Page 48 of A Kiss from the Fae (Mistress of Magic #2)
Excerpt from Grainne Morgan’s diary
The witchfinders have arrived in North Berwick and have set up a tribunal there. I have heard that the sheriffs are rounding up men and women from the local villages, though it is mostly women.
All this is an excuse: these evangelical hatemongers resent women for their power to make life.
They know they cannot make it themselves, and rather than honour women as was always the way in the old times, they seek to control our bodies for their own purposes.
If they cannot own it, they will nail it to a mast and kill it.
Time is short. I fear the worst, though Gwyn says he will protect me. An ill wind blows. I fear for the future of the Morgan women.
When Faye opened the door to the shop, Gabriel reached up for the hag stone charm that hung by the door.
Grandmother had made the charm before she was born, threading pebbles with natural holes in them onto a thick string and chanting a spell of protection over it.
It was old lore that if you looked through the hole in a hag stone, you could see the faeries that were usually invisible to human eyes; it exposed spells and rendered them useless.
‘Morgan magic?’ Gabriel smiled wanly. When Faye turned on the shop lights, she saw how gaunt he was; he’d hardly improved since she’d last seen him a couple of weeks ago. Faye nodded, not remarking on his grey pallor or the dark circles under his eyes.
‘It’s a protection. Against the fae,’ she replied. ‘Come in and get warm. I’ll light the hearth.’ The bottom of her jeans were still wet where the sea had splashed them, and she was chilled to the bone.
‘Can it protect me from nightmares?’ Gabriel shuffled in behind her and folded himself carefully into the chair by the fireplace.
Faye knelt, arranging kindling, and sat back on her heels as it caught, waiting to add the dry wood stacked in a basket next to the hearth.
He closed his eyes as the firelight started flickering over their faces. Faye regarded him cautiously.
‘I don’t think so.’ She wouldn’t lie to him – the nightmares would be with him a long time.
Yet, Faye didn’t ask whether Gabriel’s terror was the memory of his sadist torture, or the masochistic loss of his torturer Levantiana.
She knew it could be either. Still, she was glad of the charm.
At the beach, she’d felt watched, and she knew Levantiana and Moronoe’s eyes would be on her every moment until she’d had the baby.
‘Why did you come?’
Gabriel sighed, his eyes still closed.
‘I needed to get away from London, Sylvia, the coven. All of it. You always spoke so lovingly of Abercolme. Clean air, cold sea, wide horizons.’ He opened his eyes and stared into the fire that crackled now that Faye had added two logs. ‘I didn’t have anywhere else to go.’
‘What about Fortune’s?’ Faye sat in the chair opposite him.
‘Penny will look after it until I get back. I trust her.’
‘Oh.’
Neither of them said anything more for a moment.
‘I’ll make up the spare room for you,’ she murmured as her own eyes closed. She’d just close her eyes for minute, she thought. But they were both so exhausted that they slept in the old, sagging chairs until the early hours when Faye woke up cold, the fire having gone out.