Dangerous Magic

by Sullivan Clarke

  “Oh, it’s you, Col. By the stars, but you gave me a fright!”

  “So it seems.” Since he’d migrated to the village with his family as a child, Colin Magregor had grown tall, broad and handsome. But the years had not robbed him of his thick Scottish accent. “What are you so afraid of, lass? You fought me like Old Nick himself were after you!”

  Lark scoffed. “Old Nick. Don’t tell me they’ve convinced you that their devil is real, especially since he looks so remarkably like our god.”

  “Shush, child,” snapped Colin, looking down at her. He noted her irritation at being called a child, especially when he was but three years her senior, but ignored it.

  “Keep your tongue in check where our allegiances are concerned,” he continued. “From what I understand, there are more fervent villages up the coast that would put you in stocks just for not going to the Sunday services.”

  Lark’s green eyes narrowed and she snorted in derision, bending down to collect the things that had fallen from her basket. “What are you jabbering about, Col?”

  He leaned down to help. “The old religion. The one you practiced and the one I was raised to practice —”

  “—and yet have abandoned,” Lark finished for him, the resentment apparent in her voice.

  “—not abandoned.Just not followed, Lark. There’s a difference. My parents put more stock in being accepted by the flock than your folks did. That’s why they joined the church, even if their hearts are not in it. How would it look for me to go dancing about in the moonlight with them studying the Bible?” He looked around. “Besides, as Gran says, it’s not the same without the standing stones.”

  Lark stood, picking her basket up. “You don’t need standing stones for the gods to hear you. And what’s this you’re saying about stocks?”

  There’s talk afoot of ministers seeking out those who still practice the old way and doing things - terrible things - to make them admit they are still followers of the Lady and Lord. Only now, as you realize, they say the old god is an evil thing and that those call upon him are his consorts in sin.”

  Lark looked for a moment as if she may laugh. Then her pretty face clouded over in disgust. “Poppycock!” she said. “Tis can’t be true. That’s the silliest thing I’ve ever heard of.”

  “Well, silly it may be, but I’ve heard it from more than one person. There are special ministers who come to villages for the purposes of holding investigations and trials. That’s why I’ve come. To warn you.” He looked down at her, his handsome face etched with concern. “We’ve been friends for a long time, Lark, since we were children running about among these trees.”

  Lark smiled for a moment, looking wistfully at he forest around them. “Yes,” she said. “They are our friends, so full of spirits, some playful, some protective.”

  Colin shook his head. “The trees can’t protect you, Lark. You must protect yourself, and not just with spells and talismans. You must be prudent and go as the village goes…”

  “What are you saying, Col?” Lark asked, her voice barely a whisper. “That I can no longer raise enough energy to protect myself? That the gods won’t protect me? That they’ve turned coward? For shame.”

  She started to walk away but he stopped her by taking hold of her arm.

  “Let me go, Col,” she said.

  “No,” he said. “You will listen to me on this Lark. You will listen or I will take a switch to you as I once did.”

  She narrowed her eyes at him, her pale skin flushing in embarrassment at the memory. Oh, she remembered the memory.

  Colin had always been protective of her, even though she did not feel his protection was needed. But Colin would not be deterred and would scold her for climbing too high in the trees or wandering off in the forest, which is what he caught her planning to do day just before a storm.

  She’d been seventeen at the time, and already on her own, and on this particular day was planning to go in search of a particular plant that lay deep in the woods.

  Colin had stopped by her cottage to find her on the way out clutching both her small basket and her boline, the ritual knife she used for cutting vegetation she needed for her magical work.

  “Where are you going?” he asked.

  She ignored the question. “What are you doing here?”

  “A wicked storm is blowing up,” he said.

  “I know,” she said. “Isn’t it great. This is the perfect opportunity to cut cranesbill. It only blooms after a good rain.”

  She made to move past him but he took her arm as she did.

  “No, Lark,” he said. “This is no ordinary rain. This is a storm. A bad one by the looks of it, which is why I’ve come to fetch you. You’ll be safer at my family’s house. Come on.”

  But she held her ground.

  “Are you mad? I need to harvest this plant while it blooms! And it only blooms during a good, hard rain. Now get out of my way!”

  A streak of Lightning lit up the slate grey sky outside as she spoke.

  “No!” he said. “You’re coming with me!”

  A clap of thunder nearly drowned out his words. Colin still held fast to Lark’s arm, and she realized that there was no way of pulling free of him.

  “Very well,” she said with a sigh. “I’ll go with you then.”

  He smiled is relief and let go of her. “Good, because that storm…”

  She did not hear the rest of his sentence. As soon as he dropped his guard Lark was out the door, running like a deer through the trees.

  “Damn you minx!” he called, and took off after her. Colin could see her red hair through the trees, see the way she wove in and out of them. But then he saw nothing. The rain was coming down now in sheets. He looked around - where could she be? Colin guessed she’d placed a glamour over herself, a type of magic to mask her appearance and help her blend in. It was a short-lived spell but lasted long enough to help her find one of the many hiding places she had in the forest, which Lark knew like the back of her hand.

  A blinding flash accompanied by a deafening crack rent the air in front of him. Colin ducked and looked up to see a tree cleaved nearly into by lightning. It was no use. He would not find her now. But he’d decided even as he chased her that the wild, impetuous Lark needed a good lesson. She did herself no favors, living out in the edge of the village alone by her own dictates. Reason had fled the girl and he decided then and there he was the only one who could get close enough to restore it to her.

  So instead of going home, he went back to her cottage. He walked in, leaving the door open so that she would think he had given up and gone home to his own place. His plan worked. An hour later when Lark walked in, set down her basket and removed her cloak, he was waiting.

  He stood still in the dark corner, waiting for Lark to remove the cloak and shake the water from it. When she turned to hang it on the hook by the door, he stepped from the shadows and grabbed her.

  She cried out. “Unhand me!”

  “No, you listen,” he said.

  “Col?” She turned her head to look up at him, fear replaced by irritation. “What is wrong with you?”

  “You could have been killed out there?”

  “I wasn’t!”

  “You could have been. Why is it you never listen?”

  “Because,” she spat. “I am beholden to no man.”

  “It’s time that changed,” he said. “You have no respect for authority, lass, and like it or not, authority always exists.”

  “You have no authority over me!” she cried, but he was determined to show her he did. Dragging her over to a short stool by the fire, he sat down and pulled the struggling witch over his lap. Lark kicked and cursed, but he had his own tricks and had cast a protection spell over himself before she’d come into the cottage. Her words were useless against him and only served to increase his resolve.

  Pulling her simple skirt up, he looked down then at her perfect white bum. He’d long thought of what her skin beneath the skirt was
like and fancied it flawless. It was. But this was no time for admiration. He had a lesson to teach.

  Raising his hand, he brought it down hard on the white bottom. An imprint of his hand bloomed instantly across the fair skin and she cried out in pain and indignation. Colin ignored her, and began to spank her, each blow reddening the fair skin until her entire bottom was pink from the dimples at the top of her buttocks to the butter-soft crease of skin just above the tops of her thighs.

  Lark - her dignity stripped - sobbed against the humiliation and painful burn of the spanking.

  When he let her up, she turned and glared at him. Colin could see the curse in her eyes and smiled.

  “Save it for someone else,” he said.

  “Coward,” she said, rubbing her bum. “You honor the old ways when it benefits you and yet in public you reject them.”

  He stood. “Perhaps so, Lark, but all the better if it protects you. With my hand in the old world and my ears in the new I can better look out for you.”

  “I don’t need looking after,” she said.

  “You say that now, but you may find that my guidance isn’t such a bad thing. In the future I trust you’ll be more careful when I ask you to be.”

  He turned to walk to the door.

  “This changes everything between us!” she cried, following him to the doorway.

  He turned back to her and smiled his handsome, self-assured smile.

  “No it won’t,” he said, chucking her gently under the chin. “You’ll forgive me soon enough. We’ve been friends too long.”

  And he’d been right. Initially she’d refused to speak to him, but Colin was the one person who understood her and soon a glance on the path became a word which became a conversation. Soon things were back to normal. But now, as he stood there warning her to assimilate into the village, she felt her anger grow anew.

  “Just what are you suggesting, Col? That I profess faith to their one God and abandon the many who have been so good to me?”

  Colin threw up his hands in exasperation. “No, not profess faith. Just pretend to. And if you must follow the old path, do it in secret.” He paused and looked down. “And if not then at least accept my protection. I could stay near your house, just in case. And if this madness comes to the village I could take you away.”

  Lark made an exasperated noise and moved past him, resuming her march down the path. “I am not one of these frail goodwives, Col. I’ve told you a dozen times that I need no protection.”

  Colin frowned and walked after her, catching up and taking her arm to spin her around towards him again. “That is where you are wrong, Lark,” he said firmly. “You do need protection.”

  “Says who?” she asked angrily.

  “Say I,” he shot back.

  “I thought after that one time…,” she reddened at the memory of the spanking. “It’s not been repeated. I thought it meant that you realized you were wrong.”

  “And that’s where I made a mistake, not being firm with you from the start.” he said. “All those times we tussled as children.” He shook his head. “I should have thrashed your bottom then, just to show you the order of things. If I had, perhaps you’d respect me enough now to accept my offer.”

  Lark’s face flushed red with anger, and for a moment she forgot the ugly incident with the Hatches and even Colin’s warning about the rumored assault upon her religion.

  “How dare you!” she hissed, and pointed a finger at him, her green eyes flashing. “For such a threat I should hex you.”

  Colin threw back his head and laughed. “You’re forgetting who you’re talking to,” he laughed, looking down at her. “We both know I mean well, and if you hex me I can counter it. Perhaps my magic is weak, but an unjust hex is easy enough to answer.”

  Lark dropped her finger, but her green eyes were still burning with indignation. Her face had colored up, too, from a combination of the wind and her high temper. It occurred to Colin to tell his friend he’d never seen her look more beautiful, but he thought the better of it.

  “Very well,” she said, picking up the hem of her cloak. “I shall spare you. This time. But threaten to skelp me again, Colin Magregor, and I shall gladly risk retribution to avenge my affronted spirit.”

  She turned and stalked off, leaving Colin looking after her, amused. Lark Willoughby was a fine woman, and the only one in the village who stirred his loins. He’d long been in love with her, and it seemed curious to him that such an astute soul as she had not seemed to detect this fact. As she walked, she hugged the cloak to herself, briefly revealing the outline of her hourglass shape. Yes, he would certainly risk a hex to thrash her pretty bottom again. She needed it. But then he felt a seriousness descend over him. Frivolity aside, the rumors he had heard disturbed him and he suddenly felt a deep frustration at having his warning go unheeded by the woman he cared about. If they were true - and he had no reason to believe they were not - it meant Lark had a great deal to worry about.

  *

  “The rudeness of that chit of a girl is unspeakable.” Gertrude Hatch paced the floor of the house she shared with her son, her arms crossed in front of her so that her elbows stuck out from her sides like a pair of skinny wings. With her beaklike nose and long neck, her son thought she looked a bit like one of the chickens he’d killed earlier in the day.

  But he did not say this. His mother was mad enough, although she may have felt better if she’d known that the incident in the shop had done what she’d failed to do: pique Lester’s interest in Lark Willoughby. Up until that afternoon, he’d thought her pretty but a bit too high spirited and different for him. He also wasn’t sure he believed his mother’s assertion that Lark was in possession of the rumored gold. But now everything had changed. He’d been rebuffed and within thirty minutes - thanks to Constance Bell - the whole town knew about it. And while Lester may not have been particularly handsome or bright, he was a man of considerable ego. No little red-haired wench was going to make him the laughing stock.

  “She won’t be so rude after I bring her to heel,” he said, looking at his mother. “And make no mistake. I will do just that. In the end I’ll find a way to make her marry me, and on our wedding night the first thing I’ll do before I take my pleasure is stripe her backside with a nice thick willow switch so she starts married life learning who’s in control.”

  Gertrude smiled admiringly at her son. “A fine idea, son, if you ask me. And since I’ll be living with the both of you she won’t be able to say ‘boo’ to a goose without my informing on her. A good beating never hurt a woman, but a lack of it has made many a man miserable.”

  Lester thought of his own father, nagged to death he believed, but again said nothing. Instead he mindlessly whittled another chunk of wood from the stick he was holding, watching as it jettisoned into the fire and burst into flames.

  “Yes, and when she’s sufficiently tame she’ll give us babies to play with and I’ll finally have some help around this house.” Gertrude looked around at the sooty walls and scuffed floor. Even if was one of the nicer homes, it could use a good cleaning. She smiled to herself, imagining her bouncing a smiling grandchild on her knee as a plumper and more subdued Lark scrubbed the floor at her feet.

  “But how are we going to make her marry me?” Lester said a bit miserably. “You heard her this afternoon. She’s not interested.”

  He whittled off another piece of wood. This one missed the fire, instead ricocheting off the mantle and to land back at his feet. “She’d rather stay up there in the woods dealing with sick peasants. Most women I could at least see at church, but she doesn’t even come to services.”

  Gertrude, who’d been kneeling down to stir the dying coals of their fireplace suddenly stopped and looked over her shoulder, the thoughtful expression on her face slowly replaced by a mean, calculating smile. She put the poker aside, stood and started to pace the room. She tapped the side of her beaklike nose with her finger as she walked. Lester knew what that meant; his mother
was scheming.

  “Reverend Pratt’s wife came in today, along with that gossipmonger Constance,” she said. “Before they left we had a conversation that I didn’t think much of. But now, in light of Lark Willoughby’s arrogant actions…” Her voice trailed off.

  “Well, what did she say, woman?” Lester found his mother’s attempts to be mysterious irritating.

  Gertrude glared at her son. “Don’t take that tone with me, boy. I didn’t brook it from your father and I won’t brook it from you!”

  Lester drew back, intimidated. “Beg pardon,” he mumbled, looking down at his feet.

  Gertrude smirked at her son’s ready compliance and continued. “I asked her what Reverend Pratt’s sermon topic would be for this Sunday morn and she said he would be discussing ‘the devil in our midst.’ There is, she said, a growing fear that some unsavory religious practices have followed some families from across the sea to take root here.”

  She turned to Lester. “There are those among us who are practicing the Dark Arts in cooperation with Old Nick himself.”

  Lester looked at his mother, his expression indicating he was clueless to what this had to do with his current dilemma. “How’s knowing the topic of a sermon going to help me get Lark Willoughy to marry me?”

  Gertrude gave him another moment to make the connection before snorting in derision and cuffing him on the side of the head.

  “Sometimes I think you’re as slow and stupid as your father, God rest his soul,” she said. “Isn’t it clear? Lark Willloughby is different. She always has been, with her strange herbs and unnatural beauty. She doesn’t attend church services and cures where the doctors can’t. Clearly this is the work of the devil.”

  Lester wondered how healing sick people was the work of the devil, but knew better than to ask.

  “Go on,” he said.

  “So we go to Reverend Pratt with our suspicions,” she said. “And then when she is formally under suspicion we - as good Christian folk - offer her the chance to clear her name by entering a respectable marriage to a good Christian man.”

  “And that would be me, right?” Lester asked.