Excerpt from WHITE MIST by Jaclyn Reding   She was utterly surrounded by them. Eleanor could feel their frozen gazes on her at all sides, watching her in silent study as she sat with her hands folded, gloved fingers laced together in her lap.  No matter where she looked, no matter how she tried to avoid them, they were there.  If she closed her eyes, she could almost hear them, their voices whispering to her on the flurry of the island wind— Run… Get out now… Before it is too late…  Eleanor’s eyes shot open. A medley of assorted deer, wildcat, and furry pine marten met her gaze, stuffed and mounted on gray stone walls that were unfinished and rose a good twenty feet above her head.  Nearby, a fierce-looking claymore whose scratched and pitted blade had no doubt contended with more than its share of severed heads hung alongside a dagger that looked quite able to gut an ox. Oh dear, she thought to herself.  What in heaven had she just done? Eleanor sat alone, back lamppost straight, knees pressed tightly together, wondering not for the first time what could have possessed her to come there. Perhaps she should…

Excerpt from WHITE HEATHER by Jaclyn Reding Then came king Arthur unto Galahad, and said, Sir, ye be welcome, for ye shall move many good knights to the quest for the Sancgreal, and ye shall achieve that never knights might bring to an end. Then the king took him by the hand, and went down from the palace to shew Galahad the adventures of the stone. “Catriona?” Catriona MacBryan abruptly raised her head from the small circle of light given off by the single tallow candle she’d been using to read by. She glanced quickly around the shadowed room, her heart thumping in her chest as she half expected to see King Arthur himself standing there before her, swathed in rich velvets, grumbling her name. But he wasn’t there. No one was. The room was dark and she was sitting with legs akimbo on the floor, feet tucked neatly beneath her woolen skirts. The book she’d been reading, the Malory, lay open on her lap while others were scattered around her like fallen leaves from a grand oak tree. The quill and paper she used to scribble her notes rested somewhere among them, lost beneath the burgeoning pile of literature….

Calum took the stairs that led to the lass’s chamber with a particular slowness, stopping once, and then twice, to reflect along the way. He had, after all, absolutely no idea what he was going to find when he got there. They’d taken a hostage.  He’d come to accept that.  It wasn’t as if he had any real choice in the matter.  What was done, was done.  Now he just had to decide what to do about her. He could simply let her go, and at first, he’d considered doing just that.  He would make Fergus do it, of course, put her right back on that ship and drop her at the nearest inconspicuous landing point near Edinburgh.  They could forget any of it had ever happened.  After all, it was Fergus’s doing that had brought her to the castle to begin with.  Calum need not see her at all. But the possibility, nay, the probability, was that now the waters all around Edinburgh would be heavily patrolled, especially if she was indeed Belcourt’s daughter.  Returning to the scene of the crime as it were, wasn’t at all wise. And then there was the stone. Other than to have known…

Douglas awoke on the singular thought that somehow during the night, whilst he’d been asleep, and without him even waking because of it, someone had clubbed him over the head with a cudgel. He stirred, tried to swallow, his mouth wanting water. Just the effort of opening his eyes to squint against the muted light of the dawn caused him to set his teeth, top to bottom, together. Any noise—the lads working in the stables outside, muffled voices coming from the downstairs taproom, the simple closing of a door down the hall—all of it took on a volume that thrummed, throbbed, ached. Why the devil had he drunk so damned much whisky? He’d not woken to a morning thus since he’d been a lad of fourteen, the day after he and his younger brother, Iain, had stolen their way into their uncle’s underground distillery. They’d been two green boys who’d wanted to play at being men and Douglas had learned then that while the drink of his ancestors went down quite smoothly, it came up with a violence that could make a grown man—or a fourteen year old lad—weep out loud. He’d spent two days afterward hanging over a chamber…