Chapter 7
Chapter Seven
R ob went looking for Polly in all the places she liked to hide from the head gardener, but found only the work she had yet to do. He dealt with her unfinished tasks out of habit as he thought about what she had claimed she’d seen. Never had there been any worms in the spell trap; like insects from the outside world they died the moment they came inside. Only birds and furry creatures could cross the threshold; what Benedict Miller called “warm-blooded.” He’d turned over all the dirt in the bed looking for the worm but found no trace of it. After that he’d gone to speak to Eachann about the matter.
“’Tis no worms here I’ve ever seen, lad,” the head gardener had assured him. “I’ll wager that good-for-naught told you that so she might sneak off again and leave her work for you.”
“Polly’s no’ so bad, Maister Eachann.” Rob always tried to defend her, but his heart wasn’t in it anymore. “Mayhap ’tis an enchanted worm.”
“And who should send such, and for what purpose?” The old man sighed heavily. “You’re a good lad, Robby, but you need part from that selfish wench before she tramples your heart. Now go and finish your own tasks.”
Later, as Rob pushed the last barrow of weeds over to the burn pile, he thought about the outsider woman he’d considered his sweetheart over the last two years. He’d bedded a few maids since being caught in the spell trap, but none had ever stayed with him, and he’d never had a chance with any of the true beauties. That was why Polly coming to him had so startled him. He’d been baffled by how she’d lavished him with affection and spent every free hour in his arms. Her generosity and eagerness had dazzled him entirely, and when she’d told him she loved him he’d wept with gratitude and fervently pledged the same to her.
Only lately did he think it had all been a ruse of some kind.
Polly had always refused to marry him, claiming she’d left a husband on the other side. He’d had to accept her refusal, for that was the one rule that the laird demanded all men at Dun Talamh follow. She’d also sworn him to secrecy about bedding her, claiming she did not wish to let the laird think her loose. He’d once made a joke about her setting her cap for Tasgall, but she had not laughed along with him. Something about the way she looked at him in that moment, as if she wished shove the trowel in her hand into his belly, had made his bladder seem over-full.
Since that day Rob had never again jested with her.
Over time her affections cooled, and she no longer sought to share his bed. When he came to her she seemed to tolerate rather than desire his attentions. Indeed, of late she hardly bothered to find her own pleasure. He caught her watching other men with a shrewdness in her eyes, as if gauging which one she might next offer herself. It hurt him to imagine she would discard him, but not as much as it should have.
Perhaps he’d grown tired of her as well.
Elspeth stood at the burn pile casting bundles of old rags into the flames, and smiled at him as she picked up the coal rake to shift them into the center of the pit.
“Fair day, Robby.” She eyed the barrow. “Polly’s off again?”
“Aye, fetching a spade.” He cringed a little at being caught doing his woman’s work, but then sighed and met Elspeth’s gaze. Not for the first time did he admire the brightness of her dark brown eyes, and how her full lips framed her very white teeth. “Do you plan to choose a new man at the binding ceremony, lass?”
“You ken I’ve never wed anyone.” The little maid ducked her head as if ashamed. “’Tis enough that the clansmen welcome me when I desire a lover.”
So that was where she spent her nights. Rob sometimes pitied the maids who went to the garrison hall to find their lovers, for the men of the McKeran Clan refused to wed any female. Still, he imagined they treated her with great care and much affection, for females like her provided them with release as well as pleasurable comfort.
“I’d welcome you, you ken,” he blurted out, his face instantly reddening. “Aye, and so would every man servant, I reckon.”
Elspeth’s expression grew pained. “I appreciate your kind offer, Rob, only I gave my heart to another long ago.”
No wonder she’d never joined in the binding ceremony; she must be in love with one of the clan.
“You’ve but to show yourself as wanting a husband, and we’d gather round you in a throng,” he said with all his gallantry. “I reckon the McKeran himself would need wait his turn.”
His outlandish suggestion made Elspeth giggle. “From your lips to the Gods’ ears, then. What of you? Shall you try to persuade Polly to take you as husband this year?”
Fresh disgust made Rob shake his head. “She’s done with me, I reckon.”
“I ken some lasses who think you a good, kind-hearted man,” the maid said. “I hope you’ll give one of them a chance at the ceremony. Mayhap the one I fancy shall do the same for me.” Suddenly looking shy, she hurried back into the stronghold.
As Rob walked back with the empty barrow he saw another heap of herbs that Polly had left beside the drying shed. The healer would want them hung up inside to dry so they could be scattered with the new rushes by the next moon. Sighing, Rob picked up the pile and carried it inside to place it on the worktable.
What would it be like, to have a wife? He’d never imagined such, but if Elspeth had spoken truth then there might be someone longing for him. For Rob to offer for her she would have to be kind, for he had long ago tired of Polly’s spiteful tongue. He had no other desires, for he knew himself to be only a middling choice at best. Calling a lass of any shape or size his wife would please him greatly. If only Elspeth hadn’t let another into her heart.
Who does she love, then?
The head chambermaid kept tidy the chambers of the laird and his senior men, so she might fancy any of them. She had never shown any particular affection toward the McKeran himself, but of course she wouldn’t. He thought of how worthy she was; she remained cheerful and smiling as she worked each day, and often helped out other maids when she finished her own tasks. Indeed, she could serve in any other part of the stronghold, for since coming into the spell trap she had worked her way from being the lowest of sculleries to being only second to the chatelaine herself.
Her love would be unwavering, too. Rob could tell.
Musing away, he sorted and bundled the herbs. Some idiots did not care for Elspeth because of her dark skin, but Rob had always thought her pretty. He didn’t notice the color of her flesh the way others did, and how could that matter? So her parents had been runaway slaves. Certainly they had not wished to be captured, taken to a strange land and sold like animals.
He also knew how it was to be desperate.
Before the clan had been cursed, Rob had been hired on as an under gardener at Dun Talamh. He’d been obliged to seek work so he could support his newly widowed mother and younger sister, as no one in their village would offer the aid. The burden had been crushing, too, for he’d barely reached manhood and had never been strong enough to do farm work.
Farlan McKeran had taken an interest in him from the day he began working in the clan’s gardens. Seneschal permitted him to take home a measure of veg and fruit for his family, which at that point had been close to starving. He’d also paid him double what any other master in the highlands offered. That income had allowed him to buy chickens to raise at home for eggs, which they bartered for food and whatever else they needed.
That was why Rob had stayed on when the McBren and his men went to war with the clan; it didn’t seem right to run off and save himself.
Although his mother and sister had been dead almost a thousand years, it still tore at his heart to think of them. Without him to provide, they would have had a very meagre existence in the village. His mother might have even been forced to wed his sister to some rutting villain like the blacksmith, who had scattered bastarts all over the countryside. He couldn’t think about them without tears leaking down his cheeks. In that moment he wanted a woman who would hold him and tell him it would be fine.
I need a wife. I shall join the draw this year.
Some of the vassals entered a lottery held at the binding ceremony. Couples were chosen by blind draw, and they were obliged to marry and stay together for a year. It was a reckless thing, much like gambling. But Rob knew some men and women who chose to do so for their own reasons. Sometimes it ended hilariously, as last year when a young scullery had been matched with one of the old, widowed crones. Yet sometimes it did not, and men like him could take a wife much finer than they could expect to choose them.
“I shall tell Polly ’tis over between us now,” he muttered to himself. “I shall tell her before the ceremony, and then I may wed whoever I’m matched with in the lottery.”
As Rob finished tying the bundle of sage and lifted it to hang it from an overhead rod, something nudged his foot, and he half-turned expecting to see his lover behind him. Only there was no one else in the drying shed.
“Och, now I’m imagining things.” He shook his head.
Something tugged at his ankle, and when he glanced down he saw a nearly invisible thread wound around his boot.
“By the Gods, does she sew here?” Rob reached down to pull off the thread, and another floated out of the shadows and wrapped around his wrist. The sticky stuff seemed colder than ice, but no matter how he shook his hand and foot the threads would not come off. Two more drifted through the air, one encircling his leg and another draping across his chest.
He knew he looked a fool, dancing around the shed trying to free himself of the wretched tangle, when Polly might walk in any moment and laugh at him. Then, too, the day had left him strangely tired, and the coldness of the webbing seemed to be numbing him everywhere it touched his body–
Webbing?
Rob staggered over to the dark corner from where the threads had come, and there saw something so monstrous he tried to rub his eyes in disbelief. Only the threads had now pinned his arms to his sides, and then another bound his ankles together, sending him crashing to the floor. From the shadows the thing that was attacking him slithered and reared over him, its hideous mouth opening wide as hundreds of threads came from it in a cloud, forming a blanket that slowly descended and covered him.
’Tis a way out of the trap, Rob thought as the icy shroud tightened around him . Death.
T asgall ordered Darro to lock in the dungeons the three missing vassals, whom they found pished and unconscious in the buttery. After sending for Rory to repair the door lock they’d smashed to get at the whiskey, he walked with Ava to the stronghold’s library, which lay around the corner from the room she occupied.
“I didn’t think they had books in your time,” she said as he led her into the archive chamber, and then stopped in her tracks to stare at the shelved scrolls. “Laws.”
He had already noticed that she used that word as an expression of astonishment. Over time the library had expanded slowly but steadily and had grown in size to rival the great hall. Every wall had wooden cases filled with scrolls, from the oldest that had belonged to his sire to the very latest that he had written the night Ava had arrived. Few of the men bothered to write down anything anymore, as there seemed no possibility of any outsider reading their words.
Tasgall had not given up hope yet, and wrote one scroll each week as he had since the clan had been cursed. In them he detailed what had occurred within the trap, the many ways he and his men had tried to break the spell, and his own thoughts as time passed. Since the magic of the spell trap replaced all the blank parchment and ink he used the morning after he wrote his scrolls, he had an unlimited supply and could write forever.
Should he tell her that? Or would such frighten her more than the sight of the more than forty-seven thousand scrolls he’d already written?
“Have you kept records of everything that’s happened since the clan was cursed?” she asked as she went over to one of the cases and peered at the sixty scrolls it held.
“Only the new events, of which they’re no’ many,” he admitted. “I wrote down every attempt we made to escape, what and who came into the trap from the outside, and how my brothers and our vassals managed the attacks by the MacBren. We now ken what to do to prevent him and his men from harming our people before the last siege.”
“I’d like to read some of those.” She came to join him at the viewing stand, on which he mounted one of his sire’s scrolls. “What’s making that paper sparkle like that?”
“Keran’s magic.” He notched one end of the parchment into the stand’s umbilicus rod, and then stepped back as the surface brightened with green and brown enchantment.
Ava’s eyes widened as the first image appeared on the scroll, that of Keran making his way through a densely wooded forest in the highlands. “It’s like television. How on earth are you doing that?”
“’Tis a Fae viewing scroll. My sire wrote of the events you see for his King and meant to deliver them when he returned to Elphyne. He died before he could.” He had watched this scroll a thousand times or more, but he never tired of it. “On the hunt he encountered a rogue Fae warrior who nearly slew him.” He reached out and advanced the scroll to a mark he’d made on the outside of the parchment.
As the image of Keran returned Ava gasped, for he lay senseless and bleeding on the ground, the now dead rogue Fae a short distance away. A hooded figure rushed over to his sire and knelt down to touch her fingertips to the side of his neck. As she did the hood fell back and revealed Tuirne’s solemn, lovely features.
“My lady màthair ,” he told Ava before he removed the scroll and wound it back up around its storage baton.
She glanced at him. “You watch this one a lot, I imagine.”
“Aye, for I miss her still. Tuirne was the gentlest and kindest of women.” She’d also been dead for more than a thousand years, but that didn’t matter to him. “’Tis the only scroll my sire left behind that shows my màthair . He never wrote of his time with her or us after the attack.”
“Maybe he wanted to keep that to himself.” Ava reached out to touch the viewing stand. “How can these window scrolls help us here?”
“While serving his king my sire captured and executed many rogue Fae hiding in our world.” He thought of some of the immortal beings he’d seen in his sire’s scrolls and grimaced. “Most committed crimes in Elphyne before fleeing, for which the Fae king sentenced them to death. Here they proved extremely dangerous to mortals, often becoming the monsters they feared. After Keran dispatched them, their kin often swore vengeance.”
“Then your father made a lot of enemies,” Ava said, nodding. “But why would that have anything to do with your clan being cursed?”
“If one came to slay Keran, only to discover he was long dead, they might have cast the curse to imprison and torment me and my brothers in his stead.” He rubbed the back of his neck. “Mayhap you’d oblige me by watching the scrolls he wrote for clues as to who cursed us. ’Tisnae pleasant to view, but I believe your eyes may spot what I cannae. If we learn what manner of immortal condemned us to this place, ’tis possible we may discover how to escape it.”
“I can do that, sure, but since I don’t know anything about Fae folks I’ll need you to tell me about what I’m seeing,” she said. “Maybe we can start watching them together when you have some time to spare.”
Her willingness to aid him and his brothers made his heart swell. It had been so long since Tasgall had possessed any true hope of ending the curse that he wished he could take her into his arms. He also knew the likelihood that they might uncover anything from the archives was doubtful.
Since an embrace seemed far too intimate, he held out his big hand. “Thank you, Agent.”
“You’re welcome, Laird.” She placed her slender palm against his and curled her long fingers over his.
Here time had little meaning, but the moment they touched it seemed to Tasgall that the spell trap went still and silent, and faded away until only the two of them became a new world. Seeing the warmth in her eyes darken and grow hotter made him imagine tugging her close so he could hold that long, strong body of hers against him.
Pure madness, and he didn’t care if it was.
Her allure kept growing stronger, and Tasgall wondered how much longer he could withstand the attraction between them. All he could think was the way he wished to slide his hands over the soft curves of her arse and press her hips to his, so she’d ease some of the throbbing of his stiff, aching cock. He imagined persuading her to accept him as her lover, and how quickly she might agree. How easy it would be to do so and lift her onto the table, and tear away the garments keeping them apart, and sink his pulsing length into her over and again.
Being with her, Tasgall suspected, would give him more pleasure than anything he could imagine. She had the same self-control as he did, which meant she likely shared his passions. Yet for all the bliss Ava’s body promised him, being her lover had to remain for him but a dream. He had first his obligation to his brothers and their vassals, which demanded all of his time and attention.
“My lord?” someone called from the passage.
“Saved from foolishness,” Ava muttered, as if more to herself than him.
“Forgive me.” It took all of Tasgall’s will to release her hand and turn away.
Outside in the passage Darro stood waiting, and bowed to Ava before he said, “Forgive me, my lord, but the men in the dungeons, they’re awake now and begging to speak with you.”
“I won’t keep you,” Ava said, and smiled at the chieftain before leaving them, her strides hasty as she headed toward the guest chamber.
Tasgall nearly went after her before he managed to stop himself. To his brother he said, “If they mean to confess, they may do so to you.”
“I need you there, my lord. They claim they saw a monster and barricaded themselves in the buttery to escape it.” Darro lifted his hands in a helpless gesture. “I cannae judge as well as you if they speak the truth.”
Walking down to the dungeons with his brother allowed Tasgall some time to collect himself, but all he could think on was the chance to review his sire’s scrolls with Ava. It would require them to spend a few hours alone for each report. The notion made his baws tighten and his cock twitch, and he did not relish the torment he’d suffer being close to her. Yet he could not deny her request. She would not understand his father’s weapons or methods, or the powers of the terrifying creatures Keran slew for the Fae king.
“If you think any more, smoke shall pour from your ears,” his brother predicted.
Tasgall eyed him. “What did you with your famous silence?”
“I’d shout to the heavens if ’twould stop you denying yourself.” He stopped at the gate at the dungeon stairs and unlocked it. “She’s quiet, lovely and everything you admire in a female. When she looks upon you her eyes fill with softness. Crook your finger at her, Brother, and I’ll wager she comes running to leap into your arms.”
“You’d lose that bet, lad,” Tasgall told him.
Down in the cell where they had dumped the drunken men, Darro took down a torch and brought it over to illuminate the straw-covered floor. In one corner all three young men huddled, their eyes widened and their bodies shaking. All their hands had been bandaged heavily so that they appeared to be wearing white mitts.
“On your feet, eejits,” the chieftain said. “You there, Baird. You’re the eldest. Come and speak to our lord.”
The vassal, whom Tasgall recognized as a carpenter, hurried over and fell to his knees. “Forgive us, milord, we beg you.” He pressed his bandaged hands together as tears spilled down his cheeks. “We reckoned the beasties, they’d break down the door and eat us, so we shared a wee dram to toast the clan, and our lassies, and before we realized we’d made a few too many–”
“–you ended so blootered you fell senseless,” Darro finished for him. “What manner of beastie chased you to drink yourselves stupit? Some of the dogs, then?”
“A monster,” one of the other men said in a quivering voice. “As tall as a man, and twice the width, with a great maw as big as your head, milord.”
The third made a sound as if he intended to puke, and then rushed over to the piss bucket and did just that.
Tasgall decided the men were still drunk, but he saw no reason to further terrify them. “You’ll spend a safe night here, lads. Naught may get through Rory’s steel bars.” He gestured to the dungeon guards, and told them to bring a meal, washing water and clean garments down for the trio.
On their way back upstairs Darro gave him several troubled looks, which he tried to ignore. Yet he knew that unlike Alec, his younger brother never fretted over the notion of trouble, but preferred to deal with it face to face when it came in truth.
He stopped before they reached the top landing. “They’re foolish lads who likely told the tale of the beast to escape punishment.”
“You didnae see their hands when we found them, my lord.” The chieftain grimaced. “They used a scythe to hack at the buttery’s lock, with one holding while another struck a blow. All three of them cut themselves over and again so much they near severed their fingers. While ’tis possible they did thus while already minced, why should they persist? Ken you any drunkard that should do such?”
“No.” Tasgall glanced back down in the direction of the dungeon cell. “Very well, what would you have me do? Send patrols through the keepe searching for monsters that likely only exist in those lads’ heads?”
Darro made a calming gesture. “In the morning, when they’ve truly sobered, I’ll bid them take me to the spot where they saw these creatures.”
He’d all but ripped his brother’s head off for his very reasonable counsel, and a sudden weariness came over him. “Go and assure they did no more harm in the storage chambers.”
Tasgall retreated to his bed chamber, where he barred the door before eyeing the tapestry on the wall which concealed the entrance to the hidden passage. He could walk through it now, turn left, and be inside the guest room in a few moments. Ava would be there, perhaps warming herself by the fire, or resting in bed. Imagining her asleep as he stood over her made his cock swell again.
“You may as well go to sleep, you great fool,” he told his lustful penis. “For you cannae have her.”
Realizing he was both sweaty and cold, Tasgall jerked off his tunic, and then went to sit by the fire to warm and dry his disobedient flesh. Despite his warning to his unruly member, he imagined having the tall, dark lady of his dreams anyway.