Page 35 of The Moorwitch
“Whathappenedto her? What did you do?”
His hand presses to his breast, his eyebrows arching in offense. “I?I?Fiona wasyoufour decades ago, my dear, and just like you she was small and mortal and clever. But she failed at her task, and there was nothing I could do to save her.”
“What bargain did she make with you?”
He shrugs, squinting as if finding it difficult to recall. “A human she cared about was sick. I healed him. She knew the terms, and she agreed to them, just as you did.”
“What did she offer as collateral?”
He sighs. “It’s been so long ...”
“Tell me!”
“Her time,” he says, blunt at last. “Or her sense of it, anyway. At least that was how I interpreted it, which wasgenerousof me, by the way.I swear on what time I have leftwere her exact words, and you can guess how I might have otherwise read that. But she was a foolish one from the start. That lad she loved—the oneIhealed for her—moved on to woo another merely a month after Fiona departed. The girl had no sense then either, tethering herself to such a faithless wastrel.”
It must have been her Philip whom Lachlan had healed, summoned by a young Fiona out of desperation and terror. And to call due her debt, he’d then sent her on the same mission he has sentmeon.
And she failed and paid a terrible price for it, living the same day over and over for forty years, still believing her beloved was waiting for her. How many of those pitiful letters did she write and never send, having no idea the years were passing her by?
I step closer to him, until I can see the dark-blue lines in his pale eyes. “Give me some other errand or task to perform. Not this, not anymore.”
“I cannot.”
“Release me, faerie, or I will—”
“What?” He steps closer, until his eyes are boring into mine and I smell the evergreen sprig he has pinned to his coat. His voice is as soft as the first wind of winter. “What will you do, Rose Pryor?”
I tilt my jaw, glaring at him.
“Yousummonedme,” he murmurs. “Twelve years ago. Do you think I had a choice but to appear in your house? To offer you a bargain? I did what you asked of me. Now it’s your turn. Forget Fiona. You’re stronger and smarter than she ever was, and you will succeed where she did not.”
“And if I do not, you will take my magic from me forever.”
“I did not write the rules,” he says. “I only play by them. And so do you. That is a choiceyoumade. Now, you came all this way. You may as well give me a report.”
I release a little breath as he walks back to the castle. For a moment I stay where I am, watching the way his hair moves when he walks, like water flowing.
I imagine pulling a silver strand from his scalp and Weaving it into a rending knot, to burst the heart in his chest. Then what would become of me? Would his death set me free? Or would this bond between us, this thread of my vow, destroy me along with him?
The very idea sends a cold shudder through me. I don’t have the nerve for murder and dark magic, the kind Fiona turned to when she was desperate, draining the life out of birds to fuel her spells. And maybe Lachlan is right, and it is all my own doing, my own choices which brought me here.
In the castle, I find fae everywhere—lounging, eating, idly picking at stringed instruments. It takes me a second to realize there are more here than there were before. I remember counting near forty when we first left London; there are closer to sixty now. Fates, where did they all come from? Even as I watch, another arrives and is greeted with shouts and wine by her brethren. The fae have their own way of saying hello, placing their hands palm to palm and then resting their foreheads together while they murmur a low, synchronized phrase in their whispery tongue.
“Come and tell me what you’ve been up to,” Lachlan says, gripping my elbow and steering me away from the scene. There are two armchairs tucked beneath a brightly woven awning, a low fire burning before them in a ring of stones.
“Well?” Lachlan sits lithely, throwing one leg over the other and flicking his ringed fingers at me. It occurs to me, suddenly and quite strangely, how very different he is from Conrad North, like winter and summer, like silver and gold. Faerie and human. Lachlan is an ethereal creature, all light and air, as if he might shift in and out of existence with a whisper. The laird of Ravensgate, on the other hand, is as solid as the earth, as much a part of the moors as its rocks and heather and rough, woolly sheep.
With a start, I wonder why I am comparing them at all, as if they were two racehorses I was thinking of betting on. It seems even here, Mr. North exists only to distract and delay me from my mission.
I tell Lachlan of coming across the laird in the wood, and of Mr. North’s begrudging acceptance of my lodging at Ravensgate.
“This laird of yours,” Lachlan says. “Is he handsome?”
With a start, I sit up straighter. “What?”
“It’s only that, when you speak of him, the blood rises to your face, just here ...” He leans toward me, one cool finger grazing the air by my cheek as if in a restrained caress. “How pretty you are when you blush. Should I bejealous?”
I pull back, my stomach tumbling. “What on earth is there between us, sir, that you should be jealous of?”