking up from his work.

“Robertson,” the good Pater Bancho said.

“Gordon,” Lyall said at the same time.

“Glenna Gordon Robertson,” the scribe repeated, scribbling away.

“Lyall?” Glenna said weakly, opening her eyes clearly and sitting up, holding the blankets tightly to cover her and staring at all the monks surround them.

He spun around. “You are awake!” His joy at that moment was unexplainable. He was inexplicably overcome by the urge to cross the room and hold her tightly against him. Instead he moved cautiously, then touched her brow and swept his hand gently down her cheek.

Head cocked slightly, her look was puzzled and disoriented.

“Your fever is gone,” he said gruffly.

“What happened to your mouth?”

“My mouth?” Lyall raised his hand to his lip. It was swollen and sore to the touch.

“My lady,” the prior said, stepping close. “Is this man your husband?”

She glanced at Lyall, but he dared not shake his head. He tried to communication with his eye.

“Aye,” she said, mistaking him and agreeing quickly, then added, “I am lady Montrose.” Glenna frowned at him and she rubbed her face and looked around. “What is he doing?”

“We are merely documenting that you are in truth a husband and wife,” the prior said. “There was some concern when you were too ill to question. A small mistake, but all is well now that you are awake. Please tell us your family names.” The prior gave a wave of his hand added. “For the scribe.”

“My family name?” She frowned thoughtfully and Lyall knew the drift of her thoughts. “I used to be Glenna Gordon,” she said casually, then looked up. “But I believe my correct surname is now—“

Lyall tried to wink at her but she wasn’t looking at him.

“Robertson,” Bancho interrupted again. “You are wed to my lord.”

“Gord—“ Lyall started.

“Canmore,” Glenna corrected at the same time, and the monks in the room began to quietly murmur amongst themselves. The look on her face showed she realized what she had just said was a grave mistake.

It was a mistake he would shoulder, one he must fix. “Wait. “ He stood quickly, laughing as if it were a jest, his hand in the air. “Aye it is the same name, and they are not related by blood. My lady wife is merely a cousin by marriage, I can assure you.”

“Oh, you were thinking of the king?” Glenna laughed softly, quickly picking up on the story. “It is true. We are cousins. Distant cousins,” she said firmly—her lies rang uncomfortably true, then she added a jest, “But in both family bond and….” she smiled at the prior with a look that proved her lying was equal to her thieving, “by vast distance….” She paused, then said with a smile, “Is not our king in exile?”

A moment later all the monks laughed at her jest.

“Glenna Gordon Canmore Robertson,” the scribe repeated slowly as he wrote slowly, hunched over his ink pot and writing table.

She watched the scribe as if she were afraid to look away. She was still pale and Lyall wished they were alone.

The prior bent down to take her hand in his. “You have been very ill indeed. You should rest, my dear lady.” He released her hand and straightened, turning to Lyall. “Come, my lord. The scribe is ready for you. You can place your mark on the papers.” He faced the monks. “You may all stand as witness.”

Lyall looked down at his ring, not the baron’s, and he dared not look at Glenna. An imaginary noose just tightened around his neck. On the inside, he was choking.

The prior stood over him as he pressed his seal onto each parchment. “We will keep the records here with all our birth, death and marriage documents,” the prior assured him and Lyall understood there was as much threat in his tone as there was promise.

Unlike Pater Bancho, there was no sweetness in the prior. The man was too sharp-eyed. All the monks surrounded him like harbinger ravens perched upon a hangman’s tree.

Lyall hid his concern and blithely carried on the masquerade to the end. “ ‘Tis very reassuring to know,” he said simply. He kept his gaze hooded, unable to look at Glenna, looking down upon the documents that lay before him, knowing he wanted to burn them into ashes.