The Autumn Duchess- The Seasons' Fairy Tales

by Katie M John

  He snorted a laugh and let go of my arm. “Who are you? One of George’s men sent to spy on us?” He crouched down to add another log to the burner. “That would at least explain the weird dress,” he added under his breath.

  “George’s men. Funny dress? What are you talking about?” He flashed me a look over his shoulder, which I couldn’t quite read. “You’ve just told me you were kissed by a fairy and now you can animal shift, and yet, I’m the one who feels like they’re being interrogated. And what’s wrong with my clothes?”

  He was busy in the cupboard, gathering things, which he then laid out on the table.

  “We’re lucky that the medical box is fairly well stocked.”

  I looked down at the tatty old wooden box and its heavy, clumsy metal contents. The items looked like something from several hundred years ago, and certainly didn’t give the impression of being sterile.

  His gaze returned to me and he looked me up and down again. “Although us Scots men like to wear a skirt, our women haven’t yet taken to wearing the trousers,” he said, laughing.

  I looked down at my jeans and frowned. “They’re just jeans. About as normal as you can get.”

  “If you say so,” he said, returning to the blanket box, where he thrust his hand right down into the bottom and pulled out a bottle of amber liquid. Whisky.”

  “Oh, you beauty,” he said kissing it.

  “How did you know…?” I asked.

  “I like to keep my boltholes stocked with all the necessities,” he said, heading back to the table and beginning to wash a nasty looking needle with a piece of relatively clean cloth he had soaked with the liquor.

  “Oh, no!” I said, shaking my head. “I hope you’re not thinking of coming near me with that dirty piece of junk.”

  He stopped and fixed me with a look. “It needs stitching up or it’s going to go bad.”

  I backed into the wall of the bothy. “I’ll just wait until we get to the village and then I can get to an A and E. I should probably get the rest of me checked out, too.”

  “A and E?” His lips twisted with confusion. “I have nay idea what you are talking about, lass. You sure you’re not a spy. You’re English, which means you’re naturally treacherous.”

  I gasped at his insult. “Rude, much?” I replied, affronted.

  He held out the bottle of liquor, encouraging me to drink it. I shook my head. “No thank you.” I was still smarting from his insult.

  He shook his head. “Well, as you wish. I guess you’re braver than most of the men I know.”

  “I told you, I’ll wait until I get back to the village. I’m more likely to die from an infection from that needle than this wound.”

  “There’s no one there that can help you—not unless you count old Meg, and to be honest, I’d rather take my chances with myself than that old crone. At least I knows to clean the needle first.”

  It took me a moment to fully register his words. “What do you mean there’s no one to help me?” A cold, unsettled feeling had begun to snake its way around my guts. Something was really wrong. The hunters’ dress, the shapeshifting demi-god in front of me, the sense that time hadn’t passed.

  “Where am I?” I asked, not really meaning place, but something else.

  “You’re in the Highlands,” he said with an expression that told me he was increasingly unsure about my sanity.

  “Yes, I know that, I don’t mean that… I mean,” I paused, knowing I was about to ask something ridiculous. “What year is this?”

  “Did yous bang your head too?” he said, moving close to me and dipping my head under his firm hand. “There is a wee cut there.”

  “Please, just tell me what year it is, please.”

  “Why, it’s the year 1745.”

  “No!” I gasped. “You’re wrong. You have to be wrong. That’s not possible.” I said, having more difficulty accepting this than the fact I’d seen a stag transform into a guy.

  “There are lots of things that seem impossible, it doesn’t mean they are,” he said. “Now let’s get this arm fixed up before I end up having to chop it off. It wouldn’t be easy what with it being so close to your shoulder.”

  “Shit!” I whispered under my breath but it was loud enough to shock him.

  “She has a mouth like a soldier, too,” he said laughing. “I’m Glen, what’s your name, lass?”

  “Skye.”

  “As in the island?”

  I shrugged. “I guess so.”

  “It’s pretty. Your eyes are the same colour as the waters there.”

  I frowned.

  “Yes,” he said, “the waters on the isle are different somehow. More blue. Maybe it’s because they’re closer to the sky.”

  I blushed under his stare and wondered what he thought when he looked at me like that.

  “So,” I said. “If what you say is true and it’s really 1745 then I guess there aren’t many options about getting my arm fixed?”

  “Sorry,” he said, handing me back the bottle of whisky.

  “Guess, I’d better drink up then.”

  He nodded. “Just don’t drink it all. I need to keep some back to wash the wound.”

  “Great,” I said, removing the cap and swigging the liquid in the hope that if I could get it back far enough in my throat, I wouldn’t have to taste it. I hated the stuff. Even the smell made me sick.

  Glen watched me with entertained curiosity. “Not only does the lass dress and speak like a soldier, she drinks like one, too.”

  “Oh, God!” I gasped as the fire erupted in my chest. The whisky burned and stole my breath and I was forced to pace around the bothy thumping my chest as if I were afraid I was actually going to set on fire.

  His laughter filled the space. “Guess I spoke too soon.”

  “This isn’t funny. None of this is funny.” I said, my mood souring with self-pity. My head had had far too much to deal with in the last few hours and I didn’t know which was was up.

  “Let’s get this over with,” he said gently, “and then we can settle for the night and you can tell me more about how you got to be in my bothy wearing odd clothes and speaking like a heathen.”

  “Spend the night—here, with you?”

  He raised his eyebrow and smirked. “There are some lasses who would think that good fortune.”

  “Hmmm,” I said, rolling my eyes and taking a seat, extending my arm out onto the table. I knew it was going to hurt, but there was already so much hot pain there that it was just yet another layer of suffering for my body to deal with.

  Glen had found the smoothest stick from the kindling pile and he offered it to me with a look of apology.”

  “Well, if I wasn’t nervous beforehand…” I said.

  The pain was horrendous and I had already managed to sink my teeth into the stick by the time the needle went in and out for the second time. I prayed I’d just pass out. No such luck; my inner spirit was stubborn and so I spat the stick out and spent the next fifteen minutes shouting and yawping as Glen grew increasingly impatient with me.

  “Keep still, lass. You’re making it worse.”

  “I hate you!” I screamed

  “Aye, I know you do.”

  He patted me on the knee and smiled before snipping the end of the thread with the rusty pair of scissors. Just when I thought my agony had dulled to a deep, throbbing pain, he took the bottle of Whisky and poured it over the wound, eliciting a further scream from me that I was sure they’d hear right down at the bottom of the valley.

  “But you’ll forgive me.”

  I sat for a while afterwards, gazing at the fire, my body adjusting to the different sensations of injury. I’d still not checked out the rest of my body but I guessed that if there had been any internal bleeding or tissue damage, there was a good chance I would probably be dead by now.

  “I’m going to go and get us some water. Brew us up a cup of sweet tea,” he said.

  I nodded and watched him head out into the storm
y evening. He looked slightly ridiculous wrapped up in his tartan blanket skirt and shawl, but there were other elements that couldn’t be ignored, like the way his muscles curved around his shoulder bones and how his forearms were sculpted with strength, and how his torso was defined into a tidy six-pack that rippled slightly when he walked and which was held in tight and taught at the navel, so that he looked sprung for any kind of action, whether that be fighting or loving.

  I blushed deeper. These thoughts mixing with the other crowded emotions in my head. If what Glen had said was true, if this really was 1745 then somehow, I had managed to break the equation of space and time and had travelled back into the past.

  The likelier explanation was I was lying in some state of the art intensive care unit in Aberdeen in an induced coma and this was the funky effect of the sedatives they’d plied me with.

  After all, it wasn’t just the total impossibility of time travel, but Glen had appeared to her as a freaking stag! What the hell was all that about? And the talk of fairies.

  CHAPTER THREE

  “So are you an English spy?” Glen asked, pulling the spare chair up to the fire.

  “Do I look like a spy?” I asked, pushing up my leggings to reveal my shins covered in bruises.

  “I guess not—but then a spy’s job is not to look like a spy.”

  “That’s true,” I replied, wincing as I rolled up the other leg.

  “What happened to you?”

  “I don’t know.” I fixed him with my eyes, wanting him to trust me. I needed him to trust me because if this really was 1745 then he might be my only friend.

  I returned to inspecting my wounds and could feel his eyes moving over me again. “Maybe you’re French,” he said, more to himself than to me. “They wear funny clothes, too.”

  I rolled back my leggings and sighed heavily. “I’m going to tell you something, and the only reason I’m telling you this is because you’ve told me something pretty unbelievable and asked me to believe it. And, what with you being an enchanted animal shifter and all that, this thing I’m about to tell you should be pretty easy to believe.”

  He leaned forward onto his knees and I could tell he was really listening. I regretted starting the starting the conversation almost immediately but it was too late to fudge it. “So, I…” I stopped to clear my throat, “the reason I asked you what year it was is because I don’t live in 1745.”

  His brow knitted together tightly and he snorted. “What do yer mean, you don’t live in 1745. It is 1745.”

  I shook my head. “I need you to believe me, even though it sounds a little crazy. I live in 2018.”

  He leaned back in his chair and slapped his thigh, laughing almost uncontrollably. Any other time, he would look cute laughing like this, but I needed him to stop laughing and start believing. “I’m serious, Glen,” I said. “I think, somehow, I’ve travelled back in time.”

  He pinched his nose and tried to regain his composure. “You’ve got to admit, lass, that’s a pretty tall tale to swallow.”

  “I guess it’s about as tall a tale as a boy kissed by a fairy and who ended up so enchanted that he can shift between man and a stag.”

  His laughter stopped at that. “It was a curse.” The atmosphere in the bothy thickened. “It weren’t an enchantment. It was a hex.”

  “A hex? From a Witch?”

  Glen shook his head. “No, from the queen of the Green Fae.”

  “Aren’t fairies meant to be nice?”

  Glen pressed his lips together and all the previous sunlight in his face shadowed over. “No, not all fairies are nice. They’re proud and cruel and selfish.”

  “So why were you cursed?”

  “Because I stole something from them—only I didn’t know I was stealing from them.”

  “What was it?”

  “A small gold enchanted crown,” he said, placing his hand under the blanket he had wrapped around his shoulders. “Like this one.”

  I’d noted the small gold necklace topped with tiny pearls earlier but had put it down to being a trinket from a sweetheart.

  “It’s a fairy crown.”

  “So why didn’t you just give it back?”

  He shook his head. “It doesn’t work like that and now I have to wear this as a reminder of my crime, or at least that’s what she told my mother. I was only three years old when it happened.”

  “The fae held a three-year-old responsible for such crime?”

  “Like I said, Fairies aren’t nice.”

  “But you were three years old!” I said again for emphasis. “You just found something pretty and sparkly. How were you to know it belonged to someone else.”

  “My mother got to choose my punishment,” he said.

  “Wow, that really is messed up.” Scottish fairies certainly seemed a different breed to the sweet little flower fairies that had decorated my nursery bedroom.

  “Sure was. The fae queen said I could either have my heart emptied, meaning I would never love or be loved, or I could live out the rest of my days shifting between human and stag. The Fae knew the choice was awful either way. No mother would ever wish for her child to live a loveless life, and yet, as a stag, in this part of the world, I would always be in danger of being hunted down and my head being made into a trophy.”

  “And she chose the Stag,” I said, thinking this would probably have been the choice I would have made in the same situation.

  “She believed I would grow strong and smart enough to outrun the hunters but today was a close call. I felt the bullet kiss my flank and it was only fortune that led me here to you. She could never have known that some of the clansmen I grew up with would have such a talent and a thirst for the sport.”

  “But surely there must be a way of marking you so the local people know it’s you—I mean, they must know about the curse, it would have been hard to hide such a thing from your people.”

  Glen shook his head. To be cursed by a fairy is a fate worse than anything. If the villagers knew of my curse, then they would be sure to kill me. We’re still linked to the old world here, and they would be frightened to have someone in their community who had been fae touched.”

  “They’d really kill you?”

  He shrugged. “Let’s not go there. You haven’t finished telling me about your time-travelling adventures.” He smirked before making a poor impression of a cup of tea.

  “So what do you want to know?” I asked.

  “What don’t I want to know?”

  CHAPTER FOUR

  I didn’t know how the law of the universe worked when it came to things like time travel, but I was pretty certain that me being here with a knowledge of what the future held for Glen and his people, was not a good thing. I’d need to be careful, and hopefully not offer anything that might irreparably alter the course of history. I’d seen enough Doctor Who episodes to know that was a very bad thing indeed.

  It was hard though, knowing he was a Jacobite and that within the year many of the Scottish Highland Clansmen would be slaughtered on the battlefield of Culloden. The thought weighed heavily in my chest. It took all of my self-control not to let Glen know the fateful outcome of that long nighttime slog to the village of Culloden under the flag of Bonnie Prince Charlie, and the battle the next day, when they faced the superior canons and muskets of the red coats of George. Sixteen hundred men died in the first hour of battle. Fifteen hundred of them were Jacobite Clansmen. The mass graves were still there now, tended by descendants.

  We had visited the battle field and the museum only last week, on the way from Inverness airport. Benji, my younger brother was history obsessed, or at least when it came to battles and wars. He had begged mum to make the detour. I’d just wanted to get to Uncle Jamie’s but the power of Culloden had soon gotten under my skin and I’d found myself walking through the exhibition, lost in the narrative.

  Of course Glen tried to question me about the history; who was King? Who won the Jacobite uprising? I refused to ans
wer him, which did my cause to be believed no good. I avoided most of his questions by playing the English card and telling him with feigned stereotypical English arrogance that I hadn’t bothered to learn too much about Scottish history.

  He had snorted as if this was an acceptable explanation and as if expected any less from an English girl.

  “It’s your history, too,” he said. “Unless of course, you won?” he said, his eyes sparkling.

  I shrugged. “I’m sorry. I really don’t know anything about that time. History was never my best subject at school.”

  “’tis a pity. If you’d paid a little more attention, then who knows how the future could be rewritten.”

  “Then it’s just as well I spent my History lessons writing love notes to Simon Harvey,” I joked. “Time is a delicate thing. It shouldn’t be messed with.”

  He nodded and folded his arms across his chest. “Don’t tell anyone what you’ve told me,” he warned. “I mean it. And you might want to act a little differently. You’re not very ladylike, the swearing, the swagger, the way you speak like you’re educated.”

  “Seriously!” I said, my inner feminist stirring.

  “I’m trying to help you, lass. You don’t want to bring too much attention to yourself. It’s bad enough you’re English, but what with being from the future, too. They’ll be only too keen to get you in a chair with a dirk to your throat. Don’t give them any easy reason.”

  All at once, the immensity of what Glen was saying hit me. I was a freaking walking oracle of the future and I didn’t doubt there were some who would do anything to get that knowledge out of me.

  “You need to promise to keep my secret,” I pleaded, understanding the danger of my position. In times of war, knowledge was the most precious commodity. “I mean it, Glen. If people got to know what I know…”

  “I guess we both have secrets to keep,” he said, adding another log to the burner.

  I nodded. “I promise your secret is safe with me, Glen,” I said making a solemn vow.

  I yawned. The heat of the fire had wrapped around the small bothy and the earlier effects of the whisky were making me sleepy. I looked around looking for anywhere I might snuggle down and sleep but soon realised there was nowhere to lie down.