All the things that had bothered her before made sense now. But for one. “The spaewife we met in Dunvegan, how did she know?”
“She’s a friend who aided me before I took on a finite human existence. When I became human permanently, I knew the unseelie would seek to harm me and would use anyone I cared about against me. I sent her off to MacLeod lands, the last place anyone loyal to Clan MacDonald would go, to protect her.”
There was a resignation in her voice. The tone harmonized with the one deep inside Ceana. Protecting those one loved often required great sacrifices, but one took those on because they valued those lives above their own happiness.
Now she was doubly glad Gavran had prevented her from killing the spaewife.
Lady MacDonald handed her the plate of food.
As she finished off the meal, the gnawing feeling in the back of her mind returned. Lady MacDonald had shown compassion and her desire to protect those she cared about. Yet she hadn’t done anything to stop the nuckalevee until Ceana and Gavran showed up. “You lied to us about why you couldn’t slay the nuckalevee yourselves.”
“Yes.” Lady MacDonald’s hand fluttered to her stomach. “The seelie and unseelie are at war. If I interfere in that war or attack another fae, Ihon and I will die.”
Ceana slumped back in her chair. Emotions tangled up inside her—fear, pity, anger. Mostly anger. All anger.
The anger she’d felt at her dadaidh for wallowing in his grief instead of caring for his family.
The anger she’d felt at the fairy for forcing her into an impossible choice.
The anger she felt at herself for wanting to save herself and Gavran instead of others—Lady MacDonald reflected it back to her, magnified.
She dropped the plate onto the table. It clattered and rolled in a circle. “You allowed all those people to die in order to save yourselves.”
Lady MacDonald’s eyes turned from brown to black. “You met my husband’s heir. What do you think the lives of our people will be like with him as lord? All the children we shelter here would be begging in the streets or worse.”
Ceana silently cursed her own arrogance. She’d forgotten about the additional stakes at play. Most people she knew would rather die than live under a cruel lord. Maybe Gavran was right that she was too apt to think she knew best. “I’m sorry, my lady. I spoke rashly.”
“Salome.”
“What?”
“My name is Salome.”
Ceana gave a slow nod. She saw the offer for what it was. Lady MacDonald—Salome felt the same sense of being kindred as she did.
Salome brought her other hand to rest on her belly with the first. “We would both have gladly died to spare them if we believed their lives wouldn’t be worse with us gone. If my unborn child proves to be a boy and we can place him safely out of Hugh’s reach to grow, perhaps we’ll still be able to make that choice before there’s no one left to save.”
Salome barely showed. Ceana hadn’t even noticed the slight bulge until now. She was perhaps four months along, five at most. Even if her child was a boy, their people couldn’t survive another four months or more with the nuckalevee roaming free. Even if they did, Hugh might well be appointed to manage MacDonald lands until the child came of age.
But they’d been down this rocky, twisting, barren path before. They needed fresh human flesh to lure the nuckalevee, and then they still needed someone who could kill it.
Black stars burst in her vision, and the noise of her heart beating filled her ears.
Her ragged breathing joined the cacophony inside her head. She wanted to plug her ears, but the sound rolled inside of her.
She knew how to solve the problem of needing fresh flesh. She just wasn’t sure she was brave enough to go through with it. Not now when she had peace that her brother and Gavran would be safe.
An image of her brother slid across her mind, followed by the memory of the little girl, her feet bloodied from walking for miles to reach safety, and all the others running around Duntulm Castle. How many more were there dying from the nuckalevee’s rampage? How many more that lived but couldn’t reach a safe haven? If one of them were her brother, she’s want to do whatever it took to save him.
And a death that mattered was better than a life wasted under the curses. Surely it was.
Her heartbeat and breathing slowed. “If you handed me poison, would it work?”
Chapter 23
The pounding ache in Gavran’s shoulder eased and then vanished, like the last flame sputtering out in a dying fire. He stopped his dragging march toward where Lady MacDonald said his dadaidh and Tavish waited and rubbed a hand over the space where the pain used to be.
The change was…unnatural.
He raised his injured arm above his head. No pain at all. He’d crossed the boundary of the wishes. There could be no other explanation for it. The blessing was back.
Something else was different as well. The air felt easier to breathe. A renewed energy pulsed through his body.
He strode forward. Even walking seemed to require less effort. He covered the ground in less time it seemed.
The cemetery and chapel on the edge of Duntulm soon came into sight. A small swirl of smoke rose above the trees in the distance close to the location where his dadaidh and Tavish should still be camped. It blended in against the low-hanging clouds that drizzled rain onto ground that couldn’t seem to accept it.
A wail carried to him on the breeze, and a procession entered the churchyard on the opposite end of the village. Six men bore a long wooden box.
A cadence came from a female figure standing slightly apart—the bean chaoineadh leading those gathered in the keening. He couldn’t hear the words, but the communal outpouring of grief traveled like waves.
And he felt nothing.
He drank in a breath and laid a hand on his chest. No heaviness. No sense of sadness.
The realization didn’t even bring shock, or fear, or any sort of emotion he should have felt. It was all in his mind, and even that grew fuzzier around the edges by the second. He had to concentrate now to hold onto the reason he’d felt sadness before crossing the boundary. It was like grasping at fog on the moors.
He clutched his head. Their plan would never have worked. Before he reached home, he’d have forgotten the blind boy in the market, forgotten Ceana and his promise to find her brother, forgotten all the people living under the tyranny of the nuckalevee. All those memories stolen by the wishes to spare him grief. He’d like as not have eventually accepted his family’s claim that he’d been bewitched, and the dreams themselves would cease to hurt him, believed to be no more than remnants of some witch’s spells.
Before this day, he’d feared he would feel at least some relief if Ceana sent him home with the wishes intact, and that’d it be yet another sign of his failure to be the kind of man he desired to be. His fear proved groundless, but the reality was worse.
He’d be blinded by his charmed life, not seeing the suffering around him and doing naught to ease it.
He didn’t want to live that way, under a so-called blessing that wouldn’t even allow him to grieve for the dead.
The dead!
He took two steps forward. A community riddled with death meant dead bodies—some recently dead. A freshly dead body was exactly what they needed.
If he could only make it back inside the area where Ceana’s curses cancelled out his blessing before he forgot why he’d wanted to return.
He turned back toward Duntulm Castle and ran.
Ceana poured the packet of poison into her cup and set the brown paper aside. It fluttered to the floor. She left it there. When they came to remove her body, it would be a small enough thing for them to remove it as well.
The spoon clinked against the inside of the cup, and the white powder dissolved into the dark depths of her tea. She raised the cup to her nose and drew in the steam. It smelled like fenugreek and honey.
“You won’t taste anything,” Salome said.
“Would you like me to stay with you?”
Ceana shook her head. She wasn’t afraid of dying alone, and the solitude would give her a few moments to make her final peace with the Almighty. Her anger at Him had been as unjustified as her anger at Gavran. All that she’d suffered had made her into someone who was strong enough to make this sacrifice. Perhaps she’d been brought to this point for this very reason. “You’ve sent someone to fetch Gavran?”
“I will.” Salome’s voice softened. “Before I do, I want to ask one more time if you’re certain. He might choose not to fulfill our request. Some would say fighting the nuckalevee alone is suicide.”
They’d already made the choice to fight the nuckalevee if it meant saving the MacDonalds’ people. Gavran would have stayed and fought had there been a way to do it without killing someone innocent. She’d provide him a way.
“He’ll go.”
For a second, she thought Salome would hug her. Instead, she bowed her head. “I’ll send Eachann immediately. There are few I trust more.” She left.
Ceana turned her back to the door. She brought the cup up to her lips. Her hand shook, and hot tea spilled over, burning her fingers. She set the cup down without drinking it and blew on them. She didn’t want to risk sticking her fingers in her mouth and ingesting enough poison to make her sick. That might prevent her from taking enough to kill her.
Red marred her thumb and forefinger, and her fingers pulsed, feeling two sizes too large. Soon burnt fingers wouldn’t matter. Soon nothing would matter. All she needed to do was drink the tea.
Taking her life was the better way—the only way.
The poisoned cup stared back at her like a single brown eye. She looked away. Why couldn’t she get her hands to pick the cup back up?
Slowly she reached out and wrapped her hand around it. The heat seared her palm. Courage. She clutched tighter and brought it to her mouth. Sweat beaded on her upper lip.
The door swung open behind her.
“I need a little longer,” she said. Her voice sounded like a leaf fluttering in the wind.
“For what?”
Gavran. The cup slipped from her fingers the way the coins had and smashed on the floor.
Footsteps crossed the room towards her. Gavran’s footsteps.
Or had she drunk the tea already and his voice was a hallucination, part of the poison filling her body?
She turned slowly. He didn’t seem like a hallucination, but then again, her experience with hallucinations was limited. Hadn’t Salome left her but a few minutes before? He shouldn’t have been here so swiftly. And it would make sense that his face would be the one she saw at death.
Gavran crouched and reached for the shattered pieces of her cup.
She shoved him, and he toppled over. He landed on his injured arm and cursed.
Not a hallucination after all. So it was wise she’d kept him away from her cup.
She held out her palms, facing him, placating the outburst she could see coming. “You might have pricked your finger on the shards.”
Gavran lifted his good hand in a What the hell? gesture. “Would you have cut off my finger to keep a sliver from growing full of puss too?”
“The tea was poisoned.”
He kicked the debris farther away using the bottom of his shoe, his gaze so sharp it would leave a mark. “You meant to kill yourself.”
It wasn’t a question, but admitting to what she’d intended to do was harder than doing it. It was why she’d insisted Salome wait to bring him back until she had the poison and was prepared to drink.
He crawled to his feet. “You can’t keep trying to kill yourself.”
“It wasn’t suicide this time.” She glanced down at the broken cup. “We needed flesh for the nuckalevee. All those people, Gavran, I couldn’t—”
He pulled her into his arms and crushed her against his chest.
She wrapped her arms around his waist and clung to him, his heart beating beneath her ear, the same way it had when she’d scraped her knee when she was five and he was eight and he carried her all the way back to her home. It was the day they met.
His Adam’s apple bobbed against her hair. “You’re an eejit, Ceana Campbell.”
He said it in the tone someone else would use to say you’re beautiful. The warmth of his arms, of his voice, made her feel cherished, but she couldn’t stay there.
Killing herself was still the best solution.
She pulled away. “You weren’t supposed to be here before it was done, but that doesn’t change what needs to happen.”
“I found another way.”
Chapter 24
Blood pounded through Gavran’s limbs and heart with enough force to burst his veins. If he’d been but a minute later, she’d be gone. Every time his brain came back to it, his blood pressure spiked.
He covered it up with what he hoped was a convincing smile and edged another step further from the stain on the floor made by Ceana’s tea. It looked too much like blood.
He motioned toward the door. “They buried someone near Duntulm today. If we hurry, the body might still be considered fresh flesh.”
She gnawed the inside of her cheek, a signal he hadn’t persuaded her to give up on killing herself yet, though he couldn’t explain how he knew. Some part of his unconscious mind still seemed to know things about her that his conscious mind didn’t.
“By the time we get the body,” she said, “he’ll have been dead two days, maybe more.”
Stubborn woman. He rubbed his good hand around the back of his neck. “If he’s too old, we’ll think of something else.”
Ceana rocked from her heels to her toes.
He grabbed her hand. She tried to wriggle it away, but he held tight. Finally, she stopped struggling and looked up at him.
Her hand lay limp in his. He stroked the back of her knuckles with his thumb. An emotion he couldn’t quite name flickered across her face. The look in her eyes was both fragile and strong.
He didn’t want to lose her again, even after all this came to an end. Every night he woke from the dream, he woke missing her.
Where did that leave them should they succeed? His family wouldn’t welcome her back. Brighde certainly wouldn’t accept her, and he’d made a promise there too—or at least his dadaidh had, and the Almighty commanded him to honor his father.
He gave himself a mental shake. One problem at a time. They might not even live past their battle with the nuckalevee. “Let me help. Let’s work together to find another way.”
She squeezed his hand. Just enough so he felt it. “It’s grave robbing, you know.”
“No one will know he’s gone, and we won’t be hurting anyone. We should try.”
“But if the flesh isn’t fresh…”
He kept hold of her hand and drew her towards the door. “Don’t count troubles afore they come.”
Gavran released her hand as soon as they left the room, and Ceana immediately felt the lack of connection. That hand-clasp had to be the last. Mosquitos who flew into the fire never came out. And they deserved what they got.
She lengthened her stride. “We should take horses. Quicker to ride than to walk, and it’ll give us a way to haul the body to the grove.”
Gavran groaned. “Aye, if you can stay aboard. I’m like to fall and crack my head this time round.”
She wished she could quirk an eyebrow at him, but her eyebrows had never bent to her wishes that way. “I’m taking a man who’s afraid of horses to fight a horse-like monster. I don’t like my chances.”
“So long as you don’t ask me to ride the nuckalevee, I’ll be fine.”
She laughed. It felt a far sight better than crying, and she needed to do one or the other.
Gavran sighed. “Horses it is.”
They jogged to the stables.
Gavran went into the door first, looking back towards her. “We’ll need shovels. Weapons, too.”
Gavran turned back to face forward, stopped. She dodged around
him.
Hugh stood inside the stables, his hand on the scruff of a stable boy who looked like Hugh might’ve hauled him off his feet a time or two already.
The word for the man that jumped into Ceana’s mind wouldn’t have just made her mamaidh turn over in her grave—she would have died a second time from shock.
“Off with you.” Hugh released the lad with a tiny shove, and the boy scuttled away. “There’s no good reason for two beggars in my cousin’s home to need weapons.”
Ceana held Hugh’s stare even though she wanted to look at Gavran. Maybe they could bluff themselves through this yet, and looking at Gavran would have implied guilt where there was none.
The moment stretched, but she couldn’t come up with a believable reason they needed weapons. She’d been awake for…near a day straight? Seemed like it’d been much longer, but it was only the night before they’d sat vigil for the nuckalevee and failed. Her brain felt mushier than a rotten cabbage.
Hugh’s expression darkened. “Rumor amongst the guards is that you’re from McLeod lands.”
She couldn’t stop her gaze from sneaking Gavran’s way. He’d done the same, and he had a slightly panicked look in his eyes. Nothing they said would be believed. Not by this man whose pride they’d injured when Salome sided with them over him.
Hugh took up the pitchfork resting against the stall behind him. “I believe you’re McLeod spies and assassins.”
Ceana’s heart thudded in her chest like it was kicking her for her recklessness. They’d become too comfortable in Duntulm Castle with the freedom the MacDonalds gave them. They should have sneaked into the stables or gone to Salome to ask for what they needed, but she’d known Salome and Lord MacDonald would give them whatever they asked for. Asking had seemed like a waste of time. She hadn’t considered Hugh.
Hugh pointed the pitchfork at them. “Move.”
They backed out of the stables, and he angled them towards the dungeon.
Cursed Wishes Page 16
