Fairy Tale

by Jillian Hunter

  “Get my hair loose, Marsali. And hurry.”

  “Do it yourself,” she whispered. But when she gave the necklace a sharp tug to free herself, she discovered that her own hair had also gotten tangled with Duncan’s, that they were virtually joined at the neck like some sort of mythological Hydra.

  “It’s my uncle.” Panicking, she fell back onto her knees to grab a fistful of Duncan’s hair, twisting it this way and that.

  “I gathered that, Marsali. Hell, woman, you’re ripping my hair out by the roots.”

  A long shadow fell across them. Ominous silence swelled in the night.

  Duncan couldn’t remember when he had been caught in such an absurd position. Dangerous ones, yes. Compromising ones—well, there had been more than a few before he’d met Sarah. And it seemed there was nothing he and Marsali could do to gain their freedom besides tearing into each other like a pair of tomcats. Every effort to extricate himself only made him appear more guilty, as if they had been caught in the act instead of an accident of incomparable stupidity.

  The man behind them spoke then, his voice cultured and cool with irony.

  “I am quite sure there is a perfectly innocent reason for this midnight tryst. I suspect there is even a hidden metaphysical significance to the disturbing juxtaposition of your carnal bodies. However, at the moment, an acceptable explanation for either escapes the workings of my brain.”

  “Good evening, Uncle Colum,” Marsali said meekly, leaning as far away from Duncan as possible, a move that only succeeded in dragging his head closer to her chest and making him wince aloud.

  “It is morning now, Marsali,” Colum pointed out. “We are in the wee small hours.”

  “Yes, well, be that as it may, Uncle Colum”—she gestured to Duncan’s downbent head—“this is our new laird and chieftain, Duncan MacElgin. I gave him a rather rude welcome earlier today, and now I’m—”

  “She’s decapitating me,” Duncan said in a muffled voice.

  Colum stared down his sharp beak of a nose at Duncan, his expression duplicating the regal hauteur of the hawk on his shoulder. “I’d heard his arrival at the castle this afternoon caused something of a stir. Had I not been in the middle of an important ritual I would have welcomed him myself. Unfortunately, his rank is not what presently concerns me.”

  “It doesn’t concern me much either,” Duncan retorted. “At least not in comparison to the enormous pain in the neck your niece is giving me.”

  Colum’s expression did not change. “What exactly are the pair of you doing in such a strange position, Marsali?”

  She averted her gaze, mumbling, “Trying to get his damn hair untangled from my cross.”

  “Should I ask how his hair became entangled in your cross?” Colum inquired wryly.

  “I was admiring her rubies, sir,” Duncan answered, his head forced into a perpendicular angle by Marsali’s attempt to distance herself from him.

  “Admiring her rubies.” A humorless smile flitted across Colum’s gauntly elegant face. “May I suggest, my lord, that henceforth you admire my niece’s assets from afar?”

  Duncan gave him a dark look. “May I suggest that you discourage your niece from her midnight escapades, not to mention the illicit ways she passes her afternoon hours?”

  “I cannot control her, my lord. Obviously you’re not much better at it yourself.”

  “Obviously,” Duncan snapped. “And I’ve got the cramp in my neck to prove it.”

  Marsali sighed loudly. “Could you please just get us free, Uncle Colum, and leave off discussing my sinful nature until a more convenient time?”

  Shaking his head in chagrin, the wizard unsheathed a bone-handled knife from his belt and knelt in the sand. His hazel eyes unfathomable, he raised the long curved blade to Duncan’s neck, then hesitated.

  “I’ve always known you would return, my lord.”

  Duncan grunted, pretending to be unaffected by the keen perception in Colum’s eyes. “Then you must be a true mystic because I had no intention of setting a single foot on this godforsaken land again until the Crown ordered it two months ago. Now, are you going to cut me loose or not?” Colum positioned the knife between Duncan and Marsali, severing the unwelcome bond that held them with one skillful slash.

  “There. It’s done.”

  “Well, thank God,” Marsali said, springing to her feet in a shower of flying sand.

  Duncan straightened, his face dark with embarrassment, and brushed off his tight black trousers. “Thank God is right. What a bloody absurd day this has been from beginning to end. You, Marsali, are to ride directly back to the castle and await my orders.”

  “Too late, my lord.”

  “What?” Duncan said, looking up with a frown.

  “I said you’re too late.” Colum scratched his sparse white beard, his gaze moving beyond Duncan. “My niece is already gone. I’m afraid it will take more than a few harshly spoken words to control her.”

  Disbelieving, Duncan glanced up at the black scowling cliffs, toward the sea, then back into the shadowed orifices of the caves. As impossible as it appeared, Marsali had vanished. Frustration pounded at him like the waves at his feet.

  He was horrified at the way he had treated her, shamed her, desired her. In his mind he had always pictured Andrew’s daughter growing up to marry the foreign prince her father had coveted for his only child. But this. Barefoot, bedraggled, incorrigible, and so inexperienced she’d not only let Duncan steal a kiss, but had invited others with her guileless response. He could have taken her with ease; the thought unsettled him.

  “Where the blazes did she go?” he demanded of the wizard who stood calmly observing him and who, now that Duncan had risen to his full height of six feet two inches, seemed rather frail and far less threatening than a few moments earlier.

  “I cannot say, my lord,” Colum said with a weary shake of his head. “Marsali comes and goes like a cat, at all hours, to unknown destinations. The girl exhausts me.”

  Duncan walked farther down into the water, his heart accelerating with anger that she’d slipped away from him again. “You’re her flesh and blood,” he said over his shoulder. “Why have you allowed her to run wild?”

  Colum joined him at the shoreline, apparently unconcerned by the waves lapping at his legs. “Am I a shining example of the conventional life, my lord?”

  “She’s liable to get herself arrested, or killed,” Duncan said, his voice sharp with accusation.

  “I don’t think she cares.”

  “That’s ridiculous.” The thought of a young mischievous spirit like Marsali’s headed down a path of self-destruction pierced Duncan’s usual cynical view of the world. “It doesn’t make sense for her to take such risks with most of her life still ahead of her.”

  “She has lost so much,” Colum said reflectively. “Her parents, two brothers, her first love. Why should she believe her future holds anything more than heartache?”

  Duncan was silent, finally catching sight of Marsali farther down the beach, walking her horse with heartbreaking loneliness through the lacy silver surf, no one caring enough to stop her. He knew what it was to suffer loss and lash out in pain. Perhaps, because he was male, his reaction to life’s assaults had been violent and aggressive; he had struck out blindly in his hurting, and he had hurt others on his way.

  For the first eleven years of his life, he had been raised in an atmosphere of ignorance, violence, and neglect. His mother’s love, when she had dared defy her husband to show it to him, had probably saved Duncan from complete emotional annihilation. His older sister, Judith, a victim of her father’s abuse herself, had tried to protect her little brother and save them both with her constant prayers to a God Duncan thought either could not hear them or did not care.

  But Marsali Hay had been raised by a gentle loving father, a man who would despair of his daughter’s sad destiny. She was not cursed with the darkness, the wild violence in her soul, that Duncan battled against nearly every day of hi
s life. No, Marsali’s way of denying her grief was to plunge headlong into danger herself while helping others.

  “If not for Andrew, I would long ago be dead,” he said aloud, staring at her receding figure until he lost sight of her. “Someone has to help his daughter.”

  “Aye,” Colum quietly agreed, his face shuttered.

  “You’ve given up on her,” Duncan said, surprised at the anger and dismay he felt.

  “She’s almost a woman grown. Saving Marsali would take more time and dedication than I have left on earth, my lord.”

  Duncan shrugged his massive shoulders. “Time and dedication are two things I do not have myself.”

  “But you have power, my lord.”

  “Yes,” Duncan said reluctantly, lifting his face to the eerie blood-red sky. “I have power, for what little it’s worth. The question is how best to use it.”

  Less than an hour later, Marsali sneaked into her uncle’s cabin in the bowels of the wrecked ship that listed at permanent anchor in a bed of submerged rocks. The smoke of sandalwood incense stung her eyes, and she blinked, her vision readjusting to the candlelit gloom.

  Waves battered the ship’s hull at periodic intervals and brought showers of surf through the porthole, only partially protected by the leather targe her uncle had nailed to the wall.

  As she ducked to avoid the next saltwater assault, she stumbled over the wooden bucket set in the middle of the floor; she assumed its function was to catch the water leaking through the splintered deck above. To regain her balance she lunged for the desk bolted to the warped floor.

  A ship’s bell went clanging over the edge.

  “God of all creation!” Half-asleep, Colum exploded from the bunk where he had lain under a pile of quilts with a flannel-wrapped brick between his feet. “Could you possibly make a little more noise when you enter a man’s home, Marsali?”

  She giggled, swinging around to face him. “You might consider not placing a bucket of water in the direct path of persons paying you a visit.”

  A young woman’s irritated voice cut into the conversation from the doorway behind them, the door itself hanging on the threads of a rusty hinge.

  “Och, you’ve gone and knocked over my sacred well water, Marsali, you clumsy thing! I almost broke my back lugging up that bucket.”

  Marsali glanced back at her older cousin Fiona, her eyes widening at the woman’s unkempt appearance: a lopsided crown of woodbine on her forehead, wet sand and foxtail burrs plastered to her linsey-woolsey gown, her glossy black hair a bird’s nest of mist-lacquered curls.

  Curiosity overrode Marsali’s own urgent reason for visiting. “Whatever have you been doing, Fiona?”

  Fiona swept into the cabin like a gust of sea wind and tossed a handful of pebbles onto the desk. “Well, for the past seven evenings I’ve been at the high cairn studying how to get into the Otherworld. In fact, last night I managed to project my ethereal body into the strangest place, but nothing I do so far can budge my physical form.”

  “What’s it like in the Otherworld anyway?” Marsali asked casually, helping herself to the silver chalice of water sitting on the desk.

  Fiona gasped and bolted across the cabin to knock the chalice from Marsali’s mouth. “Dhé Mhor! You almost drank the potion I brewed to arouse Hughie the shepherd’s lust.”

  “I did drink it. Ugh.” Marsali shuddered and swiped her wrist across her mouth. “What a disgusting thought, arousing an old married man with a wen on his nose and whiskers in his ears.”

  “It’s for his wife to use on him, ninny.” Fiona sniffed the contents of the chalice. “You of all people know I’ll die a spinster before finding a man worth the energy of casting a love spell. Who, I ask you, is worth arousing for a hundred miles?”

  Marsali nodded in wholehearted agreement, more than a little disconcerted when Duncan MacElgin’s dark face sprung fully detailed into her mind. Now, there was a man unlike any other she or Fiona were likely to meet in their isolated Highland life. In fact, the MacElgin was larger than life, but Marsali had decided he was a sham, a fortress so tightly guarded against human emotion that a woman would receive more satisfaction from loving a pile of rocks.

  And he had shattered her trust using only the truth as a weapon. His betrothed. The length of the summer, he had said. It was clear his sense of commitment lay on loftier goals than a forgotten Scottish castle. To think she had kissed him, and liked it. Aye, her lips still felt pleasantly bruised with the memory. Worse, she had done his damn laundry, scrubbing his clothes in the cold water of a wooden trough until her knuckles bled.

  Her laird.

  Her chieftain.

  Her self-appointed guardian.

  Fiona glared down in concern at the chalice she’d placed back on the desk. “You’re going pale, Marsali. You’re looking very unwell, indeed. How much of that potion did you drink, anyway?”

  “It’s not the potion,” Marsali muttered, turning away in agitation.

  “It’s the MacElgin.” Colum swung his legs over the bunk, bony knees protruding from his nightshirt. “That’s what has the lass all undone, isn’t it, Marsali?”

  A large wave crashed against the ship. Fiona grabbed Marsali’s arm and guided her over to the bunk, the candles in the brass sconces on the bulkheads guttering in their wake.

  “Come on, Dad, move over a moment.” Fiona crowded into the bunk beside Colum, dragging a reluctant Marsali down between them.

  “Go to your own bed, Fiona,” Colum said with a disgruntled sigh. “I’m resting to work late tonight.”

  “My cabin is leaking again,” Fiona complained, “and you’ve stolen all the warm quilts. We were better off living in the woods. And you, Marsali, you’re the one in the family who’s supposed to have all the common sense. Why are you not home snug in Bride’s cottage? Who is this MacElgin anyway, to be brewing such a tempest?”

  Marsali curled up under the threadbare quilts Fiona had confiscated from her father. Bride was Marsali’s sister-in-law, always pregnant, always tired, always needing a hand with her brood of children. The cottage, with its reek of peat smoke and genteel poverty, depressed Marsali beyond words.

  As much as she adored her boisterous nieces and nephews, even her own dimwitted brother Gavin, Marsali felt unbearably lonely in the crowded home, restless with needs of her own that she was half afraid to analyze, reminded of the future she had lost. Aye, she had her dreams, dreams of a snug home to call her own, bairns snuggled on her lap by the fire, a fine man…

  “When my back gets better, lass,” Gavin would console her, “I’ll find work again, and we’ll set sail for Virginia. We’ll grow rich raising tobacco and carriage horses. There’ll be no rebellions and raids in the middle of the night. You’ll sip tea and wear satin.”

  Duncan MacElgin had laughed at that dream, and suddenly, damn him, it did seem stupid, if not impossible.

  She sat forward, her small face intense. “I need your help, Uncle Colum.” She untied the silken cord from her neck and laid it carefully on the quilt. “I want you to take the MacElgin’s hairs from this necklace and work your most powerful spell on him tonight.”

  Colum did not respond, staring down at the quilt with a frown of concern. She had never asked him to work magic for herself before.

  Fiona ran her forefinger over the cross, her eyes misty. “A love spell. Oh, my poor desperate cousin. The man is no here a full day, and you, who scorn the ancient arts, who deny the Wiccan blood in your own veins, are imploring me to use my powers to win the man’s heart. I’m so happy for you, Marsali, I think I’m going to cry.”

  “Well, don’t take out your handkerchief yet, Fiona,” Marsali said waspishly. “And not to offend your awesome talent for spellcasting, Cousin, but it’s Uncle Colum’s help I really need. He has a wee bit more experience with this sort of—”

  “It didn’t look to me like you and the laird needed the help of a love spell on the beach,” Colum said gruffly, not touching the cross.

 
; Fiona’s leaf-green eyes widened. “Why? What were they doing then?”

  “Nothing at all,” Marsali said, her face warming at the embarrassing memory. “We were stuck together by accident. And I don’t want to win his damned heart either because he probably doesn’t have one.”

  “Then what exactly am I to do with his hair?” Colum asked, a frown carving deep grooves in his forehead.

  Marsali’s voice dropped to a whisper. “Send him into the Otherworld. Or make his man-thing wilt for a month. Cut his pride down a notch or two. Make him feel powerless.”

  “Was he misusing his man-thing?” Colum inquired sharply.

  Marsali squirmed under the quilt. “Well, no, but one can assume he had it in mind. Eventually, I mean.”

  “How ‘eventually’?” Colum demanded.

  “Did he show it to you?” Fiona whispered. “Was it very big?”

  Marsali gave a loud sigh. “Look, Uncle Colum, I know you’ve been predicting for months that the man destined to be our chieftain would magically appear out of the mountains like some sort of ancient god, but I’m afraid Duncan MacElgin is not the man in your vision.”

  Colum’s hazel eyes glittered in the gloom. “How would you know that, Marsali, you who has refused to cultivate your own talents for prophecy?”

  “Well, at first I thought you were right, and I was happy to let him order me around in front of the others—for the sake of the clan, you understand. But I’m afraid we’ve made a serious mistake. He has no intention of staying here longer than the summer, and he’s not going to punish that ass Abercrombie for having Liam flogged.”

  “I saw the vision in the Samhain bonfire as clearly as I am looking at you now,” Colum said after a long silence.

  “Well, Dad, it isn’t as if you’ve never made a mistake before,” Fiona said gently. “Remember when you predicted that flood, and we had the whole clan and all their smelly goats crowded onto this ship? It was the driest winter in anyone’s memory.”

  Marsali leaned her head on her uncle’s shoulder, her voice sweetly cajoling. “Are you going to help me with the MacElgin, or do I have to get the others to do it?”