But, as she grew the small world around her changed. Her parents died in an attack by barbarians. Many people lost their lives and the village was almost completely eradicated. The only reason they survived was because of one man – Callum, and ever since then he had been the hero of the village. Tall and strong, he walked with great purpose. His body was packed with muscle and he had a long dark beard. Everyone in the town loved him for what he had done, and after the barbarians had been driven away, he had asked Abbie for her hand in marriage. How could she have resisted? She was grieving for everything they had lost, but her tender heart knew that she had to look to the future, and she had to show everyone else that they could rebuild the village and that there was hope. So when he had approached her and asked for her hand in marriage she readily accepted, and it was the start of a new era. With Callum in the village the people thought they were invincible and that nothing could ever oppose them. He roared in triumph after the wedding and the sound echoed out through the valley, as if warning everyone that they would never stand a chance if they tried to attack again.
That had been a few years ago. Abbie had been but a babe of eighteen, and now she was approaching twenty-two, yet she felt much older, as though she had lived a thousand lifetimes. Her shoulders were rounded and her eyes had lost some of that sparkle for life, which had not turned out to be as much of a fairy tale as she had imagined it to be. Shortly after she was married she realized that Callum was not the hero the town had made him out to be either. He was rough with her, and cruel with his words. He was strong yes, and mighty, but behind closed doors he had a vicious streak that eroded Abbie's sense of self-worth. Often she tried to engage him with what she loved; the stories about the mystical forest creatures, but he scoffed at her.
“You're a woman now, you shouldn't concern yourself with such childish matters,” he said, towering above her, looking down his nose at her. “You are my wife now and that is all that matters in this world. You should be spending time trying to give me an heir so that my blood will run for generations yet. He will be the greatest child, and will be the leader of this clan, even surpassing my own efforts.” His eyes gleamed with pride as he thought about his future child, yet for whatever reason Abbie had not managed to conceive yet. She went to the healer and asked for help. The healer gave her various concoctions of herbs, and told her to make love to her husband on specific days, but still nothing worked and Callum's ire only grew.
“You are worthless. You were the jewel of this village and I thought I had won myself a prize worthy of my efforts, but now your luster has faded and I find myself regretting my choice. You are but a pebble and your beauty is being surpassed by others. You will give me an heir one of these days,” he said before he stormed out on one of his hunting parties. He often grew tired of her company and would ride out to the forest, exploring. In her youth she had imagined this would be the perfect life, married to a hero who would go out to the forest and return with wonderful stories about all the things he had seen out there. Abbie had yearned to see the wider world. To her the mountains were a prison and although everything was beautiful there was still so much more out there, and she had wanted her husband to share that love. Now she saw the error in her ways and knew that her childish dreams had been just that, childish. She faded into her shell and was but a ghost of the person she had once been. Her fire had been extinguished. Everyone in the village knew, and they knew how Callum treated her, yet none dared to go against the hero of the village. Perhaps, had her family not perished in the attack, things would have been different. When she was alone, Abbie would often imagine what her life would have been like had that night never happened, but dawn always reared its head and the days continued in the same manner. Day after day she felt an utter sense of hopelessness seep through her soul.
2
“Do you think they all died a long time ago?” Abbie said. She was sitting with her friend Maggie, sewing tunics.
“I don't think it really matters if they did or they didn't. Nobody has ever seen anything for real. If they did exist then I imagine they moved on or were killed long ago. If they didn't exist then nothing has changed,” Maggie replied.
“I like to think that they did exist.”
“I know you do, but just wishing it to be so doesn't mean that there is magic in the world.”
Abbie was silent for a few moments. “I don't know why anyone would have wanted to kill them. They must have been beautiful.”
“It's not unheard of for people to want to destroy beautiful things,” Maggie said pointedly, staring at Abbie. Both of them knew what she meant but Abbie didn't reply. Maggie was perhaps the only person in the village to see through Callum's brutish visage and didn't respect him for what he had done. She only saw him for the abusive husband that he was.
“He's due home today isn't he?” Maggie asked. Abbie nodded gently, but did not say anything. She had an air of sadness about her. Maggie reached over and squeezed Abbie's hand, a gesture which shocked the red-headed woman.
“You know it's going to get better,” Maggie said. Abbie smiled weakly.
“I suppose it cannot get much worse.”
“Have you not thought about running away? You have always spoken about the forest. Perhaps you should disappear one night, you may even find the creatures you seek.”
“How I would love to do that,” she said despondently, “I know that he would find me, somehow, wherever I went. I am not just a wife to him but I am a possession, a trophy, and even though he stopped loving me years ago, I think he would see it as a slight against his ego if I left him, and he would not be able to live with it. Either I will conceive and give him the child he craves or I will be unable to and he will cast me aside, as he is wont to do.”
“You know that he has already done that in spirit. I have spoken with the other women in the village and he has taken them to bed, some of them even married, yet nobody dares to challenge him because they all think they owe him their lives.”
“They do.”
“They are all blind. Just because he saved the village that one night does not give him the right to do as he pleases and treat everyone as his own personal playthings, and it does not give him the right to treat you this way. You are not just his wife. You are a person in your own right and you deserve to be treated as such. It pains me to see you like this. I remember when you were so full of life, the happiest girl anyone had ever seen. I want that Abbie back. I know she is still in there somewhere.”
Abbie smiled sadly again. “Perhaps, but I feel if she is, she is buried deep down where I shall never find her. Life is not what I expected it to be. I think my parents did me a disservice by allowing me to believe in the impossible. They should have prepared me for the cruelty of life, for how hard and endlessly bleak it is. Heroes turn into villains like the day turns into night. That is a simple truth that more people should be aware of, and I know that when I do have a child they will not be blind to that. I will show them the true face of the world and when they are older they shall thank me for it.”
Maggie listened to her friend and feared that she was beyond help. They continued working on the clothes for the remainder of the day and spoke of little aside from the meanderings of life. But all day Abbie had the future in her mind. A deep malaise had seized her soul and she tried to think back to the girl she had been in an effort to recapture that sense of wonder and adventure. For a fleeting moment she felt it, and a smile flickered on her face. But in the very next moment the horn sounded, announcing the return of Callum.
The village cheered for their hero. He embraced them all and laughed with them, showering upon them the hoard he had collected from his small adventure. There were little tribes dotted about and Callum often went out to collect tributes from them, for his continued protection. These took the form of cakes, baked bread, and small trinkets. Abbie rose to meet him. Callum leaned down and pecked her cheek with his lips. He was always so gentle in public.
“An
d for you my wife, I have this,” he said, and pulled out a necklace from a pouch hanging around his wide waist. It was a long chain, with a green jewel hanging at the end. The shade was the same as her eyes. She took it from him and thanked him. Everyone cheered, enjoying the delusion that this was a happy, fulfilling marriage. Callum turned and celebrated through the night, while Abbie disappeared into her own hut. She fingered the necklace and wondered what poor soul Callum took it from. She placed it beside the bed and lay there, staring up at the ceiling, dreading his inevitable return.
3
He stumbled back in the small hours of the morning. He smelled of alcohol and meat and she pretended to be asleep. Her eyes were clamped shut as she heard him stagger around the room, clattering into various things, eventually causing some bowls to fall off the side and shatter against the floor.
“Damn you woman,” he cursed, “what sense is there of putting them there? Such a good for nothing. Look at you sleeping there, so precious and loved by all. What good did that do the town when they were being attacked. They needed a man then, not a damn foolish woman who believes in fairies. I don't know why I ever married you in the first place. You can't even do the one thing you were made for.” Abbie heard it all as he carried on mumbling to himself and she tried her hardest to stifle her tears, choking them against the pillow. Callum stayed up for a while. He pulled off his clothes. His body was now getting a little chubbier as he relaxed and ate and drank more, whereas when he had beaten back the barbarians his body had been packed with muscle. There was still the essence of a handsome man inside him but it had been dulled by gluttony and greed.
He sat on the edge of the bed and the mattress creaked under his weight. He coughed and spluttered and crawled into the covers. She felt his hands over her and his hot breath and his grunts of desire and she wished that it would be over quickly. He gripped her tightly and there was no escape. She did her wifely duty, although she wasn't sure if he could even tell if she was asleep or not. Despite being a hero, stamina had never been his strong point, but as he slept and snored loudly Abbie gazed out at the wan moon and prayed to something bigger than herself, pleading for some respite from the horror because she didn't know if she had the strength to endure it for the rest of her life.
The following morning Callum rose in a rage. Something had blackened his mood and he was taking it out on Abbie. He shouted at her for breaking the plates even though it had been entirely his fault, and he made her clean it up. Then he noticed that she was not wearing the necklace he had brought back. He clutched it in his mighty fist and his face contorted with anger as he confronted her.
“I bring you back treasure and you dare not wear it? How dare you defy me like this? When you go outside you will wear this as it is a token of our love. You need to show other people,” he said.
“When are we going to stop lying to ourselves? You don't love me, you just like having me,” she said in a rare moment of courage. Usually she suffered in silence but she was tired of it, and she knew that she was going to feel the ire of his temper anyway so she might as well talk back to him.
“Do not presume what is going on inside my heart. Now sit down and put this necklace on,” he said. When Abbie didn't move Callum growled. He placed his hands on her shoulders and pushed her down on a chair. She surrendered, unable to resist his strength. He pulled her hair away from her pale, freckled neck, and placed the chain around her. The metal was cold against her skin. The jewel rested in her plunging cleavage, and Callum looked at her with approval. His long, thick fingers pressed into her shoulders and her chest heaved, fearful of what he was going to do next. But, to her surprise, he moved away and began to get dressed.
“Who did you take this from?” she asked after a few moments.
“That is none of your concern.”
“I beg to differ. If you are going to raid other tribes you are no better than the barbarians that attacked us, and one day you will meet your match in battle and you will fall.”
Callum spun around and Abbie could see the whites of his eyes. In that moment she felt sheer terror. He pointed a finger at her and when he spoke spittle flew from his mouth.
“I am nothing like those animals! I am merely being compensated for providing a service. I protect them and if they cannot see that then they are free to challenge me, but they will fall because I am the hero and the hero always emerges victorious.” Abbie found his words distasteful and bile filled her mouth. She struggled to ignore it, and waited for him to leave, but there seemed to be something playing on his mind. He paced the floor and kept stroking his beard. Eventually Abbie asked him what was troubling him.
“There is a growing clan on the other shore of the lake. I have been monitoring them for some time but they keep expanding. Their leader is a cunning, brutish man – a savage. I fear that he may be planning an attack against us. I have met him and I know that he is planning something. I must prepare the village to defend itself. I cannot allow another tribe to take what is ours.”
Abbie had never seen Callum afraid before and she wondered how terrible a man must be to provoke this reaction in him. She toyed with the necklace and stared at him, suddenly afraid of the future again. But perhaps the sweet release of death was the only thing that could provide her with hope. It was a horrible thought, but part of her wished that Callum would fall in battle. He would get the heroes' death he would have wanted and she would be free of the misery. And yet she also knew that it was a risky wish, for the man that defeated him could be even worse than him.
4
It was the dead of night. During the previous few days Callum had been preparing the village to defend itself in the case of the attack. When pressed, he offered no reasoning other than that this man was a brute and had an evil look in his eyes. Abbie suspected that there was something more to it than that, but everyone else accepted the explanation without question. Callum delayed a hunting party so that he would be in the village when the attack happened, and as the nights passed without any event, his paranoia and worry only grew. He peered through the forest, keeping sentry like a man possessed. Abbie was glad, for it kept him away from her, but also worried because he resembled a man losing his grip on his sanity and she feared for what may happen if he lost his mind and went completely mad.
But while Callum was so focused on an attack from the forest, he forgot about the lake. His clan had only built simple fishing boats, but the same was not true of the clan across the shore. In the quiet of the night, a long, narrow boat slipped across the water and a number of scouts skulked through the town. They stayed in the shadows and made no noise. Abbie had been sleeping peacefully when she was awoken by a hand clamped around her mouth and a bag pulled over her head. She struggled against them, trying to lash and kick out, but there was no hope. Her screams were muffled, and just as quickly as they arrived they departed again, this time with Callum's wife. The boat slid across the water, and when daybreak came chaos ensued, but of course Abbie did not know this, for she was being taken to a new clan.
The men in the boat said not a word. Abbie twisted her head but she could not see through the blackness of the bag. Her hands had been tied and the rope dug into her wrists. Her throat tightened and her heart was pounding as she wondered what awaited her. Was she being taken from the arms of one brute to another? Would her sorrow ever end? Only time would answer her questions, but she had an unsettling feeling as she felt the boat sail over the waves. They approached the shore and she was hauled off the boat. She stumbled against the sandy shore, and the men holding her didn't seem to care about her well-being at all. She was flung down into a room of some sort, for she heard a door being locked. Her arms were still tied and no matter how hard she tried to twist her head she was unable to free it from the dark sack. With nothing else to do, she slept, only to be awakened at the crack of dawn. The sack was pulled from her head and she saw a man, just a normal man, staring at her.
“Rise and shine,” he said.
�
��What do you want with me?” Abbie asked defiantly.
“Oh, it's not what I want with you, it's what Duncan wants.”
“And who is this Duncan?”
“You'll find out,” he said, and when he smiled she saw that he was missing some teeth. He provided her a tray of simple food and untied her hands. Outside she could hear that things were busy and there was lots of loud chatter, but she was unable to see anything. She wondered what was happening at home. By now Callum would surely have discovered that she was missing and he would be rallying the troops to come and get her. They did not have the ships to traverse the lake so they would have to make the long ride through the forest, which would take a few days. Abbie hoped that she would survive that long.
In the late afternoon, when the sun was at its peak, the man with the missing teeth came to fetch her again. He grabbed her arm roughly and hauled her out of the small hut. She screamed and hollered but nobody was there to help her, they all just looked at her with slight interest. Eventually her throat grew raw so she stopped her protest, knowing that it wasn't doing any good. The man took her to another hut, this one larger, and when he pushed her through the door he stayed outside.
Abbie looked forward and saw a man with his back to her. He wore a sheepskin and a crown made of branches. His long black hair was tied into a ponytail and it swung along his back like a pendulum. By most measures he would have been an imposing hulk of a man but in comparison with Callum he fell short, and Abbie wondered why her husband had been so afraid of him.
The Captive Bride (Scottish Highlander Romance) Page 64