Highland Tales Series Box Set

by Rory B. Byrne

  “It tells me your father glimpsed the power of the mound. But he was a good man, lass. You are your father’s daughter. You have a good head and a stronger heart. You know what needs to happen. You must stop them from opening the portal. They must not go through. I know they have those awful men.” Marcia tapped her nose. “I smell the gun grease on them.”

  “They’re armed?” Alice winced when she lifted her head. “You saw the weapons? I can get a warrant—”

  Marcia shook her head. “Lass, you do not understand. This is the law of Nicneven. The doorway between here and Elphame must remain closed. She came through before; she wiped out legions of warriors. She will come again. Nicneven will unleash the hordes of Coin-Sìth. The nuckelavee, the stoor worms, they will come into the lands and poison all life in Scotland and the rest of world. For the sake of the queen, we must keep the portal closed for the benefit of your people. I am pech. I am bound to uphold the oath of my people, to protect Elphame. I need help, Alice. I do not have access to the weapons and tools I once had, and I believe you understand that once your people see a new world, they will stop at nothing to claim it. You did it to all weaker civilizations across the planet.

  “There is another world on the other side of that fairy mound. If they breach the portal and go through, Nicneven will consider it an act of war.” There was more cigarette smoke between Alice and Marcia than clear air. After everything Alice endured, second-hand smoke was the least of her worries.

  “Your people once signed an agreement between Nicneven and humans. The Weatherspoons’ ancestors agreed to the terms of that contract. They remain in Scotland, and while I cannot speak for Nicneven or her court, I think accidents like Morgan Goodlet, Phoebe, or her daughter passing through the portal are not enough for the wrath of the queen. Yet, I know that man, MacIomhair, has knowledge of Elphame, and now he has access.”

  “It’s like a Magna Carta between two worlds.”

  “I do not know that term, lass.”

  “The Magna Carta Libertatum was the Great Charter. It is one of the most important documents in human history. It is the principle we as civilized people live under the subject of that law enacted in 1215. It guarantees people the right to justice and a fair trial.”

  Marcia nodded with the description. She gave signs to Alice that whatever happened between humans and the people of Elphame went well beyond anything in strictly human history.

  “Those men, the group that came here from who knows where, some of them burned down the guesthouse after they took Rory and Beth. They do not want anyone to know they have the Weatherspoons. People will search that house for weeks looking for Beth, Rory, and you, Alice. People must not know about the fairy mound. They must not know there is a way into Elphame right outside Inverness. If more humans learn of Elphame, it will not stop here.

  “They are in the compound, preparing to open the portal,” Marcia continued. “Somehow, they learned the secrets of the fairy mound, and that is why MacIomhair claimed the land and barred it from the outside. He intends to go through to enter Elphame. When he does that, Nicneven will wet her armies upon them. She will not stop there. I believe when Nicneven finishes with those men MacIomhair has with him, she will send her legions through the gates again.”

  “You said she destroyed the gates. Wasn’t that a long time ago?”

  Marcia nodded. “You underestimate the power of a being that has lived over four thousand years. Nicneven is timeless.”

  “What do we do?” Alice asked.

  As a law enforcement officer, she took an oath to uphold duties with fairness, integrity, and impartiality. She had to defend fundamental human rights and give equal respect to all people. And in Alice’s mind, it didn’t matter if they were human or not, everyone deserved protection according to the law. The trouble with responsibility, though, was Alice knew if anyone else found out about the fairy mound, a doorway into another world, they’d seize control. It’d become an international debate. Scotland and England would go to war to gain access. The people would want to explore, to own commercial and private real estate in Elphame. They wouldn’t care about the people and creatures already living there. This matter went well beyond anything she experienced in her short years on the planet.

  Alice knew Marcia, a pech, saved her, a human, from death because she saw something in Alice. Marcia needed help; she needed Alice to get into the compound. Alice didn’t know how she’d do it. All she knew was Beth and Rory were still alive, she hoped. And Brian MacIomhair knew the secret of the mound. Alice knew Simon Hinton probably lost his arm at some point when the portal opened for Harper. Two tragedies suddenly made sense. So far, they kept it quiet. If Marcia could smell gun oil, then the militia under Cole Fraser meant to take Elphame by force. Alice and Marcia were alone against heavily-armed and well-trained men. Fraser was a mercenary. What happened when he went through the portal? Would he think rules and laws of earth held any consequence in Elphame?

  Evander and the Selkie

  I found myself tied to a handsome young man, skinny with velvety-smooth chin and cheeks. I guessed he was a few years around my age, and manhood hadn’t caught up to him yet. Like it or not, we were allied together. The knot on my head turned to a dull ache. It was a leftover pain from when one of the miserable seven angry men knocked me out before tying my wrists together. I had made a deal with them two days ago, and so far, we traveled in a direction I didn’t know. I took subtle hints from Evander, the young scout from Clan MacQuoid. We got to know each other in the day following my capture. The warriors had lengths of hemp rope tied between me, Evander, and the selkie. We were in this together now.

  “We need to help her,” I had whispered on our first night bound together. We laid on the ground with our elbows drawn together at our backs. Our wrists were tied with the wrists facing away from each other, linked together. I had the misfortune of watching the poor creature suffering alone, bound and tied, too weak to walk, too weak to fight. “What is she?” I asked.

  The seven lost Highlanders had gathered around the cooking fire pit. They weren’t paying much attention to us for the moment. One of them still had my boots laced together around his neck. I called him Boots because he fought to keep them. He turned my thermal socks into mittens and cut holes in the ends for fingers. Another had my jacket tied around his neck by the cuffs. I called him Jacket. They were brutish men, big and smelly. Though I suspected I didn’t smell like honey and rosewater either. The female creature, the humanoid with large round eyes and a small snout, smelled like something from the water. She secreted a slime that coated her mottled flesh. I saw her sometimes drawing her webbed hands over her arms and legs, anywhere she could reach while tied.

  Evander shifted behind me, pinching my wrists as he tried seeing her from his angle. He exhaled after craning his neck.

  “It is a selkie,” he whispered. “It is a creature of water. On land, it can shed its skin used in the water. It is weaker on land. They must have captured it from one of the lochs in the north.”

  Vulnerable, that was the word I’d use. I made eye contact with her. Its form was human-ish. There was something intelligent and unnerving about her body and face. The facial symmetry emphasized her large brown eyes. She had a broad face and high cheekbones. Her lips were taut across her upper lip. The nose had common human features, with defining curves around the nostrils. The end of her nose cracked with blackened tones, and there were long thick hairs that sprouted around her eyebrows and mouth like whiskers. The mottled black and alabaster colors were asymmetrical in pattern. Her hands and feet had webbed membranes between the digits with black hooked nails on the ends of her fingers and toes. I watched her blinking at me, running the sticky film over her shoulders. Her black hair had uneven rows of thick strands. Some of the longer strands had knotted braids with seashells woven into the hair.

  “She will be dead soon,” Evander said. “I do not know where it
came from. We know to stay clear of the lochs where we see signs of the selkie.”

  “I’m not leaving her,” I said. “I’m not going to let them kill her or eat her.”

  “Why? You cannot help it.”

  “I can, and I will. I stopped them from eating you, didn’t I?”

  “Fair enough,” he whispered.

  It was an uneasy alliance. I managed to keep the Highlanders from abusing the selkie and from eating Evander. Cannibalism was way outside my grip on reality. I suspected desperate times and such, but they managed to snare rabbits and caught a few voles. Evander taught me how to just swallow the skinned voles after gutting them with our finger and pulling the fur off. It was absolutely disgusting. But starving to death seemed worse. The selkie ate the voles whole, heads, guts, fur, and all. I gave up one of mine whenever the Highlanders threw more than one at Evander and me.

  At first, when I woke in the cave tied up next to Evander, I had to think fast. The seven men were, as far as I could tell, lost Highlanders. They didn’t have a clan. I negotiated a truce between the leader, a man named Camden, and me. I was a self-proclaimed Glaistig. The trouble with the proclamation, I had no idea what a Glaistig actually was, and using its title seemed to elicit fear. I used that fear as much as I could as they followed my fake directions.

  I noticed the other men didn’t use names when they talked to each other. I had to come up with names for each of them to keep them all straight. Only Camden had the honor of naming. So I took what I knew about the place I ended up, and I needed to get away from the warriors. Unfortunately, I didn’t have a clue where I was, so getting away wasn’t easy. And I knew I wasn’t going alone. I needed Evander because he gave me the direction to go. Sometimes it was with a nod, or a look, or running his finger in the mud before stepping on it, so no one else saw the line.

  I knew the more informed I was of the surroundings, the more ammunition I had against the seven men. They were uneasy and untrustworthy. I had already broken one of their toes when they first took me hostage. He wanted payback, and so far, I had managed to keep him away from me. But our time together seemed strained. The leader, Camden, had no real plans, not that I could make out. I was lost, out of my depth. I wanted to go home. I had no idea that even if I got back to the place where I arrived I’d find my way home again. I knew when we stopped our march on the third day, my ruse as a witch had come to an end.

  “Water,” Evander said. He’d carried the selkie for miles because I’d asked him. It was a sense of duty. I knew if he didn’t lift her over his shoulder and bring her, the others would let her die.

  Someone handed Evander my waterskin. With his hands bound together, he squirted water into his mouth. I watched him and waited. I knew I didn’t drink until after the men. It was a lame backward society, and if I had my way, they’d all know what it meant to see a woman scorned.

  I took the water pouch from Evander and squatted next to the selkie.

  One of the men, who I called Stone because he was huge and dense, kneed me away from the creature.

  “She needs water,” I said.

  The group laughed as if I had said something funny.

  “It gets none, and it goes no further,” Camden said.

  I drank a few drops of water and squirted as much water as possible towards the selkie before Stone yanked the strap on the waterskin. He put it over his shoulder again.

  With a mouthful of water, I slid close to the selkie. I pressed my hands on her chin. I leaned over and opened my mouth over her. She gulped the water, and I felt the heavy hand of Stone smack my head away from the selkie. Still, all the water I had in my mouth splashed down into her throat.

  Making New Friends

  Camden and the others argued as night drew over the cloudy sky. I felt the heavy moisture in the air. We had no shelter. Jacket used my coat as a hat covering his head, tying the sleeves around his chin. Boots kept my footwear on the laces around his neck. Broken Toe gave me the hairy eyeball for the umpteenth time.

  We had reached an area of the Lowlands that made it impossible to see beyond some of the low hills. Swarms of biting insects covered us. With the three of us tied together, it wasn’t getting any better the more we moved with the warriors.

  “What are you doing?” I shouted. I wanted to stop them from tearing pages from the journal.

  The man grunted with laughter. He continued to tear off sheets from the leather-bound diary of the lost airman. Stewart Hillyard, Flight Sergeant, Royal Flying Corps had arrived at the same place as me almost a century before I did, and I had found his journal in the hut he had made and left behind. Then the brownies, as I called them, came in the night and added the deerskin to my nylon jacket for insulation. The little creatures had added rabbit fur to my hooded sweatshirt around the cuffs and insulated the hood. It was the kindest thing anyone had ever done for me, in this world or my own.

  The guy I called Fire managed the fire pits, obviously, each time we stopped while Hunter and Cook foraged for food. Cook gave scraps to me and Evander, and I shared whatever I could with the selkie.

  Once I saw the last of Airman Hillyard’s journal turn from paper to ash, I felt a piece of me had burned away. He was the link I had to my old life back on earth.

  “Bring her here,” Camden said.

  Broken Toe stopped breaking twigs for the fire. He dropped all but one thin sapling. I knew he intended to hit me with it. I readied myself for him. The first raindrops began to fall around us. I saw the selkie look at the sky with relief and awe. I had enough rope between Evander and me to defend myself.

  Broken Toe pulled back on the sapling. I dove at him. My shoulder caught him in the gut, forcing him off balance. He tumbled to the ground as the others grunted with laughter. I was entertainment, but Broken Toe meant business.

  As he rolled, I pivoted under the switch as it screeched in the air over my head. I lunged at him again. My knee connected with his groin. When he let go of the switch and grabbed at the more significant bits, the group laughed harder. Still bound by the hands and barefoot, I had nowhere to go, but I had enough going along with their plan. I wasn’t going to lay down for them. I wasn’t going to ask for their mercy.

  Broken Toe backhanded me across the face. I went down heavy, my knees dropping down onto sharp stones, and I fell sideways as my shoulder banged against rocks. The rain began to splash against my exposed flesh and around us.

  “Enough,” Camden called. Broken Toe relented from beating me up more. So far, I had gotten lucky twice with him. But I suspected it was the last time.

  I saw the selkie open her eyes. She felt the rain, and her body responded to the moisture. As the downpour saturated the group, the Highlanders worked to get the fire pit secure, protecting the flames with more wood, bracken, and dry grass. Building a fire in the rain took skills. I had to admit that it was good work. But I knew, with the rain, we’d likely go to sleep hungry that night. Hunter and Cook spent too much time playing with the fire than making snares, and I didn’t know if rabbits came out in the rain.

  I sat cross-legged on the ground, my bound hands resting in my lap. As night took over the moors, I watched the selkie absorbing the rain. It was miraculous. Her body stretched to its full potential. Its skin, once dry and cracked, looked refreshed as her shriveled limbs began to thicken and draw in the water.

  I wasn’t the only one watching her. The rest of the men watched from a distance. I saw something pass between them; a silent vote that meant one of us wasn’t leaving that campsite.

  Once I realized what they intended, I grunted, got to my feet, and launched my body between the selkie and the tip of my dirk in the hands of Knife. He kept the blade even though Camden was the leader of the wayward group; Knife ended up with my dagger and had used it consistently since my capture. He meant to slit the selkie’s throat, but instead, I felt the blade touch my neck.

  �
�Stop,” Camden said.

  “We kill them. We can still make a deal,” Broken Toe said.

  Knife’s hand was hard and steady. I felt the black blade bite against my neck. I felt the selkie under my back. I had pressed my body between Knife and her. Her fingers grabbed at my sweatshirt. She understood that I had sacrificed myself for her.

  “You need me,” I said. It wasn’t comfortable talking with the massive fist close to my jaw.

  “You lead us toward Loch Fannich,” Camden said. “We will not yield to Clan MacQuoid.”

  “Chieftess Freya of Clan MacQuoid is a just person. She will treat you with honor,” Evander said from his ropes and place away from the fire. He wasn’t going anywhere. I knew he felt exhaustion for carrying the selkie. She likely weighed around eighty pounds. I had tried to carry her, but Evander always hefted the girl over his shoulder without complaint.

  Camden looked as though he considered the offer.

  “She works with the queen,” Stone said.

  “We should kill them and leave them here to rot,” Knife said.

  I knew he drew blood because it felt hot and stung before instantly feeling cold. I refused to relent to him or give Camden an ounce of fear.

  “You claim you are Glaistig,” Camden said. “You have no hooves. You claim you are a witch, yet you show us no signs of your powers. I think you are like this lost clansman, you are a child in the wild, and you are nothing more than a burden to us now.”

  “I think Bean Nighe believes I have great power.”

  Namedrops had worked before. I knew to use them only when it benefited me. It was the mystery that kept me alive. I felt the blade pull away from my throat, and I pressed my fingers against the wound. It was a deep scratch, but I wasn’t going to let them kill the selkie.