Maid of Deception

by Jennifer McGowan

  “Not so many as you,” he teased. “Just a half dozen of us, three of them lasses. But already my sisters have graced us with bairns of their own, and of the laddies I am the only unwed.” He waggled his brows at me, and I felt another hard jolt in my stomach. Surely he didn’t think he had a chance with me? I had to make a fortunate marriage to assure my position in court! That was all I’d ever worked for, and what my family—and I—desperately needed.

  Focus! I was the one supposed to find information out about the blasted Scot—and he was in a talkative mood about something of substance finally. If that something was the curse of the dilapidated hedgerow, I would take it and to spare. “So, tell me about your family, good sir. What hulking fortress do you call home, that you think Marion Hall is an English jewel?”

  Alasdair chuckled. “My home is Dunvegan Castle, and it stretches up from the rock of Scotland in defiance against the very heavens. It’s surrounded all round by the sea, easily one of the best protected castles on Skye.”

  “By the sea!” I stared at him. “So how do you get in and out? By boat?”

  “An’ up through the sea gate, aye.” Alasdair’s brogue was thicker now, his eyes lifting up and to the northwest, as if he could recall his castle to him by words alone. “ ’Tis a wondrous place, though not entirely a kind one. ’Twas built for defense and defiance, and not for pretty things.” His hand tightened again on my arm. “Still, it has a beauty all its own. I would bring you there one day, my lady, for you to see its wonders, both inside and out.”

  “Indeed,” I said, by rote, not knowing what else to say. Well, that wasn’t entirely true. I knew precisely what to say: the flirtatious comment, the quickly forgotten promise.

  But I had no intention of going anywhere with Alasdair MacLeod after my work with him for the Queen was done. He was a captivating diversion, but a diversion nonetheless. I had a family of foundlings to care for, not the least of which was my mother, and a falling-down Hall to shore up. I would not be setting off on an adventure to the middle of nowhere.

  “So, what beauty lies within such a sturdy rock?” I finally asked, thinking it safe. Immediately I regretted my decision. The faintest surge of excitement in Alasdair’s mien was enough to make me want to run away. I would never follow you to a land of barbarians and warriors, you fool, I wanted to cry. You are mad to even suggest it. But I could at least show interest in his ancestral home. That didn’t seem too much to ask of myself, even if manners appeared to have deserted me. “Do, ah . . . do you mean just the austere beauty of its strength?”

  “Not only that.” Alasdair turned me to him and tilted my chin up. “My family holds treasures like none other in Scotland,” he said, his manner suddenly too intent. “We consider it our duty and our right to hold such beauty close, and protect it from all who would take it away. Not least of which is the Fairy Flag.”

  I frowned at him. “The Fairy Flag?”

  He seemed to recall himself, blinking at me in surprise for just a moment. Then he grinned and shrugged, the thrall apparently broken. He returned his gaze to the hedgerows as he spoke. “ ’Tis magic, my lady, pure and simple.”

  Once more he tucked my arm into his, and we turned to continue our walk, edging ever closer to the labyrinth. “The Fairy Flag is a furl of silk gifted to the MacLeods a thousand years ago, it is said, by the fairy folk themselves. It holds great power, and never have we unfurled it in the midst of battle but we haven’t won the day.”

  I lifted my brows at that. “It assures success in war?”

  “Aye, it does. Since time unremembered.”

  I smiled, getting caught up in the image of an ancient flag held high for all enemies to see. “From the fairy folk themselves, you say? Then it must be a wonder. Does it fly at Dunvegan Castle?”

  “Och, no.” Alasdair shook his head. “The thing is already tattered, as my ancestors pieced off sections of it to press into good luck charms before they realized the full of its magic. Now it is kept in its own treasure box, for use whenever the clan needs.”

  “And you’ve seen it?”

  “ ’Tis my own family’s treasure, Beatrice.” Alasdair looked down at me. “Of course I’ve seen it.”

  “Well, where did it come from in truth, then?” I asked. “Your country was not exactly known for its silk production—especially not a thousand years ago. It had to come from somewhere.”

  “Legends abound.” Alasdair shrugged. “But the most likely is that it truly did come from the fairy folk. They’ve got every reason to ensure Scotland stands strong, do they not?”

  I looked up at him, but his face was set and certain. “You can’t be serious.”

  “Oh, but I can. The legends run too long, and the truth of the flag’s power canna be disputed. Even pieced off and worn as it is, there is something about the cloth that you just simply sense.” He squeezed my arm. “You’ll see what I mean, I have no doubt.”

  My heart gave another lurch, real worry beginning to thread along my nerves with something else, something I couldn’t quite name. I struggled to keep the conversation on track. “So whyever did you choose to leave such a vaunted place, then?” I asked archly. “Magic, beauty, and the wild North Sea—why would you consent to be your clan’s delegate to the English court?”

  Even as I asked the question, something about it struck me as particularly apt. Alasdair was a Scot from the Highlands—and by his own admission, a member of a particularly self-sufficient clan. He had as much need of an English Queen’s money as he did a third foot.

  Alasdair hesitated a long moment, not answering, but before I could press my point, a burst of movement from the back entrance to Marion Hall caught our attention.

  Sophia ran pell-mell toward us, her skirts hitched high in both hands. She was wearing a frock of pale lavender, and her hair hung free, making her look exactly like the sort of fairy sprite that might have gifted Alasdair and his family with their precious flag.

  “Sophia!” I called out, and only then did the girl seem to recognize that there were others in this place. “Sophia, what is wrong?”

  “My head—my head!” she gasped, and the moment she stopped before us, I could see she was as pale as a ghost. Her large violet eyes appeared as stains of deep color against the faded tapestry of her face. Even her usually bright lips and cheeks were now a wan, soft pink. She dropped her skirts and brought her hands against either temple, closing her eyes as if to shut out noise. “I cannot stop what I’m seeing! I must get it, I must go!”

  I exchanged a look with Alasdair, and he nodded, edging to my side to prepare to catch Sophia before she bolted away. “Go where, sweetling?” I asked carefully, leaning down to lift the girl’s chin with the softest touch of my fingers. She was shaking violently, but she held herself still, a fawn being examined by a hunter, unsure of when the blade might fall. “What do you need to get?”

  “Now!” she said, as if I’d asked her when, not where. “I must away now!” She whirled away from us both, her eyes going as wild as her hair. She danced a few steps of a reel I did not recognize, her arms spinning, her feet moving fast. “I cannot stand it another moment. I must know—I must understand!”

  Alasdair lurched forward, but he was too late. Sophia was off again with almost unnerving speed, dashing away into the one place on the estate where even he could not catch her for certain: the Great Ruined Labyrinth of Marion Hall.

  CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

  As one, Alasdair and I raced into the barely cut away opening of the hedgerow, and then stopped almost immediately at a snarl of brambles as soon as we turned left. A piece of lavender-dyed fabric hung from one of the branches, and Alasdair plucked it off as he pushed the brambles out of the way for me. “Hopefully she’ll still be clothed when we find her,” he muttered. I hurried forward.

  “I—it’s been so long, but I remember there was a mathematical construct of sorts to the choices,” I said. “There’s only one way through the hedgerow, and that’s through the cent
er. She has to be going through the center—though, how she would know how to get to the center, I cannot guess.”

  “From the look on her face, she didn’t need to know an equation to get through the maze,” Alasdair said. “She barely looked when she ran toward the thing, but her steps were sure. Here, let me get that.”

  Lifting away the worst of a sagging hedgerow, Alasdair helped me duck under the greenery while I stepped over a large tree branch that had somehow found its way into the maze. We turned right at the next opening, then left again, and I slowed my urgent stride as we made our way deeper into the labyrinth. “Should we call out?” I asked him, eyeing the tops of the hedgerows. They were half again as tall as I was, and though we were catching bits and pieces from Sophia’s gown and the ribbons in her hair, the girl herself was nowhere in sight.

  “She probably wouldn’t answer, but you would alert any servants to your presence here,” Alasdair said, swearing as he ducked under another cruel sprawl of nettles. “What in blazes possessed you people to plant thorns in this hedgerow?” he complained. “It’s like something out of a children’s tale.”

  “We didn’t . . . plant them.” I frowned, my eyes going to the hedges even as we scurried past. The brambles seemed to burst out at regular intervals, sprawling out in ungainly style in the way of weeds grown wild, but a curious uniformity seemed to be developing as to when we could expect them to sprawl out of the hedge and leaf-strewn path. “At least, I didn’t plant them, and I can’t imagine who would. Once begun, removing them from the hedges would take an entire army of gardeners.”

  “And a generation of time,” Alasdair said wryly, and I contented myself with thanking him every fifth step as he lifted away some obstacle or pushed me through it. The sun was climbing in the heavens, and the heat had to be building, but the hedges seemed strangely cool and fey as we worked our way along.

  “Another . . . right, I think,” I muttered as we came into a tighter spiral of passageways. There were no brambles here, and the absence of them was a palpable relief.

  “Right?” Alasdair jogged forward a few steps, and then paused to examine another thick fallen branch. He reached out for my hand. “Just as with the Volta, my lady. I don’t want you to step on this one. It seems like it’s been here awhile.”

  He swung me into his arms, and I felt the heat of him intensely as he hopped over the offending branch and then moved forward with me still in his grasp. I wriggled to free myself, and his hold grew tighter. “I see another log in the way up ahead,” he said. The touch of his lips on my hair made me go still and taut in his embrace. “This is for the best.”

  I closed my eyes for just a moment, savoring his hold on me, perhaps more so because we were hidden away from the prying eyes of Queen and court. But as we rounded the next bend and came upon a perfect open space, I didn’t need to ask for Alasdair’s arms to loosen. His hold went slack around me as we both stared, and he set me lightly to my feet.

  “What in the name of heaven—” he breathed, as I turned around in the space, staring at the perfectly trimmed hedges, the leaf-free grass, the pristine pool bubbling with water that gleamed almost golden in the full light of day.

  “I don’t know— I don’t see how this is possible,” I stammered, unconsciously reaching for him. He gripped my hand, and we moved forward, toward the small stone bench that stood beside the burbling fountain. “There are no brambles here, and surely the maze should be shot through with leaves and nettles and fallen branches here most of all, with the open space and access to sun and rain.”

  “It’s an uncanny place,” Alasdair allowed. “And this spring . . .” He knelt down without loosening his light hold on me, and dipped his hand into the water. “This cannot be—”

  “Get away from there!” Sounding like a frightened five-year-old girl, I hauled him back from the spring, my father’s words ringing in my ears. “Don’t do that, please,” I said, trying to sound reasonable as Alasdair’s startled gaze met mine. “That water—that water is poisoned!”

  “Well, it’s hardly—” He broke off as I put my hands to my cheeks, all of the warnings and half-joking gibes and dolorous predictions clanging around in my head. “Beatrice, what’s wrong?”

  I wheeled away from him, pressing back against the hedge. “Nothing—it’s nothing.”

  “It seems like it may be more than that.”

  “It’s none of your concern!” I snapped, and immediately he stiffened.

  “I have troubled you. My apologies, my lady,” he said gruffly, then stepped away from me, attempting to find the opposite hedge fascinating. For my own part, I could have slapped myself. The entire point was to charm the rough Scotsman, not rebuff him. But every word that came to my mind was flippant and stupid and false, and after his candor about his family, I owed him more than that. I owed myself more than that.

  “My mother,” I said at last, my words hollow and chilled. “She . . . she was here. They were both here. I was so very small, but I remember that. They were here and they were happy—truly, genuinely happy. The dark spells had not begun then, the times when she was away but not away. But, then—then she was happy. They laughed and shouted and danced around, and she . . . she—”

  “Beatrice?” I heard the word, but could not track it. Could not see anything beyond my own memories.

  “She drank the water of that well and then she got so much worse, so much terribly worse. She never wanted to see me and she never wanted to talk and she crept around her darkened room and whispered to the servants and she barely ate and—”

  “Beatrice!” Alasdair was in front of me now. I could see him as if I were outside myself, watching him take my shoulders, watching him shake me, hard. But the images in my head blocked out what I was seeing in this moment, my mother’s quiet surrender and my father’s bleak scowls, the laughter of the children around us like a shielding cloak to the poison that was held within our tiny family, with no boys to carry on my father’s name and a mother who was but a shell and—

  “Beatrice!” came the shout. “Beatrice, my love, come back to me!”

  I heard Alasdair’s pleading voice, but I couldn’t fight my way back. It was as if the shroud of the past decade and more of my life had been stripped away, baring for me the truths that I had never allowed myself to see. I felt myself dropping into darkness when Alasdair’s hands suddenly seemed to spasm on my shoulders, and he hauled me up close, pulling me onto my tiptoes as his head bent and his mouth branded itself onto mine.

  Heat exploded within me. I gave a little cry. Then my arms were around him and I felt his hands at my back and head, cradling me into him even as he pressed me so closely against his body that it seemed that the two of us had become one. This was not the courtly kiss I had allowed to keep the English nobles at my beck and call. This was not even the stolen embrace at the close of a dance or in the tapestry-lined antechambers of a darkened Queen’s castle. And this certainly wasn’t the lecherous advances I’d endured from men of every stripe who’d thought to transgress a step too far in their wooing of me, before I could break away and put them in their place.

  These kisses were nothing like that. They were primal and real, made of fire and soul and spirit, and I found my every horrible memory burned away with the flames now stoked within me, a surge of heat seeming to fuse my bones together with a strength I had never known. Alasdair’s hands held my face now as if he were afraid to break me but even more afraid to let me go. And yet he kissed me still, raining soft touches upon me in benediction—my forehead, my eyes, my cheeks, and then my mouth. Then drawing his lips down farther still with a ragged groan, along my jaw and into the sensitive hollow of my neck, my own desperate gasps seeming to drive the breath from his very body. He trembled violently against me, and when he raised his gaze to mine, I was seared anew by the emotion burning within his eyes. “Beatrice,” he said brokenly. “Don’t ever leave me like that again.”

  I swallowed, then finally pulled away from him, even a
s both of us realized the extreme impertinence of his words. He blushed crimson, and my heart did another wrong lurch, beating sideways somehow. “My lady, I do—”

  “Shh,” I said, not trusting myself to put my finger to his lips, though it was a move I’d practiced coyly on courtiers since I was barely twelve years old. “I apologize for frightening you. It was my fault— I allowed myself to fall into dreams and memories from when I was very small.” I forced myself to smile, to wave an airy hand. “This is not a place to haunt one’s dreams, good sir, and yet it seemed like that to me, so young was I.”

  My little speech allowed Alasdair time to straighten, to smooth his doublet down with a distracted air, as if he’d just emerged from a dream of his own. He looked around the space. “What happened here?” he asked gently.

  “Nothing whatsoever.” I shrugged. “It was only that I had it so fixed in my mind that this was the last place my parents had truly seemed happy together, my father and mother laughing—even dancing—by this burbling pool. Her scooping up the water and letting it play in her hands, taking a draught of it.”

  I felt my body stiffen but forced myself to hasten on. “Taking a draught of it, then another, so pure and golden she declared it.”

  An odd look chased over Alasdair’s face. “Well, Beatrice, I think you misunder—”

  His words were cut off by an unearthly scream.

  “Sophia!” I gasped. We sprang farther apart, spinning round, but the scream was not close—and it was not back toward the house.

  “Is there another way out of this maze?” Alasdair asked, but I was already giving chase.

  “Yes!” I cried as we wheeled out of the open space and back into the labyrinth, going left this time instead of the way we’d entered. “But it deposits you directly into the forest. Father always intended to clear more of the land, but he never—he never—”

  I gave up speaking as Alasdair pushed past me, running fast. We leaped over logs and branches and dashed under yet more brambles, but the way out took longer than the way in. I growled with frustration at every step, but Alasdair pulled me forward and kept the pace. Still, my memory failed with the terror that gripped me. I’d journeyed so few times the latter half of the maze, and even that had been so many years ago. We finally burst out onto the forest grounds, and though it was full day, it seemed that we were caught in a fairy wood, so thick and green and still was the darkness.