up at the sight of me; his cheeks glowed red as apples from the cold air. I felt a corresponding flare in my own heart but then a pang, because I was planning to leave as soon as I was able to get the stone away from the nephilim.
“I’ve been thinking about what happened when I saw the witch hunter,” I said, as I spooned out the stew that William had made for us.
“Are you sure you want to be thinking about that?” he asked. “You were raving as if you were being tortured …”
He paused and looked up at me, his eyes shining in the firelight, and I suddenly wondered if he spent his days thinking about his captivity with the Fairy Queen. “I mean,” he continued, “I know you are worried about your friends and that you must get this stone to save them, but perhaps it’s better if you use this time to get your strength back for when it is time to go.”
“Is that what you did when you were in Faerie?”
He looked surprised but then nodded. “Aye. I thought of what I should do if I had a chance to escape. I even dreamed sometimes of the lass who would save me …” He looked away, embarrassed. Since we’d returned to the cottage, he’d studiously avoided touching me more than he had to in the course of nursing me back to health. Sometimes I wondered if that first night we’d spent here, when we’d come together so urgently in front of the fire, had been as much a dream as the dreams of the Greenwood. “But those dreams of mine were a great deal more pleasant than the ones you were having,” he said. “I don’t like to think of you dwelling on them.”
“I have to,” I told him. “I have to understand how I broke the angel stone’s spell, so that I can get it away from the nephilim. Not just for my friends back in Fairwick but for everyone here—for Mordag and the rest.”
He nodded. “Aye, I don’t like to think of what those bastards are doing to them. But I don’t see how we can help. They’re deep in the dungeons of Castle Coldclough and guarded by a squadron of those cloaked bastards. The whole town is terrified of them, everyone afraid to speak up in the kirk session lest they’re accused next. And when someone does speak, they’re struck dumb. I went to the kirk session on Sunday and watched Donald McCreavey try to speak up for his sister, but he fell on the floor in a fit. The minister said he’d been possessed by a demon and had him taken to the dungeons to join his sister. He was babbling all the while about all the sins he’d committed, how he’d stolen from the collection plate and watched the girls swimming in the burn naked. Harmless things, but he took on like he was the devil himself.”
“It’s the stone,” I said, guiltily thinking how much worse than Donald McCreavey’s were the stains I had on my own conscience. “It makes you remember all the things you’ve done wrong—and makes them worse—until you feel like your own guilt is crushing you.”
“That’s why you were gasping for air?” he asked. “But what could you have done …” He stopped as the blood rushed to my face. “Oh,” he said, “did it have to do with me—or who I became?”
“Yes,” I admitted. “I’m afraid I caused you a lot of pain.”
William smiled crookedly. “I imagine I deserved it—and I can’t imagine whatever you did to me wasn’t worth the time I got to spend with ye.” He reached across the table and took my hand. “Dinna fash yourself, lass.” As he squeezed my hand, I remembered how I’d felt his hand in mine during my vision.
“That’s how I was able to break the angel stone’s hold,” I said, looking down at his hand. “You put the brooch in my hand …”
“Aye.” He reached under the collar of his shirt and pulled out a leather thong. Hanging from it were both brooches. “I was unpinning your shawl when you started thrashing about, so it was in my hand when I grabbed yours.”
“I saw it in my hand in my vision, and the witch hunter saw it, too. I could tell he was surprised—and frightened. When I laid it on my heart, I was able to break the angel stone’s hold.”
“Then you ought to be wearing it now for protection,” he said, pulling the thong over his head. As he leaned closer to put the thong over my head, I smelled heather. A sprig was in his hair. I pulled it loose … and was flooded with the memory of the dreams I’d had of making love in fields of heather and the sprigs I’d find in my bed afterward. Perhaps he was remembering those dreams, too, because he blushed as he saw the flower in my hand.
“Och, aye,” he mumbled awkwardly, “that’s a queer thing. I fell asleep on the hillside today and awoke to find myself surrounded by heather, though it’s too late in the year for the stuff to be flowering.”
I thought about the beds full of flowers I’d awoken to back in Fairwick and wondered what William had been dreaming about. I looked down so he wouldn’t see me blush and fingered the brooch he’d put around my neck. I fitted the two hearts together. I remembered the part from the ballad of William Duffy when the fairy girl breaks her brooch in half and gives one half to William.
“Tell me what Cailleach—the first Cailleach—said to you when she split the brooch in half,” I said.
“There’s something else?” There wasn’t anything else in the ballad.
“Aye, she said that when the two halves were joined again, nothing could hurt us. What? What does it mean?”
“It means,” I said, holding the two halves of the brooch up together, “that I have an idea how to get the stone and destroy those bastards. But I’ll have to speak to your auntie first.”
CHAPTER TWENTY
The next morning, after William had left with the flocks, Nan appeared on my doorstep. I wondered how William had gotten word to her so soon that I wanted to see her, then, looking past her up the hill, I saw the smoke of a bonfire rising in the still, cold air and realized they must have arranged a signal for her to come. The signal wouldn’t have told her of my purpose, though. She was carrying a basket with food for us and another large basket full of unspun wool, which she said she’d brought for us to spin.
“We haven’t time for that,” I said, trying not to sound as irritable as I felt. I hadn’t slept well the night before, agitated by thoughts of how to steal the angel stone—and by thoughts of William asleep in the next room.
“’Twill calm you,” she said, giving me a keen look that took in my agitation. “You’re as skittered as a cat that’s misplaced its kits.”
That was true enough. I’d asked William to send for Nan so I could tell her what I’d figured out about the power of the angel stone, but now that she was here I wasn’t sure how much I should tell her. Her friends and neighbors were being rounded up as witches. Would she trust me—a stranger—to know how to help Ballydoon? Or might she turn me in to the witch hunters to save her relatives and friends? I supposed it wouldn’t be a bad place to start by going along with her request.
I helped her pull the large spinning wheel from the corner and set it up near the fireplace—the only place in the house that stayed warm now that the days were getting colder. Nan placed the basket of wool under the wheel and explained that Mordag had already combed and carded it. The stuff resembled a cloud of dirty white cotton candy and felt, when I stuck my hand in it, faintly sticky. Nan took a handful of it and, with a series of quick and mysterious finger movements, drew out a thread, which she fixed to the bobbin of the spinning wheel. As Nan pumped a pedal with one foot, the wheel began to spin, drawing more of the creamy thread onto the bobbin. I watched, mesmerized, as the amorphous blob yielded a solid thread of yarn.
“Here,” Nan said after a few minutes. “You try.”
She showed me how to pull the wool back in one hand while pinching the thread between the fingers of the other with just enough slack to let the spinning wheel twist the yarn, but when I tried, it was like sticking my hand in a cloud and trying to wrest something solid out of it. Like trying to pull a rabbit out of a hat. No wonder the old wives who wove were sometimes taken for witches.
After I’d failed at several attempts, Nan made a sound low in the back of her throat—a sort of
