Page 13

Chapter Twelve

A lec stood beside Darro at the battlements of the watch tower as they observed what the MacBren and his men were doing below. The mercenaries had erected several tents near the stables and stationed guards all around their encampment.

“Never once did the MacBren remain at the stronghold after a visitation,” the chieftain muttered. “Why stay now, after nine centuries of ever swiftly departing with his brutes?”

“Lady Ava believes something has altered the enchantment enough to change the cycle of events.” Alec turned his head as the additional watches he’d summoned to the tower approached them. “Keep eyes on the MacBren’s encampment. Do naught unless they attack, and then follow siege defenses. Send a runner to the great hall if any of his men attempt to enter the stronghold again.”

He went back into the tower, where he advised the chief of the watch to light the braziers and send to the armory for more arrows. Halfway down the tower stairs Darro caught up with him, his expression grim.

“The lads, they’re worried,” the chieftain mentioned. “I stayed behind to reassure them. You should do the same.”

His brother’s suggestion would have stopped him in his tracks, but he had too much to do and no time to waste.

“They’re warriors, no’ wallapers. They’ll attend to their duties no matter how much they fret.” He pushed open the door at the bottom landing forcefully enough to startle the two guards flanking it into drawing their blades. “Stand easy, brothers.”

Darro didn’t say anything more until they had entered the armory, where Rory was handing out swords, daggers and war hammers to a group of patrollers. They nodded to Alec and Darro as they left, their faces pale but determined.

“Word of Kelso’s death, ’tis spread like wildfire in a drought,” the armorer told them in whispers. “With the MacBren encamped, our brothers fear more shall fall who didnae in the past. ”

“Indeed. I shall advise our lord to keep our vassals locked away until this alteration ends,” Darro said, nodding.

“And if it never ends?” Alec countered. “If the MacBren can change his acts with the shift in the enchantment, then why cannae we?”

Rory grimaced. “We live, and possess free will, as we did before the curse. We’re imprisoned here. The MacBren, he’s but a memory of ours brought to life by magic. He has no will, nor spirit.”

“If only we could forget that vicious bastart,” the chieftain muttered.

Alec refilled his hip quiver as he told the armorer about the need for more arrows in the watch tower, and then retrieved a second quiver and strapped it between his shoulder blades. “Chieftain, we need to move the rest of our females to the dungeons before nightfall, and place enough guards with them to hold off any attack. Even if the MacBren’s men dinnae use the cover of darkness to make their way inside, we didnae yet find what froze Elspeth.”

“I shall see to it now, War Master.” The chieftain nodded to them both before he hurried out.

“You cannae save them all,” Rory said as Alec went to the cabinet where he kept his own weapons.

“How well I ken that.” He met the big man’s gaze. “Until this alteration ends, I want you with the laird at all times. You dinnae sleep anymore, so you shall guard him when he slumbers.”

“’Tis sensible.” Rory reached under a table and hefted his war hammer, which he had long ago forged from a strange greenish-brown metal. He then held out his free hand. “Where shall you stand watch, War Master?”

“Everywhere.” He reached out and clasped the armorer’s forearm. “Go carefully, Brother.”

From the armory Alec went to the great hall, where he expected to find Tasgall with his personal guards. Instead, the laird had his wife and Olivia standing with him by a table, on which he had spread a scroll map. Ava looked up and shook her head slightly, as if to signal that he shouldn’t approach or interfere.

Fack if I shallnae.

Tasgall’s lady could take her chances with the MacBren and his killers, but Alec had no intention of permitting Olivia to remain at risk. He crossed the hall to join them, but before he could say anything the laird’s gaze went from the scroll map to Alec and then to the greenish-yellow light now coming directly inside the window slits.

In another handful of hours, the sky would turn dark, at which point his mortal weakness would render him deaf until what passed for dawn here .

“Lass, I need speak with you alone.” Alec came around the table, seizing Olivia’s hand. “Come with me now.”

“I wanted to talk to you, too.” She hurried with him out of the hall. “The laird told me that no one has ever informed Lord MacBren that he and his men are also caught in this time trap.”

He stopped short and frowned at her. “That man died nine hundred years ago, lass. The thing you see, ’tis but a double of the MacBren produced by the curse. He and his men, they’re no’ real.”

“Whatever this MacBren is, he’s just demonstrated that he can make other choices,” she countered. “Staying here instead of leaving as he did when he was alive—and every other time cycle before this one—means he can act independently of the enchantment. This could be the perfect time to persuade him to stop repeating the mistakes of the past that culminates in the murders of him and his wife. Ava told me the whole story. Let me talk to him.”

“You shallnae go anywhere near him.” He took her arm and marched her through the passage that led to the garrison hall. In his chamber he would take her into the hidden passage between the walls that led down to the dungeons, where she would be safe .

“Why shouldn’t I try?” she argued. “I’m trapped here just like you and the clan. If I’m polite to him–”

“’Twillnae matter. His daughter, she’s all he cares for. He even ignores his lady wife when she attempts to reason with him. You’re naught to him.” He stopped only when he reached his chamber, but when he tried to take her inside she jerked free of his grip. “Olivia, he’ll give you to his men. They shall violate you over and again. Only when your body is broken and you’re near death shall they slay you.”

Her expression grew bleak. “You don’t know that will happen.”

The sound of her voice dropping low reminded him that soon he would not be able to argue with her. He would be grateful for the same but being unable to hear her plagued him as much as her reckless impulse to put herself before the MacBren and his murderous lot.

“For nine centuries I’ve kept watch over our enemies as the cycle repeats,” he told her. “I’ve seen a dozen females raped and killed by them. When I tried to stop that from happening, they attacked me. If Rory hadnae saved me each time, I would become part of the cycle as well. Each year I would vanish along with all the others slain on the day of my death, only to reappear when the cycle begins anew. ”

She looked so ashen faced now he wondered if she would swoon.

“What if you try to talk to him?” Before he could reply she touched his arm. “The people here at Dun Talamh always listen to you, Alec. The clan as well as the vassals and the outsiders. You command attention and respect.”

He made a contemptuous sound but curled an arm around her. “They stare at my face while I speak.”

“If you try, just this one time, then I’ll stay in the dungeons with the other ladies for the duration, and whenever else you want me to. I promise.” She lifted her head to meet his gaze. “Please, Alec. This may be the only way to put an end to it for good.”

“If we break the curse, Dun Talamh shall return to my time,” he said softly. “We dinnae ken what shall happen to those from your time.”

“Maybe we go back to where we belong, too.” She looked down at herself. “I wonder if I’ll still be like this. I’ve kind of gotten used to being like other women.”

“The trap healed you of the injuries done to you long ago,” he said gently. “To give them back makes no sense. Still, if you should return to how you were, I shall still regard you as the loveliest of ladies.”

Her eyes widened. “Do you really mean that? ”

“I very much like you how you are now, Olivia, but your true beauty, ’tis within you.” He pressed his hand to her cheek. “Whatever alters in time, your kindness and sweetness shall never change.”

“Oh, Alec.” Her cheeks turned rosy.

He wanted to kiss her, but a knock came at the door, and the laird entered with his wife.

“Sorry to interrupt,” Ava said as she joined them. “I’d like to take Olivia with me when I go down to check on our girls.”

Alec released her and moved aside the cabinet hiding the entry to the hidden passage. “Go with Lady Ava now, lass.”

She nodded and left with the other woman.

“I shall go deaf in another moment,” Alec told Tasgall. “You may shout at me all you wish.”

“Your lass had the notion to parlay with the MacBren herself,” the laird said, grimacing. “I’m happy she didnae attempt such.”

“’Tis a sound notion.” He explained what Olivia had said to him, and then added, “If we could persuade the laird that he’s caught with us in the time trap, he may choose another path to follow. Instead of repeating his mistakes for eternity, he might even end the cycle.”

Tasgall looked doubtful. “Do you reckon ’twould work? ”

“Only one way to find out, my lord.” Alec removed his hip quiver and unstrapped the second from his back. “I must go and try.”

O livia expected the laird’s wife to leave her in the dungeons along with the other women, but after assuring they had everything they needed she asked her to accompany her upstairs.

“Alec isn’t going to like this,” Olivia mentioned as they walked into an unfamiliar passage just past the guest room. “I don’t mind staying with the other girls, you know.”

“I know, there’s just something I want to show you. My husband has blocked off all the halls to this section of the castle except this back one, so we should be okay.” Ava stopped in front of a door with a guard posted beside it. “Sawney,” she said, nodding to him.

“My lady,” he said, briefly bowing.

“I’ll need your help,” she said as she used a huge key to unlock the door before leading Olivia inside. “This is the clan’s library. Some of the senior chieftains have been keeping records pertaining to the garrison, and I believe Farlan does the same thing for the clan’s vassals. Tasgall has been writing about the clan, the castle and life in the spell trap for nine centuries.”

Inside the room stood hundreds of wooden bookcases, but instead of books they held piles of parchment scrolls—hundreds of thousands, from what she could see. Several worktables with stools, ink pots and trimmed feather quills made it clear that the room was also used regularly for writing. Someone must be coming to read them as well, for there were podiums with slanted tops for mounting the scrolls. Olivia stood looking at everything for a few moments as she tried to imagine the determination the clansmen must have had to create such an archive.

“I would love to sit down and read his chronicles, but that’s not the reason you brought me here,” she murmured to the other woman.

“You’re right,” Ava said, and took a scroll from one of the shelves to spread it out on one of the podiums. “This is a scroll I found a couple of weeks ago.”

“It’s blank,” she said, frowning.

“It just looks like it is. It’s a Fae viewing scroll that belonged to Tasgall’s daddy, I think.” Ava glanced at Sawney. “If one of the clan touches it, you can make the past appear. All you need to do is think of what you want to see, and it creates a window to that time and plays a little movie of it. ”

Olivia stepped back and suppressed a shudder. “There’s nothing I want to see in the past, I assure you.”

“I expected as much, and I’d never ask that.” The laird’s wife grimaced. “What I’d like to see is what happened just before you first came here. When you fell into the pit in our world, and that old man hurt you.”

Although she was tempted to refuse, no one had asked her to do anything since she had arrived at Dun Talamh. At the same time, she suspected Ava hadn’t told her husband that she was coming here or using the viewing scroll. “Why?”

“I think something came in with you at the same time, but you didn’t see it, and Alec only had eyes for you,” the other woman said. “I need to get a good look at the whole situation, and that old guy, too. Tell you what. Think of what you saw when you came out of the pit. That’ll be easier, I imagine.” She indicated the scroll to Sawney and said, “Would you do the honors?” He rested his hand on the edge of it.

Olivia’s fingers trembled as she reached out to touch the parchment and thought of that terrible moment when she had been flung out of the pit. Instantly an image of Alec catching her appeared. Her stomach clenched when she saw her formerly stunted body also take on a faint glow before her arms and legs began growing out of her clothes. Yet seeing Alec and how carefully he held her made her nausea dwindle.

“Thank you, Sawney,” Ava said to the guard, who tilted his head toward them both and resumed his position outside. Ava gently closed the door.

“I’m so lucky he was there,” Olivia told her. “I don’t know what I would have done if I’d arrived here alone.”

“You’re tough. You’d have come looking for us. There.” Ava pointed to a chunk of ice in the image that fell from Olivia’s back onto the stone floor. A moment later it sprouted wings and flew off into the shadows. “That’s the same bug that I stepped on when we found the laundress and her girls frozen. Numbed my whole foot.”

Olivia touched her shoulder, recalling how it had felt just before Alec had caught her. “I remember now. It did the same thing to my right shoulder blade, but it went away a few seconds later. Maybe the trap healed that, too.”

“Can you go back to your memory of the old man who hurt you?” Ava asked. “I know it’s upsetting, but maybe that will tell us more about the bug.”

She didn’t want to even think about him, but nodded and touched the scroll again. This time it showed her dangling from the edge of the pit, and the old man coming to stand over her.

“That jerk sure is butt-ugly,” Ava murmured, and winced when the man stomped on Olivia’s fingers. “I’ve never seen him before, but he seems familiar.”

Olivia couldn’t watch him kick her in the face, so she started to look away. Out of the corner of her eye she saw something glitter in his hand.

“Look.” She tapped the scroll, and the image enlarged to show the chunk of ice he was holding, and how he tossed it in after her. “That’s how it got on me.”

“It didn’t freeze him, so he must have been the one to enchant it.” Ava peered at the image as the man turned away.

“No.” Olivia covered her mouth as the last image she had seen appeared: the old man’s filthy toga was turning navy blue, and dark hair was growing out of his bald scalp. “He’s changing into Renard Beaumont, the owner of the property. I met him just before I came inside the castle.”

“So did I.” The other woman’s expression turned grim as the scroll went blank. “That jerk has to be some kind of Fae to be able to shape shift.” She met Olivia’s gaze. “Did Beaumont smell bad to you, too?"

“Yes.” She couldn’t believe she hadn’t made that connection. “Not as bad as the old man, but it was the same kind of stink. Like something rotting.”

“We need to talk to my husband about this once he and the boys have dealt with the MacBren,” Ava said, taking down the scroll from the slanted top and rolling it up. “Beaumont could be some kind of Fae shapeshifter. If he’s the one sending these bugs in to attack us, then he has to have a reason for that.”

She wasn’t telling her everything she knew, Olivia guessed. “You already know the reason he’s doing this.”

“One possible reason, yes.” As the laird’s wife put the scroll back on a shelf, she told her about the black widow killer and some of the things she had said before she had burned to death in the smelting furnace. “She told Rory that her ex wanted her to look for treasure in here. She murdered all of her husbands before the last, so I think she meant him. He went missing right before she came into the trap.”

Olivia considered that for a moment. “Do you think Beaumont could have killed her husband so he could take his place?”

“I think Beaumont was her husband.” Ava’s jaw tightened. “He’s a very rich man in our time, and so was the black widow. Maybe that’s how he keeps adding to his fortune, by marrying and then getting rid of wealthy women. ”

“Just when I thought he couldn’t get more disgusting.” Olivia shuddered. “It’s odd, though. Why would he have hidden a treasure inside the place he cursed?”

“It’s safer here than anywhere else, for one thing,” the laird’s wife pointed out. “But if he really wanted his wife to look for it, then he doesn’t know where it is. That may explain why he keeps sending in these enchanted bugs, too.” Shouts from the outside passage made her draw a long dagger from her belt.

The door burst open, and Farlan looked at both of them before sighing with relief. “My lady, Mistress Gibson, you should be down below with the other ladies.”

“We’re okay, Seneschal.” Ava tucked away her blade. ‘What’s all the hoopla about out there?”

Farlan glanced over his shoulder. “Word, ’tis spread about Alec. He went unarmed to parlay with the MacBren, but the sun set before he could. The bastart’s guards shouted orders at him that he couldnae hear, and then seized and beat him. The last we saw of him, ’twas when they dragged him into the stables.”

For a moment Olivia thought she might collapse. “Did they kill him?”

The seneschal gave her an unhappy look. “’Tis unlikely, my lady. Alec didnae die the first time the MacBren came, before the casting of the curse.”

“But they could kill him anyway. They could tie him up and set fire to the stables.” When Farlan didn’t say anything she looked at Ava. “That’s how the black widow tried to kill you, isn’t it? It’s how she died instead, by burning.”

The laird’s wife nodded slowly.

All the fear inside Olivia spiked for a moment, and then faded as she drew on that unyielding part deep inside her heart that not even Mae could hurt.

“I need your help, Ava,” she told the other woman. “Right now.”

A fter enjoying himself thoroughly, Bodach erased the exhausted bookkeeper’s memory and took her back to her office, where she fell asleep at her desk with her head pillowed on her arms. In the morning, she would wake thinking of the suggestion he had planted in her mind, which was to embezzle as much of Jean’s money as she could. As for the gallery owner, Bodach left her sleeping in Clagden’s arms—or so he had assumed. Before he could get to his car Jean intercepted him, once again in her svelte mortal guise .

“I think I like you better as a knuckle-dragging half-breed,” he told her. “You have a certain hideous charm in your true form.”

“The changeling is mine,” she told him without preamble. “Release him from his oath to you, and I will not do anything to harm you or yours.”

“What you mean is, you’d like me to burn down your gallery with you tied up inside. That’s what I’d do to anyone of your kind who threatened me.” He reached out and sharply tapped her cheek. “Never issue orders to a dark Fae with superior powers. It always ends badly.”

“I love Clagden.” When Bodach’s brows rose she added, “As much as I can love anything.” When he rolled his hand she sighed and said, “I need to breed soon, and he will make a fine sire for my young. I do not wish him injured or incapacitated while serving you.”

“You are part troll,” he said, amused now. “When they come into their breeding years they’re like rabbits.” He saw the subject of their conversation come out of the gallery and nodded in his direction. “I will speak to your lover about fulfilling his oath to me sooner rather than later. Does that suffice?”

Jean bowed to him, and then hurried to kiss Clagden before disappearing inside the gallery .

“What were you two discussing?” Clagden asked, looking distinctly disgruntled.

“You, of course.” Bodach was beginning to tire of the whole matter, and for a moment considered granting Jean’s demand. Yet he detected a difference in the way Clagden regarded him. “I very much like your darling Jean. When do you plan to mate?”

“She needs to sell the gallery first, but as successful as it is that won’t take long.” He sounded smug now. “Once I’ve finished my obligation to you, we plan to move to Ireland, where she was abandoned by her parents. There’s a hollow there beside a village with plenty of mortals, where we can live and breed in peace.”

Clagden sounded as if he had it all planned out, and now he suspected there was more to what he and Jean had schemed.

“Fine, we’ll discuss the details tomorrow,” Bodach told him before climbing into his car and driving out of the parking lot.