Highland Awakening

by Kathryn Lynn Davis

  Highland Awakening

  By Kathryn Lynn Davis

  A Scrolls of Cridhe Novella

  COPYRIGHT © 2015 by Kathryn Lynn Davis

  This is a works of fiction. The characters, incidents and dialogues are the creation of the author’s imagination and are not to be construed as real. Any resemblance to actual events or persons, living or dead, is completely coincidental.

  All rights retained. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the individual author except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles or reviews. The unauthorized reproduction, sharing, or distribution of this copyrighted work is illegal. Criminal copyright infringement, including infringement without monetary gain, is investigated by the FBI and is punishable by up to five years in federal prison and a fine of $250,000.

  ISBN-13: 978-1-942623-21-2

  Produced in the USA

  Dedication

  To my father, Mickey Davis, whose response to this story gave me lingering inspiration, I love you, Dad.

  And to my dearest sister, now and always, Susan Cusack. You have helped me breathe no matter how deep the water got.

  Acknowledgements

  First and foremost, I want to thank my husband Michael, whose patience seems to grow as I procrastinate more and more.

  I also want to thank my Guardian sisters, especially Lily Baldwin and Sue-Ellen Welfonder, who helped me take this chance, as well as Ceci Giltenan, Victoria Zak, Tarah Scott, and Kate Robbins.

  And to my blood sister Anne, who encourages me in any way she can,

  and lets me know she believes in me.

  Finally, thank you Sharon Frizzell and Ashley Reader Granger for unwavering enthusiasm and support.

  Table of Contents

  Highland Awakening

  Dedication

  Acknowledgements

  Table of Contents

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Chapter Ten

  Chapter Eleven

  Chapter Twelve

  Chapter Thirteen

  Chapter Fourteen

  Chapter Fifteen

  Chapter Sixteen

  Chapter Seventeen

  Chapter Eighteen

  About Kathryn Lynn Davis

  More by Kathryn Lynn Davis

  Other Titles by Duncurra LLC

  Chapter One

  Glen Affric, Scottish Highlands

  1811

  The mist rose and fell like gauze before a windowpane, blocking Esmé’s sight, and then revealing the late winter world to her in softly sharpened detail. She was crouched behind a half-buried boulder, shuddering with cold and apprehension as she peered through the yellow cotton grass beyond the boulder that hid her from her father. The huge bear rose on its hind legs, snarling when it sensed danger nearby. The mist hovered for a moment, highlighting its glistening white teeth—sharp and deadly—then dropped like a thick, wet curtain of white, blinding her. She had seen the marks of those teeth on the sheep the beast had mangled, whose carcasses it had left behind. She shivered, hands clasped tight, terrified.

  Enveloped in the moisture that cut off both sight and sound, she remembered how, throughout the winter, this bear had terrorized the valley of Glen Affric and the manor house at the Hill of the Hounds where Esmé and her family lived. The huge animal had come out of hibernation too soon, and winter had hung on too long, and for reasons no one understood, it hovered around the crofts and manor at night, killing sheep and chickens and goats instead of moving south, where the air was warmer and prey was more plentiful.

  The people of the Glen had been afraid to go out at night, and one man had been killed when he tried to hunt the beast down. Everyone was spooked by the creature, so Connall Fraser, Esmé’s father, the owner of the Hill of the Hounds and keeper of his tenants, had a whispered conversation with Caelia Rose and Rory MacGregor, his in-laws. Esmé, who was not afraid of anything, crept out of bed—leaving her young brother Ewan snuggled among the covers. He often came to talk to her at night when bad dreams beset him, and usually ended up sleeping in her bed.

  She had tiptoed up to the doorway in the sitting room to listen as her father, whom she thought very brave, declared that he would hunt down the Beast until he killed it, and his family and tenants and friends would be safe once again. He might as well have spoken the motto of the Fraser Clan: ‘I am ready!’

  He set off that very night, musket and knife in hand, so intent on his object, he was unaware that his nine-year-old daughter was following him, wrapped tight in her heavy wool cloak.

  She, in turn, was not aware that she was followed.

  Blond-haired Esmé was warm, but she shivered with excitement. “What a great adventure!” she whispered, adding the Fraser war cry with vehemence. “Caisteal Dhuni!” She ran lightly from birch to oak to alder to pine so Connall would not spot her. She breathed in the taste and smell of the grasses and trees and water all around her—those not still covered with snow or with ice hanging from the branches—her heart racing in anticipation.

  Connall Fraser carried a small bladder, which he hoped would mask the smell of the meat until he was ready. He took out half a fist-sized morsels and moved deeper into the dark forest, placing them just above bear height so the animal would have to struggle to get to them. As he worked, the mist fell like insubstantial snow, playing tricks with the odor of the meat and calming the breeze until everything but Connall Fraser and his daughter were still.

  The meat was bait; the height his chance to catch the giant unaware. Every few feet, he stopped to listen, absorbing every sound and odor and movement, until he knew exactly where he was, and where the night birds rested and the wildcats huddled in nest and cave. He sniffed the thick Highland air, chilled and heavy with mist, murmuring, “Not long now.”

  Staying far enough away that he would not see or hear her, Esmé copied his movements, thrilled by the hunt, by his ignorance of her presence, by the challenge they faced that night. She heard rustling near at hand and covered her mouth to stifle her involuntary cry, catching it just in time.

  Her father knelt, raising the rifle, watching and waiting for just one glimpse of the Beast. He could feel it nearby; the hair on his neck stood on end and goose bumps rose along his arms. He steadied the rifle as the animal moved from tree to tree, seeking more of the meat left high in the branches.

  Connall saw the creature’s outline through the failing light of the crescent moon, aimed and released the trigger.

  The bear roared in pain, stumbled, clung to the tree and righted himself. He wavered for a moment, growling and snarling as he tossed his head back and forth.

  Behind her boulder, Esmé grabbed her hip and stifled several screams that rose in her throat. She could feel the burning, the rage, the pain beyond bearing just as if her father had shot her instead of the bear. Finally she could not hold it in any longer; she screamed in agony as she watched in slow-motion while her father prepared to fire again. He flinched, turned and saw her, and lost his grip on the rifle.

  Abruptly, the bear stopped, motionless, sniffed, and began to stumble toward Connall, who grabbed wildly for his gun and dirk at the same time. Still reeling with agony, Esmé swayed as something struck her in the chest like a physical blow.

  She had always felt an affinity with animals, but never like this. The bear met her eyes and his yellow eyes b
egged her just before he collided with her father and the mist fell, obscuring her view, slowing the rapid beat of her heat. A shot exploded from the rifle and her father cried out harshly, in panic.

  “Da!” she screamed. “No!” Her father was inside her in his fear and rage and instinct. The bear was inside her in his torment. Each was part of her; she could not choose. “Da!” she screamed again and again, scrambling blindly through curtain after white, stifling curtain.

  She became confused, turning in circles, until her father called for her shakily. “Esmé!”

  Moving quickly through the undulating surface of the mist, she reached his side and collapsed there. Only then did it strike her that the bear’s pain was gone. “Are ye hurt?” But she knew he was. “Where is he?” She glanced warily over her shoulder.

  “Gone,” Connall choked out. “I don’t know why. He knocked the rifle out of my hand, clawing my arm, and I fell back on my knife, and while I lay there, he just—went away.”

  Busy examining his wounds, the girl opened and closed her mouth on sounds of horror that would not come. Esmé sat frozen in place. “Da,” she whispered at last, “my Da…” You have to do something, she told herself without a sound. But I’m only nine! she replied desperately, in silence. Old enough for it to be your fault! She felt as if she were strangling, as if the knife had pierced her own shoulder.

  “I’m sorry, Da!” she cried as her feet were released at last from the moist night soil and her hands from the rough boulder. With all her strength and fear and guilt, she touched Connall’s shoulder gently. Using her teeth, she ripped strips from her petticoat, balled one up to press against the wound, and wound the others around his shoulder, tying them to keep the blood from flowing. Then she paused to catch her breath. She could not help but stare at the deep ugly marks from the claws. Again, she felt her father’s pain, and her heart pounded, stealing her breath.

  “I can help,” she said between chattering teeth. Tearing off more cloth, she fashioned a rough sling, cupped his injured arm in it and tied it above his shoulder. “Forgive me, Da, I never meant—”

  “I know.” His voice became more hoarse by the minute.

  Esmé knelt beside him in tears, her silver-grey eyes full of regret and dread. “I have to get ye home. Do ye think ye can stand?”

  Connall cleared his throat painfully. Doesn’t matter what I think. I have to do this for my daughter. No choice.

  Esmé stood as close as she could get and helped him up. She winced when he groaned more than once, but he finally stood upright. She draped his good arm around her slender shoulders.

  “We’ll get ye home and send for the healer. Come here.” They limped back to the Hill slowly as the mist closed around them, holding each other as tight as they could, though it made their pain worse.

  The girl slept in a chair beside her father while Eachan the healer worked, spreading on tincture of iodine to disinfect the wounds, giving a decoction of yew for the pain, making poultice after poultice of skunk cabbage and kelp to help draw the toxins from the wounds, and pennyroyal and yarrow root to break the fever. Connall moaned and twisted, unable to rest, so finally Eachan gave him an infusion of black willow and hops to sedate him. At last he fell into a restless sleep.

  Esmé sat staring for hours, trying to understand what had happened. When she felt the bear’s burning pain, it had shocked her. She didn’t understand why the mist had kept falling just when she needed most to see. She had felt her father’s pain as well, and that was something she could not endure. Her own was enough and more than enough. She knew—though she did not want to admit it—that some kind of power had taken her over tonight, and it left her frightened, bewildered and confused.

  Her grandmother Caelia Rose MacGregor, sat beside her and took her hand. “Can I help ye, Esmé? Is there anything I can do?”

  Esmé loved her grandmother more than just about anyone else. She understood so many things, and Esmé could tell her anything. But not this. She could never speak of this to anyone. Ever.

  Not until the next morning when Esmé went up to her room, did she discover Ewan’s night rail and a hat he always wore outdoors on her floor. She sensed at once that her little brother, aged six, must have followed her into the night. But he had not followed her home.

  He had vanished.

  Chapter Two

  The Isle of Lewis

  1820: eleven years later

  Magnus MacLeod smiled in his sleep, which helped soften the usual scowl he displayed day and night of late. He felt light, as if he weighed nothing at all—a patent impossibility at 6’1”, with muscles lean and hardened from the life that had been thrust upon him. Bouncing about in his dream as he used to do when a child, he ran and ran—wild and free and happy. Even in his sleep he growled a rebuttal, but he couldn’t deny it was different in this pale green land, this yellow-blue-green fertile land.

  He frowned, nose twitching when it came to him that though he was laughing and shouting like a child, he was just as tall and ungainly as ever. “Legs too long,” he muttered incoherently. “Always have been.” He stomped the undulating ground, one foot after the other, as if to shorten his lengthy calves and thighs, shaking his head at his own daft efforts. Except his legs got shorter. Gaping, astonished, he tried to back away from them. “None o’ that funny stuff,” he warned sternly, though who or what he was warning he could not guess, because no one else was there.

  Magnus shuddered when he caught a whiff of charcoal breezing past. “Have to get out of here,” he mumbled, even less comprehensibly than before. “Tis daft, daft, dangerous.” But when he tried to scramble away from a giant tent that was colored so like the forest of rowan, oak and pine, that it had blended with the background, his feet did not move—or they moved a little, but he stumbled, because he wasn’t used to his long torso on such runty legs.

  All at once he was not certain it was actually him swaying back and forth so far each way he thought he might be sick. His body was moving—or trying to—but his mind was oddly detached. He was torn, physique from concentration, yet enveloped by distant music—drumbeat and reed whistle—seductive and hypnotic, drawing him into the peculiar tent that stretched to the edge of his sight and beyond. Without being aware of it, he began to move—unsteadily, wary and perplexed. The music filled his head: not a song, but a thing whole in and of itself, like the wind or the cold winter rain. Gradually, glowing with a soft yellow light at first, a sound burst forth, incandescent, and resolved itself into a voice: “Arise,” it sang in a tone like melted caramel, “the whole of the world awaits me.”

  He awoke suddenly—his long, lean body slick with sweat, arms and legs tingling—to realize that the dream, The Voice had indeed aroused him, creeping up along his neck, around his ears and along his shoulder blades. It clung to him, tracing the skin on his belly and tugging the dark hair that disappeared into the worn pair of breeches he slept in. He felt light-headed, as though he needed something. Something he had lost in the dream.

  The awkwardly shaped stone room was unfamiliar for a long moment.

  “No, ye blackguard!” he shouted to the voice or the chilled emptiness; he wasn’t sure which. Anger raced like liquid fire through his veins, because he could not leave the remnants of that unsettling dream behind. He didn’t like it: this disorientation. He liked—no needed—to know exactly where he was, exactly what was what.

  Bed, rug, chest, stone ceiling, heavy purple velvet curtain. They looked vaguely like things he had owned once. A flicker of comfort cracked his chest. He was sure they were familiar. “Mine,” he said with emphasis in case the empty room might argue. Safety was near; he could smell it, like heather in the dew-touched morning. He was grateful even for the thick rim of ice over the ewer holding his washing water, because he saw it every day. It was dependable, normal. Though the sky he could see through his high crescent window was still dark, he shattered the ice with his elbow and dumped the lot over his black hair and into the chipped basin, shudderi
ng and snorting as he did so. He was not going to risk returning to bed.

  “When will this cursed winter leave me in peace?” he bellowed. And realized he was free. The dream was gone.

  But its loss meant the return of the tormenting memory of other things lost. He clenched his fists around the cracked basin, threatening to break it straight across. “Julia,” he snarled at the water, as if he could see there her lovely, elegant face, surrounded by her upswept dark hair, braided like a crown. “You’re no princess to me, ye—” he could not quite bring himself to call her a whore, though his betrothed had left him for another man—a bookkeeper from Edinburgh, no less! He and she had been betrothed since childhood: “to put an end to the feuds between the two clans,” his parents had explained in tandem. Magnus was now laird of the MacLeods of Lewis, and Julia the daughter of the current laird of the MacDonnells of Glengarry. In Magnus’s view, for 50 years past those feuds had become no more or less than nuisances that burst into flame at a few heated tempers, the flames dying out as quickly as they’d risen.

  “Now you’ve given them a real reason for a feud, ye foolish girl.” He still spoke into the water as if her image were there. That’s no’ the real problem, and ye know it, he told himself. Tis that ye were falling in love with her.

  “I wasn’t!” he declared belligerently. Then what’s that hole in your heart? And the grimace on your face, day after day?

  “I’m worried about this endless winter. About feeding our people. As a laird should be.” Hmmph! In love is what ye are.

  Magnus felt ridiculous when he realized he was speaking to a basin of water as if it were a woman long gone from his sight, and having a conversation with his thoughts. “What is wrong with me today?”

  “Weel, I could tell ye that if ye give me an hour or two.”