Ghost Clan

by Heather Walker

  “The enchanted mirror did fall and break,” Jamie told Carmen. “Ye broke it getting’ back tae us.”

  “But the seventh winding to the bell tower croft doesn’t tell us anything about breaking the curse,” Carmen argued. “I wish Ross had at least told us where to find this witch.”

  “Ye say ye found the magic stronger the higher ye went,” Callum reminded her. “The witch mun’ be at the uppermost point.”

  “That would be the bell tower croft, wouldn’t it?” Carmen asked. “I mean, look up there. I went all the to the top of one of those towers, and it was Gahkra I found, not the witch herself. Wherever she is, she must be very well hidden. She must know we’re coming after her, and she doesn’t want to be found. She wants to manipulate all this from a distance where she’ll be safe.”

  “What do ye say we do about it?” Angus asked. “We cinnae separate to search each tower one mon alone.”

  “Of course not,” Carmen agreed. “It would be far too dangerous. We’ll have to stick together, no matter how long it takes. I wouldn’t mind betting she wants to attack us. She’s probably been waiting a long time for us to show up so she could do away with us all.”

  Ewan rolled his eyes. “Weel, that’s just splendid.”

  Carmen smiled at him. “It’s a good thing. It means she won’t leave us wandering around her castle for the rest of eternity. The minute we get inside, she’ll attack us. We’ll be able to find her and defeat her—or not, as the case may be.”

  The brothers exchanged glances. Angus laid his hand on Jamie’s shoulder. “She’s richt. We cinnae stand out here jawin’ all the day. Let’s go in there and get the worst o’er with.”

  He and Carmen started for the drawbridge. The others crossed behind them into the courtyard. Carmen already told them about the drawbridge closing behind her, but the brothers all jumped when it creaked up to slam home in its arch. They were trapped.

  The drawbridge boomed into place, and dead silence descended over the castle. Carmen let out a long breath. “I think we can skip searching the lower levels the way I did. We know there’s nothing here.”

  “Wait,” Angus told her. “I want tae see this Throne. I want tae see it for myself.”

  Every eye in the group snapped to his face, but Angus didn’t flinch. If he was going through with this, if he was going to fight some witch for a Throne he never heard of, he was jolly well going to see it first. If the ebony dragon curled around it made such an impression on Carmen, he had to see it. He had to know what he was fighting for and if this thing really did belong to him. He wouldn’t take another step without that.

  Carmen retraced her steps to the grand Throne room. The long red carpet stretched down the hall the way she described. The whole place stood silent and empty, but Angus could almost hear voices around every corner. Ghosts filled the place, just out of sight.

  The party strode down the long red carpet and stopped at the foot of the throne. Angus moved around in front of the wooden dragon, and it fixed its eyes on him. A queer prickling sensation crept up his spine. Carmen was right about one thing. That dragon really did seem to look down into a person’s eyes.

  The throne worked its magic on him. He suspected, ever since Carmen first described it to him, that he belonged here. That’s why he insisted on seeing it for himself, and he was right.

  He belonged on that Throne. He knew that now. Only one small detail remained to deal with, and that was the witch. She was nothing but a formality. He would ascend the Throne. He would break the curse and free the castle and everyone in it. He would….

  He cut that thought off at its root. He almost let himself weave Carmen into that vision, but he couldn’t let his mind go there. That’s one thing he wouldn’t do. He wouldn’t make Carmen his Queen. That part of the dream would not come true, no matter what he did. He had to remember that, no matter what else he did.

  He locked eyes with the dragon for a long time. The dragon stared down at any pathetic cringing vasal who approached that throne. It stared down with the King’s eyes.

  Angus was no cringing vasal. He was the King. The dragon told him so. The King Carmen saw in the painting must have been him. It prophesied that he would regain his Throne, and that’s what he came here to do.

  No doubt remained in his mind for the battle ahead. He would rout this witch out of her hiding place. He would kill her and break the curse. He would never go back to being plain old Angus Cameron from Nowhereville.

  He turned to find Carmen watching him. He nodded. “Richt. Let’s go.”

  He stormed out of the Throne room without a word of explanation to anybody. He tucked what happened in that Throne room into his secret heart. He alone carried the truth. The others would find out soon enough, and when that happened, Carmen would be gone. She didn’t need to know what became of him or his family.

  The party made their way to the nearest staircase. “Now where?” Fergus asked.

  Angus shrugged. “Anywhere’s as good as anywhere else, I suppose.” He put his foot on the stair.

  “Wait a minute,” Carmen called. “That book says we could get an answer if we knock seven times at the last door. Maybe we could get an answer to how to break the curse. We won’t get any other straight answer from the Fire Trilogy.”

  “We would ha’e tae go tae the forgotten fields tae find the last door,” Callum countered. “That could tak’ years.”

  “Do you have anything better to do?” Carmen asked. “Besides, if we don’t know where to go or what to do, we could be wandering around and never get anywhere.”

  “The book says we can get tae the forgotten fields through the fourth winding,” Angus replied. “That would seem tae be somewhere in this castle. It’s worth a shot.”

  The others shrugged, and when Angus started climbing, they came, too. No one argued. What difference did it make? They might all die in here, and then they wouldn’t have to worry about anything.

  Angus no longer cared what happened. He was on his way to meet his destiny. For the first time in his life, he felt the truth in his bones. He was a King. He was born to rule.

  No one told him what this Phoenix Throne ruled, but that didn’t matter. Strange Laws and rules governed this magical realm. He would learn them once he got his Throne back.

  If only his father had known, maybe none of this would ever have happened. Angus would give anything to sit down in a quiet place and puzzle out the Fire Trilogy, but he had no time for that.

  The party gained the first landing. “Fan out and find the stairways leading tae the keeps. There mun’ be a way tae discover which staircase leads tae the fourth winding.”

  His brothers and Ewan scattered, but Carmen stayed where she was. He studied her. “What is it now, lass?”

  “I don’t think it makes any difference which staircase we take. It says the fourth winding. We’re in a magic castle where things could shift around whenever the witch wants to throw us off her trail. I say we pick a staircase at random and take it. What harm can it do?”

  Just then, a shout went up from one side. It was Robbie. “O’er ‘ere.”

  The party rushed to the spot to find him staring through a door into a huge cavern. Everybody crowded around to steal a peek. The tower rose out of sight overhead and plummeted into the distance below. A wooden staircase led down to a wooden platform, where two more staircases split off. Hundreds of staircases cut this way and that through the whole tower. They ended at platforms where other staircases angled off in different directions.

  None of those staircases seemed to lead anywhere. Angus couldn’t see a single door in the tower as far as the eye could see.

  “Which way do we go?” Carmen asked.

  “Which one is the fourth winding?” Callum asked. “How do we ken whether tae go up or down?”

  Angus seized the door handle. “We don’t. This an’t the way.” He herded everyone back out into the hall and shut the door in their faces. “Get alang wi’ ye. This an’t the way.
Go find some other way up.”

  His brothers blinked at him, but he stood firm. “Go alang.”

  They looked at each other. He never acted this way before, but he acted this way now. He blocked their path from going anywhere near that door, and he didn’t budge until they all split off to search the place again.

  Carmen walked at his side back to the landing. He couldn’t explain this change coming over him even to her, but somehow, he didn’t have to. He probably didn’t have to explain it to Ewan, either. Ewan knew all along Angus was King, even when Angus didn’t know himself.

  Back on the landing, they met Jamie coming back all out of breath. “I think I found it, mon. Come an’ see.”

  Angus followed him to another innocent looking door, and Jamie threw it back. Instead of a room, green rolling fields extended all the way to a beautiful blue horizon. A fragrant breeze sent the wildflowers nodding, and sunshine played along the waving grasses. Jamie whispered in Angus’s ear. “It mun’ be the forgotten fields. Do ye think so, Angus?”

  How could this exist inside a castle? Angus stared out at those fields. They would be so inviting if he saw them anywhere else. Now they filled him with dread. He couldn’t go out there. What if he never came back? What if he got lost out there and wound up wandering in nothing forever?

  Ewan shouldered past him. The big Highlander crossed threshold and strode out into the field. He turned around, and the breeze kicked through his cropped hair. “It’s awricht. The door’s just here.”

  Angus snapped out of his trance. He entered the field and turned around to see what Ewan was looking at. Sure enough, the doorway stood in the middle of nothing. The stone wall with the door frame embedded in it stood in the middle of the open air with field grass all around.

  One by one, the others passed through. Carmen came to Angus’s side. “I guess it’s all right.”

  Fergus waited until last to cross the threshold. “Should we close it behind us?”

  “Leave it open,” Angus told him. “Maybe that will mak’ it easier to find later.”

  They all stood around and stared at the door a moment longer. It didn’t disappear. Angus took a deep breath. “Awricht. Let’s see what we find ‘ere then.”

  He led the way a little into the field where they all paused to look back. There was the door, big as life. It didn’t disappear. It would wait for them to come back.

  Angus pushed down the field. Everyone in the party kept glancing back to make sure the door was still there the farther they moved from it. They hadn’t gone very far before Angus realized the land sloped upwards just here. They were climbing a low hill.

  When he gained the top, he looked back one last time. The door stood still and alone in the distance. He didn’t want to descend the other side of that hill. He didn’t want to lose sight of the door. “Weel, I suppose this is it.”

  “We don’t have much farther to go,” Carmen told him. “Take a look. There’s the standing stones.”

  He turned around to see what she was looking at. Sure enough, a perfect circle of charcoal grey monoliths jutted up out of the grass. They faced each other in perfect symmetry. Angus rummaged in his sporran for the book and rifled the pages.

  The fourth winding leads to the forgotten fields

  Wherein dwells the fire demons under the seventh standing stone.

  Knock seven times on the last door for an answer.

  Ewan and Callum already headed down the hill toward the circle. They crossed the last stretch of field. Jamie and Fergus came behind. Robbie clapped Angus on the shoulder. “Dinnae lag behind, auld ewe. Shak’ yer tail leg!”

  Angus set off down the hill. Without meaning to, he grabbed hold of Carmen’s hand. She squeezed him back. He took the first step down the hill after his brothers when a cloud shadow raced over the grass. It darkened the waving stems for an instant and disappeared. Angus’s eye slid across the scene, but he didn’t stop walking.

  Another shadow blinked over Ewan and Callum. It cut across their path between them and the stones. Angus pulled up short, but Carmen kept walking. She looked back at him. “Anything wrong?”

  He opened his mouth to say something when it happened. Another four or five shadows glided across the ground between his two companions and their destination. Before Angus could focus his eyes, they exploded into three-dimensional shapes, solid black and moving at top speed.

  Ewan staggered back a step. Where once only shadowy images shifted over the green, ten mounted knights all in black burst into existence out of nothing. Black plumes flowed from their helmets, and their black visors gave their faces the demonic appearance of monsters.

  Angus leapt forward, sword in hand. Ewan took a moment to react, and in that split second, one of the knights wheeled his charger around and leveled his lance at the big Highlander. He set his spurs to the horse’s midnight sides. The horse screeched and sprang at Ewan in a heartbeat.

  Ewan jerked his sword up, but he couldn’t react fast enough to escape that lance. The knight tilted his long spear at Ewan to impale him when Angus landed in a crouch next to his friend. He swept his sword to one side and knocked the lance a few inches sideways. The tip impaled the soft earth next to Ewan’s foot.

  Ewan snapped alert in seconds. He whirled his saber around his head and brought down a smashing blow across the lance. He splintered it to matchwood in the knight’s hands, but the others already reined their steeds around to charge the Highlanders in all their fury.

  Two knights targeted Angus. Their horses foamed at the mouth in desperate fury to get at their enemies. One knight raised his spiked mace to cleave Angus’s head in. He bent low over his mount’s neck.

  Angus flexed his legs and waited his moment to strike. The horse wheezed against the bridle bit, and the animal reared off the ground when the knight touched him with his spurs. Angus narrowed his eyes at the oncoming knights. He expected something like this. The witch would never let him waltz into that field and find the answer to breaking the curse—just like that.

  As much as he itched to fight, Angus held himself back until the last moment. He closed both hands around his saber hilt and raised it over his shoulder at the ready. Every fiber and sinew stretched to the breaking point.

  The knight galloped forward to smash Angus’s head in with his mace. Sulfury smoke billowed off the knight’s armor, but Angus didn’t give himself time to hesitate. He whipped his body around and plunged his sword as far as it would go into the horse’s chest.

  The horse reared on its hind legs. A sickening slushy sound accompanied Angus’s saber when he withdrew it from the stricken animal’s body. The horse rose off the ground and just kept going, and going, until it toppled backward with the knight flailing for balance behind. The horse crashed down on its back and pinned the knight under its weight.

  A scream attracted Angus’s attention from behind. He spun around just in time to see the second knight wield a menacing two-headed battle ax over his head. He brought it down to cleave Angus in two when Carmen, standing unarmed at Angus’s back, caught the knight by the armor and swung up behind his saddle. She pitched him off the horse in one yank, and the knight clattered to the ground at Angus’s feet.

  Wild rage seized Angus, body and soul. That was his Queen up there. She killed these enemies of his with her bare hands. His saber whistled through the air, and he drove the point between the knight’s armored chest plate and his helmet. A gurgling sound bubbled under the closed visor, and the knight lay still.

  Chapter 16

  From the knight’s empty saddle, Carmen looked down on the Highlanders fighting these mystical knights. They smashed and slashed and stabbed them one and all until not one knight remained alive.

  Robbie caught one knight’s lance in his two hands and jerked the apparition from his saddle. Before the knight could rise, Robbie jammed his foot into the knight’s chest and held him there while he turned the lance on its owner. He skewered the knight through the helmet and left him twitching whe
re he fell.

  As soon as the last knight lay dead on the grass, the horse underneath Carmen vaporized in a wisp of shadow. She landed hard on her backside next to Angus’s latest victim.

  He helped her to her feet. “Awricht?”

  She nodded and dusted herself off. “We should have expected that.”

  “It’s ended weel. No one dead, at least.” He turned his attention to the stones. “Now which is the seventh stone, I wonder?”

  Carmen pressed forward into the circle. She studied the stones at close range. “I don’t see any identifying markings.” She looked up and noticed the six men all standing outside the ring. “What’s the matter? The way inside must be here somewhere.”

  None of them would budge. Angus extended his hand to her. “Come out o’ there, lass. Come out o’ the circle.”

  “What’s wrong?” she asked. “We have to find the entrance where the fire demons live. Maybe they can explain the verse from the book.”

  He took a step toward her, but he wouldn’t cross into the circle. “Come out, lass.”

  His words didn’t change, but something in his voice made her stop and look at him. He never told her what to do like that before, but something in the way he looked at her made her leave the circle and join him outside.

  He wilted when she crossed back to safe ground. “Ye dinnae ken what’s in there. Don’t go in there until ye do.”

  She strolled around outside the ring. She touched every stone in turn. “I don’t know what the big deal is. They’re just stones standing in a circle.”

  Angus shook his head, but he didn’t argue. He used whatever hold he had on her to get her to come out of that circle, but he didn’t try to stop her exploring the place. He ought to know better than to do that.

  “Look at this one here,” she called. “This one’s taller than the others, and there are fourteen stones in all. If this is the first stone, that makes that one over there the seventh stone. It doesn’t matter which way you count. You still come to the seventh stone.” She walked around to the stone she indicated. “This must be the one. The fire demons must live beneath this.”