She looked down.
And her heart stood still.
She remained there, mute and unmoving. She wondered, with what poor wits remained her, how the man lying before her had been rendered senseless. Had her garrison actually taken a blade to him, or had he struck his head fleeing from her great hall? He surely didn't look the part of a coward. She judged him to be rather taller than she, perhaps even almost as tall as Connor MacDougal, who wielded a six-foot broadsword that even he topped by a hand. A man so large wouldn't be intimidated by much.
She considered his clothing. He was dressed in those denim long-legged trews that she occasionally saw mortals wearing. She had to admit that he did them justice. His shoulders were wide, but that apparently came from his build, not the excess fat that Roderick's pampered, corpulent visitors sported when they came to visit. She looked at his long fingers resting over his belly and wondered absently if they grasped a sword readily or if his were other kinds of tools.
Hammers and saws most likely, damn him.
His face was a wonder of planes and angles with a finely shaped nose, a handsome mouth, and attractive ears. His hair was dark, far darker than hers, and fell back from his face in pleasing waves.
None of which truly mattered, she supposed. However he looked, whatever his business, it didn't change the fact that beyond all reason and logic stood the single fact that set the hairs on the back of her neck on end.
It was him.
The man she had dreamed about for centuries.
She had dreamed of him while walking through the meadows, sitting under trees during the rain, snugly holed up in the warmth of the hay during the winter. She had dreamed of him in spring, hoped for him in fall. He'd first come to her heart during her tenth summer and never left it since.
The man who would come to rescue her.
She stared at him in silence for several minutes before another thought occurred to her.
If he was the man who had been destined to rescue her, then where had he been? Where had he been six hundred years ago when he could have saved her life? Where had he been for the past six centuries?
He was late. If his being that late wasn't reason enough to feed him to the wolves, she wasn't sure what was.
"Damn the man," she muttered.
"Aye," Connor said, rubbing his hands together purposefully, "let us slay him and send him to his foul rest."
Iolanthe found the thought suddenly very appealing. As for recognizing the man, perhaps her wits were addled. She had likely seen him before, and that was what unsettled her so.
But the only Colonists she'd seen in the past two hundred years had been tourists, and this one certainly hadn't been amongst them. She'd never seen a man so handsome. More was the pity that his face wasn't covered with pockmarks, that his nose wasn't broken from too many encounters with another man's sword hilt, that half his teeth weren't missing thanks to another's fist in his mouth.
She knew the last because he was snoring with his mouth quite widely open.
"Attractive," Roderick said, peering over her shoulder. "But not nearly as handsome as I—"
Iolanthe elbowed him in the belly and he ceased speaking with a great whoosh of air and a tiny squeak. She turned her attentions back to the man lying just inside her hall. Recognize him she might, but that was beside the point. He had come too late. To her, he could only be a Yank bent on destroying her home. Perhaps 'twas best for all if he did just disappear.
"Cut off his head and be done with him," a man behind her grumbled.
"Och, and where's the sport in that? Open his belly and pull out his intestines. There's a goodly bit of entertainment in that for the afternoon."
Iolanthe considered the last. 'Twas Connor MacDougal to suggest it, and she had to admit that he had a fine head for thinking when it came to meting out gruesome revenges. A pity that was his only redeeming quality.
"Carry him to the woods, and let the beasties finish him," Duncan said. "Herself’ll be well rid of him, and no murder will be laid at our gates."
Iolanthe listened to the men argue first over whether or not they could manage the feat of carrying a mortal such a far distance, then they began to discuss what could be done to make the man more palatable to whatever animal might be haunting the woods. Several ideas were fine ones, and when the men looked at her expectantly, she was fully prepared to agree and commend them on their resourcefulness. She opened her mouth to speak.
"I'll parley with him," she heard herself say.
"What!" thundered Connor MacDougal. "Have ye gone daft?"
She was wondering that herself. "I—" she began.
"Ye've no head for thinkin', ye silly twit! What need have we to surrender to some spineless coward from across the sea? Why, he couldn't even stand up to me blade, and that was naught but illusion!"
Iolanthe agreed heartily, but apparently her mouth didn't.
"I said I'll parley with him, and that's what I'll do," she said firmly.
"Ye'll do nothing of the sort," the MacDougal snarled.
Iolanthe glared at him. He was not her lord, and she had no intentions of having him wrest the chieftainship of her little clan from her. "Who's to stop me?" she asked haughtily.
In answer, he drew his sword.
She had to admit that it was a fearsome weapon indeed. Add to that the ferocious Highlander glaring down at her from his great height, and she found herself nigh onto intimidated.
Until he spoke.
"What think ye of that, girl?'
That was truly more than she could bear. Not that she'd ever given her name to any of the men surrounding her. They mostly called her Herself
