Forbidden to love, their hearts join in timeless fidelity.
At the hall of a Scottish chief deep in the western Highlands, a bard sings and plays on his harp, spinning tales to the gathered company. Amid the leaping torches and flickering candles, there is magic encircling the chamber this night. The first of his stories tells of a warrior’s wounded heart.
Ardahl MacCormac is poised to become foremost among his tribe’s warriors until the day his best friend winds up dead at his hands on the practice field. Though he cannot say how the deed occurred, he must accept the punishment handed down by the druids, to make reparation by assuming Conall’s place within his family. His growing attraction to Conall’s sister can change nothing, for between them only duty may exist.
Liadan has long followed Ardahl with admiring eyes and cannot believe he would take her brother’s life. That he has now in essence become her brother is a truth her heart refuses to accept. Mired in battles, betrayal, and distrust, it seems their whole world conspires to keep them apart.
Dare she hope if they can’t be together in this lifetime, they may be in the next?
Two souls in exile reach for refuge in one another.
At the hall of a Scottish chief deep in the western Highlands, a bard sings and plays on his harp, spinning tales to the gathered company. Amid the leaping torches and flickering candles, he has finished telling one story, but his listeners beg for more. So with beauty in his voice and magic in his fingers, he weaves on.
It is an old tale, that of a father sending each of three sons to accomplish a seemingly impossible task. When Adair MacMurtray is sent to the wild kingdom of Dalriada, in Scotland, to claim his father’s lands there, he does not see how he can succeed. That is before he lays eyes on Bradana MacCaigh, for love of whom he discovers he might well accomplish anything.
Bradana has been searching all her life for a missing piece of herself. Not till she sets eyes on Adair the exile does she begin to suspect where that piece might be found.
But she’s betrothed to another, and it will take a long trail of doubt, fear, and hardship before she learns whether fate will favor her desire.
At the hall of a Scottish chief deep in the western Highlands, a bard sings and plays on his harp, spinning tales to the gathered company. Caught in the enchantment he weaves, his listeners cannot get enough of the stories he tells, the next of which concerns a princess and the Scotsman who loves her most helplessly.
Snatched from her beloved home and sent away to marry a man she neither knows nor loves, Caledonian princess Darlei vows it will not break her spirit. Yet her determination to be true to herself is thwarted at every turn, and she begins to fear that in losing her freedom she will lose her very self. The one compensation she can find is a growing friendship with Deathan MacMurtray, the brother of the man she is to wed.
Deathan has always lived in his brother’s shadow, second in the field and in his father’s estimation. His brother will one day be chief, and Deathan must allow him the glory. He’s never minded till now, when a woman of singular strength and beauty is destined to become his brother’s bride.
Her spirit speaks to him with the voice of a shared past, and he swears this once he will do whatever he must to make her his own.
