Black Raven's Lady: Highland Lairds Trilogy by Kathleen Harrington Page B

answer brought a feeling of acute disappointment, as though a marvelous prize had just slipped through her fingers.
    Raine turned to look out at the wood-carved black raven, its wings spread wide above the long, pointed bowsprit. “What more do you know of Laird MacMurchaidh, other than his support of Macdonald as the lord of the Isles?”
    “Torcall is kinsman to the earl of Argyll by way of marriage. And as you must already know, Donald Dubh is Argyll’s grandson.
    “Have you ever met MacMurchaidh?” she persisted, knowing she risked rousing his suspicion with too many questions.
    “A few times,” he said. “Why do you ask?”
    “Simple curiosity,” she lied.
    They turned at the sound of the ship’s bell ringing the hour. Raine had learned to tell the time by its pleasant ding-ding-ding , for it measured the day and night every thirty minutes. A continuously ringing bell would mean a man had fallen overboard, or worse—abandon ship.
    “Time for the midday meal,” Keir said, apparently distracted from their conversation by the thought of food.
    She smiled in relief. “I wonder what Cook has prepared for us today.”
    R AINE FOUND LIFE on the three-masted galleon exhilarating. She quickly learned many of the seamen’s names and their assigned tasks. The bosun, Adam Wyllie, was in charge of the deck crew and rigging. He was a tall, cheerful man with hands the size of melons and a mahogany braid so long he tucked it into the back of his belt. Iain Davidson, the ship’s carpenter, stood no taller than Raine and had a perpetual squint, as though always looking straight into the sun. The quartermaster, Simon Ramsay, was a solemn-faced man with a lantern jaw who rarely smiled. He attended to the steering, the ship’s compass, and the signals amongst the three ships. While the cook probably held the most important post of all—feeding a crew of two hundred and fifty hungry sailors three messes a day.
    Fortune had favored Raine when Keir assigned Jasper Barrows to be her sea-daddy, for the little man had a garrulous nature and he regaled her with endless stories of the Raven ’s sea battles and the individual heroism of each member of the crew. Two seamen, however, captured her special interest.
    “Tell me about the Moor,” she said, indicating the crewman on the forecastle deck. Standing well over six feet tall, he wore a lavishly embroidered caftan with loose-fitting trousers tucked into knee-high red leather boots. In his wide cloth sash, he carried a huge, curved scimitar. The Moor’s hairless head, decorated with intricate inked swirls, glistened in the bright sunshine.
    “That’s Abid al-Rahman, the Raven ’s chief navigator,” Barrows told her with an amused chuckle. “As a young lad, he was trained as a scholar in Alexandria. He’d even written a paper on the many uses of the astrolabe. His owner, a rich pasha, sold him off as a galley slave in a fit of anger. The cap’n rescued al-Rahman from the wreckage of a sinkin’ Ottoman galley.”
    “Oh, my,” Raine said sympathetically. “What could have made the pasha so angry?”
    Barrows looked out over the waves. “That I would nay ken, milady.”
    Raine had the distinct feeling that he did know, but wasn’t about to tell her.
    “And the seaman standing beside the Moor?” she asked, motioning to the man with a ferocious visage. His black beard and mustache were trimmed short and neat, leaving multiple scars still visible beneath. “Why does he address me so politely as domina ?”
    That’s Apollonius the Greek,” Barrows replied. “He was an orphan raised by Christian monks on Rhodes. They taught the laddie to be a scribe and how to copy manuscripts in Latin. When the monastery was overrun by pirates, he was taken captive.”
    “How did he end up on the Raven ?”
    “We boarded a pirate ship durin’ a sea battle. Apollonius came forward, surrendered his sword to the cap’n, and begged to be rescued.”
    One afternoon Raine and her