My Something Wonderful

by Jill Barnett

Lyall walked toward the fire pit he’d dug and dropped an armful of wood into its center, and dusted off his vest and tunic. Odd how he had realized for the first time that his walk was different here, on this ground of his childhood, his step lighter, natural and less careful than when he walked upon land elsewhere, where a man had to watch his step because he knew not what he would face next, and because his heart held no bond to those soils, no familiar scent or comfort, no knowledge of those places, just instinct to protect him from the unknown.

  Outside of Dunkeldon, he felt forever like a stranger in a foreign land.

  But here, for a time, his youth had been idyllic, growing up in the warm, lactescent breast of Dunkeldon, where the castle had sat upon its motte like a giant game piece, facing the road that led to its gates, surrounded by a velvet green robe of a forest with trees so tall and full of majesty they became the giant warriors he fought in his child’s mind—the enemy he vanquished in his youthful dreams toward greatness. He was shaped by this plot of land, the forest and the ever-changing river, where trout sought him out and salmon leapt into his hands, where a tree cradled him as he dreamt the dreams of young lads who believed in the existence of honor in men.

  High in the treetops, the wind sang it’s languid, plaintive song and overhead the stars were beginning to shine as the sky grew into the deepest purple. If he were a lad, he might still believe in the magic of this place.

  The night was unusually bright. A misty ring hung around the full moon; it would be cold tonight. Odd, he thought, the things that stick with one long after they should be forgotten.

  His mind went back in time to when his father told him about moon rings and the weather—and how much more he had learned that single night. They had been standing together on the roof watch of Dunkelden, his father’s hands secure on his shoulders, making him feel safe even when the drop was dizzying and the ground looking far, far below. Lyall never liked heights. When Malcolm would dance over the walks along the guard walls, Lyall seldom followed. He preferred his feet to be flat on the hard ground.

  That singular night, his father had shown Lyall each of the distant borders of their land. The misty ring legend originated from Ewan’s father, who first told it to his son on a cool, autumn night long ago and Ewan passed it on to Malcolm, and then to Lyall, those stories handed down through the male line.

  His grandfather Robert had been a mariner who traversed the seas and rode with other men into Outremer, and who came home to lands that were dowered to him when he married the youngest daughter of one of the old Celtic earls. Lyall never knew his grandfather, who died before he was born. He had only his father’s stories and Malcolm’s thin memories of a large man with golden hair and a laugh that echoed in the rafters of the greatest halls.

  But on that same night when he stood with his father, something else happened. Perhaps it had been the tone of his father’s voice when he spoke that night. Perhaps it was the way his father hunkered down and pointed in the distance, his arm on Lyall’s shoulders as if he were not just a lad but a man grown. Perhaps it was because Lyall had been born there, and his destiny was blood and bone of the place—the parts of a man that made him hollow and dead if you took them away.

  On that night long ago, Lyall began to understand the rite of passage between fathers and sons, rings around the moon, the traditions in a man’s life, and the reverence of a man for the lands that gave him worth and defined him. As his father showed him all the places that marked their borders: the granite rock shaped like an angel’s wing; the distant hills, two in row, camel-like in their twin humps; the hook in the river where the wild aspens grew—what became clear to him, even as young as he had been, was that Dunkeldon and the ground upon which it was built, was the passion that fueled Ewan Robertson’s lifeblood. When Lyall turned away from the passionate light and pride in his father’s eyes to look out past the light of the moon, in the path of the stars over the trees and the river and grasses he had seen a thousand times and never thought twice about, he saw and felt something else. What it was, he did not truly understand, but felt deep in his bones the very seeds of something important to his measure.

  He understood it all too clearly when it was too late, when he buried his brother in the chapel next to father, when he walked over that drawbridge and saw the traitor’s flag, when the stars misaligned and he had to turn his back on his father’s legacy, Malcolm’s and his own. The gift they could have given to their sons was suddenly gone with the first snap in the wind of a vile yellow flag.

  So under the night’s moon with a ring around it, Lyall sat back on his heels in the clearing in the forest and studied the sky, watched the colored edges as they deepened into almost black, the bright spots of starlight some claimed were small holes in Heaven that shone down to mortal men the merest glimpses of its bright light.

  Lyall found that fable of Heaven unlikely, but then he did not believe in much anymore. Life and years had changed him. He had lost his belief in the alignment of the stars and the warm, fate-changing glow of magic trees, and even his belief in the goodness of man.

  Away from the vastness of the night sky, he glanced at the river. Glenna was gone. Where was she? Her horse was still there by his. He moved swiftly, calling her name. At the river’s edge, he found one of the water skins in the thick grass alongside one of her shoes.

  Had she fallen in? He cupped his hands about his mouth. “Glenna!”

  There was no sound but the rush of water over some rocks downstream. A hot wave of panic swept over him. He shouted, “Glenna!”

  No response.

  His vest hit the ground and he stripped off his tunic and boots. A heartbeat later he was in the river. “Glenna!” he called out, standing in the water with his feet wide apart to counter the current, and he looked around him and off towards the blackest edges of the water, where the moonlight was blocked by the shoreline trees stretching out along the opposite bank.

  He saw nothing and his heart pounded, his panic grew.

  “Glenna!”

  “I am here,” she said calmly and came striding through the water easily around a small bend, pulling herself along by exposed tree roots along the river’s edge, seemingly unaware he wanted nothing more at that moment than to strangle her. She stopped when she was a few paces away.

  Fortunately for her…out of his reach. He stood chest deep in cold water and glared at her, overcome for a moment with relief made his chest ache strangely as if bound by tight ropes. He took a long breath and wiped his wet face in frustration. “You could not find your voice long enough to answer my call before I jumped into the water?”

  Her back was to him as she tossed the water skin she carried onto the grass near the bank and spun in slow circles, looking down to search the water around her and completely unaffected by anything he said. “I’ve lost my shoe.”

  “You have what?”

  “I was filling the skin, and it slipped, and I reached out to grab it and fell in the water, and so I caught the skin, but now I cannot find my shoe.” She faced him frowning, clearly annoyed—she, who could not find her voice a moment earlier.

  He spotted her shoe caught in the roots to her left, and next to what looked like a fat cluster of river mussels. He waded closer, took out his knife, cut the mussels away, and tossed them on the bank. Then he found another cluster under the waterline. Now they had food. He put away his knife and faced her. “This shoe?”

  “Oh! That is quite wonderful. You found it. I was certain I was going to be riding around in a boot and shoe.” She grinned, her eyes bright. “See? There was a reason you jumped in.”

  “Aye. I wanted to freeze to death tonight.”

  “Cease your grousing, Montrose. ‘Tis not all that cold and you were beginning to smell like your nameless horse.” She paused. “Do not glower at me like that. I speak the truth. I would know since I had to ride downwind of you. And I…I smelled of that pit,” she said viciously as she shivered slightly and grabbed a handful of roots to
pull herself up the bank.

  “Wait! Glenna...do not move.”

  Of course she turned around, and her movements sent a strong ripple over the surface of the water. “Why?”

  It wasn’t enough she had disturbed the water. She also had to speak. Standing still as a stone, he swore under his breath and said evenly, “Do. Not. Move.”

  “Why can I not move? You said yourself the water is cold. You do not have to—“ She shut up as he tossed a large, spotted trout high over her head and well onto the bank, where it flopped and twisted in the grass, its scales sparkling like jewels in the bright moonlight. “Good Lord in Heaven.…” She turned and looked at him, stunned.

  He stepped closer and used his knuckle to close her open mouth. “You might catch waterflies, love.” In a blink he picked her up and plopped her on the bank, then jumped up and joined her, both of them soaked and dripping water, and he looked down into her amused face and said, “I assume you are as hungry as I.”

  She laughed. “How did you do that?”

  He shrugged. “It swam into my hands. There would be two fish had you merely obeyed me and ceased your talking.” He stood then and water dripped down his chest and onto her head and he bent to gather up the mussels. “All your chattering frightened the other one away.”

  She picked up the fat fish and followed him, a slight smile on her lips. “We have mussels to eat and this fish. Looks to me to be plenty for both of us,” she chattered.

  21

  The pearl was the size of Lyall’s fingernail, yet perfect and round, with the same milky sheen of the moon. River pearls came from the mussels that lined the shores of the river. They were small and imperfect, in colors of pink and brown and gray, with knots and marks and sometimes they had large dark holes in them.

  He had found river pearls when he was a lad, years back, another lifetime ago, when he was careless and young and free to comb the shores of the river, innocent enough to make wishes on magic trees, to fish and play at war and pretend life was less idyllic than it had been, back when he roamed the wild woods not comprehending the hard truths of life.

  But he had never found a pearl like the one he was staring down at. Nestled in soft, tender and pale flesh, surrounded by the pearlescent wall of the shell, the pearl was huge, it was flawless, and it was in the last mussel…the one they argued over….the one he offered her…the one she had insisted he eat.

  Glenna stared at it in such shock, almost as if the pearl had spoken. He knew that because of her life as a thief, she understood its value and its rarity. When she finally spoke it was with the reference of a truly larcenous soul. “It is beautiful.”

  He glanced down at it, then held out the shell. “Here.”

  “I cannot take it.” She looked up at him, clearly stunned, and said quietly, “ ‘Tis yours.”

  He shook his head. “What am I to do with a pearl like this? I have jewels,” he lied. His stepfather had jewels. “Take it, Glenna.”

  “Nay.”

  “If I keep it, you will merely steal it from my bags at some point,” he teased, knowing it was most likely true.

  “You do not trust me,” she said, but even she could not pull off that false humility; it just was not the Glenna he knew.

  “Nay, I am not a fool.” He laughed. “How much silver have you taken from me?”

  “I have not counted,” she said proudly, chin up a bit. However, she had not taken her eyes off the jewel he dangled right in front of her nose. Had wealth a scent, her nose would have twitched.

  “If you do not take it,” he said casually. “I suppose I shall be forced to throw it back in the river.”

  She looked from him to the pearl and paused—oh, she wanted it—but she stubbornly shook her head. “ ‘Tis yours, Montrose.”

  He sighed heavily. “Then as mine, I can do whatever I wish with it.” He started to rise. “Even toss it back where it came from.”

  “Nay! Nay!” She scrambled over so swiftly to grab his arm she almost made him light-headed. “Montrose! Do not!”

  Moments later she sat across from him, crossed legged, with the pearl cupped tentatively in her hands as if it were more delicate than a robin’s egg, her expression filled with awe and a little touch of avarice that was Glenna.

  He wanted to laugh out loud and his first instinct was to swing her up into his arms and kiss her senseless. But he stopped himself and stayed there, savoring what was an odd feeling--a great and overwhelming sense of gratification at merely watching her.

  Not much later, he had second thoughts, after he had banked the small fire and before they had made pallet on the ground or gone to sleep, that she came over, pearl clutched tightly in her fist, and placed her other hand on his chest as she stood up on tiptoe and gave him a tender kiss. “Thank you, Montrose. This is the loveliest gift I have ever been given.”

  He called himself a fool as he watched her walk away from him, Glenna Canmore, the king’s daughter, with the chance at a future full of more than pearls, more than jewels, and he turned away from her and all the fine sense of joy left in her wake.

  His hands clenching into fists at his sides and his face skyward, he stood there powerless. Everything he saw, even with his eyes closed, was tinged in bitter yellow—something else passed from father to son, he thought as the taste of betrayal swelled in his mouth.

  And for a mere moment, he had to fight the sudden urge to hang his head in shame….because of what he was going to do to her.

  * * *

  “What in the name of Heaven and Hell are you doing to me, witch?”

  Glenna froze. She was lying on the ground and tucked snugly under her woolen blanket. Yet Montrose was talking? She lay still and stopped breathing, and didn’t dare open her eyes.

  Did she actually hear him speak? Or had she imagined it, a dream or wish or mind-trick? Did he believe she was still asleep? Was he even really there? What would she do if she opened her eyes only to stare back into his?

  Oh God’s toes! She could not see a thing with her eyes closed!

  He began pacing the grass for so long the monotonous sound of his footsteps might have lulled her into a soft sleep if not for the possibility that he had said those words. His voice had just come to her as real as if he were standing over her and talking.

  She kept her breathing soft and slow and even. Before long some part of her could feel the heated warmth of his eyes on her. Oh, he was surely standing there. She knew as instinctively as she knew how to lift a purse.

  Odd how she always knew the exact moment when he was looking at her, a kind of sixth sense came over her, a feeling of unearthliness, like when bees hovered right in front of one’s eyes or when the birds vanished just before lightening would strike the earth and set it on fire. But the feeling, the sense, happened with him alone, as if they were invisibly chained by their thoughts and minds as well as the wild emotion she was keeping secret deep inside her heart.

  He wasn’t pacing any longer. The absolute silence came in the amount of time it took for her heart to beat once, like a moment of emotional clarity, or a snatch of color in the night--something warm and pink, like alpenglow, rare and only there in the last breath before night fell or the first glimpse of dawn.

  But then the real sounds of night invaded her sense: the chirping song of the insects, the distant rush of river water over rocks and small falls, and the pounding of her own foolish heart.

  “I am bewitched,” he said. “And destined to hell. Why do I care about you when I dare not?” His voice was real and it was heavy with emotion when it drifted off. “I cannot…I will not.” He cursed in a low voice and walked away, his footsteps swift and growing distant.

  She opened one eye, then turned over just as he disappeared through the trees. Kicking aside the blanket, she knew there was no way she would let him walk away from her after what he’d said, whether or not he'd spoken only because he believed she was asleep.

  Up on her feet, she slipped on her shoes and moved stealthil
y through the woods, staying back far enough for the moon to light his shadow. The woods grew thick, then opened up. When the roots of a giant, old yew tree almost tripped her, she placed her hand on the bark to steady herself and almost cried out, looking down at her hand as if it were suddenly burned. She stared at the tree, almost expecting to see a handprint where she had touched it.

  Carefully, tentatively, she reached out and then touched it with one finger. No burn. The tree was cool, the bark rough, like every other tree in the woods.

  Still, her hand throbbed, and she stared down at it expecting to see something like a slave brand, but her palm appeared perfectly normal. Yet something…there was something. She stared at the tree, then shook off the strange thoughts that made gooseflesh of the skin on her arms. Silliness. With no time to dawdle, she rushed on to stay in sight of Montrose, who was moving again and even farther away.

  Eventually, he stopped at the top of a rock ledge and stood looking into the distance, his strong profile, sleek nose and square jaw limned in the moonlight like the effigy of an ancient god. She hung back, unable to see past him or the woods and tall fir trees flanking his sides. The vision he made reminded her of him poised on the prow of the ship the morning after the storm, and made her breath catch. She could not have looked away had lightning come down and flashed right there before her eyes.

  Suddenly swinging his arms out into the air, he leapt down to the forest floor with a soft thud and a whoosh of breath, and he began to run. She moved swiftly to the ledge, which she found was perched at the forest’s edge, where a short, gentle slope rolled down into a small clearing.

  There, she spotted his dark figure running across the field towards a sight she never expected. In the distance, the dark, burned out ruins of a castle stood atop its motte, looking like the island’s Celtic stone rings: staggered, jagged and great, black against the iridescence of moonlight that shone down turning the field a silvery white, almost as if it were not a night on the cusp of the end of summer and beginning of autumn, but a night in the height of the coldest winter. She moved down from the ledge and onto the slope.