She stopped and smiled down at Hazel. Stray wisps of curly blonde hair framed her moon-bright face. “Come in, come in. I’ve been waiting for you.”
Hazel gasped. “You have?”
“Of course. Didn’t you come to see me? You took long enough getting here.”
The woman started to walk away back into the castle. “I came to see you?” Hazel stammered. “You must be the one they call the Loch Nagar witch.”
The woman laughed out loud. “That’s what some people call me, but I’m just an ordinary person like you. Come inside. Your supper’s waiting for you.”
Hazel hesitated. She glanced over her shoulder at that lonely spot far away. “What about….?”
“Your friends?” the witch asked. “They are safe, and they aren’t going anywhere. When we finish visiting, I can free them for you if you wish, or you can free them yourself. I wonder you didn’t think of that, but then again, you wanted to see me alone, didn’t you? They didn’t want to come, so they’re in the best place for them now. You have nothing to fear. They’re unharmed, and when the times comes to release them, they’ll never remember they were ever imprisoned.”
Hazel looked around her in astonishment. She never expected her first encounter with the Loch Nagar witch to turn out like this. The woman regarded her while she considered the matter. If this woman was telling the truth, then Fergus and the others were no worse off staying over there across the lake. Hazel could talk to this woman and find out what she knew about the curse.
The woman’s voice interrupted her thoughts. “You’re Hazel, aren’t you?”
“Yes. How did you know?”
“I hear a few things, and the story of how Angus and his brothers reclaimed the Phoenix Throne spread far and wide in the last few months. Most all of Faery knows about you.”
Hazel’s resolve melted. “That’s what Fergus says. The King knew all about me, too.”
The woman nodded toward the courtyard. “Come inside. We can talk much more comfortably in there.”
Hazel didn’t resist. She walked at the woman’s side, across the drawbridge, into the courtyard, and through a low, unassuming door beyond. The door opened into a rustic country kitchen hung all around with pots and pans and cheeses in nets and dried haunches of meat.
The woman sat down at the rough table. “Sit down here and have something to eat. You must be famished.” She pushed a steaming plate of food across the table. She positioned it right under Hazel’s nose where she couldn’t ignore it. “I’m Althea.”
Hazel studied the kitchen. “You don’t seem like much of a witch to me.”
“I’m not really one,” she replied. “I’m just a local housewife and mother like any other.”
Hazel scanned the woman’s clothes. “You don’t seem like much a housewife, either.”
Althea smiled on her. “I have the task of protecting the country from anything that threatens it. Other than that, I’m an ordinary person, just like you. I was born with certain abilities, just like you, and when something happened to threaten our people, I used my abilities to stop it. You can understand that, can’t you?”
“Oh, I understand why you did it,” Hazel replied. “I just don’t know what I can do to stop it. This curse has ballooned into something so far out of control I don’t know what to do, especially since I didn’t really mean to cause it in the first place. That’s why I wanted to see you. I wanted to find out if you knew anything about it that could help me, but if you’re telling me you’re just an ordinary person like I am, then I guess I’m out of luck.”
“Not necessarily,” Althea returned. “You could use your power to close the holes, the same way I did. You have one unique advantage, though. Instead of causing the power to backlash the way mine did, the curse will continue to surround you. It will follow you wherever you go. You could just keep closing the holes whenever they appear so they don’t bother anybody.”
“That doesn’t help me lift the curse,” Hazel pointed out. “The holes will just keep appearing as long as my friends and I remain in Urlu. They’ll keep appearing in other places, too, where I can’t close them. Innocent people will be in danger.”
“Then you have a simple choice to make. You can either accept the situation as it is, or you can use your power to lift the curse and send yourself and your friends home. It’s that simple.”
Hazel nodded. “I thought of that. I’m willing to do that. I don’t want to, but I will, and I think my friends would agree to it, too, if they knew what was going on. The problem is they don’t know. If I cast the spell from here, they would be torn away from their husbands, and one of them is pregnant. Besides, I don’t even know how to cast the spell to send us back.”
Althea clucked her tongue and shook her head. “What nonsense that is. You cast the spell to get rid of those ghouls, and you’ve used your power again and again since then. Admit it. If you set your mind to do it and collected all the tools, your power would show you what to do.”
Hazel bent over her plate. She didn’t want to think about casting the spell and going back. She wanted the whole problem to disappear. “Anyway, I can’t go back yet. We have to find the Stone of Scone first.”
Althea stared into the fire. “The Stone is safe.”
“It is?” Hazel asked. “Where is it?”
“Think about it,” Althea replied. “Those holes are the curse made manifest. The curse is you. The curse brought you to Urlu, and those holes are the magic force of the curse trying to take you back there and restore the balance between the worlds.”
Hazel stared at her. “Are you saying the hole transported the Stone back to….to America?”
“I’m not saying anything,” Althea replied. “I’m saying you came to Urlu, and the curse is trying to correct that mistake. It’s trying to take you back there.”
“That’s impossible,” Hazel countered. “The hole brought us here from Urlu. It didn’t take us back, or we would be there now.”
“I don’t say this whole thing makes sense,” Althea replied. “I can only say what I know.”
“If you’re right that the Stone is in America,” Hazel remarked, “then we’ve got a whole new set of problems. First of all, how are we going to get it back? If I sent myself and Elle and Carmen back there, we would have to find a way to send the Stone back here by itself. We would have no way of knowing where it would end up. It could end up at the bottom of Loch Nagar.”
Althea listened with her head on one side. “And what’s the second problem?”
“Well, I don’t see how you can say it’s safe,” Hazel returned. “It’s anything but.”
“Much worse things could happen to the Stone of Scone than being transported intact to America,” Althea replied. “At least you stand a chance of getting it back.”
“We’ll have to get it back,” Hazel observed. “Getting the Stone back takes priority over sending us home where we belong or even lifting the curse. We have to get the Stone back no matter what or Faery will cease to exist. I could live with the curse. I couldn’t live with that.”
“Then you don’t really need anything from me, do you?” Althea asked. “You already know what you need to do.”
Hazel took a closer look at the woman. She couldn’t explain how she knew, but she did know. “You’re keeping something from me, aren’t you?”
“Not really. It’s just a simple matter, and since you already said what you needed to do, it won’t change anything.”
“You better tell me anyway,” Hazel replied. “Any scrap of information will help.”
“This won’t. You’ll still need to get the Stone back before you do anything else, because it’s not just Faery that will disappear if it’s not found. Faery will disappear first. After that, the human world will wither, too, until that fades into the mist along with the rest.”
Hazel stared down at her plate. She hadn’t eaten much of the food, and now she realized she wouldn’t eat any more. This whole situation wei
ghed on her shoulders, and now she knew better than ever what she had to do.
Althea stood up first. “Is there anything else I can do for you?”
“Tell me something,” Hazel replied. “Did you grow up knowing how to use your power?”
“Of course,” Althea replied. “My parents were the guardians of Loch Nagar before me. I knew from my infancy I would follow in their footsteps.”
“That must have been nice. I’m jealous.”
“Why?”
“Because you had someone to show you how to use your power,” Hazel replied. “I don’t really know how to use it, and I really need someone to show me.”
“You know as much as any of us,” Althea told her. “I had magical parents, but that didn’t help me. I still had to practice a lot and hone my skills. That’s the only way anyone ever gains power. There is no other way. Having parents with their own skills doesn’t help you much, except that they understand what’s going on. Everybody has different abilities. Your parents—I mean, my parents—couldn’t necessarily teach me how to use abilities they didn’t have. Even if they had, everybody has different ways of doing the same things. Each person just has to practice until they get good enough to use their power. You’ll be no different, I’m sure.”
Hazel nodded and pushed her plate away. “I was afraid you would say something like that. I better go then.”
“One more thing, Hazel,” Althea added.
“What is it?”
“That Urlu boy…”
Hazel waited. “Do you mean Fergus?”
Althea nodded. “The Urlus and the Faery…. they make a strange combination when they breed.”
Hazel’s eyes flew open. “Breed?”
“Mate. Call it what you want. Something strange happens when an Urlu and a Faery…cross over, shall we say. They share more than their bodies and their minds and their souls the way everybody else does. They share their power. They become one and the same.”
“Are you saying…?” Hazel could barely get the words out. “Are you saying….?”
“I’m saying,” Althea replied, “I’m saying that if you mate with him, if you share your body and your soul and your mind with him the way you’re thinking about doing, you’ll become each other’s power. He can’t become Faery because he already is, but you can become….”
A gasp from Hazel cut her off. “It can’t! I can’t. That’s impossible.”
Althea touched her arm. “It’s true. If you mate with him and breed with him, it goes far beyond having children who are half Faery and half Urlu. Your children will be dragons like their father, and you will become Urlu, too.”
Hazel shook her head, but she couldn’t get her voice to work. Become an Urlu? How could she? She loathed the Urlus—at least, she always believed she did.
She could start to put aside her revulsion for the dragons to love a man like Fergus. If she was ever going to give herself to a man, it would be him—but this? She couldn’t become an Urlu herself, not for anything. Not even Fergus could induce her to do that.
Somehow, she walked at Althea’s side on the way back outside. Hazel’s mind tumbled through all the possibilities. She didn’t notice Althea until her foot touched gravel. The next time she looked, she found herself alone outside the drawbridge.
She peered through the arch at the bright courtyard. She stood in exactly the same position where she was before she entered. Her interview with Althea might never have happened.
Maybe she dreamed the whole thing. Maybe the possibility of changing into an Urlu sprang from some fevered nightmare about getting with Fergus. Maybe she hallucinated the worst possible scenario, and her brain concocted Althea to give it a face and a voice when none of it was real.
Her foot stuck the gravel. The vibration of walking jolted up her legs into the rest of her, but she felt nothing. She walked around the lake and stopped next to the stone figures near the forest tree line.
Sinclair lay on his back where Hazel left him. Athol and Faing still brandished their swords at nothing. No trace remained of the Burgees.
Hazel wandered back to the prostrate figure of Fergus. He curled off the ground in a contracted spasm of pain around his midsection. His face twisted in agony, and one hand flew up to his shoulder where the invisible sword penetrated his flesh.
Hazel gazed down on him in a confused flurry of emotion. She cared about him enough to….to what? Did she really expect to marry him and have Urlu children with him the way Elle and Carmen did with Angus and Robbie?
If she ever entertained that notion, she shoved it away now. She couldn’t fall in love with an Urlu, much less have Urlu children. Now that she knew she would become Urlu, too, she slammed the door on that idea forever.
She would have turned away, but she couldn’t exactly leave these men like this. Althea said Hazel could free them with her power. Could she? Should she?
Of course she could. She could do anything with her power. She transported herself and four friends across time. She commanded those ghouls to the bottom of the ocean. She conjured four daggers out of nowhere when she needed to, and she stopped those Burgees destroying her along with the men.
She swept her eye one last time over the battle scene. She owned this. It was all hers. She raised her hand and snapped her fingers, and all the men instantly resumed their usual forms in exactly the positions they held when the Burgees turned them to stone.
Chapter 9
Fergus’s eyes popped open. Searing pain shot through his shoulder. His fingers closed around the wound, but the next moment, the pain left him and he felt as good as ever. He checked his hand. No blood. He wasn’t injured at all, so what was he doing down here on the ground?
Then he remembered the Burgees. He glanced around, but he didn’t see anything. Hazel stood a few paces away, along with his three companions from Faery.
Sinclair jumped to his feet in a rage. “Boaby geggit, the jobby pikers! I’ll flatten ’em!”
Athol whirled around. “Where are they?”
“They’re nowhere,” Hazel told them. “They’re gone. We can go.”
Fergus rolled over onto his knees. “What d’ye mean, they’re gone?”
“They don’t have to protect the castle from us anymore, because I already spoke to the witch. We can go now. The Burgees won’t come back.”
The men exchanged glances. Sinclair muttered curses and chopped his saber at nothing. Fergus got to his feet. “Ye spoke tae the witch? What did she say?”
“Nothing we didn’t already know,” Hazel replied. “She said the only way to stop the curse is to send me and the others back. She thinks the Stone of Scone may have been transported to America in our place, that the holes are sucking everything back there in some kind of vacuum effect to correct the mistake of my spell.”
Athol scratched his head. “That’ll make it a mite difficult tae get’t back.”
“That’s putting it mildly,” Hazel returned. “Even if I managed to cast a spell to send the five of us back, there would still be the problem of finding the Stone and send it back here—or to Scone, or wherever it’s supposed to go. We did decide, though, that getting the Stone back takes priority over breaking the curse. The fate of all Faery depends on it, so that’s the first job.”
Sinclair’s saber blade whistled through the air going back the other way. “Scunny bawbag! Just gi’e me five minutes wi’ ’em, and I’ll teach ’em what tae do wi’ their….”
Hazel started walking toward the forest. “We might as well move out. The sun will be up soon, and we have no reason to hang around here.”
Fergus hurried after her. “Where’ll we go now?”
“I have no idea,” Hazel replied. “Those three might as well go back to Faery. They have no reason to stay here.”
“Where are ye goin’?” Fergus called after her.
“I told you,” she clipped over her shoulder. “I’m going to find the Stone of Scone. You can come if you want to.”
He h
esitated to look back at his friends. Then he raced to catch up with her. “Wait, lass. Ye cinnae go alone.”
“Sure I can. You don’t have to stay. I’m sure they’ll find a way to send you back to Urlu, if that’s where you want to go.”
He put on a burst of speed and caught her by the arm. “Stop, I said. I told ye I’m no goin’ back tae Urlu. If ye’re so bent on goin’ after the Stone, I’m comin’ wi’ ye.”
She returned his gaze with an infuriating stubbornness he never saw in her before. “You don’t have to. You’d probably be better off there, and you can tell Angus what’s going on. You can also warn Elle and Carmen that they’ll probably have to be sent back if we can’t find any other solution to the curse.”
He frowned. What was wrong with her? Something must have happened in that castle she wasn’t telling him. “I dinnae ken how many times I ha’e tae tell ye, lass. I’m no goin’ back. Now tell me what the witch said.”
“Are you too dense to hear the words I just said?” she shot back. “She didn’t say anything I haven’t already told you. She told me I had the power to cast the spell to send us back, and now I know it’s true. I can do it whenever I want. I could go back to Urlu myself right now. I could transport you and me back to Urlu and those guys to Faery without batting an eyelash, but I won’t do that. I have to find the Stone. That’s the most important thing. It’s a lot more important than breaking the curse, and you know it. You kept it from me, but I found out anyways.”
Fergus’s jaw hit the ground. So she found out. He recovered in an instant. “Awright, lass. I kept it from ye. I’ll own that. I didnae wish tae see ye e’en more cast down than ye awready were o’er the curse.”
“Well, you can see I’m not cast down about it now,” she replied. “Just make sure you don’t keep anything from me again.”
He bowed his head. He should have expected this. He should have known the day would come when she would know her own power. Now that it happened, his guts wrenched. What was she turning into? She no longer had any use for him. He read that in her fac. She was handing him his walking papers.
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