Magick (The Dragonfly Chronicles Book 2)

by Heather McCollum

  She seemed to relax somewhat. “Keep the stone close to ye.”

  Hauk brushed the sides of her fragile jaw with his thumbs.

  “Ready to sail,” Svein called down to Hauk.

  Hauk ignored him and continued to search Merewin’s eyes. How could he banish that look? As he closed the distance between their faces, Merewin stared, eyes open. She didn’t blink as he moved his lips against hers. He deepened the kiss, tilting her head to fit intimately against him, and her eyes closed. Only then did he give himself completely over to the warmth of her mouth, the feminine taste of her breath, the spicy sweet smell of her skin. Hauk kissed her like he wanted to lure her inside him, devour her so that she rode safely within him.

  He heard the whoops of laughter from the men behind him, and he slowly released Merewin from the kiss. Her eyes fluttered open and she looked dazed. Passion deepened her look, making the green orbs more like the deep green of the forest. Why hadn’t he woken her during the nights this week? Those long nights when he’d watched her? Why hadn’t he carried her back to bed? Mayhap he should have turned down this mission.

  “Ready to sail, Hauk?” another man called, laughter in his voice. “Or must we give you ’til midday to say your farewell?” Several others chuckled, but he ignored them. He should have done more before now, should have ignored the smell of sick potions and carried her from that curing cottage.

  He touched his thumb to her kiss-parted lips. “I will return, Merewin.” The tip of her tongue slipped out to wet the small space between her lips and Hauk nearly groaned out loud. She nodded and stepped back.

  Hauk turned and boarded. “To the oars,” he shouted. The quicker they arrived and subdued the Picts for Ragnar’s ally, the quicker they would return and the quicker he could bed Merewin. Then he would feel normal again. He would be alone in his world where his mind worked on strategies for battle and conquest, not on remembering the specific smell of one woman’s skin.

  As they pulled away from the wharf, Merewin watched. Hauk saw her standing there until her body grew small and slipped away with the view of land. “Spicy sweet,” he mumbled to himself then looked up at the sun to confirm the course. Due west.

  ****

  Merewin rode Hauk’s horse beside Gamal as they descended back into the valley where Spring House sat along the stream. Tired, she felt tired and alone, even as Gamal’s lively tales coaxed smiles. A hollowness sat heavy inside, similar to the empty feeling she had when Navlin had died.

  “I will visit every few days, but send Diarf or Vivien for me if you are in need,” Gamal said, as their horses splashed through a narrow crossing before the large house. “With all the able men from Ribe at sea, there shouldn’t be any danger to you or the rest out here. And I’m sure that townsfolk will keep visiting for your remedies.” He smiled broadly. “Between them and Dalla, you should stay busy.”

  Speak of evil and ye summon evil. Navlin’s words tumbled through her mind as Dalla stepped out the front door, sneer in place. Her eyes looked red and puffy, like she’d been crying. None of her concern, Merewin thought. Best to stay away from the little hellion.

  “Thank ye, Gamal,” Merewin said, as he lowered her off the huge beast. “I look forward to yer visits. Mayhaps Bera could come with ye.”

  “Aye, she wouldn’t stay away. She considers you a friend, I think.”

  Merewin’s smile was genuine. “I would like that.” She ignored the tightness in her throat. A friend. She’d never had one before. “Please tell her to come unless she’s feeling too uncomfortable.”

  Gamal nodded and remounted his horse. “Farewell,” he said to Merewin, and then waved to Dalla. “Farewell, Dalla. I will return in a few days.”

  Merewin turned toward Dalla, who abruptly stalked into the house. Merewin drew a long breath. Hauk traveled toward battle, but somehow Merewin felt that the real battle was before her here at Spring House. Merewin had stood defiant before a Viking horde, but one little girl had her nearly trembling. With another long breath, Merewin walked into the dark interior.

  Dalla sat before a large wooden loom where she pulled a shuttle back and forth to weave the dyed wool into a colorful blanket. Merewin walked past toward her small room.

  “He leaves me behind here, but takes you to see him off.” Dalla’s voice overflowed with subdued hatred. “His own daughter he doesn’t take, but his thrall,” she hissed, emphasizing the title as if it meant something much worse.

  Merewin stopped. “He took me to check on the king’s son, the one I healed a fortnight ago.”

  Silence swelled in the stagnant room until it shoved Merewin toward her curtain. As she let the thin material fall, she heard Dalla’s whispered curse above the clicking sound of the loom.

  “I hate you.” The words so simple, more pointed than all of Svala’s clever innuendos, cut through Merewin’s stomach. Why did this girl of ten years hate her so badly? But she didn’t ask, didn’t want to talk to Dalla. Let her stew in her hatred.

  Merewin had work to do in her curing cottage and with her plans to leave. With Hauk away, this would be the perfect time to escape. Escape? Aye, that’s what it would be. For she was a captive even if Hauk and most of Ribe treated her more like a valuable guest.

  Merewin snorted as she sat down on her pallet and rubbed her mother’s stone at her neck. A guest with no rights, who can never go home. Where exactly was home anyway? Northumbria, in the forest, all alone with Bela? Some place in the west that pulled at her? And how exactly would she get back across that pitching sea? Her mind whirled, creating and rejecting possibilities.

  And then there was Hauk. Merewin sighed as she leaned back on the pallet and looked at the hewn logs that slanted to make the ceiling overhead. She felt her cheek where he’d touched not two hours ago. She ran a finger over her lips. His sensual power overwhelmed, truly capturing her will. Merewin spread fingers through her hair. Aye, she’d have to start making plans, for if he returned, she may never leave.

  Unfortunately during the following week, Merewin spent more time avoiding Dalla’s tricks than formulating plans. Crickets and slugs in her bed, toads in her room, honey under her pillow. Dalla had declared all out war with her simple curse the day Hauk left.

  Week two, Merewin thought as she stepped out of her curtained room. Autumn had fully descended on Denmark. Frost bit the air in the large room, bringing all toward the warmth of the central fire pit. Diarf, Vivien’s eleven-year-old son, hauled logs indoors. Vivien brought fresh baked loaves of bread. Dalla poked at the fire with a long stick.

  “Get out,” Dalla’s words rang as Merewin stepped up to the fire. “I free you to leave,” she said, and then looked up, meeting Merewin’s eyes. “My father is not here, so I am in charge. He gave you to me, and I’m telling you to leave.”

  Merewin glanced at Vivien. The woman’s flustered, wide-eyed stare didn’t help. She turned back to the ten-year-old girl.

  “Yer father bade me to stay.” Merewin’s mind reeled around Dalla’s dictate. Hadn’t she wanted a way to escape? Why then did she feel her heels dig in against the child’s latest plan to get rid of her?

  “He will never know where you’ve gone. You can return to your country.”

  “How? I haven’t a boat, nor money, nor help.”

  Dalla shook her head, her face growing red. “I don’t care how you go. I just want you gone.” She stood up and pointed at the door. “In fact, I order you out, now. You and all your things.” Dalla pulled her hand from her pocket and hurled a fist full of round objects across the room toward the door just as Diarf unexpectedly walked in.

  “What? Hey!” he yelped, dropping the wood to cover his face from being pelted. One of the objects rolled across the dirt to rest against Merewin’s shoe, and she picked it up. An acorn.

  “Where did ye get these?” Merewin asked past the lump in her throat as she stood.

  “Out!” Dalla’s finger pointed toward the door where Diarf gathered the fallen logs amidst the scattered nuts.


  “These are mine.” Merewin held her ground, her fingers clamping tightly around the little nut, the acorns the boy from Northumbria had given her. “Ye were in my room.”

  Dalla’s face flushed blotchy and red. “It’s my home, my room. Your little nuts are mine. You are mine.”

  Merewin’s heart pounded in her chest. Stubborn anger warred against uncertainty and humiliation. She kept her words low, a telling sign to anyone who knew her that she neared the breaking point. Of course there was no one who knew her anymore, not since Navlin. “I belong to no one. I am a thrall captured by Hauk Geirson of Denmark. I am no one to Dalla Geirson.” Merewin kept her stare even, refusing even to blink. She barely noticed Vivien gathering up the acorns.

  Merewin sat back down and forced herself to take a bite of the warm bread even though her stomach clenched. She kept her gaze on her adversary. “Hauk Geirson said to stay,” she said and chewed lightly. “So I stay.”

  Dalla growled low in her throat, not willing to give up. “I will throw you out.”

  “I doona believe ye can lift me.”

  Dalla glared. “I will throw your things outside and bar the door.”

  Merewin made herself shrug nonchalantly even though blood rushed in her ears. The bread sat like a lump in her stomach. “I will go to yer Uncle Gamal. He will house me until yer father returns to hear what ye’ve done.”

  “If you don’t leave, he will only drag you back here,” Dalla said with the hint of a child’s whine. Dalla narrowed her eyes. “Or do you like being his whore?”

  Merewin straightened. Vivien stood still, her mouth gaping open. If she had been eating, the food surely would have fallen out. “I am no ones whore, little girl. And ye should not be speaking about matters ye doona understand,” Merewin whispered. One more insult and she’d snap. She tried to breathe calmly. She is just a child. She is just an insane little girl. Let her words go.

  Dalla’s look moved from Merewin’s down to the jade pendant she wore on a leather cord around her neck, her mother’s jade that had carried her to this time. “Did Papa give that to you?” Dalla asked. “Was that my gift from his trip that he misplaced?”

  “Nay,” Merewin answered, fingering the familiar weight resting just below the hollow at the base of her neck. “It has always been mine.”

  Dalla shook her head. “You’re lying.”

  Thuds from a horse drew Dalla’s attention. Diarf ran to the door to look out.

  “Svala, cousin to the king, just arrived,” the boy announced. Could it get any worse? Vivien shooed the boy toward the back of the house. Dalla ran outside to great the evil woman.

  Merewin had seen her talking to Hauk in Ribe before he sailed. The woman hid her face behind a veil, no doubt to hide the bruising of a broken nose. A twang of guilt tightened Merewin’s stomach. She was a healer, not someone who caused injury. Yet in the short time she had known Hauk, she’d stabbed his arm, tried to injure his manhood in the woods, broken Svala’s nose, and was about to throttle his daughter. Though her temper was easily lost, Merewin did not consider herself an aggressive person. The Danes obviously brought out violent passion.

  “Merewin,” Vivien whispered loudly and flapped her hand toward the back where Diarf had disappeared. “Out through here.” Maybe Vivien was right, maybe it would be best to avoid what possibly could be another violent confrontation with Ragnar’s cousin.

  As she rounded the corner toward her healing cottage, she heard Svala’s grating voice soothing Dalla. Merewin rolled her eyes and stepped inside. “Evil consoles the demon,” she muttered rubbing her arms. She trembled against the door and realized that tears ran down her cheeks. She wiped at them quickly. She hadn’t shed a tear through the whole capture, yet somehow the words of this hateful child felt worse than any mortal fear she had experienced so far.

  Merewin pushed away from the door and moved woodenly around the small room checking that her warding stones were still in place around the edges of her door frame and in each corner. Navlin had taught her basic Wiccan safety measures against evil. If the warding held, those with evil intent should avoid her cottage. Nevertheless, Merewin kept her attention on the flimsy barrier until she heard Svala’s horse clopping lightly out of the valley. Merewin let a long breath escape. Had she held it all day? No wonder her body felt beaten, exhausted by the tension and darkness here at Spring House.

  Two evenings later, Merewin sat on the end of her pallet and picked nettles out of her woolen hose. “Hate-filled little fly,” she mumbled at the biting thorns. Merewin rubbed at her birthmark and pulled the blanket up around her shoulders to ward off the night chill. Bela had taken off into the darkness to hunt, leaving her to jump at every little noise, expecting another torturous surprise. Two weeks of attacks had made Merewin as jittery as a mouse living with a falcon.

  “She needs a beating.” Drakkina’s voice shot out from the corner. “Or a good dose of poison.”

  “Ahh!” Merewin jumped up, dropping the hose.

  “Shhh...” Drakkina drew out, her bent finger to her lips, as her body coalesced into a more solid form. She floated toward Merewin. “You will wake your master.” Drakkina smiled but then frowned. “Actually I would have thought to find you in his bed. No?”

  Merewin grabbed up her hose. “Nay, his bed is empty and this is where the thrall sleeps.”

  “Empty? He doesn’t seek another?” Drakkina sounded astounded by the possibility. “True, I haven’t seen him near you when I’ve checked in. Just his mischief-filled child.”

  Merewin frowned at the mention of Dalla. “Nay, Hauk’s left.” She thrust her hand absently toward the west. The pull she’d felt since arriving in Northumbria as a child hadn’t dimmed since reaching Denmark. The westward sense of direction still pulled from her core.

  “Left?” Drakkina’s voice rose and she smacked her hand against her lightly wrinkled forehead. “Why can’t you girls keep your men with you? First your sister can’t keep her man from going to battle and then yours up and leaves.” She looked at Merewin. “Where did he go?”

  “To battle.” Merewin felt the first grin on her face in two weeks.

  “Battle?” Drakkina shouted.

  “Shhh...” Merewin chided.

  Drakkina flapped her hand toward the curtained doorway. “They can’t hear me, only you. What do you mean battle? Where, who?”

  “Dalriada to battle the Picts.” Merewin didn’t like to think about him fighting the fearsome painted men from the scary tales Navlin had told her as a child. At least he’d taken one of her warding stones.

  Drakkina began to pace around the small quarters. “Dalriada…near the stones then.” She huffed. “I suppose I must go protect him.”

  Merewin stood, the hose dropping in a heap once again. “Ye can protect him?”

  Drakkina pulled up to her full height, even floating a bit off the floor. “I am a great Wiccan Master. Of course I can protect him.”

  “Ye dinna protect me this week from Dalla’s wickedness.”

  Drakkina waved her hands in the air, dismissing Merewin’s complaint. “She’s but a girl.”

  “A girl with cruel cunning and a vicious nature.”

  “I don’t see her wielding a blade.” Drakkina said, condescendingly.

  “Not yet,” Merewin mumbled.

  “Punish her.”

  “Punish her? She’s in charge,” Merewin drawled out. “When Hauk’s not here.”

  “Another reason not to have let him leave.”

  “I dinna let him leave. He’s the master.” Merewin’s words dripped sarcasm. “I’m a mere thrall.”

  “You’re his soul mate.”

  Merewin rolled her eyes. “He doesn’t know that.”

  “Well if you’d kissed him...”

  “I have, several times,” Merewin cut her off and then felt heat creep up her neck.

  Drakkina smiled wickedly. “He smells nice, doesn’t he?”

  Merewin frowned. The crone had no business smel
ling Hauk. “It doesn’t matter. He still left.”

  “Did he bed you?”

  “That is private, crone.”

  Drakkina’s smile faltered and one of her gray eyebrows rose. “Nothing is private as it pertains to saving this world.” She waved her hands in the air. “All the worlds. You and your soul mate must be joined and come as one to the stones to fight the last battle.”

  “So ye’ve mentioned before.”

  “You have no idea of the hell I’m trying to prevent,” Drakkina rebuked, “the vileness of the demons who want to rule this world and all worlds.”

  “Aye, ye’re right, I doona know what ye warn about.”

  Drakkina huffed impatiently. “Do you remember your parents, your father, Druce?”

  Merewin’s throat tightened. Images of a large man with laughing green eyes smiled at her as he tossed her in the air. Twirling her around until they both fell on the ground.

  “Aye, I remember.”

  “Druce was my most powerful student while I lived in corporeal form, your mother a close second. Their power combined was immense. Frightening, in fact, if they did not honor the Earth Mother with it, frightening if anything dark took it.”

  “The demons killed them.” Merewin sat gingerly back on the small pallet.

  “Your father met them on his own, foolish, conceited man. Thinking his powers were enough to overthrow them.” Drakkina shook her head. “My body had died and my powers were not strong enough yet to be much help.” She raised her eyebrow in a sarcastic gesture. “They still aren’t much compared to what they were.”

  “So they killed him,” Merewin prodded. She was learning more than she’d ever known about her family before.

  Drakkina’s sharp gaze stared directly into hers. “They did more than kill him, they stripped his powers from him first, stealing them to use for themselves. Then they killed him for pleasure.” Drakkina’s expression looked sad. “Such is the way with evil.”

  “And they killed my mother.”

  Drakkina nodded. “Big difference though. Gilla, she was wise, wise and cautious. Always had strong wards set around the stones that surrounded your house. The wards gave her enough time to transfer her powers to each of her children, to each of you, and then hide you.” Drakkina fluttered her hands around. “Somewhere in time.”