I did, in fact, remember something of the kind from a class I’d taken on the European witch hunts. From 1597, when James VI proclaimed in his work
“In 1659!” I said aloud. “Nan’s right. The country’s on the verge of one of the worst witch hunts in Scottish history.”
Nan stared at me for a moment, then wordlessly turned, opened her door, and pulled me through it into a small, neat, homey parlor with cushioned chairs by a fireplace, a spinning wheel, and bunches of fragrant herbs hanging from the low roof beams. She locked the door behind us, drew the lace curtains at the windows, and poked her head into an adjoining room—presumably to check if we were alone. Then she took me by both hands, drew me down onto a bench in front of the hearth, and stared hard into my eyes.
“Who are ye?” she asked. “You do look a mite like that demented girl who wandered out of the Greenwood, but I can see you’re not her. How do you know what will happen in the future, and how did you know me? Are ye one of …” She licked her lips and looked nervously around the room. “One of the fair folk?”
I looked up at William, who was hovering nervously above us. “Nay, Auntie, she’s the one who saved me from them.”
“So that
“Was her name Cailleach?”
“Aye,” Nan said, eyeing me suspiciously. “That’s what she said her name was, but it’s not a Christian name, so we called her Katy. She was not right, puir thing. She was ravin’ about having lost her way to a door and that all her folk would die. I asked her about William, and she just wept the harder and told me he’d been taken by the Queen of Elphame and it was all her fault. I didn’t know, though, if she were raving or telling the truth—and I knew that, if it were the truth, if she kept on like that she’d be taken as a witch. I looked after her until Malcolm Brodie, whose own wife had died the year before leaving him with two motherless bairns, fell in love with her and married her. We thought she’d settled down when she had her own bairn, but then the witch hunters came and she ran away. We never did see her again.” She looked at me. “If you’re not her, what are you? Witch or fey?”
I considered lying, but I felt an instinctive trust of Nan, perhaps because I knew her descendants in the twenty-first century and there were no people more trustworthy than the Stewarts. “A bit of both,” I replied, and then proceeded to tell her my story as honestly as I could, translating the details of the twenty-first century into terms a seventeenth-century woman would understand. She listened patiently, stopping me only when I got to the part about the nephilim. She made me go back and describe them.
“Aye, I know their ilk. I believe that some of the witch hunters may be those devils. Their kind have been abroad in the country for many years now. They are the ones behind the war on the auld folk and all who hold the old ways. They have outlawed the minstrels and tale-tellers—all those who tell the old stories—because it’s in those old stories that lie the secrets to destroy them. They’re the inquisitors who trick hapless old women into telling tales of the little folk and then accuse them of consortin’ with the devil, because they are afraid that any who know the old ways will know how to destroy them.”
“That’s what Nan Stewart—your descendant—told me. She said that I had to find the angel stone that would destroy them, but I don’t know where to look. The girl you call Katy must have had it. Did you ever see her with a milky-white tear-shaped stone?”
“Aye, she wore it in a brooch just like the one you’re wearing.” She pointed at the pin on my shawl and then flicked her eyes toward William and saw the one that he was wearing. “When the witch hunters came and Katy ran away, she left the brooch for her daughter, little Mairi, but it no longer had the stone in it. Malcolm thought she must have taken it to sell. The witch hunters stayed six months, turning neighbor against neighbor, sister against sister. By the time they were done, twenty-four men and women were hanged for witchcraft. And now they’re back again. They’ve taken my cousin Mordag—”
“Mordag?” William asked. “Why, she’s a harmless old woman. We stayed in her cottage last night.”
I thought of the unfinished bowl of oatmeal and the spinning wheel knocked over on the floor and the beautiful woven blankets I’d slept under. Although I’d never met Mordag, I felt a pang for the woman being yanked out of her quiet life by those monsters. “Where have they taken her?” I asked.
“To the dungeons of Castle Coldclough,” Nan replied with a shiver.
I felt a chill, remembering how the dark ruin seemed to loom over the village, casting a malignant shadow.
“We’ll rescue her,” I said. “Once I have the angel stone, we can use it with your magic plaid.”
Nan snorted and plucked at my ordinary and decidedly
It was hard to disguise my disappointment. “But your descendant told me that her family used the plaid against the nephilim. She said a fairy woman taught them. Are you sure Caill—I mean Katy—didn’t teach you?”
“Nay, she couldn’t even spin or knit or weave. Whenever she tried, the wool tied itself into knots. As for the stone … well, you’ll just have to stay here until you find it, I suppose. In the meantime, I suggest the two of you stay out of sight. That pirate story you spun in the town square fooled no one, and this lass looks enough like Katy Brodie that folks will say she’s a changeling. If the witch hunters get ahold of you, it won’t take them long to discover you’re not who you say you are.”
The idea of being interrogated by a seventeenth-century counterpart of Duncan Laird made my knees go weak. I was remembering the details of that class I’d taken on European witch hunts and the horrific torture devices they used to extract confessions. I suddenly had had enough of the seventeenth century. It had been foolish to think I’d be able to find the angel stone with no clue to its whereabouts. And as for William … I looked at him regretfully. He might look like the incubus, but he wasn’t the man I’d fallen in love with in the twenty-first century.
“I’m sorry,” I said. “There’s no guarantee that I’ll ever find the stone here. After all, it’s just a fairy tale …” My voice cracked on the last words. What was any of this but a fairy tale? My life, my love for Bill—it was all a fairy tale that had evaporated into the mists. “I have to get back and help my friends.” I turned away from the look of hurt in William’s eyes and, like my ancestor before me, fled Ballydoon.
CHAPTER NINETEEN
I ran through the narrow alley, my bootheels echoing on the cobblestones. When I reached the square I turned to look back, but William hadn’t followed. I squelched the pang of disappointment, raised my shawl over my head, and hurried through the square, ignoring the curious looks of the few remaining stragglers. Most townspeople had scurried back behind their shutters, but a few old women lingered by the market cross in the center of the square, gossiping—probably about the scene I’d played a part in earlier. They’d go back to Jeannie MacDougal, no doubt, and tell her they’d seen William Duffy’s
I hurried fast out of the town, fueled at first by my urgency to get home and then by the need to keep warm. The sunny day that William had extolled on our way into town—it already felt centuries ago—had become gray and overcast. When I got to the top of the hill, it was raining. By the time I reached the stone cross, I was soaked. I glanced up toward Mordag’s cottage, where William and I had spent the night. The memory of the warmth of the fire—and the heat of his hands on my body and his mouth on mine—flashed through me. He wasn’t Bill. He wasn’t the man I had fallen in love with, but leaving him behind seemed a final admission that I would never see Bill again. Even as I’d seen Bill’s throat cut, watched his blood seep into the ground, I’d clung to a remnant of hope
