Malcolm smiled wryly and said: “It’s as I thought. One hunger at a time, then. We must quench the ache o’ the belly first. My apologies, lass, but there is no salt tae be had here, such not being allowed on hallowed ground. But I think ye’ll find that ye donnae crave it overmuch any more.”
“It doesn’t matter,” Taffy assured him, hurrying
to the small fire in the stone pit where a pair of trout hung, spitted between roasted berries. “This looks marvelous. I can’t recall ever being so hungry.”
“Aye. I warrant it does look like a feast, fasting as ye did the night just past.” He plucked a spear from the fire and shook the fish into a waiting leaf, which served as a plate. It was a broad thing, glossy and thick, and of a type Taffy had never seen before. “Eat your fill, lass. It will make ye strong.”
“Good. I need it.”
Taffy, reaching eagerly for the fish, barely saw Malcolm nod his head in agreement.
“I’m glad ye cannae kiss back the sunlight that kisses ye so boldly,” Malcolm said into the hush that had followed their meal. “I would be a jealous man.”
Feeling languid, Taffy turned her head toward him, not bothering to open her eyes or stir off the warm stone table where she lay, letting her hair dry spread out in the summer sun.
“Sing another song for me, Malcolm. Something beautiful and romantic.”
Nodding, he stared for a moment at her lustrous tresses, which were a dazzlement to the eye, and then allowed his gaze to sweep down her body. It was more revealed than usual in this new garment.
“Are you thinking of a song?” she asked.
“I am thinking that a man should have a caution when making wishes,” he muttered. Then more loudly: “I have a musical poem for ye in the Sassenach style.”
I swear by fin and feather,
By the fish out in the sea,
By the birds in the heaven,
By the grand and the wee,
By the holy sprigs of mistletoe,
That grow in holy oaken trees,
That this day, mistress,
Yer lover I will be.
Taffy opened her eyes and then made one slow blink as she saw the hectic flush upon his cheekbones, the shadows stirring again in his dilated eyes.
“Have ye nothing tae say?” he demanded, his accent growing more pronounced.
“You have good lungs,” she offered, at something of a loss to know whether she was supposed to take the verse seriously, and fearing that she was intended to do just that.
Her blood grew lighter, her pulse more rapid, her head dizzy as she considered all the things that might happen between them. Such immoral, yet wonderful thoughts she was having.
“Aye, he that’s short o’ breath shouldnae meddle
wi’ a chanter.” He rolled to his feet and approached her stony bed. “Or a woman.”
With him standing over her, Taffy was suddenly self-conscious about her mode of dress. The wantonness of her own attire—her very behavior, even—rushed into her mind, and awareness stained her cheeks until their color matched Malcolm’s own. Still, she did not move to cover herself.
“How easily ye blush,” he said, touching her fevered cheek. Then he shook his head. “Yer innocence is a bane, lass. I dree for it.”
“I suffer, too,” said some bold stranger with Taffy’s tongue, causing her to color more.
“Do ye? Yet only yer actions can free us now.”
“My actions?” she asked, thrilled, alarmed, and puzzled.
“Aye. Do ye not ken what all this signifies?” He gestured to her gown and then to the glen as a whole.
“No,” she whispered. “I don’t.”
But she was beginning to. The still-folk had brought her here for a reason. She had thought it was to rescue Malcolm from the Campbells, but there had to be more to their plan, or they would have left the glen as soon as the Campbells tired of their search. Or they might even have guided her directly to the path back home.
“ ’Tis you that must decide when we leave this place. I would sooner be dead and buried in the
clay than have ye in my bed against yer will. But we may be here in this bower many a long year, lass, if ye do not decide in my favor. And though ‘tis a bonnie enough spot, it is still a prison for us, and becoming more so wi’ every passing hour.” He dropped his hand and turned away. “I’m going down tae the river for a spell an’ see if they will let me cross. Best we find the limits of our travel.”
“Wait!” Taffy sat up and reached for his hand. When he turned back to her she could see the shadows were again moving in his eyes. His long, hard fingers closed about her wrist. The flesh was hot, nearly scorching where it lay against her skin.
“That’s
what they want, isn’t it?” she whispered. “For me to…”
“Save them. Through me.”
Save them?
Sacrifice.
“Mayhap I’m the last wi’ the sight,” he answered, knowing her unspoken question. “The last
clanna
wi’ enough faerie blood tae see the old ones. Whatever the cause, we cannae be leaving this place until there is some hope for the future.”
“Hope? A child, do you mean?” She looked at the hand about her wrist and smiled. The dark of his skin looked right against her paler flesh.
“Ultimately.” He shrugged. “No plan of the
still-folk’s making is ever so simple to understand. But they want ye tae be mine. They would have me take you now, but I shall no’ be doing anything against yer will. So ye must decide, lass.”
“No one has ever left the important decisions to me,” she confessed, still looking down at the strong hand that encircled her wrist. She was unable to think reasonably. It was as though something had peeled all of society’s morality back from her brain leaving only selfish honesty. This new voice told her that this was a moment when the winds of change would either snuff out the spark that glowed between them, or else fan it to a blaze.
“Nay?” A tiny smile had crept into his low voice. “It seems to me that yer full o’ a deal of decision regardless.”
“I’ve been practicing.”
This was her decision.
“Well then, lass? Ye should be prepared for this moment. What is it tae be? Aye, or nay? Be certain o’ yer choice now, though. There’ll be no going back once ‘tis done.” His beautiful voice was very nearly harsh now, as though he were angered by something.
“I know ‘tis madness,” Taffy whispered, staring up into his face. “Complete wanton wickedness to want you in this way.”
“So the priests tell us. But, lass, life is short.
And happiness is rare.” His thumb rubbed gently over the thrumming veins in her wrist. If it was meant to calm her, the gesture failed in its intent. “An we died on the morrow, would ye regret having passed this moment by? Never having a man tae yer bed?”
“I would,” she answered, in barely a whisper, her mind finding the peace that came with decision, or at the heart of intense prayer. Her lonely soul was not meant to be confined to one body, one heart, but should venture forth and find its mate.
“Then so be it.” He lifted his gaze from her face and directed it around the silent glen as though warning someone away.
“Are
they
here?” Taffy asked uneasily, pulling her hair about her shoulders in a curtain.
“Nay. We are alone, lass.” Malcolm smiled suddenly, a grin as bright as the hot sun of summer. He repeated: “We are alone.”
Around them, the trees lost their rigid posture and seemed to fold inward, weaving together their tressy arms into a bower. The tender leaves swallowed up the sunbeams from above, which gave a soft green twilight to the glen.
The moment narrowed until it seemed that mortal time shifted to one side and left them stranded in some unearthly place—like those stories of bespelled into a night of faerie revels
who awoke only to find that one hundred years had passed, Taffy thought dimly. This was just such a place.
There was no breath of passing breezes, no sound of ripples from the nearby waters. The whole world, other than her and Malcolm, faded away behind the veil of emerald twilight.
Taffy sensed, as she lay back on the stone, that she was joining now in a long chain of magical events. She was at last taking her place in some vast design, spanning a gap between events and clasping the lives of those who had come before her, and yet also those who would follow.
Words would not shape themselves on her thickened tongue, but she stared with her eyes wide, two flawless blue pools in which Malcolm might see all that she could not speak. She wanted to abandon herself to this desire she felt to throw herself into his passion and be consumed there. It was her destiny.
Malcolm’s eyes were a turmoil of color and emotion as he cast aside his plaid and sark and joined her on the altar. Taffy’s silvered gown slithered away, the ties unfastening and slipping off her breasts before his fingers were even there to touch them.
As though she had been given a window into Malcolm’s mind, Taffy could see and even feel what he wanted of her. He wanted to cleave into her, to become part of her very bones and flesh,
to pour himself into her dew-damp body, to lose himself in the awed regard that shone in her fathomless, ocean deep eyes.
His thoughts moved her even as they terrified her with their intensity.
He glanced down once as he brushed aside the silken tassel shielding her maidenhead and folded back the tender flesh.
Her modesty protested being seen thus by him, but no protest could force itself past her mute lips.
He paused for a moment, returning his gaze to her eyes. She knew that he worried about hurting her, but she knew there would be some pain. This ceremony was both communion and sacrifice, and had to be sealed in the blood of innocence.
Her breath caught as he entered her, and the passion in her dimmed. He dipped many times into her body, fighting his own pleasure that she might know joy, too. But it was futile. Conduits of new thoughts had been forced open in her brain. A confusion of foreign emotions raced unchecked through her mind and body, and they overwhelmed her. Malcolm was asking her to fly with him, but though she wanted desperately to please him, she could not do what he desired. In the end, her own timidity was defeating her. Malcolm had to go on alone; she could not let go of the modesty and restraint that were the only familiar landmarks she had to guide her through
this strange land of alien sensation and passion.
Yet though she had not allowed her body to be entirely swept away by Malcolm, in every other way Taffy felt herself give over to him. She poured out her feelings until there was nothing else to relinquish: He had her thoughts, her heart, even—for a moment—her soul, which flew with him where her body could not.
“Malcolm,” she whispered, her lips finally unsealed. She closed her eyes when he stilled upon her.
Amidst all the strange notions cluttering her head there was, hovering at the back of her mind, the first small shadow of grief. Something said to her that though she had somehow failed herself—and Malcolm, too—she had given the still-folk what they wanted. It was time for them to leave this holy glen.
“Have a care with yer thoughts now, lass,” Malcolm warned gently as he rolled aside. “The old ones may take yer part and give ye yer sad-thought destiny, an ye wish on it often enough.”
“They can do that?” she asked, suddenly growing alarmed as her senses returned. Flushing, Taffy started searching for her gown, feeling more naked than she ever had in her life, but the meager protection of silver shift had disappeared just like all her other clothes.
“Here? Aye, they can.”
“Wonderful. And what now—since we’ve fulfilled our destiny?” she asked, watching uneasily as the leaves overhead thinned and revealed a sky painted bright with stars and a full moon.
Only the night before it had been a crescent, she thought, the hair rising upon her arms. How much time
had
passed since they entered the glen?
“Now we dress—an’ I can find my plaid.
Ah!”
Malcolm went quickly to a nearby gorse bush and plucked up the garment. The moon was bright enough to show that the tattered woolens had been mended. It also revealed Taffy’s dress of jean laying neatly on a nearby shrub.
Feeling painfully naked and tender-skinned sitting on the cold, bare rock, Taffy hurried for the protection of her heavy clothing. She was fastening her blouse when she felt Malcolm’s hands gently lifting her tangled hair from off of her neck.
“Little though it pleases me, lass,” he said in his beautiful, calm voice, “I think we must bind these locks up so we may travel wi’ stealth. The flora shall not be so cooperative once we are gone from the glen.”
Taffy stood still as he secured her hair with a piece of wiry vine.
“Where will we go?”
“Where we must.”
“But where is the door?” she asked, turning to face him.
“The door?”
“The way back. You said they would show me the door when I had given them what they wanted.”
“Do ye still seek death then?” he asked sadly, his expression growing slightly aloof.
“Death! Of course not. What are you talking about?”
“The road ye traveled was the way of the dead, lass. The low road.”
“No. It couldn’t be. How could I have survived?” But she lacked conviction. The road certainly hadn’t been anything of this world. Malcolm seemed so definite that way was dangerous, and if anyone should know about such things, it was he. Had she really traveled through the land of the dead to come here? And what would the return trip mean for her?
Too, though she knew she should rush back to reassure her father of her well-being, she found herself in no haste to leave Malcolm. Not even if it meant facing the wrath of all the Campbells without a single change of clothing.
Some strong emotions were teeming in her breast and she did not know what to do with them. They had appeared so quickly, with no time for conventional preparation. She now had a lover—yet there’d been no courting, no flowers,
no mention of any future. Her whole world and all her assumptions about her relations with the male half of it had been turned on end.
She needed time to adjust to what had happened. To think about what she should do.
Malcolm saw her indecision. “Aye, it was the low road. Well, an it is the still-folk’s wish, ye’ll travel the spirit road again, ye may be sure of it. For the present, I think we’ll content ourselves wi’ departing from Duntrune. The Campbells are apt tae be in evil humor, what wi’ me escaping and ye shooting so many o’ their men. We’ll head Kilmartin way.”
“Thanks for reminding me about the Campbells. It had nearly slipped my mind,” she grumbled, smoothing her skirt with a nervous hand. The ugly jean should serve her against Malcolm’s lust as well as any armor had ever protected a knight in battle, especially now that it had been restored to wholeness.
The piper laughed softly as he pulled Taffy close. His body was hot, pulsing with life and energy, which made her own heart join the unwilling thrum of renewing desire.
“Aye. I’d no’ Campbells in my head, either. All the same, best we recall them now or there’ll be no more chances for sweet forgetfulness. Fetch yer gear, Taffy lass. We’d best be away while we may.”