He stepped in front of Ceana, blocking her from Lady MacDonald’s view. “My lady—”
Lady MacDonald held up her hand and left it there, suspended in mid-air like a blocker. She angled her head so that her profile faced Gavran, and her gaze commanded the attention of her guards. “Please leave us.”
The taller guard, with the pointy face, rocked back and forth, and the older guard’s gaze hopped between Ceana and the door.
Lady MacDonald lowered her hand and turned the full force of her unnaturally calm gaze onto Gavran. “We had a misunderstanding earlier, but they’re no threat to me. True, yes?”
The yes hit Gavran’s ears funny. Foreign. Like her appearance and mannerisms. “We came to seek your help, not your harm.”
Both guards murmured Aye, my lady and backed out the door.
Lady MacDonald’s gaze flickered past him, toward the floor. “A fairy curse can’t be broken by any human means. I spoke true before when I told you I couldn’t provide what you sought.”
A small sound escaped from Ceana. He glanced back. She still lay curled into a ball.
He dropped to his knees beside her. His own pious platitudes in the past about failure making a person stronger and providing a learning opportunity for future success taunted him now. Ceana had been right. He’d never known true failure. And this kind of failure didn’t bear the bitterness of medicine, bringing healing along with the sting. It bore the bitterness of fetid meat, sickening him with every bite.
He wasn’t sure Ceana would rally this time. Everyone had a point where their spirit could take no more punishment.
He looked back up at Lady MacDonald. “Is there nothing we can do? No one else you could send us to?”
Lady MacDonald sighed, more deeply than seemed possible and looked again at Ceana. “Please encourage her to sit. I have a proposal, but I won’t make it until I know you’re both willing to hear it. I suspect she’s had enough choices taken from her since the curse.”
Ceana moved on the ground beside him. She gave him a fragile look. He hated not being able to stand between her and whatever Lady MacDonald might have to say.
He offered her his hand, and she took it. They both stood. At least they wouldn’t have to look up at Lady MacDonald that way.
Ceana dropped his hand but stayed next to him.
“I can’t cure the curse,” Lady MacDonald said, “but I have a connection who may be able to aid you. Unlike you and me, he’s not human.”
A strange pain rattled in his chest like something vital had shaken loose. Perhaps, after all of this, he shouldn’t have been surprised to hear it confirmed that the fae existed, but part of him still was. “He’s fae?”
The lady nodded. “But you will never find him without my help, and he will not reveal himself to you unless I’m with you.”
He well knew the change that happened in a voice during a marketplace haggle. Lady MacDonald’s voice sounded that way now. “And what will such help cost us? We have no money. Nothing of value to offer.”
“We have no want or need for your money. What I need is a service from you.”
Ceana stiffened beside him, and he spread his feet, bracing for what was to come.
“What type of service?” Ceana asked.
Her voice was spread thin with suspicion. He moved closer to her so their sleeves brushed. He’d expected her to jump at the offer with no questions asked. But with all she’d suffered in the time before he found her, perhaps he shouldn’t be surprised she regarded the lady’s words with more caution than even he did.
The lady’s lips quivered as if they wanted to smile, but she wouldn’t give them the freedom. “My contact can’t be reached by letter or messenger. He’ll show himself to me alone, and at present, I’m a prisoner in my own home. Because of my knowledge of the fae, they’ve sent a nuckalevee to kill me should I ever leave the castle grounds.”
Gavran traded a glance with Ceana. Christ preserve them. The fae were more malicious even than the tales told.
Ceana tilted her chin up. “And you want us to do what, exactly?”
“I want you to kill it.”
Gavran ground his teeth together to keep from cursing. Lady MacDonald had a castle full of trained soldiers, yet she chose to send them against whatever a nuckalevee was. “Why don’t your guards kill it?”
She smiled this time, but it was more of a movement of muscle than an actual sign of mirth. “My husband believes that if we directly attack it, it will anger the fae further. If someone else were to slay it, there would be no repercussions.”
For the MacDonalds at least, but what about them? His mamaidh feared the power of a fae as small as a water spriggan. “What’s a nuckalevee?”
Ceana shifted. “According to my mamaidh’s stories, it looks like a one-eyed horse. With no skin.” The hand next to his brushed his fingers. “Crops wither in its path, and its breath spreads disease wherever it goes.”
No wonder his mamaidh refused to tell the old myths and stories. Neither of his sisters would sleep if they thought a skinless horse roamed the countryside, waiting to afflict them with the Black Death or whatever other pestilence struck its fancy. “Is that truth?”
The lady watched Ceana with narrowed eyes. “Yes.”
Gavran scrubbed a finger across his upper lip. It was moist. “Then how do you expect us to kill a supernatural beast? Can a fae even die?”
One side of her mouth quirked again. “They can’t die, but they can be banished from this world by killing their physical form, and that, more precisely, is what I ask of you. Once you return it to the spirit realm, it will be locked away in Tartarus, and it won’t be able to return to this earth until the end of days.”
Slaughtering a cow or a sheep was easy, but a supernatural monster like Lady MacDonald described would be more like a bear. He’d seen men mauled to death trying to rid themselves of a bear who’d gotten a taste for their livestock. He shifted his gaze to the lady again. “I’m sure you don’t kill a monster with an arrow or an axe.”
“If they’re made of iron.”
He wanted to lower his head into his hands and block out everything. A month ago, he wouldn’t have believed any of this existed. Now he was tied to a woman cursed by a fairy, had learned his whole life was the way it was because he was blessed by three wishes, and he was being asked to believe that he could kill a supernatural beast with a simple iron weapon.
Instead of burying his face, he straightened. “Why iron?”
Something flickered across the lady’s face that he couldn’t interpret. It almost looked like respect. “You’ve heard the tale that iron will keep fae away?”
He nodded.
“For once, the stories are true. When the Lord God created the fae, he put safeguards in place to limit their power because some were predestined to fall. One of those safeguards is iron.”
Something about it all still didn’t sit right, but he couldn’t be sure if it was because his instincts were telling him Lady MacDonald played them false or if it was that some baser part of him sought a reason to leave with the wishes intact. Perhaps a bit of both. His feelings couldn’t be trusted.
Ceana’s feet pointed towards the door, but her upper body leaned toward Lady MacDonald as if a war raged inside her as well over whether to take the offer or run.
His gaze snagged on hers. “Ceana?”
Gavran didn’t want to take Lady MacDonald’s offer. Ceana could see it in the set of his jaw. Lady MacDonald had given him a perfect excuse to abandon her without feeling guilty.
Angry words kindled in her chest and started to cascade down her tongue, but Gavran’s gaze held hers, his face a touch paler than usual.
She clamped her teeth on her bottom lip and swallowed the words down. Gavran wasn’t her enemy here. He’d asked wise questions—ones she should have thought to ask—and his fear didn’t mean he’d run away. She ought to be more afraid than she was.
Lady MacDonald was the one to be doubted. Ceana bro
ke away from Gavran’s gaze and faced Lady MacDonald again. “Won’t they send another if we kill this one?”
“Perhaps.” Lady MacDonald’s expression gave nothing away. “Perhaps not. I am hoping for the latter. And, at the very least, it will give us the time needed to reach my contact.”
“What guarantee do we have that you’ll keep your word and help us once the nuckalevee is gone?”
“None. You can’t speak of this to anyone, nor can we sign an agreement of any kind. You will have to trust me, and I will have to trust you not to share what I’ve asked of you. If you reveal my connection to the fae, my life may be forfeit as well.”
The niggling in her mind wouldn’t clear. It poked at her gut and twisted around her lungs, making it hard to draw a clean breath. Trying to trust Gavran was one thing. What Lady MacDonald asked was entirely another. “You could stay safely behind your walls. Why endanger your secrets for us?”
Lady MacDonald rested a hand on her belly. Her gaze settled on Ceana, and for a moment, she looked almost motherly. As quickly as it’d come, her features smoothed out again, and she lowered her hand. “I know what it feels like to make a decision that you would willingly make again and yet which fills you with remorse at the same time. The opportunity you’re giving me in slaying the nuckalevee isn’t so very different from the opportunity I give to you.”
It wasn’t the answer she’d expected. And instead of setting her at ease, it set the niggling feeling inside her looping and spiraling again.
Beside her, Gavran heaved in a breath and let it out, out, out.
She didn’t need to make this decision on her own. “We need to talk it over before we decide.”
Lady MacDonald inclined her head. “I’ll give you a few minutes, but no more. If you wish to accept the offer, we must begin preparations without delay.”
She left them alone in their cell. She didn’t close the door behind her.
Ceana ran her tongue slowly over her lips and rolled them together. She was no naïve bairn to fall for every tale she was told, and this felt like the tallest tale she’d heard. And yet, if the past few days had taught her anything, it was that she might be too quick to judge and too slow to trust. “Does something feel wrong about this situation to you?”
Gavran cocked an eyebrow at her in a way that said What doesn’t feel wrong about this?
A laugh built like a geyser inside of her, but she stoppered it before it could escape. Her mamaidh always said she had a touch of the macabre to her. She shouldn’t find humor in this. “Do you trust Lady MacDonald?”
Gavran rubbed his eyes. “Harvesting the wheat with the tares. I’m sure there’s some truth in what she’s told us, but she’s sown some lies in as well, so we either have to take the lies with the truth or none at all.”
All or none. He was right.
Futile as it might seem, fighting the nuckalevee was at least an actionable goal. No more hunting for elusive answers or stumbling around blind. But they might go through with all Lady MacDonald asked and have no reward to show for it. Or be killed in the attempt. “So then what do you think we should do?”
The words sounded stilted and off-key to her, like playing a fiddle with untrained fingers. Perhaps trust and teamwork weren’t something that always came naturally. Perhaps they required practice like anything else.
He flickered a smile like he was trying—unsuccessfully—to set her at ease, and then said nothing for the longest time. When he finally spoke, his voice sounded rusty. “Our question needs to be do we believe she’s told us true that she’s the only one who can help us and that the nuckalevee has trapped her and is causing the blight and plague? If that’s true, we have no choice but to fight the nuckalevee, whether we trust her or not.”
But how was she supposed to tell true from false? She’d been wrong about Gavran when she’d given in to her hatred and foolishly thought he’d changed when she was the one who’d changed. They’d been taken in by the spaewife, too. “Not all famines and plagues are caused by supernatural evil.”
“True enough, but what reason would the MacDonalds have for sending us on a fool’s errand if there’s no nuckalevee?” Gavran absently rubbed at his shoulder. “If they wanted us gone, they could have turned us over to my dadaidh and been done with it. And I’m certain they’re not cruel enough to seek entertainment by tormenting us. Even on MacLeod lands, the MacDonalds are spoken of with respect.”
“So the nuckalevee is real, or at least the MacDonalds believe it is.” If Lady MacDonald spoke true, and she walked away, she’d never get another chance to break the curse. She’d not be able to help her brother. “Do you think she’s telling the truth about being our only hope?”
He let out an eternal sigh. “I want to tell you I think we can find another way.”
He wanted to, but he didn’t. This was the only way. Fight the nuckalevee or give up. “We choose together.”
The words still hurt on the way out, but they felt a little more natural than before.
His gaze slid away from her face, and more emotions than she could name or attempt to guess at washed across his features. “If this is the only way, we need to do it, for your sake and for your brother’s. And for mine, too. I’m trying to become better at keeping promises than I am at making them.”
Her words tossed back at her, but his smile took the sting out of them. “So we fight the nuckalevee?”
He took her hand and she let him—just this once, to seal their agreement. “We fight the nuckalevee.”
Chapter 16
The walls, lined with claidheamh-mor swords, war axes, dirks, and other weapons she’d never seen before, made Ceana feel like she was suffocating. She’d been lucky as a child not to slice off her finger while skinning neeps. She’d like as fall on one of these weapons as be able to wield it well against the nuckalevee.
Gavran strode forward and pulled a claidheamh-mor from its hooks on the wall. The sword had a twisted hilt that looked like a unicorn’s horn, and decorative clovers capped each end of the curved crossguard.
He drew it from its sheath with a rasp and swung it confidently in a figure-eight pattern. “A handsome weapon.”
Lord MacDonald grinned. “Aye. But you won’t want to go up against a nuckalevee with a claymore. Long as it is, you’d still be in too close quarters with the beast.”
Ceana raised a hand in front of her, stretched her fingers out as long as they would go. She could lay her hands palm to fingertip ten times or more along the length of the blade, yet that would be too close to the nuckalevee?
She straightened her shoulders. She’d not lose courage now. Given the choice of anything over continuing to live with her curse, she’d choose the other option. “What weapons would you have us use? Neither of us have even seen a nuckalevee before.”
Lord MacDonald lifted a polearm from the rack next to him. The weapon’s long shaft ended in an axe-like blade and spike mounted on the top. On the opposite side from the axe blade was a pointed hook.
Lord MacDonald offered it to her. “A Lochaber axe. The nuckalevee’s like a giant horse, and this is the best tool for fighting a mounted opponent.”
She hesitated, then grasped the pole with both hands. It swayed slightly in her grip, like a wind caught it even thought they were inside. The head towered over her, more than six feet long in all.
She raised it off the floor, and it bobbed left to right. Gavran and Lord MacDonald jumped back a step. The Lochaber axe wasn’t as heavy as she’d expected, but it was awkward.
“Maybe we’ll have to saw the bottom off to fit it to your height,” Lord MacDonald said.
He motioned for Gavran to grab one as well and headed outside. She followed them, but the end of the Lochabar axe caught on the edge of the door, and she pitched forward over it. She threw out her hands, and the rough stones scraped her palms. She bit back a cry and scrambled to her feet.
The men were far enough ahead that neither of them seemed to notice. She turned away fro
m them and pressed her gritty palms to her eyes. She couldn’t fail at this. She couldn’t.
She scooped up the Lochabar axe and held it close under the head, dragging the pole along the ground.
The training fields stood empty, and no movement came from the nearby stables. Lady MacDonald had emphasized that they couldn’t be tied to what Ceana and Gavran were planning to do, but Ceana hadn’t fully understood the lengths they were willing to go to in order to keep their secret. Emptying an entire segment of their castle, especially given the unusual number of children who inhabited the place, must have taken a monumental effort.
A tingle of numbness ran over her. They weren’t being sent out like some sort of sacrifice to appease the monster or to keep the secret, were they?
She slapped her palm against the Lochabar pole. The time living under the curse made her expect the worst in every situation. If the MacDonalds expected them to be killed by the nuckalevee, they would have let them go out with swords.
Lord MacDonald staged Gavran through moves with the Lochabar she could barely follow let alone imitate. Gavran picked them up quickly. The MacLeods forced the men on their lands to undergo a certain amount of training when they came of age. She hadn’t envied Gavran that at the time, but she did now.
“Your turn,” Lord MacDonald called.
She dragged her Lochabar out onto the field. The thing thumped behind her like a broken limb. If she didn’t know better, she’d think it mocked her.
“Hold it like this.” Lord MacDonald pushed her hands apart. “You’ll balance it better with a greater spread.”
She increased the distance between her hands.
He grimaced in a way that clearly said You’re not paying attention. “Not that far. Your shoulders will tire too easily.”
Ceana closed her grip until he nodded.
“You need to learn is how to take a blow without losing your grip. You can’t take the full force as small as you are. Let it roll off to the side, like water off a tent.”
But how was she supposed to do that? Beside her, Gavran swung his Lochabar and cleaved the arm from the straw-stuffed practice dummy. Was this something born into a man? Surely Lord MacDonald realized she had no idea what he meant.
Cursed Wishes Page 12
