Fairy Tale

by Jillian Hunter

  “I love you like one of my own, Marsali.” Colum’s voice grew reflective. “But heaven knows I have failed your father in watching over you. I should never have let things go this far. I taught you the academics, but nothing of life. Yes, I will help you with this man.”

  Marsali swung her feet to the floor, restraining herself from releasing a whoop of victory. “Then it’s settled. What a relief.”

  “Fiona, accompany your cousin halfway to the castle,” Colum said crossly, pushing off his warm quilts with a deep sigh at the night’s work that lay ahead. He had planned to concentrate on improving the oat crops, but that would have to wait.

  “Do you think that the MacElgin might be lying in wait for her along the way, Dad?” Fiona asked, a gleam of hope in her big green eyes.

  “I doubt it.” Colum looked preoccupied, waving his blue-veined hand in the direction of the door. “But I need peace to work. Get out, the pair of you. Your babbling drains my energy.”

  The two young women crept like mice from the cabin and crossed the deck to the ship’s gangplank, a warped length of wormy oaken board that extended into the cliffside path to provide passage to dry land during high tide.

  Without warning Fiona whirled around, grabbing Marsali by the arm with a wicked grin just as she stepped onto the wobbly planking.

  “Are you in a hurry to return to the castle, Marsali?” she called over the wild music of the waves hitting the ship’s hull.

  Marsali hesitated, shoving her bright curls from her face. Something inside her ached to see the MacElgin again before Colum turned him into a lobster, just to convince herself his voice was not as deep as she imagined, his magnetism not as overpowering. Something inside her wanted to give him another chance at redemption to prove his integral goodness. Hope did not die easily in her stubborn heart.

  But then she remembered that he belonged to another woman, that he’d promised to “take control” of Marsali’s life—with all its chilling implications. And he’d fought for the English, given them the loyalty he owed his own people. Away from him, she could begin to untangle her thoughts.

  Indecision tore at her. She thought of the various facets of his character that he’d revealed during the day: authority and anger, the talent for tactical organization that had served him so well as a military leader. The grudging respect he’d commanded from his reprobate clansmen.

  But it was the vulnerability beneath the mask of defiance worn by the boy in the portrait that haunted her. Aye, it had touched her, made him a little more human. That and the horrible black humor he’d displayed when he humiliated her a few hours ago.

  Duncan the man, matured with all his dark emotions channeled if not conquered. No longer just the boy in the portrait but the fierce ancestor who hung above it. A Celtic warrior born into a position of privilege.

  A sad unpredictable warrior with the power to decide the destiny of a common girl such as she.

  “No, I’m not in any hurry,” she said, shrugging off the day’s anxiety and exhaustion. “What are we going to do?”

  Fiona gave her a sly look. “Won’t the laird be angry if you disobey him?”

  “I don’t know.” Marsali shivered as a smattering of spindrift hit her face, remembering Duncan’s unbridled anger when he’d confronted her in the cave. “I don’t care, either.”

  “It’s still light, Marsali. I was going to sneak back to the cairn and give the Otherworld another chance. But let’s try and raise a storm instead. I’ll just run back to the cabin to fetch my things.”

  “Oh, all right,” Marsali said without a great deal of enthusiasm. From her perspective, however, the day had begun and ended stormily enough, with no lull on the horizon either. Everyone said her uncle worked genuine magic, and she’d never really taken advantage of his occult abilities until now, except to help a sick bairn or animal.

  All she knew was that he’d have to work quite a spell to help her out of this coil. The MacElgin obviously possessed his own potent brand of power, a power that had proved to Marsali her precious freedom could not only be threatened but taken away by a snap of his long elegant fingers.

  Fiona slipped soundlessly back into the cabin. Easing the door shut, she paused to breathe in her favorite scents in the world: melted wax, herbs, burnt wine. Eun did a shifting dance on his driftwood perch, recognizing her through the little red velvet hood he wore.

  Her father did not acknowledge her at all. Mumbling to himself, hunched over the assortment of Wiccan’s tools arranged on his desk, he was already too deep in concentration to notice his daughter’s return.

  She picked up her pouch of sacred stones, wolves’ teeth, and flowers plucked under a full moon at midnight, padding up behind him. “No one’s ever asked me to make a man-thing wilt before. Do you mind if I watch?”

  He spun around, clearly startled by her voice, if not the question. At the strange intensity of his face, his gaze so oblique in the candlelight he appeared not to know her, Fiona stumbled back a step.

  “Dad,” she whispered, a quiver in her voice, “are you all right?”

  He scowled at her from beneath his thick white brows, his voice a rasp of sound. “Get out of here, Fiona. Now.”

  She stared past him in fascination toward the desk. An altar strewn with dried rosebuds and a red silk cloth; a mortar and pestle; salt, oil; a thurible burning cloying incense. Gasping softly, she lowered her gaze to the strands of hair woven into nine thin knots, black tightly entwined with auburn.

  Lovers’ knots.

  The chieftain and her cousin.

  Swallowing, she noticed the triangle drawn in chalk on the dull wooden floor. “Dad,” she said again, backing into the bucket Marsali had overturned earlier. “The Irrevocable Spell. Why are you doing this?”

  “She needs a protector, Fiona. I have failed at the task, and the man who loved her is dead. No one else in the clan is good enough.”

  Fiona shook her head in bewilderment. “But everyone said Duncan MacElgin is a devil. He caused a clansmen’s death and disfigured another. He—he murdered his own parents.”

  “Andrew said the lad had been mistreated and had a good heart beneath all the drunken deviltry.”

  “Then it must have been buried very deep,” Fiona said in a tremulous voice. “And he must have terrified the life out of Marsali to bring her here for help against him in the middle of the night.” She darted forward to stay his arm. “You can’t do this.”

  He shook her hand away, his fine white hair failing into his face. “I’m only helping along the attraction I saw with my own eyes tonight. If it’s not meant to be, then all my magic will not matter anyway. Now leave me to do my work. See your cousin back to the castle and mind you behave yourselves.”

  “Papa—”

  His voice rose into a fearful roar. “You will not learn the secret of penetrating the Otherworld if you interfere with me tonight. Go!”

  Throwing him a final desperate look, Fiona found her pouch in the wall cupboard and hurried from the cabin. As she met Marsali pacing on deck, she squelched a surge of guilt at the enormity of what her father had undertaken.

  The chieftain and her cousin.

  Duncan and Marsali.

  Bound together for all eternity in earthly passion and spiritual partnership in a spell that linked soul to soul. Fiona was sick with fear and envy.

  She lowered her troubled gaze, marching past Marsali to the gangplank. She had no power, mortal or magical, to countermand her father’s spell. “Come on,” she muttered. “We’ll work our own magic from the cliffs so the waves won’t wash over us when I start to raise the storm.”

  Marsali glanced back skeptically at the sea, the waves already lashed into angry whitecaps by a strong northwest breeze. In her opinion, there was a good chance of a summer storm before dawn, magic or not.

  “I hope this won’t take long,” she grumbled as she followed Fiona down the unsteady gangplank, her skirts blowing up to her knees.

  Fiona waited on th
e crooked path carved into the cliff, her face averted, her hand outstretched to Marsali. “It might take longer than usual since you knocked over my bucket of sacred well water. That was part of my offering to Taranis, God of Thunder, and the mermaids.”

  God of Thunder. Mermaids.

  Marsali rolled her eyes at this nonsense and allowed Fiona to pull her up onto the path. In silence they climbed to the clifftop, a raw breeze buffeting them. When they reached the summit, Marsali was reassured by the sight of her horse standing patiently behind a grove of wind-blasted brush.

  Duncan, however, was nowhere to be seen.

  She shrugged, turning back to Fiona, who had deftly assembled a little altar at the edge of the cliff. With her thin brown arms thrown up to the sky, the would-be witch was chanting at the top of her lungs to a hodgepodge of Celtic gods.

  “Hurry up, Fiona,” Marsali shouted irritably. “I’d almost rather be back at the castle waiting on his miserable lordship than standing here watching you making a fool of yourself.”

  Fiona pivoted slowly, studying Marsali in concern. “It’s working already, isn’t it?” she whispered, biting her lip. “My poor Marsali.”

  “ ‘Poor Marsali’ what?”

  “Nothing. You could throw me into a den of lions and I’d never tell.” Fiona whirled back to the sea and hurled a handful of polished stones into the water. “Dance around the altar three times, Marsali.”

  They danced. They blew their warm breath onto Fiona’s sacred stones. They took turns waving Fiona’s rowan wand over the ocean. If anything, the waves calmed, the breeze lessened. Finally, overcome with delayed fatigue, Marsali lurched to her feet and yawned.

  “I’m going back to the castle and see if his lordship has been changed into a lobster. This is damned silly.”

  Fiona looked up from her forlorn little altar, murmuring sadly, “Poor brave wee cousin. I should have done something to stop him. It’s probably too late now.”

  Marsali was too worn out to try to understand what her cousin meant by her cryptic remarks. Marching to the verge of the cliff, she tossed over the stones and wolves’ teeth she’d been clutching in her hand.

  “Those were for you, Taranis, God of Thunder, and the mermaids, though what the hell you’ll do with them is beyond me.” Her voice climbed into a mischievous shout. “Rise up and storm on Duncan MacElgin! Rain on his handsome head, strike him down where he…”

  She hesitated, not hating him quite enough to wish him actual physical harm, although he undoubtedly deserved it. “Strike the ground he walks on!” she concluded with a satisfied nod. “There, Fiona. I’ve said my piece. Good luck raising your storm.”

  She whirled and threw the rowan wand back into Fiona’s lap. She had not taken two steps past the altar before thunder rumbled over the mainland. Fiona rose to her feet and stared, disbelieving, at the lightning that zigzagged directly over Castle MacElgin, illuminating the stark parapets in a flash of silver.

  Fiona jumped to her feet. “You did it!” she shrieked, squeezing Marsali’s shoulder. “You raised the storm. For all we know, he might have been standing on the battlements, watching for you, and your lightning struck him dead.”

  Marsali swallowed, reaching around her throat for the familiar comfort of her cross before remembering she had left it with her uncle. “I didn’t raise the storm, Fiona. It was going to happen anyway. All I did was give it a little helping hand, if even that.”

  Fiona looked unconvinced, tom between professional jealousy and admiration. “But the lightning—right over the castle, Marsali.”

  “Look, Fiona, if it struck him dead, then that was meant to be too. I won’t lose any sleep over it. And now it’s starting to rain, which means I’ll be soaked before I reach the castle.”

  As Marsali strode off toward her horse, Fiona turned and stared down at the ghostly silhouette of the wrecked ship wedged between the cliffs of the cove. Yellow candlelight glowed behind the heavily curtained porthole of her father’s cabin.

  It was going to happen anyway.

  She glanced up appraisingly at Marsali, her rain-blurred figure already receding as she cantered her horse toward the castle in the gloaming light. Strange how Marsali’s words had practically echoed Colum’s. Fiona didn’t know what conclusions she ought to draw from this, but she did know that Marsali had more talent for witchery than she’d ever admit. Or use. What a terrible waste. Fiona had to work so hard for her spells.

  * * *

  Duncan stared down in astonishment at the crumbling mortar of the turret that had landed at his feet from the lightning blast. Another few inches and he might have been cleaved in two. Even the weather in this accursed castle was conspiring against him.

  Andrew’s daughter. What a cruel joke.

  He gripped the wet stone of the battlements, heedless of the storm that had erupted without warning. Soft summer rain splashed down his face and soaked his shirt front. He didn’t fight it. Aye, he needed to stand in a cold downpour after tussling with that imp in the sand. The irony of discovering her identity mocked his well-constructed plans.

  To think he had even considered seducing her like a common serving girl.

  Andrew Hay’s daughter, for the love of God. It made sense now. Hay’s had been the only voice of wisdom in his disordered clan, and it was with his death, and not the old chieftain’s, that the castle had begun to fall into chaos. No wonder everyone loved Marsali. They had loved the loyal-hearted Andrew too.

  He lifted his brooding gaze back toward the sea. The first night he had encountered Andrew was still emblazoned on his mind like a burn that had healed into a deep painful scar.

  Panic. Fear. Grief. Rage. Memory after memory cascaded over him, a waterfall of human emotions. His chest tightened even now with the shocked disbelief of dragging his older sister away from the sight of their mother and Fergus’s unmoving body. He held his hands out to the rain unthinkingly as if to wash the viscous warmth of the blood from his fingers.

  His older sister Judith’s voice, stark with horror, echoed in his mind. “What have you done, Duncan? Dear God, what has that violent temper made you do now?”

  He pushed around her and stumbled outside, heaving in the thistle-choked yard until his stomach emptied. Judith followed, recoiling when he straightened and she saw his battered face in the moonlight. High on the hills behind them, the bonfires of the Beltane celebration burst into the night, a fitting backdrop of hell. The muted laughter of revelers rose into the silence, punctuated by the hysterical screaming for help of Fergus’s elderly sister, who had awakened to see her brother and his wife dead on the floor.

  Duncan grabbed his sister’s hand and dragged her into the woods that surrounded the stone cottage. She was the only person he had left; even though she was five years his senior, he towered over her, tall for his age. They had always protected each other.

  “We have to run away, Judith,” he said in desperation. “We’ll take one of the fishing boats from the cove and row to France.”

  “France? France? We’ve no siller, Duncan. No relatives over there. Who would take us in?”

  There were shouts coming closer to them, hoofbeats, dogs barking. Judith worked her hand free, giving a quiet sob as she wiped the blood off her gown.

  “Mama,” she whispered, clutching her midsection as she stared back at the cottage. “We can’t leave her there like that.”

  The sound of wood splintering, an ax biting through the door, filled Duncan with a fresh surge of panic. He knew what his punishment would be. Never mind the reason. The chieftain wouldn’t let the crime go unpaid.

  “Go, Duncan,” Judith cried softly, pushing at his shoulder.

  “I’m not leavin’ you here to—”

  Before he could finish, a gruff but gentle voice broke into the darkness of the tall beech trees that protected them. A short cloaked man stood staring down the incline. “The bairns could not have gone far, my lord. Pray God they were not hurt in the violence tonight. With any—”
<
br />   A startled cry from inside the cottage interrupted him.

  They’d found both bodies now, Duncan’s mother, the obscenity of her death, concealed beneath the plaid he had laid over her. He heard one of the chieftain’s retainers murmur, “Double murder,” and at that Judith panicked anew, shoving Duncan deeper into the wood.

  “Go. I’ll be all right. Go.”

  He wavered before he started to run, but he did not get far. Andrew Hay, the chieftain’s tacksman and closest friend, caught him even before he reached the top of the hill. Two great slavering hounds pounced on his back and pushed him face down into the soggy grass. When Hay stuck his booted toe into Duncan’s ribs to turn him over like a snail, Duncan was cursing and crying, raising his fists to defend himself against the punishment he anticipated from experience.

  The unexpected compassion in Hay’s eyes struck him even more deeply than any physical assault. Duncan was an admitted thief, always in some sort of trouble. No one knew, or cared, that he was beaten into stealing for Fergus.

  “Someone’s killed your parents, laddie,” Hay said quietly, lifting his foot away. “Do you know who it was?”

  He leaped up and tried to run around Hay, only to find the castle dogs and the tall intimidating figure of the chieftain barring his way. Even then, staring into his natural father’s rugged face, he did not recognize the similarities between them. He spat instead at his feet, wild in his fear and grief, resenting the nobleman who represented everything Duncan would never be.

  “Take the boy back to the castle,” Kenneth MacElgin said after appraising Duncan in endless silence. “See that he’s well treated as befits my only son and heir.”

  Duncan sneered, ducking the hand Andrew extended to help him. Well treated. My only son and heir. Had the old man lost his mind? Was this a demented Beltane prank?

  The memories faded. He forced himself to breathe. His lungs burned as if he had been running for miles.

  The rain had stopped.