Alex shook his head. “It was a rout,” he said. “They tell me there are some two hundred or more wounded, but scarce over a dozen killed outright. It seems fair unbelievable.”
Kelpie assimilated this and then returned to another matter of interest. “What of Mac Cailein Mor?” she demanded vindictively. “And what was happening to us, after all?”
“Och, the great General Campbell was away down the loch in his galley before the fight was yet over, hero that he is!” Scorn was bright in Alex’s voice. “But as for us, we lay until some of our men found us and recognized my tartan, so they took us up to the castle with the other wounded. There were plenty of the army who knew me—and you, too, it seems, for there was a hulking great man named Rab and a huge fierce woman called Morag Mhor nearly come to blows over which could be doing most for you.” His eyes crinkled at her with approval and amusement. “So it was soon enough that my brother and Ian both found us. And when we were fit to be carried, they brought us here.”
“Here!” echoed Kelpie, renewed bafflement upon her. Forgetting her wounds, she tried to sit up and then changed her mind. Wincing, she lay back again, and her ringed eyes stared beneath lowered brows at Alex. Dubh, his nap disturbed, glared with equal fierceness, and Alex found the combination disconcerting.
“You would be coming here?” Kelpie spat. “You, with all your prating of loyalty and the laws of hospitality and this principles thing? And you have not even good sense, for here am I, and whatever makes you think I will not be telling? And yet you have not even tried to threaten me.”
Complete bewilderment was on Alex’s face. “Either your wits or mine are wandering entirely,” he said. “What are you talking about? Tell what?”
“That you tried to kill Ian!” answered Kelpie.
“What?” He was utterly dumfounded, and Kelpie’s conviction wavered, but only briefly. She knew what she had seen!
“Do not be denying it, for I saw it myself, and twice over—once with the Second Sight, which never lies, and again when it happened.”
Alex’s eyes narrowed thoughtfully, as if he had begun to see a clue to some deep puzzle. “You were saying something of the sort back at yon cave,” he said. “It made no sense, but I had already given up expecting to understand you, and there were other urgent matters on my mind. Tell me now: What was it that you saw twice over? Tell me exactly, for although the Second Sight never lies, sometimes the reading of it can be wrong. What was it you were seeing, water witch?”