On a Highland Shore Read Online Free

again. “I wish I could stay, but I’d best get back before Father misses me. Come down after yer meal, aye?”
    “I will,” Margaret said, then watched her friend head back to the village. She would convince her parents to let Fiona come with her and never hear that note of envy in her friend’s voice again.
    She joined Nell and the boys then, dancing with the water and laughing, lunging forward, then hanging back to let the waves catch a foot or a dangling skirt. Overhead the birds joined the game, calling to each other, as though they, too, were savoring this hour. After a while Margaret stood back with Fergus while the others continued playing. The day was cooling; clouds were moving toward the sun. Farther down the beach something bobbed in the water, now visible, now hidden, finally tossed onto the sand by the waves. The boys, weary of their game, ran to see what it was. Davey reached it first and let out a shout.
    “Look!” he cried, bending over it again.
    Nell, just a few feet behind him, screamed and backed away. “Margaret!”
    Margaret hoisted Fergus onto her hip. “What is it?”
    “A head!” Davey cried, waving Ewan and Cawley toward him.
    Fergus turned to stare at Margaret.
    “It’s probably just a clump of seaweed,” Margaret told him as she started forward, “or a seal’s head, or their idea of something funny to tell us.” But when she saw what had washed ashore, she stopped laughing.
    Davey was right. It was indeed a man’s head, long blond hair still attached to the skull. He appeared to be in his middle years, his face broad with flat cheekbones and lips drawn back in a grimace. Skin still clung to his cheeks. Which meant he’d died recently and probably not far from here.
    Margaret’s stomach heaved, but five young faces watched her, their eyes wide with fear. She pushed aside her sudden sense of foreboding and took a deep breath. “Poor soul,” she said, keeping her tone calm and trying to still her heart.
    “How did it get here?” Davey asked.
    Margaret looked across the water, half-expecting to see more heads bobbing in the waves, but the sea was empty. “Perhaps a ship got caught in a storm. Remember how hard the wind blew last night? Perhaps he fell off the ship.”
    “And the wind cut off his head?” Nell asked.
    Margaret frowned at her.
    “Maybe a monster ate him!” Davey cried.
    “Or there’s a war!” Ewan said.
    “It’s probably nothing so dreadful,” Margaret said. “There are no monsters. And Father will ken if there’s a war.”
    “We should take it to him!” Davey said. The younger boys echoed his words.
    “I’m not carrying it!” Nell cried, stepping backward.
    “None of us are,” Margaret said. “We’ll push it higher, away from the water, and tell Father about it.”
    She glanced up at the sun, feeling a chill of apprehension. One man had died; it was nothing more. Ewan gave the head a kick, bouncing it away from the water.
    “Leave it!” she snapped. “Let’s go home.”

    Margaret herded her charges before her across the low hills of rock that separated the beach they’d played on from their village, relieved when she saw the keep rising starkly above the clansmen’s homes clustered at its base. The four-story unadorned stone structure was neither beautiful nor graceful, but fearsome. Built to protect its own and discourage visitors rather than welcome them, it lay at the heart of Somerstrath, overlooking the houses and the harbor below. Margaret had always thought it ungraceful and bulky, but now it looked beautiful to her. And the sight of the stone walls that enclosed the village, the ones that she’d so often considered confining, she now found comforting.
    She began to relax as people waved and called cheerful greetings to the children. Men were returning from the inland fields. Down in the harbor the fishing boats were being unloaded, the men’s laughter drifting up the hill, and near at hand a plume of smoke rose from a cottage