The Angel Stone

CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

We fell asleep in front of the cottage’s fire. At some point, when I felt William’s body relax, I stretched out beside him and brushed the damp hair from his brow. Fresh washed with tears, gilded by the light of the smoldering embers, he looked like a boy, not a monster. I felt like Psyche gazing at her lover by lamplight, astonished to find a beautiful youth instead of the beast she had feared. But as beautiful as he was and as much as this man looked like Bill, he wasn’t Bill. And now that I’d saved him from a cursed existence as an incubus, he would never become Liam or Bill. I should have been glad that I’d spared him years more of servitude to the Fairy Queen, but all I felt was a pang for the man William would never become. I let slumber overtake me, my own tears falling on his breast like the oil from Psyche’s lamp, all the while feeling the beat of his heart under my cheek.

From the warmth of the fire, I drifted into the dream-heat of the sun filtering through the trees of the Greenwood, the crackle of the dying fire becoming the snap of branches as I frantically ran through the dense underbrush, the beat of William’s heart becoming the pounding of horses’ hooves in pursuit.

The hunt was on my heels. I heard the baying of the hounds, their jaws snapping, hungry for my blood. If they got to me, first they would rip me limb from limb. But they weren’t the only creatures hungry for me. The horses’ riders wanted to devour me, too. I fled in terror. Heedless of branches slapping my face and thorns tearing at my flesh, I left a trail of blood behind me. I could smell it—and smell the excitement of the hounds as they picked up the scent. Any second they would be upon me, their sharp teeth sinking into my flesh …

A white horse crashed through the brush in front of me, splitting the dark-green leaves like a beam of moonlight slicing through the night. The rider, cloaked in black, leaned down and scooped me up in his arms. He swung me onto the back of the horse with a supernatural ease that should have alarmed me but only made me glad to be above the snapping dogs, sheltered behind the rider’s broad back. As we rode through the woods, I held on to him without knowing what I held on to. Only when we came to the glade with the stone ruins of a door did I begin to remember. He helped me down from the horse, murmuring reassuring words. We were safe, he told me; the hunt couldn’t find us. His lips were warm on my skin, his hands gentle as he laid me down on the soft green moss. The sun was behind him, his hair falling in loose waves that hid his face. I reached up and pushed his hair away … and found myself looking into the hungry eyes of a savage beast.

I startled awake in the cottage, in William’s arms. I felt the jerk of him waking, too, saw his eyes widen in the dim glow of the coals from the dying fire.

“You!” he gasped. “You were with me in the Greenwood. I became a monster!”

I lifted a shaking hand to his lips to quiet him. “It was just a dream. You’re not a monster.”

I felt his breath on my hand as his lips parted and he kissed my fingertips. “Only because you saved me.” He lowered his lips to mine. They were soft, not the hard, snapping jaws of a monster. I opened my lips and tasted him. He tasted like honeysuckle and heather. When I closed my eyes, I saw the Greenwood ringed around us, keeping us safe from the hunt. His arms gathered me up, strong as the serpent’s hold, not crushing me but encircling me with his warmth. I wrapped my arms around him, pressing myself against his smooth, hard chest. No lion’s fur, but a lion’s heart beating hard and steady as I wrapped my legs around his waist. I wanted to be the serpent encircling him, the lion ravishing him, the fire branding him. I wanted to burn away everything that had happened to him in Faerie these last seven years. I heard him gasp as my legs locked around his back. He dragged my shift over my head and his nightshirt over his so we could press bare skin against bare skin, our hearts pounding as fast as hoofbeats. I felt him hard against me. He slid his hands under my hips and gathered me up as he’d scooped me up onto the horse in my—our—dream. Were we dreaming now? I wondered as he hovered above me. The moment seemed to stretch as I opened up for him—as if we both had left time and gravity behind, outside the circle of the Greenwood, where the dogs bayed for our blood and winged monsters beat at the trees above our heads and we were always together on the brink of him entering me …

And then we came together, meeting in midair like dragonflies mating, and I felt the strong hot length of him entering me, and I knew it wasn’t a dream. This was real—us rocking together on the hard stone floor beside a dying fire, kindling our own heat from flesh and blood. Even if the cry he made as he came inside me didn’t sound quite human, that was okay. Neither did mine.

When I awoke in the morning, I was alone. I sat up, pushing aside a wool blanket. A fresh log burned on the fire. Something bubbled in a cast-iron pot hanging from a hook in the fireplace. I sniffed and recognized the comforting aroma of oatmeal.

The back door opened and William entered, wearing the long nightshirt I’d found for him last night and a blanket tied around his waist like a kilt. I was suddenly aware that I was naked beneath the blankets—and remembered why. Memories of last night came rushing back—the soreness between my legs told me that part hadn’t been a dream. Probably the second time we’d done it hadn’t been a dream, either.

I pulled the blanket up over my breasts, feeling completely abashed. In some ways I’d known this man forever, but in other, more practical ways, I’d met him for the first time only last night. Worst of all, I felt disloyal to Bill.

“Ah, you’re awake!” William said, coming to sit on the stone ledge in front of the hearth. He kept his back to me as he stirred the oatmeal in the pot. Maybe he was also feeling a little shy after our impromptu lovemaking in the middle of the night. Or maybe he’d forgotten …

He turned to me and smiled. “I thought ye might be hungry after … weel, the exertions of last night.” He blushed—or perhaps it was the glow of the fire on his face. He rubbed his chin. “And I found I needed a shave. I’m afraid I’m a wee bit out of practice. My hair never grew in Faerie. What do ye think?” He slid down beside me, taking my hand and holding it up to his smooth shaven cheek. “Do I feel like a beast to you this morning?”

“You’re not a beast,” I told him.

He brought my hand to his lips and kissed it. “I was afraid ye would think I was after how I behaved last night. I promised myself I wouldn’t take advantage of you, and then I ravished you like a wild animal.”

I started to laugh, but, realizing that he was serious, I cleared my throat and pretended it was a cough instead. “As I recall, I did some of the ravishing.”

He grinned. “Aye, I thought so! But then I told myself this morning I must have conjured up that part. I didn’t wish to presume … weel, I feel as if I have known you a long time, but perhaps you do not feel the same for me.”

“I feel as if I’ve known you for a long time, too,” I said. “But … well, I suppose it will take some time before we figure out what we know and what we don’t know about each other, and I’m not sure how long we’ll have.”

His face darkened. “And where will you be off to then?”

“Back home,” I said. “My friends are in danger. I have to find the angel stone and return to save them.”

“Back through Faerie?”

“Yes …” I began.

“But did ye not hear the Fairy Queen’s curse?” he demanded. “She cursed us both. She said if ye ever set foot in Faerie again, she’d pluck out your eyes and heart and replace them with eyes and heart of wood.”

I smiled at the arcane language of the curse, but I felt a chill remembering the Fairy Queen’s blazing green eyes. “When it comes time, I’ll deal with Fiona,” I said with more conviction than I felt. “But first I must find the angel stone.”

“And do you know where to find this stone?”

I admitted I didn’t.

“Weel, then,” he said, his mood restored. “You’d best eat your parritch to keep your strength up. Who knows how long it will take to find one wee stone amongst all the stones in Scotland? But I know where we’ll start. We’ll go and ask my auntie.”

Besides a prodigious collection of vintage underwear and nighties, Mordag possessed no other clothes, so I had to put on my costume from last night. William found an old, much patched and baggy pair of trousers—that he referred to as breeks—which he wore with his nightshirt tucked in and a pair of misshapen clogs he’d found by the back door. No doubt we looked a strange sight as we headed down the road, but there wasn’t anyone to see us.

“Are there always so few people around here?” I asked.

“Well, it’s no’ the Royal Mile of Edinburgh, but there’s usually a farmer taking his wares into town.” He pointed down the road in the opposite direction from where we’d come last night. “This is the way to Ballydoon.”

We headed in that direction, William whistling along the way. Gone was the young man who’d been woken by nightmares.

“You seem happy,” I said, slightly envious that even in borrowed shoes he strode along with less effort than I did.

“Aye, and why not? I’m strolling along a country lane with a beautiful lass on a fine day.”

The sun had burned off the morning mist and was warming the air. A gentle breeze rustled the yellow birch leaves on the side of the road and the purple heather on the hillsides. Magpies chattered in the heather, sunlight glinting off the blue iridescent stripes on their wings. The road climbed at a slow and steady incline. At the top of a rise, we looked down at a small village nestled in the next valley. It was really only a few dozen stone houses around a town square with a market cross and an old church. The ruins of a castle perched on the opposite hill, casting its shadow over the stone houses—the ruin that William had identified last night as Castle Coldclough. It looked like the idyllic Scottish village one might see on the label of a single malt or a tin of shortbread. Or, I thought uneasily, like the bewitched village in that old Gene Kelly movie, which appeared only once every hundred years.

“Brigadoon,” I said aloud.

“Nay, this is Ballydoon,” William said. “At least, it was Ballydoon. There’s something queer about it.”

I gazed back down at the village. It seemed picture perfect to me, like a model under glass or a movie set—and then I saw what he meant.

“Where is everybody?” I asked.

“Aye,” he said. “That’s what I’m wondering. The sun’s been up more than an hour. The market should be full. The farmers should be bringing their wares into town, the good-wives should be washing down their front steps, having a gossip …”

“Do you think they’ve all left?” I asked, staring hard at the stone houses, as if I could pierce their thick walls with the intensity of my gaze.

“Nay,” he said. “There’s smoke coming from the houses. The folks are still there, they’re just staying close to home.”

I noticed now the trails of smoke rising from a few houses.

“What would keep everybody at home?”

“The pest,” he answered in a hushed whisper, as if the word could conjure such a thing. I shivered as though a shadow had passed over us, blocking the warm sunshine and blotting out the beauty of the day.

“William, do you know what year it is?” I asked.

He scratched his head. “Weel, it was 1652 when I left, so if it’s been seven years …”

I ran through my patchy knowledge of British history, trying to remember if there was still plague in 1659. Had there been an outbreak in Scotland at this time? But all I could recall was the date of Defoe’s A Journal of the Plague Year, which took place in 1665. It was certainly possible.

“What should we do?” I asked. “Should we go back to Mordag’s?”

He turned to me for the first time since we’d seen the village. The fear I saw in his eyes was not reassuring, but there was something else—a flash of steel that I recognized from when Bill had gotten angry after Duncan Laird hurt me.

“Perhaps you should go back to the cottage and wait. My auntie who raised me is down there, and I need to know if she’s all right.”

“We’ll go together,” I said quickly. After all, we’d already braved the Fairy Queen and William changing into a monster. “You said she might know something about the angel stone.”

William nodded. “Aye, she’s a wisewoman.”

“Let’s go, then,” I said, putting on a bright smile that felt false on my face. Only as I followed William down the hill toward the village did it occur to me that wisewoman might not refer to his aunt’s sagacity. In these times, it was what witches were called.

As the dirt road turned to cobblestone, it remained deserted, but I sensed movement behind the closed shutters of the houses we passed, a stirring that might have been townspeople pressing their eyes to the cracks and peepholes—or rats scurrying in the walls, carrying plague.

“There are no quarantine signs to mark a house condemned,” William whispered. “And no reek of dying. There’s something else amiss.”

“Fear,” I said, sniffing the air. The clean scent of heather and running water was gone now, replaced by a metallic tang that I could taste at the back of my throat. “The people here are afraid of something, but what?”

As we continued, I saw up ahead a town square with several open-air stalls—perhaps a farmers’ market. But the stalls were deserted, save for a half-empty basket of rotting potatoes and a bit of undyed wool snagged on a wooden contraption set up in front of the market cross. As I looked around the abandoned square, William read a sign affixed to the front of the church. A bright scrap of cloth drew my attention to the far side of the square. Coming closer, I saw it was a crudely made rag doll. Black stitches marked its eyes; undyed wool made up its hair. I picked it up and winced as something stung my hand.

“Leave that!” William cried, grabbing my arm. “Let’s get out of here—”

“William? William Duffy? Is it really you?”

William’s grip on my arm tightened, and I felt his body tense. I could sense him on the verge of bolting, but then he steeled himself and turned around to face the speaker. She was a young woman, perhaps in her early to mid twenties; her long blond hair was pulled back on top but then worn loose in long ringlets flowing over a royal-blue cloak, which was clasped at the throat with a silver pin. Her eyes were Wedgwood blue and grew even larger as they fastened on William.

“It is you. We thought ye were dead. Instead you’re with”—her eyes swiveled to me—“another … woman.” She managed to inject a note of disdain into the word woman. She might as well have said slut.

“So there is someone alive in this godforsaken place,” I said. “Maybe she can tell us what’s going on. Do you know her?”

The girl’s eyes grew even wider. “Know me?” she asked, affronted. “I’m Jeannie MacDougal. William Duffy and I were—are—engaged to be married.”

“Engaged? But he’s only just arrived.”

“Aye, he vanished seven years ago. He left me standing on the kirk steps, feeling like a fool.” Her glance shifted from William to me, her china-blue eyes traveling from my unkempt hair to my stained and wrinkled green skirt, then to my muddy boots and back up again to meet my gaze.

“I recognize you! You’re the demented girl who wandered out of the Greenwood just after William vanished and whom Malcolm Brodie took pity on and married. But then you up and deserted him and your own bairn when the witch hunters came to town. You ran back to Faerie, didn’t you, where you’d left poor William? Weel, never you fear, William, the witch hunters are here in Ballydoon, and they’ll know what to do with this witch.”