“’Tis he!” shouted Alex. “’Tis Graham of Montrose! Look you there!”
“The King’s Lieutenant!” “He’s come!” “My Lord of Montrose!” The words were being shouted back and forth, and the sound swelled into a thunder of cheers. Kelpie found herself running with the lads toward the center of the excitement.
As nearly as she could see through the crowd, the Lord of Montrose seemed to be a slight young man in groom’s clothing, with brown hair and a bunch of oats stuck in his bonnet. Dhé! She had seen him before! And now from the wooded hill a red-bearded giant in the MacDonald tartan—Antrim—rushed down to clasp the hand of the slight young man, and Kelpie remembered. She had seen it in the crystal, that first morning at Glenfern.
And so now they had come together, Antrim and Montrose, totally different and yet fighting for the King’s cause. What would be the outcome?
13. The Hexing of Alex
The immediate effect of Montrose’s arrival was that of a most powerful magic charm. It could not have been more telling had he come with a full army at his back instead of just one man, his cousin Patrick. The King’s standard was raised then and there on the hillside and saluted with a flourish of trumpets, and cheers, and triumphantly skirling bagpipes. And some of the clans who had been hovering about waiting to attack the Irish Highlander Antrim now came to join the King’s Lieutenant, Montrose—including Stewart of Atholl.
Kelpie decided to stay for a while. Things looked interesting. She was safer here than wandering alone. Besides, she liked Ian’s company, even if it meant putting up with Alex. She even thought that she just might persuade Ian to guard himself against his precious foster brother, though she had not much hope of this, Ian being so stubbornly trustful. Besides, since she had “seen” the thing in the loch, it would surely happen, and there was nothing she could do to stop it.
For a while, staying with the army meant simply staying right there where it was. Nothing much seemed to be happening. Clans—or, more often, bits of them—drifted in. Kelpie roamed where she liked, usually with the lads and their watchful ghillie, Lachlan, exchanging insults with Alex and hostile silence with Lachlan and his wife Maeve, who had no use for her whatever and made no secret of it.