Chapter 6
CHAPTER 6
S he’d almost forgotten that her drunken-self had booked a car to take her from the airport to the hotel, so when she saw a sign with her name on it in the hands of a smiling old man she was briefly taken aback. Still, it felt good to have someone know who she was in this completely unfamiliar place. His name was Davey, he informed her in a lilting, rapid fire accent that made her heart melt instantly, and American tourists were always his favorite clients. He must have been in his sixties at the very least, and when he started to take her bag from her, she tried to protest, but with a surprising — and vaguely unsettling — amount of strength, he pulled it from her hands, and she was forced to concede.
“I’m glad I didn’t go with a cab,” she said as they headed out of the airport. The line-up at the taxi rank was significant, and with the sky looking like it was going to open up at any minute, she was grateful for her drunk-self’s foresight. “Looks like they’re going to get rained on.”
Davey chuckled agreement as he stowed her bag safely in the trunk of his car, a sleek black four-wheel drive. “Rain, snow or sleet,” he agreed with a quick glance at the sky. “Half an hour or so away, though.”
“How can you tell?” Lissa had settled herself in the passenger seat, but she peered curiously at the sky through the window as Davey climbed into the driver’s seat beside her. By her estimation, it was a uniform shade of gray.
“Oh, you haven’t heard?” the old man asked, shooting her a quick, mischievous glance before he turned his attention to backing out of his parking spot. “You’re in magic country now, lass. The locals around here have magic in our blood.”
Lissa grinned, settling back into the seat. “Is that so?”
“Oh, aye. Magic’s been in these parts for centuries — since long before Lord Weatherby made his appearance, that’s for sure.”
“Who?”
“The man who built your hotel?” Davey shot her another glance, one eyebrow lifted. “Usually the folks I take up there are familiar with that much of the history, at least.”
“Oh, right.” Lissa bit her lip, debating exactly how much of the story she felt like sharing with this old man. “When I booked this trip, I was feeling a little …impulsive. Not a lot of research went into it.”
“Is that right?” He sounded curious, but not judgmental, which eased her embarrassment a little. “Well, that just means you’ve got all the more to learn about the place. But — forgive a nosy old man, I’m far too old to change my ways — what brings an American girl all the way to the Scottish countryside?”
“That’s a good question,” she said drily, fighting the urge to laugh. Suddenly, it seemed ridiculous to feel embarrassed. Why did she care what this man thought of her one way or the other? What was the harm if he assumed she was some daft American who’d made a crazy choice one day and carried through with it? That was the truth, wasn’t it?
And so, as the car wound its expert way through the streets of a foreign city, Lissa found herself telling her driver the whole story. It surprised her how good it felt to get it all out of her head and into the air between them — though she did modify a few of the more unpleasant details of the fatal confrontation with her client’s boyfriend. Davey was an excellent listener. Despite his blue eyes remaining mostly trained on the road, he had a knack for knowing the right time to flick her a reassuring glance, a little nod or a smile, or a quick laugh at one of her jokes. By the time she got to the part of the story when she’d gotten drunk and booked the whole trip in what was more or less a blackout, she was feeling comfortable enough about the whole stupid affair to laugh along with Davey.
“Oh, you’ll fit right in around here, lass.” He chuckled, reaching up with one finger to wipe a tear of laughter from his eye.
The streets of the town had given way to rolling countryside around them, and Lissa smiled as she looked out over the fields. The Scottish highland… a phrase she’d heard here and there, always associated with wilderness and remoteness. Beauty, too, certainly — but whatever impression that word made paled in comparison with the experience of actually seeing the place.
“You said you get a lot of American tourists?” she said eventually, into the pleasant, comfortable silence that had settled between them. He nodded. “Any particular reason why?”
“Oh, this and that,” he said, and there was something about the twinkle in his eye that made her suspect he was holding something back. “A lot of folks from all over come through for the castle tours, you know — going all over the countryside looking at old ruins. Harry Potter has a lot to answer for,” he added with a mocking little shake of his head. “Some come because they’ve traced their ancestry back to Scotland and want to reconnect with their roots. Spent a week with a lovely family once, driving them all over the moors in search of the town their great-great-great grandmother grew up in. No idea if they found the right place or not, but they loved it. And then there are the witch-hunters.”
Lissa raised an eyebrow, waiting for the old man to elaborate on that particular point. “Witch hunters?” she asked eventually, when it became clear his silence was designed to provoke her. “What do you mean?”
“As I said, lass… we’re all the descendants of witches in this neck of the woods.”
Lissa smiled, reflecting that on a different day, Davey’s refusal to give her a straight answer might have annoyed her. Right now, though, being transported in absolute comfort through the beautiful foreign landscape around her, she couldn’t help but find the whimsy charming.
“Then I’m guessing the witch-hunters aren’t particularly welcome.”
“Oh, the modern types are just fine,” he said with a chuckle. “They come in the spirit of inquiry, curiosity, fascination with the supernatural… all qualities that witches generally approve of. Back in the old days they’d have met a different kind of welcome altogether, of course — but no, we don’t mind the folklorists, the occultists, or the just plain nosy. We had a podcaster come through in the summer just gone, that was great fun. Had half the population of the area lining up, competing with each other over who could tell the most exaggerated lies without them catching on.”
“Sounds like fun. But you’re saying there’s some truth in it? There are witches around these parts?” She was surprised to realize she was only half joking. Lissa had never been much for spooky stories or silliness — growing up with a father who spent so much of his time showing her how sleight-of-hand tricks were done had been an early inoculation against the kind of magic and mystery that so often entranced the other kids her age, and she’d had already had a deeply rational head on her shoulders by the time she hit high school. But there was something about the countryside here, the rolling gray clouds, the dull haze of purple that shimmered over the distant field… if there were going to be witches anywhere, she thought with an unaccustomed little shiver, then this was where they’d be.
“There may well be,” Davey allowed, clearly pleased that she was playing along. “Oh, there may well be — many say that the gift is passed down by the ancestors. Not necessarily by blood, mind you. There are other ways. Darker ways.”
“What kind of ways?”
“Curses,” he said.
And Lissa, who’d literally been trained to keep a cool head in a warzone, uttered a shriek of surprise and clapped her hands over her mouth as, behind him, a crack of lightning split the sky. Davey roared with laughter, clearly delighted by the timing, and Lissa was quick to join him, her embarrassment quickly giving way to mirth. He’d been spot on about the timing, she noticed, glancing at the clock on the dashboard — thirty minutes exactly since they’d left the airport, and the first few drops of rain were striking the window.
Davey followed her gaze, grinning. “I’d get used that if I were you. Never stops raining in Scotland.”
“Is that part of the curse, too?”
He laughed. “Maybe, maybe — though if it is, it goes back a lot further than any of the rest of our stories.”
Lissa settled back into her seat, grateful for the warmth of the heater, for the safe and cozy feeling in the car as it wound its way through the rain-slick country roads. “Tell me about the witches.”
And Davey was more than happy to oblige her. It was clear he’d driven these roads a thousand times, and very little conscious attention was required to keep them safely on the road as he talked. The story, too, had a well-practiced quality, and Lissa smiled to herself as she thought of the animated old man taking tourist after tourist down these winding roads over the years, weaving the same spell for each of them. And it was a great story, too. Davey had a gift for weaving a narrative — she found herself wondering if driving was his only job, or whether he moonlighted as a tour guide. At any rate, she was quickly absorbed in the tale he was telling.
The story centered on a series of fateful events, hundreds of years ago. A time of great upheaval in the country, so Davey said — there was great tension between the Scottish clans and the English lords who had laid claim to considerable parts of their country. And amidst all that upheaval — perhaps, the old man intimated, as a response from the country itself to the chaos — there emerged tales of magic. Strange, dark powers moving across the land, striking fear into the hearts of honest, God-fearing folk, and drawing the attention of witch hunters. One particular clan — the clan whose ancestral home lay not far from where she’d be staying, in fact — came up again and again in these stories. Clan MacClaran, whose name still adorned the famous ruins of their castle in the countryside — and the subject, so the legends went, of a terrible curse.
Lissa found herself holding her breath as Davey paused for breath, the ominous rumbling of thunder in the distance only adding more tension to the silence. The rain was little more than drizzle, but it seemed to press in on the car and hide the countryside around them — though it was still daylight, the gloom seemed to suggest otherwise. Davey, Lissa noticed with amusement, was absolutely reveling in it — he could hardly hide the glint of delight in his eye as he continued with his tale.
The origins of the curse were unknown, or at least conflicted — there were dozens of stories, but the majority of them revolved around some member of Clan MacClaran provoking the anger of a witch, who laid a curse upon the whole family in vengeance. Though efforts to break the curse failed over and over, a spell was cast in an effort to ease the tragic effects, at least a little.
“What were the effects?” Lissa asked, her voice hushed. “What did the curse do?”
“A cruel thing,” Davey said, shaking his head in sorrow. “The curse ensured that any woman who fell in love with a man of the Clan would meet an untimely death soon after.” He shot her a glance, and seemed to read a certain skepticism in her face. “You’re thinking it’s unjust, to punish the innocent.”
Lissa nodded agreement.
“Oh, yes. Curses are curses — they’re meted out in the height of dark passion, in rage and sadness — they’re not the sober, considered decisions of a judge or a jury. A curse is not intended to right a wrong — a curse is about inflicting as much misery as possible. And this one certainly succeeded. As the years went by, tragedy after tragedy befell the MacClarans. Young women with their whole lives ahead of them, lost to accidents, to disease, to violence or foul play…”
“And the spell? You said someone cast a spell, to try and fix it?”
“I was getting to that,” Davey said, though the amusement in his eyes undercut the sharpness of the rebuke. “Indeed. Some say the very same witch who laid the curse tried to reverse it, but failed. Others say that it was another witch, a good witch, who added an afterword to the curse. At any rate — the lost loves of the MacClaran family were returned to them.”
“Returned? Like — brought back from the dead?”
“Not quite,” the old man said. She could tell this was his favorite part of the story by the way his voice dropped. “One by one, the lost loves of the Clan returned to their heartbroken men… but something was different, so the stories tell. They returned, but without their memories of who they had been. They returned, but in strange clothes, speaking with strange voices. They returned, miraculously unharmed, and their love was pure and true as ever it had been… but something in them was never the same.”