Her eyes were hard as flint stone. “You were going to back out. I could see it.”
“I wasn’t.” His voice kicked up to a higher pitch. He wasn’t sure what he’d been about to do.
Ceana wriggled the cork back into the empty bottle. “You haven’t changed that much. It was the same look you had when you were going to let me drown. You’re good at making promises and terrible at keeping them.”
He barely stopped himself from grabbing her and shaking her. It wasn’t so much that she drank the potion. It was that she hadn’t given him a chance to decide. Just like she hadn’t given him a chance on the night of the wishes. How was he supposed to prove to her, to himself, that he could be a man of honor if she never gave him the chance? “You don’t know that.”
She laughed. Not the beautiful sound of before but harsh and brittle and much too old.
“I think I know you better than you know yourself.” She tucked the bottle away. “But it doesn’t matter now. This time I was prepared. I did what it took to protect myself. And I’d do it again.”
All spirit of camaraderie he’d thought he’d felt growing between them sizzled out. He nodded once, businesslike. “Let’s figure out if this worked. It’s clear enough you’ll be happier once we can go our separate ways.”
“How do we figure out if it worked?” Her voice lost both its edge and its age. A lost little girl stood in front of him where a bitter old woman had been seconds before. “We can’t test it unless we’re apart, but if it hasn’t worked, I won’t be able to find you again.”
After she’d near enough called him an untrustworthy lout, she still expected him to stick around if this didn’t work.
And he would. Because doing anything else would prove her right.
He shook his head. “I’m sure it worked. You said yourself your mamaidh bought potions from the spaewives. She must have trusted their skills.”
He might as well have drowned a bag full of kittens for the look she gave him.
He rubbed his eyes. They still felt gritty from lack of sleep and the spaewife’s smoky tent. Even if he had to live without the wishes after this, at least he’d get some sleep. “The wishes work by making you fail?”
“Aye.”
“So pick something simple.” He scooped up a handful of apple blossom petals from the ground beneath the tree. “Decide you want to fill your pockets with these.”
She crouched down and ran her fingertips through the petals. “But you’ll have to come back to me. To check. If it didn’t work—”
“I know. You won’t be able to find me.” He let the blossoms fall from his hands. “I’ll return before sunset.”
Ceana settled in under the tree. She wasn’t sure how far away he needed to be. She counted to three hundred and reached out a hand.
She hesitated with her fingers hovering over the pile of petals. It must have worked. Everyone went to the spaewives for magical cures. Gossip even said they sold a few curses to feuding neighbors, so they must know how to cure them if they could create them.
She closed her hand around the glossy petals and tucked the first fist-full into the empty money pouch at her waist. She continued until it was near to bursting.
Pouch full, she slouched back against the tree and counted to twenty. If she was cured, when she reached her hand in again, the petals should still be there.
She slid her hand inside the pouch and her skin brushed the same silky softness. She pulled out a handful and blew them off her palm. They twisted and fluttered in the air for a second like they might take flight before floating to the ground.
She felt light enough to fly with them, so buoyant her weight shouldn’t have been enough to keep her earthbound.
At last. She was free.
She swirled her fingers through the rest of the petals, pulled the pouch up to her face, and breathed in the sweet fragrance.
She scooped up another handful and shoved it in. And another and another.
What would it be like to live free from the curse of the wishes? What could she do with her life?
Though what she did mattered less than that she could do something. She could find her brother, and somehow she’d earn enough to feed them. She’d survived having nothing, so even if they had very little, it’d feel like a wealth of riches. More importantly, they’d be together again, and she could keep him safe.
She let her eyes drift shut and tilted her face up to catch the warmth of the sun. Drowsiness settled over her.
Someone gently shook her, and her eyes opened sluggishly. A man stood over her, his face too dark to see because of the sun at his back. She shaded her eyes, and Gavran’s features became clear. Of course it was Gavran. In her fear, she’d made him promise to come back to check on her.
She flashed him a smile. “It worked.”
His return smile was hollow as a robbed grave, but she’d expected no less. He’d offered to give up the wishes, but now he had to face the consequences of that action.
“It worked?” he asked.
She unbundled her cloak. She’d show him the petals to prove it.
She sank her hand into her pouch.
It was empty.
Her heart seemed to tick to a stop. Or maybe time slowed and her heart beat in synch to the new tempo.
It had to be the wrong pouch. She still had the one Davina lent her along with the clothes. Maybe she’d filled that one, only thinking she’d tucked the petals into the larger coin pouch.
She reached into the second pouch.
Empty.
Ceana’s face went from the angelic pink flush of sleep to pale as a three-day old corpse. Her lips faded away, and her eyes widened, her gaze flicking.
He knelt beside her. “What’s wrong?”
She turned out his dadaidh’s coin pouch. “They’re not there. They were there, and now they’re not.”
Gavran bit back a curse. As he’d walked the moors, he’d convinced himself he was glad to be done with it and be able to return home even though he’d lost the blessing of the wishes.
Now they weren’t done at all. The fairy who cursed Ceana seemed to have created the wishes to give them enough tether to run ahead and think they were free, only to be jerked back.
“You must have put them in before I was out of the boundary, and they disappeared once I was.”
“It’s hopeless then.” Ceana tightened and loosened the string on the coin purse. “I’ll be bound forever.”
They wouldn’t solve this problem if she focused on the dark side of things every time they encountered an obstacle. “We’ve only tried once. You give up too easily.”
She yanked the string, and it made a snapping sound. “As would you if you’d spent even a season where everything you tried could only fail.”
“You can’t blame the wishes. In my dream, you wanted to give up and drown.”
“And you would have let me.”
He felt the words like another jab to his face. He didn’t know what he would have done had the fairy not snatched them from the water. In the dream, he had considered letting her drown to save himself. It’d been a fleeting thought, but it’d been there nonetheless.
Perhaps it was that selfish cowardice, and not that he’d ended up blessed by the wishes instead of her, that made her hate him now. “Why did you give me the best of the wishes, then? If I’m so despicable?”
“I didn’t do it for you. I did it for my brother. I thought if I was erased, he would be whole.”
She chewed the edge of her lip and dropped her gaze to the coin purse.
He didn’t know how he knew, but he knew it meant she was lying. He took the balled-up coin purse from her hands and tucked it into his belt. “You could have kept the wishes for yourself and been more sure of helping your brother.”
She squeezed her eyes shut, ashamed to face him or blocking the path of unwanted tears, he wasn’t sure which. “You were family to me, too. You looked out for me better than my own family ever did. You were o
nly out in the loch that night because of me.”
Resolving the break between them felt like digging broken pieces of glass from beach sand and trying to mend them back together. They were worn so smooth that maybe it was impossible.
But if either of them was to have any peace—if they were going to be able to work together to solve this—he had to try. Their common enemy was too powerful for them to continue fighting each other as well. “Will you tell me what happened that night? I assumed our boat overturned. The dream always starts with us in the water.”
“I wish it were as simple as an overturned boat. Then it would have been an accident and not something I caused.” Ceana pulled the spaewife’s bottle from her pocket and clenched it in her hands. She turned it around and around so the glass sometimes caught the fading sun and other times looked as opaque as obsidian. “I was out on the loch sandbar digging for cockles because my dadaidh drank himself unconscious, again, instead of collecting what we’d need to sell.” She looked off over his shoulder. “You came looking for me and offered to help, but I wouldn’t let you. I wanted to prove to my dadaidh I could help him same as the son he thought I’d stole from him. That night was my last chance. He planned to promise me to a widower with five sons the next day.”
Fury blazed in his belly until he started to believe he might be able to breathe fire. If he knew where Ceana’s dadaidh was, he’d flog him until he never wanted to see another bottle of mead again.
His betrothal to Brighde would help secure the help of Tavish’s sons during planting and harvest, but it’d been done with his agreement. Even though Morna and Ros were girls, his dadaidh would never trade them away or make plans for their future without their consent. “He was bartering you?”
“In a way. Robbie, the widower, promised he’d send over the two middle boys to live with my dadaidh and help him.” She heaved the bottle hard. It arched through the air and rattled down through a tree. “If I could go back and do it over, I’d never have gone out to the loch that night. I’d have married Robbie Forsyth. At least then my brother would be safe and I wouldn’t be stuck like this.”
Robbie Forsyth. He knew the man. Robbie worshipped his first wife, and that should have meant he’d treat the one he wed last summer the same way. But all anyone heard from him was how much better his first wife had been at everything—from the cooking to the mending to the marital relations. His second wife’s empty eyes haunted Gavran every time he saw her. She deserved better. And so did Ceana. “You don’t mean that.”
She tilted her head to the side and just stared at him.
His chest constricted. She did mean it.
He took a risk and cupped her cheek in his palm, an image of her giving her bannock to the boy playing in his mind. “Then it’d be a shame. I’d hate to see you trade yourself for a fraction of what you’re worth.” He nodded towards Dunvegan. “Let’s go back and find out from the spaewife why the potion didn’t work.”
Chapter 10
Gavran’s dadaidh turned back in her direction, and Ceana ducked down behind the wagon she and Gavran were using as cover.
There was no way they’d be able to go in the front of the spaewife’s tent. The spaewife must have told Allan and Tavish that they’d been to see her because now the two men and three others, including a priest, loitered near her tent, trying to look casual but not-so-surreptitiously watching the crowd in the hope she and Gavran would return.
And they had.
She rubbed her temples. What must it be like to have a dadaidh who loved you that much, enough to not give up on you even after you’d attacked him and stolen his money? She pushed the thought away. Comparing her family to Gavran’s wouldn’t do any good. It never had.
Gavran rocked back on his heels, away from the edge of the cart. “We’ll need to go in the back of the tent.”
“How?”
He pulled his sgian from its hidden pocket. “I’ll slice the fabric, and we’ll have to catch her before she screams.”
Not the best plan, but she couldn’t come up with anything better.
Gavran squatted into a runner’s stance. He shot across the opening between the cart and the spaewife’s tent. As soon as the tent shielded him from sight again, he turned and nodded to her.
Ceana peeped through the wheel spokes one last time. With Gavran nearby, she had as good a chance as anyone of making it across without being spotted. The crowd was thick since they’d chosen the busiest time of the day to return to the market, and the ox harnessed to the cart stood between her and the men looking for them.
The men all seemed to be facing away. She skittered across next to Gavran. He caught her, stopping her momentum before she crashed into the tent in her haste.
“I’ll make the cut,” Gavran whispered. “You duck inside and grab her.”
Ceana tried to ignore the thumping of her heart in her chest, but it was like trying to ignore being trampled on by a plow horse. If they were caught now, she’d be executed as a witch for sure. No one would believe Gavran when he claimed to have acted of his own free will.
And all it would take for them to be discovered was one hint of a scream from the spaewife.
Gavran raised his sgian, and Ceana dipped her head. She was ready.
He slashed through the thick fabric, the ripping noise soft enough it shouldn’t have been heard by the men out front above the noises of the market. She burst through the hole and crashed into the spaewife. They dropped to the ground.
Ceana clamped a hand over the woman’s mouth. The spaewife stared up at her with wide eyes but, surprisingly, didn’t struggle, as if she’d had the air knocked out of her.
Gavran ducked in and knelt beside them, his sgian still in hand. He made his fake fierce face—squinty eyes, lips parted in a snarl—that she knew so well from their play sword-fights as children.
But maybe the spaewife would believe it. Ceana wiped her face of expression in support of Gavran.
“Stay quiet and we won’t hurt you,” he said. “But if you let them know we’re here, I’ll kill you before they can stop us. Understood?”
Ceana slid off the woman and inched her hand away from the spaewife’s mouth. The woman gasped for breath. She had knocked the wind out of her. She knew from experience after her tussle with Tavish that she couldn’t have said two words, let alone screamed. Perhaps the Almighty looked out for them after all.
The spaewife sat up and dragged herself back. She wedged herself against a table leg. “What do you want?”
“The potion you sold us didn’t work. We want one that does.”
The spaewife’s forehead smoothed, and her eyes shrunk down from their owl-like enlargement. She drew her cloak up over her shoulders. “You’re too impatient, child. Cures take time.”
Ceana held out her hand to Gavran. “Give me the sgian.”
He frowned but handed it over.
Ceana nestled it close to the woman’s neck. Each time the spaewife drew a breath, her skin kissed the blade’s edge. “This isn’t boils or whooping cough. I know how this curse works, and if it isn’t gone now, it’s not going to magically clear up over time.”
The spaewife’s fingers tapped the hem of her cloak—one, two, three, four, three, two, one. “How did you get this curse again?”
Ceana held the sgian steady. “We were pulled from the water, near to drowning, by a fairy.”
The spaewife lost her grip on her cloak, and it slipped off one shoulder. A sprig of heather pinned to her leine poked out from underneath the edge. A strange ornament for a woman on MacLeod lands. She should take care who saw it or she risked being accused of loyalty to the MacDonalds, the MacLeods’ sworn enemies.
Without removing the sgian from the spaewife’s neck, Ceana shifted the woman’s cloak back over the heather sprig with her free hand. She knew what it was to be wrongly accused. She’d not wish that on another, even if the woman had sold them a useless potion.
The spaewife’s gaze dipped a fraction, enough to
tell Ceana she noticed the gesture but not enough to look directly at where the heather lay. An innocent woman would have looked straight at it.
“You have a real curse.” The spaewife selected each word with the care of someone picking berries in a stinging nettle patch.
She must have interpreted Ceana’s covering the heather as a bigger threat than the sgian at her neck. The sgian would kill her quick. A MacDonald spy would suffer slowly. “Of course we do. That’s why we came to you to buy a cure.”
The spaewife pressed her fingers to the sides of her nose. “How was I supposed to know you had a real curse on you?”
Ceana glanced at Gavran. Deep furrows scarred the space between his eyebrows.
The spaewife continued to rub the sides of her nose. “People come to me thinking they’re cursed because their neighbor threatened them or they had a bad season with their crops.” She shook her head like she couldn’t stop herself. “A real curse is rare.”
“Can you cure a real one?”
The spaewife gave a short, bark-like laugh and dropped her hands from her face. “Nae. And I’m not fool enough to meddle with the fae even if I could. Crossing them leads to worse consequences than whatever curse you might be under.”
Gavran shifted beside her. She glanced at him again. He splayed and fisted his hands. For as long as she’d known him, he’d stretched out his hands that way before starting a task he dreaded. Like a fighter preparing to throw a punch at his best friend.
Her fingers went cold. Perhaps she was acting unfair to Gavran to insist he do this. But he’d promised—twice now—and shouldn’t a person also be made to bear out their promises?
She turned back to the spaewife and lowered the sgian. “There must be something we can do about the curse.”
“Go home. Try to live your lives around it as best you can. Seeking a real cure will only make your situation worse as soon as the fairy who cursed you realizes what you’re up to.”
“Going home isn’t an option,” Gavran said. “You must know of someone who can help us even if you can’t.”
Cursed Wishes Page 8