He set off at a jog on the rutted wagon path toward Dunvegan.
Gavran drew up sharply and doubled over. Crossing the boundary was like having the source of his energy sucked out of him. His body seemed to weigh twice as much.
It could have been his imagination. He’d slept maybe three hours this night.
But something inside him knew it wasn’t. He’d felt a similar sensation the morning he’d been out searching for his lost sheep, before he found Ceana. He’d attributed it to fatigue and the weather then. Now he knew. He’d crossed whatever the line was between being away from Ceana and with her. The benefits of the wishes were gone. He was a normal man.
He spotted the wagon with the horse hobbled beside. The men’s snores rumbled from the wagon bed. With the wishes held in check, he wouldn’t have them helping him convince his dadaidh and Tavish to take Ceana to find her family rather than ferrying her to the kirk.
He slunk forward. He didn’t want to wake them until he had a chance to ask Ceana a few questions. Just because he’d felt strange when he came close to her didn’t mean that wasn’t another trick of hers. He needed more evidence before turning his family against him, even if for a short time.
They’d tied her sitting up to a tree on the far side of the clearing, as far from them as possible while still keeping her in sight. He skirted around, staying to the tree line, and came in behind her. Her blindfolded head slumped forward on her chest, and her chest strained against the ropes, as if her bones had abandoned her body and with them all her strength to hold herself up.
He touched her shoulder. She jerked, and he clamped his hand over her mouth.
“It’s me,” he whispered in her ear.
He eased his hand away and removed the blindfold. She glared at him, her eyes narrowed into accusing slits. It made her face look even thinner than before. And more helpless.
He knelt down into the grass beside her. The dew wet his trews, and a chill crawled up his legs. “If you want me to believe you and help you find your brother, you have to answer my questions.”
A muscle twitched in her cheek, and for a second, he thought she might refuse. Then she nodded once. The hatred in her eyes could have frozen the ocean.
“What were the wishes you made?” he asked.
“You know that already.” She spat the words out.
He batted his hands in a shh-shh motion. “Humor me. You say my dream was real. Well, I want to check some details.”
“I wished that you would find love and that that love would always remain true.” Her voice tore on the last word. “I wished that you would be spared pain and only face success and happiness.”
So far she’d gotten them both right. Her words were almost identical to the ones spoken by the woman in his dreams. But there was one more. The one he could never understand. “And the final wish?”
“That every night you’d dream of me and what happened.”
The air rushed from his lungs like someone had trod on them. “Now I want to know why you wished the dream on me.”
A cloud crossed the moon and blacked out her face. When it shone again, she’d turned away from him. “I told you why that night.”
“The dream is imperfect. Like pieces are missing.”
The vein beneath her temple pulsed. She muttered something he couldn’t catch.
“What did you say?”
She drew in a shuddering breath. “I should have been more precise in my wish. I knew I couldn’t trust her to have it turn out the way I’d tried for unless I was specific, but I couldn’t think clearly.”
She squirmed within the ropes, her heels digging for purchase in the dirt.
He wanted to brush back the hair that fell across her face, but he didn’t. “So why the third wish? You could have wished for anything. Why that?”
“The fairy, she told me you wouldn’t remember me, that no one would. I’m no great loss from the world.” A smile warped her lips, then died prematurely. “But I needed someone somewhere to know I existed and that I did something worthwhile. That for that one moment, my life mattered.”
Her words burrowed deep inside, and his heart beat a strange rhythm. He knew he’d never told anyone that the woman in his dreams was out on the sand bar collecting cockles the night they almost drowned because she was attempting to prove her worth to her dadaidh. Or how he somehow knew the dream woman felt valueless.
Ceana stared at him, her face devoid of emotion. “Is there anything else?”
“Just one thing.” The question that plagued him. “Why you?”
Her face tightened. “Why me what?”
“Why did the fairy choose you? Choose us?”
“I don’t know.”
She spoke with the ease and even tone of someone telling the truth, but it didn’t make sense.
“There must be some reason. Fae don’t show up without warning to rescue drowning—” He almost said couples, but he didn’t know what they were before the wishes. “Drowning people for no reason, and then force them to make wishes for one of them to get the opposite of what the other wishes for.”
“If your help depends on me having an answer,” she said in a tone that clearly said I’m done trying to convince you, “then go home.”
He rocked back on his haunches. If she’d created this, made up the dream and bewitched him, she’d have had a good answer for him. Everything else held together too well for her to have missed that detail. She could have said she’d stolen something from the fairy or crossed her in some other way. She hadn’t. Instead of proving her story false, that mystery made him more certain of the truth.
He stood and brushed off his knees. “I’ll wake them and tell them we need to find your brother.”
“They won’t listen. They’ll only think I’ve bewitched you again.”
She had a point. They were more likely to tie him up as well to keep him out of the way until they’d left her and brought him safely home again. Especially given he’d pursued them out here in the middle of the night.
He pulled his sgian from its hiding spot high on his left side and sawed through the rope binding her. “If we go now, we’ll be well ahead before they wake. I’ll return home once we’ve found your brother.”
Chapter 7
The raw skin on Ceana’s wrists where she’d been bound burned. She stared at the loose rope. “You’re going to take me to find my family?”
Gavran pulled her to her feet. “We have to go now if we’re going. They’ll look for you as soon as they wake.”
The sky was already lighter than when he’d first woken her, all streaks of orange and crimson. The men could rise any moment.
She followed Gavran back through the trees. Maybe she should ask him what changed his mind. She knew better than to trust him. But opportunities didn’t linger for the hesitant. They favored those who chased them. And she couldn’t be worse off for following him now than she had been bound to the tree. At least she was free.
He moved a low-hanging branch out of the way for her. “Where would your family have gone when they abandoned your cottage?”
She looped the rope around her waist and tied it off. “I have no idea.”
He stopped, and she plowed into him.
He rubbed the front of one foot against the heel of the other where she’d stepped on him. “You said you wanted me to help find your brother. I thought that meant you knew where he might be.”
“You assumed.” As much as she’d explained the wishes to him, he still didn’t seem to grasp the extent of what they meant. “How would I know? Nothing I do has succeeded in the year I’ve been under the wishes.”
Gavran slapped his palm against a tree trunk. “We need to figure this out before we go any farther.”
“You said yourself your dadaidh’ll be after us as soon as they wake.” She made a shooing motion with her hands. “We can’t stand here and make it simple for them.”
“And if we run off in the wrong direction, they’ll catch
us when we double back.”
It was easy for him to be so optimistic about their chances of staying hidden long enough to make a plan. He knew only success. She tugged on a tree branch, testing to see if it would hold her weight. It didn’t budge. She hoisted herself up so her stomach rested on the branch and swung her legs over. She tested the next branch.
“What are you doing?” Gavran asked, his head now level with her shoulders.
“You can fiddle around down here waiting for them to catch you, but I’m going to find a safer spot to think on where my family might be.”
She swung up onto the next branch. A scuffling noise below told her Gavran followed suit. It was almost like they were children again, climbing trees to reach the fruit at the top.
When she couldn’t see the ground anymore for the leaves, she stopped. Now they’d have some cover when the men woke.
Gavran settled in on a branch below and to her left. A holler broke the morning stillness, and sparrows shot into the air above the clearing.
She tried to keep an I-told-you-so look from her face, but she wasn’t sure she succeeded. It felt wonderful to be right, to have something go right. She might as well savor the feeling while it lasted. As soon as they found her brother and Gavran went home, she’d be back to the way things were.
She wrapped her arms around the trunk and leaned close to Gavran so that, even if the men came near where they hid, they wouldn’t hear her. She hoped. “My dadaidh had a cousin in Dunvegan. Her husband was a thatcher. He always said there was more work for him in town, so like as not they’re still there. Whether or not I exist shouldn’t have changed that, and they might know where my family is.”
Gavran cocked his head, and she strained her ears, listening for voices or branches breaking down below.
Gavran slid down to a lower branch. “I think they’ve headed off.”
She scurried down after him.
They left the cover of the trees, cut off perpendicular to the road until it was out of sight, and set across an open field for easier walking.
Gavran glanced at her sidelong with a hesitancy in his eyes that she hadn’t seen before. “Why did you think your brother’s life would be better if you hadn’t existed?”
She should have known he’d come back to that eventually. The Gavran she knew never forgot a fact about anyone he met. But she didn’t want his pity or, worse, to have his pity turn to disgust. “I need your help, and you owe me a debt. Let’s leave it there.”
The expression on his face might have been regret, but she focused on the ground at her feet rather than looking at him long enough to figure it out.
They walked the rest of the way to Dunvegan in silence, stopping only to eat strawberries she spotted along the path. She was accustomed to ignoring her stomach. The cramping in her gut and unpleasant taste in her mouth took some getting used to, but she’d discovered ways to turn her mind away from it. She didn’t envy Gavran the sensation, especially when he’d never known real hunger.
The sun sank into the water, casting Dunvegan Castle to the north into murky shadows, as they entered the cluster of two-story homes and shops comprising the town. The pigs who wandered the streets during the day to clear away some of the rubbish had already been brought in for the night. Ebbs of weak candlelight filtered out of the cracks around the doors and from windows of the wooden houses like fingers of an evil fae grasping at their ankles.
Goose pimples popped out on her skin, and she wrapped her arms around her middle. They might not have to worry about evil fae, but she knew from experience that other evil beings roamed the streets at night. “Best not to still be here after curfew.”
“Which way?” Gavran asked.
She led him through the maze-like paths between the buildings. Even if they weren’t in the same house, someone there might remember them or know them and be able to direct them to the right spot.
Their hovel looked exactly the way she remembered it. Same door that looked like it couldn’t support its own weight, and a roof that the thatcher never had the time or materials to fix for himself.
Gavran marched up to the door, but she drew back. For the first time since the wishes, she sent up an actual prayer. If her family happened to be here now, she’d glimpse her brother’s face this night.
Gavran banged on the door. A woman answered.
Ceana tucked in behind Gavran and blinked twice to be sure her eyes didn’t play her false.
It was her dadaidh’s cousin, but unlike the house, she’d changed. The skin hung from her in folds like wax that had melted down the side of a candle and congealed again. Her lip was cracked, and her clothes looked patched one too many times over, the original material long gone.
Ceana’s tongue dissolved into the bottom of her mouth and disappeared. She tapped Gavran’s elbow.
He greeted her dadaidh’s cousin. “We’re looking for Irving Campbell.”
“He’s not here.” The woman inched the door closed a little more. “And I ain’t paying his debts no more. If you want money, you’ll have to find him.”
Ceana rubbed her hand over her forehead. Some things never changed no matter how many fairy wishes came along, and it seemed her dadaidh still welched on work and ran up debts he couldn’t pay. A snake couldn’t change its scales. Except without her around to care for things, the burden had fallen to others.
Though her brother should have stepped up to the responsibilities she’d left instead of allowing their dadaidh’s poor choices to hurt others.
Gavran glanced back at her and lifted his eyebrows as if to say what now?
She crept up beside him. “We’re not after money. I’m…a friend of his wife. Do you know where they might have gone?”
“You’re awful young to be a friend of Agnes, aren’t you?”
Ceana chewed the inside of her cheek. If she still thought they were after her dadaidh for money, she wasn’t likely to tell them where her mamaidh and brother were. “She helped our mamaidh when she was so sick. Our mamaidh passed this winter and wanted us to bring Agnes a few items as thanks.”
The woman’s face drooped into fresh folds. “Aye, that kindness sounds like Agnes. I fear I have sad news for you.”
She opened the door a little wider. Ceana glimpsed a sheep lipping the straw from the torn side of a straw tic long in need of replacing.
“Her son wasn’t right,” the woman said. “And when my worthless cousin found out, he left her and the boy. She tried to provide for him, but even with what help we could give ’em, Agnes died of a sickness in her lungs last winter.”
Ceana’s knees buckled. Gavran caught her before she hit the ground.
It didn’t make sense. Her cousin must be thinking of someone else. Her mamaidh couldn’t be dead, and her brother couldn’t still be addled in his brain.
Her body wanted to continue to lean on Gavran, but she forced her legs to straighten and support her own weight. “What do you mean, their boy wasn’t right?”
The woman tapped her head. “Up here. Even when he was ten, he wasn’t any further along than my littlest one, and she were only five. Didn’t get no better as he grew.”
Brilliant white and black spots blossomed in Ceana’s vision.
“What happened to the boy?” Gavran asked from a distance.
“Ran off soon as the weather turned warm. My husband was too harsh on him if you ask me.” The woman shrugged. “Haven’t seen him since.”
It was a lie. Or a mistake. “You’re wrong.”
The woman’s expression closed down, all compassion gone from her face. “I’ve got things to do. Be on your way now.”
She slammed the door in their faces. Ceana surged forward and beat on the door. Gavran grabbed her around the waist and spun her away. She flailed against his grip.
It wasn’t supposed to be this way. She’d been the one who hadn’t kept a good enough watch on him when they were little. She was the reason he fell from his cradle as a toddler learning to climb things. S
he was the reason he hit his head and didn’t have more smarts than a bairn no matter how old he grew. With her gone, he should have been normal, healthy.
But he was worse off than before and so was her mamaidh. She was dead, and he was as good as. With the brains of a child, how could he hope to survive long on his own?
She sank to the ground. “It was all for naught.”
All she wanted was to lie down and never move again, to let the ground swallow her up so she could forget. Almighty forgive her for thinking it, even hell would be preferable if she could only forget. She was too tired to think.
She was so heavy, unbearably heavy. The pounding in her head. The air couldn’t find its way down her throat. Not enough air.
Steady arms lifted her from the muddy ground, and the seal blocking her throat burst. Air rushed in.
“Let’s get you off the street,” Gavran’s voice said in her ear.
She couldn’t make her eyes focus. Couldn’t convince her limbs to respond even to free herself of his touch. She’d endured this year, given up her family, and where had it gotten her? Even her sacrifice was worthless.
Maybe her dadaidh was right about her after all. He’d always said she wasn’t worth the food he fed her. That she couldn’t do anything right. Maybe she shouldn’t have bothered to try.
Or maybe she should have taken the fairy’s wishes for herself and wished for her brother to be well, regardless of the consequences to Gavran. If she hadn’t loved Gavran so much—If she hadn’t loved Morna and Ros and Davina and Allen all so much—
Gavran let her go, and she found herself sitting on a patch of springy grass at the edge of town. She curled her arms around her knees and rocked back and forth.
Not only had her sacrifice been for nothing, but now she had to live with the knowledge that she’d made things worse for two of the people she loved. She couldn’t bear it. Her life had only been tolerable before because she’d believed they were better off.
Cursed Wishes (Three Wishes Book 1) Page 5
