Night Visitor

by Melanie Jackson

  “Hope? A child, do you mean?” She looked at the hand about her wrist and smiled. The dark of his skin looked right against her paler flesh.

  “Ultimately.” He shrugged. “No plan of the still-folk’s making is ever so simple to understand. But they want ye tae be mine. They would have me take you now, but I shall no’ be doing anything against yer will. So ye must decide, lass.”

  “No one has ever left the important decisions to me,” she confessed, still looking down at the strong hand that encircled her wrist. She was unable to think reasonably. It was as though something had peeled all of society’s morality back from her brain leaving only selfish honesty. This new voice told her that this was a moment when the winds of change would either snuff out the spark that glowed between them, or else fan it to a blaze.

  “Nay?” A tiny smile had crept into his low voice. “It seems to me that yer full o’ a deal of decision regardless.”

  “I’ve been practicing.”

  This was her decision.

  “Well then, lass? Ye should be prepared for this moment. What is it tae be? Aye, or nay? Be certain o’ yer choice now, though. There’ll be no going back once ‘tis done.” His beautiful voice was very nearly harsh now, as though he were angered by something.

  “I know ‘tis madness,” Taffy whispered, staring up into his face. “Complete wanton wickedness to want you in this way.”

  “So the priests tell us. But, lass, life is short. And happiness is rare.” His thumb rubbed gently over the thrumming veins in her wrist. If it was meant to calm her, the gesture failed in its intent. “An we died on the morrow, would ye regret having passed this moment by? Never having a man tae yer bed?”

  “I would,” she answered, in barely a whisper, her mind finding the peace that came with decision, or at the heart of intense prayer. Her lonely soul was not meant to be confined to one body, one heart, but should venture forth and find its mate.

  “Then so be it.” He lifted his gaze from her face and directed it around the silent glen as though warning someone away.

  “Are they here?” Taffy asked uneasily, pulling her hair about her shoulders in a curtain.

  “Nay. We are alone, lass.” Malcolm smiled suddenly, a grin as bright as the hot sun of summer. He repeated: “We are alone.”

  Around them, the trees lost their rigid posture and seemed to fold inward, weaving together their tressy arms into a bower. The tender leaves swallowed up the sunbeams from above, which gave a soft green twilight to the glen.

  The moment narrowed until it seemed that mortal time shifted to one side and left them stranded in some unearthly place—like those stories of bespelled into a night of faerie revels who awoke only to find that one hundred years had passed, Taffy thought dimly. This was just such a place.

  There was no breath of passing breezes, no sound of ripples from the nearby waters. The whole world, other than her and Malcolm, faded away behind the veil of emerald twilight.

  Taffy sensed, as she lay back on the stone, that she was joining now in a long chain of magical events. She was at last taking her place in some vast design, spanning a gap between events and clasping the lives of those who had come before her, and yet also those who would follow.

  Words would not shape themselves on her thickened tongue, but she stared with her eyes wide, two flawless blue pools in which Malcolm might see all that she could not speak. She wanted to abandon herself to this desire she felt to throw herself into his passion and be consumed there. It was her destiny.

  Malcolm’s eyes were a turmoil of color and emotion as he cast aside his plaid and sark and joined her on the altar. Taffy’s silvered gown slithered away, the ties unfastening and slipping off her breasts before his fingers were even there to touch them.

  As though she had been given a window into Malcolm’s mind, Taffy could see and even feel what he wanted of her. He wanted to cleave into her, to become part of her very bones and flesh, to pour himself into her dew-damp body, to lose himself in the awed regard that shone in her fathomless, ocean deep eyes.

  His thoughts moved her even as they terrified her with their intensity.

  He glanced down once as he brushed aside the silken tassel shielding her maidenhead and folded back the tender flesh.

  Her modesty protested being seen thus by him, but no protest could force itself past her mute lips.

  He paused for a moment, returning his gaze to her eyes. She knew that he worried about hurting her, but she knew there would be some pain. This ceremony was both communion and sacrifice, and had to be sealed in the blood of innocence.

  Her breath caught as he entered her, and the passion in her dimmed. He dipped many times into her body, fighting his own pleasure that she might know joy, too. But it was futile. Conduits of new thoughts had been forced open in her brain. A confusion of foreign emotions raced unchecked through her mind and body, and they overwhelmed her. Malcolm was asking her to fly with him, but though she wanted desperately to please him, she could not do what he desired. In the end, her own timidity was defeating her. Malcolm had to go on alone; she could not let go of the modesty and restraint that were the only familiar landmarks she had to guide her through this strange land of alien sensation and passion.

  Yet though she had not allowed her body to be entirely swept away by Malcolm, in every other way Taffy felt herself give over to him. She poured out her feelings until there was nothing else to relinquish: He had her thoughts, her heart, even—for a moment—her soul, which flew with him where her body could not.

  “Malcolm,” she whispered, her lips finally unsealed. She closed her eyes when he stilled upon her.

  Amidst all the strange notions cluttering her head there was, hovering at the back of her mind, the first small shadow of grief. Something said to her that though she had somehow failed herself—and Malcolm, too—she had given the still-folk what they wanted. It was time for them to leave this holy glen.

  “Have a care with yer thoughts now, lass,” Malcolm warned gently as he rolled aside. “The old ones may take yer part and give ye yer sad-thought destiny, an ye wish on it often enough.”

  “They can do that?” she asked, suddenly growing alarmed as her senses returned. Flushing, Taffy started searching for her gown, feeling more naked than she ever had in her life, but the meager protection of silver shift had disappeared just like all her other clothes.

  “Here? Aye, they can.”

  “Wonderful. And what now—since we’ve fulfilled our destiny?” she asked, watching uneasily as the leaves overhead thinned and revealed a sky painted bright with stars and a full moon.

  Only the night before it had been a crescent, she thought, the hair rising upon her arms. How much time had passed since they entered the glen?

  “Now we dress—an’ I can find my plaid. Ah!” Malcolm went quickly to a nearby gorse bush and plucked up the garment. The moon was bright enough to show that the tattered woolens had been mended. It also revealed Taffy’s dress of jean laying neatly on a nearby shrub.

  Feeling painfully naked and tender-skinned sitting on the cold, bare rock, Taffy hurried for the protection of her heavy clothing. She was fastening her blouse when she felt Malcolm’s hands gently lifting her tangled hair from off of her neck.

  “Little though it pleases me, lass,” he said in his beautiful, calm voice, “I think we must bind these locks up so we may travel wi’ stealth. The flora shall not be so cooperative once we are gone from the glen.”

  Taffy stood still as he secured her hair with a piece of wiry vine.

  “Where will we go?”

  “Where we must.”

  “But where is the door?” she asked, turning to face him.

  “The door?”

  “The way back. You said they would show me the door when I had given them what they wanted.”

  “Do ye still seek death then?” he asked sadly, his expression growing slightly aloof.

  “Death! Of course not. What are you talking about?”

 
“The road ye traveled was the way of the dead, lass. The low road.”

  “No. It couldn’t be. How could I have survived?” But she lacked conviction. The road certainly hadn’t been anything of this world. Malcolm seemed so definite that way was dangerous, and if anyone should know about such things, it was he. Had she really traveled through the land of the dead to come here? And what would the return trip mean for her?

  Too, though she knew she should rush back to reassure her father of her well-being, she found herself in no haste to leave Malcolm. Not even if it meant facing the wrath of all the Campbells without a single change of clothing.

  Some strong emotions were teeming in her breast and she did not know what to do with them. They had appeared so quickly, with no time for conventional preparation. She now had a lover—yet there’d been no courting, no flowers, no mention of any future. Her whole world and all her assumptions about her relations with the male half of it had been turned on end.

  She needed time to adjust to what had happened. To think about what she should do.

  Malcolm saw her indecision. “Aye, it was the low road. Well, an it is the still-folk’s wish, ye’ll travel the spirit road again, ye may be sure of it. For the present, I think we’ll content ourselves wi’ departing from Duntrune. The Campbells are apt tae be in evil humor, what wi’ me escaping and ye shooting so many o’ their men. We’ll head Kilmartin way.”

  “Thanks for reminding me about the Campbells. It had nearly slipped my mind,” she grumbled, smoothing her skirt with a nervous hand. The ugly jean should serve her against Malcolm’s lust as well as any armor had ever protected a knight in battle, especially now that it had been restored to wholeness.

  The piper laughed softly as he pulled Taffy close. His body was hot, pulsing with life and energy, which made her own heart join the unwilling thrum of renewing desire.

  “Aye. I’d no’ Campbells in my head, either. All the same, best we recall them now or there’ll be no more chances for sweet forgetfulness. Fetch yer gear, Taffy lass. We’d best be away while we may.”

  “All right.” Reluctantly, she stepped away from the shelter of Malcolm’s arms. She didn’t share his sense of urgency about being away from the protected glen and back among the hostile people of his world. Even with its strangeness, this all seemed preferable to the danger they had left at Duntrune.

  “Take only what ye need.”

  “I need it all,” she said firmly, donning her belts and checking her rifle to see that it was loaded. “I wish that there had been time to photograph the glen.”

  “Photograph?”

  “Make a picture.” Taffy gestured at her camera.

  “A picture? Wi’ that small box? The one ye carry about all the time?”

  “It’s called a camera. It captures images and puts them onto plates. Wait! I have a picture of you in here.” Taffy hurried to one of the haversacks and began searching for the photograph she had taken at Duntrune. She was not aware that her sight had improved to the point that she could see nearly as well in the halflight as she did in the daylight.

  “Here it is,” she said, opening the thin boards and removing her most precious print for his inspection.

  Malcolm stared in amazement.

  “Are these my bones?” he demanded.

  “They were,” she corrected happily. “But they won’t be there now, will they? You didn’t die after all.”

  “Nay, I didnae.” His sudden smile was fierce. ”Well, lass, I suppose we must bring yer magic picture-maker. But I’ll carry it for ye. Ye’ll have yer hands full wi’ the Sassenach weapon.”

  “It isn’t Sassenach. It’s American,” she said releasing her camera into his hands with only the smallest twinge of anxiety.

  “Is it now?” he asked, eyeing her rifle with sudden interest.

  “It is. It is called a Winchester repeating rifle, and it carries ten bullets in one load.”

  “Ten! So that is how ye shot so many o’ those bloody Campbells. The MacColla would be a happy man an he had a brace o’ those.”

  “No doubt. And I wish I could have brought him some,” Taffy said, feeling a surge of belated anger at the woman who had tried to harm Malcolm. “I just wish I had shot that awful woman too.”

  “Aye, ‘twould have been a grand thing, but ye must no’ dwell on what might have been. Ye’ve taken a large revenge on the bloody Campbells.” It was unbelievable to Taffy that there was no chastisement in his voice. No disapproval of her unlady-like actions.

  “I have, haven’t I?” she contemplated thoughtfully, shouldering one of the packs. It was awkward with the criss-crossing ammunition belts. “Like a soldier.”

  “Aye, like a soldier. Give me yer bags, lass. We’ve a bittock distance tae travel and I don’t want ye tae be laggard of foot an’ we need tae run. I don’t know how ye managed tae get here in the first place with so much luggage.”

  “Slowly,” she muttered at Malcolm’s back as he started away from her with a long, limber-hipped stride. It was a reminder of her own deficiency of leg on the last occasion when she had followed her long-shanked Gael into a hostile wood.

  She knew immediately when the edge of the faeries’ lands had been reached. Beyond a last ring of rugged stones on the hillcrest, there lay a thick brooding mist that covered over the suddenly sullen moon. The air felt charged and heavy with the heat and damp that always preceded a violent summer storm.

  The gay stream they had bathed and fished in had dried to a trickle where the stumps of dead bushes rotted in shallow pools of still, stagnant water. Nothing swam within its thinning puddles.

  “It’s ugly,” Taffy breathed, wrinkling her nose at the smell of decay.

  “Aye.” Malcolm’s voice was equally soft. “Too ill a place for attracting men or beasts. Go softly now, lass. It may be that Campbells are nearby.”

  As if to prove his words, below their perch torches came into view—dozens of them, swarming like sinister fireflies though the woods and advancing upon them as surely as an ocean’s tide reclaimed its beaches under the pull of a full moon. It seemed impossible, but Taffy was certain that she could hear their agitated snuffling as the men quartered the ground, searching for them.

  Malcolm jerked his head once as a sign to follow and faded back into the woods. They could not escape from the glen that way. Taffy walked carefully, trying to still her burgeoning alarm.

  He led her down a narrow path where sharp stones pierced the valley floor. There was a heaviness in the air that made the moon hazy and red. Presently, even its dim light was covered over with swollen black clouds that left a black shadow upon the land. The air around Malcolm and Taffy brooded, and every once in a while, the unpleasant smell of a lighted flambeaux was carried to them.

  Malcolm moved swiftly through the ravine, seeking the woods on the other side. Such seemingly barren places could suddenly become riverways where streams churned with angry waters released by a storm. Already, there was an approaching rill from the spring and the faint sound of trickling water from the top of the gorge.

  He did not curse the weather, though it would leave them cold and wet should it break before they found shelter. Pounding rains would discourage even the most ardent hunters, and it would confuse the hounds that were set upon their trail.

  The first of the heavy rain did not come until they were sheltered within a copse of mountain ash, but the wind that came rushing upon them was a fearsome thing. Driven by some unknown purpose, it raced through the trees and shrubs with careless, tearing claws that propelled the dust and summer chaff like leaves before a hurricane. The short wall of heather that ringed the copse wailed for mercy from the torrent’s lash. The tiny purple blossom’s bells were frayed and torn before they were sent spinning into the darkening air.

  Taffy could barely think; the storm filled her head, clotting her thoughts with noise that rivaled a raging river or a locomotive in a tunnel. It seemed for a moment that the wind would actually unseal her lips and rush down to
bruise her lungs with its stinging particles before it dragged her up into the sky. But at the moment when she feared she should be lost, Malcolm’s arms found her and anchored her to the earth. He dragged her swiftly into the shelter of the wood where the storm winds declined to follow.

  “There was a croft,” Malcolm began, but ceased speaking as the dim light showed them that there was no longer a cottage in the glen, but only a tumble of stone blackened by fire. The sickening smell of recent burning permeated the air.

  “I see that Black Bitch has been tae call.” The words were soft, but Taffy felt the bitter anger behind them.

  “Why did she do it?” Taffy whispered. The cruel destruction demanded a lowered voice.

  “Because she could.”

  “But these are her own lands, aren’t they?”

  “Aye, her husband’s, but not everyone is pleased with their laird’s choice o’ brides.”

  “But the destruction of their home would leave these people beggared—a costly charge upon Lord Dunstaffnager,” she pointed out, baffled and dismayed by the woman’s illogical heartlessness.

  “Better a beggared body than a beggared spirit. Anyhow, if the inhabitants of this cot spoke out against the lady, they’ll be beyond all human cares now.”

  There was a sudden soft whine from under a pile of stones, barely audible over the rain splattering above their heads. Taffy shuddered at the pitiful sound and moved swiftly to see what was trapped within the rubble. As they knelt on the ground by the largest gap in the tumbled stones, a giant furry head thrust itself out from under the tumbled wall and whined again. Inside, a long tail was flailing against the sooty stones.

  “Poor baby!” Taffy cooed. “Don’t worry. Well get you out.”

  Malcolm didn’t bother with words. Setting her bags and camera aside, he began to carefully dismantle the blackened cairn that had the hound trapped. Before the job was even half done, the poor beast was thrusting his way out of the stone prison, careless of any fur and skin he might leave behind.