Chapter 9
Chapter Nine
After dropping Rowan a coffee and a kiss in bed and, because it was before sunrise, successfully avoiding his typical morning question of if I slept well, I was in one of my happy places: the castle artifacts room.
After the Rembrandt, I wanted to double-check our inventory.
Open to the public, it also contained the items we’d unearthed from the midden before I went Viking and set fire to the hillside with my Ulfberht sword.
The Ulfberht was an artifact I was loathe to see again, but equally desirous to carry at my hip at all times. I had to see her.
The Ulfberht looked beautiful in her plexiglass case that Marion had found for her.
The sword still subtly called to me, the song of a beautiful thing to her owner, and as I crossed the room to her, I fought the urge to break the case and hold her.
The runic symbols running down her spine spelled out her name. Her edge was still sharp.
I forced myself to turn toward the other cases.
Broken bits of pottery, carved bone, and shards of wood were laid out on cloth.
An educational card next to each item told guests what they were looking at, and with Holly’s help earlier that summer, there was an artistic sketch to show the original form.
All was in its place in the basement room.
Along the back wall were the boxes of artifacts we still hadn’t identified or that were waiting their turn in the display rotation.
I reviewed each box to ensure no item on the inventory sheets was missing.
The last case was larger than the rest. It was about the size of a steamer trunk, and at the bottom of it was a boxy item covered in a stained muslin cloth.
As I reached for the protective cloth, something in the walls groaned.
My hands froze halfway to the item. The sound set my hair on end, and only after a few heartbeats did I realize it wasn’t the walls groaning.
They were…hollering. The hair on my arms stood on end, and I sat still, wondering if my mind was playing tricks on me.
In a few seconds, I heard it again. I was out of my chair and at the far wall.
I put my ear to it and waited. Just when I thought I was going mad and should leave to find another human being, I heard it again.
Feeling my heart race, I walked to the room’s entrance, waiting.
It was coming from below me. It was coming from the fairy hole—the lower dungeons.
“What the… Oh, fuck.” I ran down the hall to the end room where I had, days before, fought as Ormr with Eli, Rowan, and Mickey.
I yanked the old wooden door. The door that led to the stairway down.
The door opened with its own groan. I slipped two at a time down the stone stairs that were now damp with dripping seawater—a sign that it was high tide in the loch.
I thought the inevitable had happened. Someone had caught the banker and had thrown him into the fairy hole.
With Holly aware of the Rembrandt’s disappearance, everyone would be on high alert, and there were some members of the clan who were all too glad to take matters into their own hands.
I skidded around the corner and into pitch-black.
I had not thought this through. From the initial grand tour that Rowan gave me, I remembered there was a pull cord for a bulb somewhere. That somewhere went outward like a question, and as if he were there with me, Rowan responded.
What are you doing?
Fairy hole light?
Four steps into the hallway; wave your hands around.
OK.
Why are you down there?
There’s hollering. Did someone put Dick Murdoch down the fairy hole?!
Mo ghràdh, you aren’t making sense. Call me.
Bank-er. Fair-y hooole.
You’re really not making sense.
THERE IS A HUMAN IN THE FAIRY HOLE.
Oye, fuck. I heard that. I’ve just arrived. Wait for me.
I waited a beat, waved my hands for the light’s string, found it, and then pulled, illuminating the narrow, dank space.
From the end of the hallway came “Hello!?” It was a voice I recognized.
“Mickey?”
“Hello! Who’s there?! Let me out of here!”
He wasn’t in the fairy hole. He was in one of the sea-level dungeon rooms that Rowan’s uncle used to store whisky in. I stopped short in my rush toward him. “Oh, shit,” I whispered to myself. Did I put him in there, as Ormr?
“Mickey! How long have you been in here?” I fumbled with the ancient iron door latch, cursing as I went.
“Just get me out of here!”
“I’m trying! I can’t get the latch to give at all.” With both hands around the latching mechanism’s handle, I squeezed with all my might to get the rusted metal to move.
“Kick it like Holly does!”
“OK,” I said, standing back, ready to kick. “Wait, Holly?!” I kicked the door, not hearing his response. The latch settled, and I attacked it again, “Holly put you in here?” I hollered as I threw open the door.
The room seemed plush for a dungeon. It was warmly lit by several camping LED lanterns that hung low off the wooden rafters in each corner, and in the glow, there was a round hand-loomed rug on the floor, pillows and plush blankets on a camping cot, an assortment of snacks and an orange-colored drink, and stacks of books.
The flicker from a candle, making the room smell like vanilla baked goods, wavered in the corner on a small wooden stool.
But writing paper and pen were scattered onto the rug as if thrown down in a hurry.
His wrists were bound together with silky rope, and an ankle chain was around his boot.
Dirt coated his cuffs, and the knees of his pants were encrusted.
It was as if he had been midway through a gardening session and got trapped in that room to write a dissertation on isolation.
Only that room was solid stone. Where had he been digging?
“What is going—”
“Thank the Lord you’re here. Undo me and get me the fuck out of here; she’s fucking out of her nut!”
“Are you living here? Who’s out of her nut?” I asked aloud at the same time my mind was processing “undo me.” So stunned by seeing him in that room and a chain on his ankle when we’d all thought he’d left for some tropical paradise.
“Holly! She hit me in the back of the head and stowed me down here—”
“Holly-Holly? Our Holly, researcher Holly? She hit—”
“That cow put me down here, and when I—”
“Hey!” I cut him off. “Don’t call her that. I’ll get to the bottom of this, but tied up or not, you’ll not call her a cow.” I hadn’t forgiven him for hiding the Ulfberht sword. I was trying to be calmer these days but was no saint. I snapped my rubber band and exhaled: “What happened?”
“I dunno, she’s gone mad! Get me out of these ties!”
“Yeah, yeah, OK,” I said and reached for his bound hands, mumbling, “This isn’t weird at all.”
“Hold on a moment.”
I hadn’t heard Rowan enter; I jumped when I heard his thick Scots.
“You…” Mickey squinted at Rowan, his multicolored eyes taking on the dark of the room. Then pressed his wrists toward me. “Hurry.”
“Aye, me,” Rowan said to him, “If I didn’t know better, I’d think ye were back to steal the sword.
But you’ve seen Ormr’s face. Ye’ve seen what he can do, so what could have possibly motivated you to return?
” I wasn’t sure about Rowan’s tone—it was as if he was leading him into a confession, and the full story was one he knew.
“I was trying to leave when—”
“Trying to leave? Ye mean you found something that’s keeping you here.
Save your lies.” He looked at the silken ties that bound his wrists.
“Purple looks good on ye. And that chain around your ankle is so rusted a quick kick would snap it off the wall. So the question is, why are ye still here? Buying time?”
Mickey opened his mouth to respond when Rowan added, “Again rhetorical.”
Rowan then gently took my arm to turn me away from Mickey as he lowered his voice. “I have a fair good reason why he’s here. Holly’s sobbing up in the artifacts room; I caught her on the stairs coming down.”
Eavesdropping, Mickey interjected, “That ungrateful hag—”
“Oye!” Rowan’s brow cleaved as if he couldn’t believe the decorum of the man in bondage ties—now I realized where I’d seen the silks before—and chained to the wall. “Have some pride, aye?”
“Pride? Pride?! I’m being detained like a prisoner.”
“Again, give it a kick and be done. I’ll walk ye up to the constable; there’s much to discuss on why you’re here. The Fund is mighty eager to get to the bottom of it as well.”
This had a subduing effect on Mickey, but his response was saturated with loathing. “Unchain me, and I’ll get out o’ everyone’s hair and not press charges.”
Rowan went to Mickey, slid his hand over his shoulders as if he were about to confide something to him, and softly said, “I’ve never been a big fan of ye after everything you’ve done; so how’s about I’ll not knock yer teeth out, and I will keep this door open in a show of good faith while we sort your story out, aye? ”
Mickey’s response was a molten glare.
“Aye, there’s a good lad.” Rowan patted his back.
Rowan and I found Holly in a crying jag to beat all crying jags upstairs at the table near the heavy boxy object I was going to uncover when I first heard Mickey. Tears ran out her eyes and nose and off her chin. Her eyes were red and swollen.
I rubbed her back. “What’s going on, Holl? He’s saying you locked him up?”
She looked up at Rowan and sputtered something that sounded like “So sorry…”
Rowan shrugged as if finding people tied up in the dungeon was something that still happened in modern times.
“Och, never mind it. After all he’s done…
Trying tae convince Cole tae break it off with me for payment from Charmaine, falsely claiming he was sent from the Fund just so he could nose about—”
“Taking the Ulfberht,” I added.
“I wish I’d done it. The stones it took to do it…” He shook his head and grinned at her. “Bella ad mortem. If we were still a skirmishing country and clan, Holly, I’d declare ye chieftain.”