The Angel Stone fc-3

by Juliet Dark

I sank deep into the darkness, into a waking dream, as if falling into a pit. Far above the pit hung a gibbous moon that looked down on me with a cold and pitiless eye. I could feel the angel stone pinning me down—its gravity pushing me ever deeper into the dark.

  But then I was being lifted and carried out of the pit. I struggled to open my eyes and saw William’s face instead of the cold, heartless moon. I couldn’t keep my eyes open for long, though: the force of the angel stone was dragging me down into a nightmare world where, instead of being carried by William, I was taken to a dungeon. I wasn’t alone there. The skeletal faces of the condemned women in the cart were with me, as were my friends from Fairwick—Frank and Soheila, Nicky and Ruby Day. All of us had been condemned by the nephilim to this cold dungeon, where our hands and feet were bound by cold iron and the beaked-faced creatures came and took us one by one to another room, where someone screamed and screamed and screamed …

  When I was able to open my eyes, I caught glimpses of William and Nan. I saw that they had carried me to Mordag’s cottage and put me in the upstairs bedroom under layers of wool blankets and sheepskins, but when I closed my eyes I was back in the dungeons and nothing could keep me safe or warm—not the hot tea that William held to my lips or the broths that Nan brought. Just by looking at the angel stone, my soul had been pierced. How could I ever have thought I could wield it as a weapon against the nephilim? How could I ever have thought I could save my friends back in Fairwick when I couldn’t even save myself?

  “Foolish girl,” my nightmare inquisitor said when at last they came to take me to the torture room. “You didn’t come here for this.” He touched the stone and I felt a cold weight against my breast, as if a heavy stone had been laid there. “You came for your demon lover, to consort with him. Look, here is his devil’s mark on you.”

  I looked down and saw the dark circles on my wrist where Liam’s hand had encircled mine when I banished him to the Borderlands. As he dissolved, the shadows had bitten into my wrist.

  “You see what trafficking with the devil has gotten you,” he sneered.

  The weight on my chest grew heavier, crushing my lungs. My hands clawed at the stone, trying to push it away, but it was too heavy. It held the weight of every regret—banishing Liam, loving Bill too late to save him, failing to save my friends and students from the nephilim back in Fairwick.

  Somewhere I heard a woman’s voice say, “She can’t breathe,” and I knew that in a sheepherder’s cottage on a Scottish hillside I was strangling to death.

  “I’m sorry,” I gasped with my last breath. “I couldn’t save you.”

  “But you did.” I heard a man’s voice. “You saved me.”

  I felt something press into my hand. In the cottage room, warm fingers gripped my hand. In my nightmare dungeon, I looked down and saw the heart-shaped brooch, then looked up and saw the red glass eyes of my inquisitor fastened on it. The mask couldn’t hide his surprise. I wasn’t supposed to have the brooch.

  I curled my fingers around it. In the cottage room, a hand closed over mine. In my nightmare, the inquisitor opened his mouth and let out a raucous caw. Black glossy wings filled the room with wind and noise. I could barely lift my hand in the tumult, but then I felt another hand on mine, guiding it to my chest. As soon as the cold silver heart touched my chest, the weight burst. I opened my eyes, gasping for breath, in the cottage. William was by my side, holding my hand.

  “She’s back,” I heard Nan say.

  When I saw the look of relief on William’s face, I didn’t have the heart to correct Nan. I wasn’t back. I was trapped in the seventeenth century. But I did manage to squeeze William’s hand and whisper before I fell into a deep and dreamless sleep, “I think I know how to get those bastards.”

  Once the immediate danger to me was past, Nan came less often, leaving William to care for me. I felt bad that William was stuck watching over an invalid—and worse that, while I lay in a warm bed, Mordag and eleven others were in the dungeons of Castle Coldclough. Nan had told me that the number of the accused was up to twelve, but she was right that I was too weak to face the nephilim now. I had to gather my strength. I sat up when William brought me oatmeal—my parritch, as he called it—in the morning and broth in the evening. During the day I watched out the window at the foot of the bed. In the morning, I followed his progress through the heather as he led Mordag’s sheep, which a neighbor had been tending since she’d been taken, into their pastureland; in the evening, I waited for the moment when I’d spy him silhouetted against the lilac sky, a lithe shape like some pastoral figure on an antique vase. In between, I thought about the vision I’d had of the inquisitor. The angel stone he wore had exerted great power over me. I didn’t even like to think of how it had made me feel, but I forced myself, remembering the cold weight of despair that had nearly crushed me. Despair, guilt, regret—the stone had evoked every mistake I’d ever made. It seemed to pull them out of me like a magnet. Only the Luckenbooth brooch had broken the spell and released me. I lay in bed each day trying to figure it out, my thoughts spinning in fruitless circles.

  Then one day after a week or so, I got up to meet William downstairs as he came in the door. His eyes lit up at the sight of me; his cheeks glowed red as apples from the cold air. I felt a corresponding flare in my own heart but then a pang, because I was planning to leave as soon as I was able to get the stone away from the nephilim.

  “I’ve been thinking about what happened when I saw the witch hunter,” I said, as I spooned out the stew that William had made for us.

  “Are you sure you want to be thinking about that?” he asked. “You were raving as if you were being tortured …”

  He paused and looked up at me, his eyes shining in the firelight, and I suddenly wondered if he spent his days thinking about his captivity with the Fairy Queen. “I mean,” he continued, “I know you are worried about your friends and that you must get this stone to save them, but perhaps it’s better if you use this time to get your strength back for when it is time to go.”

  “Is that what you did when you were in Faerie?”

  He looked surprised but then nodded. “Aye. I thought of what I should do if I had a chance to escape. I even dreamed sometimes of the lass who would save me …” He looked away, embarrassed. Since we’d returned to the cottage, he’d studiously avoided touching me more than he had to in the course of nursing me back to health. Sometimes I wondered if that first night we’d spent here, when we’d come together so urgently in front of the fire, had been as much a dream as the dreams of the Greenwood. “But those dreams of mine were a great deal more pleasant than the ones you were having,” he said. “I don’t like to think of you dwelling on them.”

  “I have to,” I told him. “I have to understand how I broke the angel stone’s spell, so that I can get it away from the nephilim. Not just for my friends back in Fairwick but for everyone here—for Mordag and the rest.”

  He nodded. “Aye, I don’t like to think of what those bastards are doing to them. But I don’t see how we can help. They’re deep in the dungeons of Castle Coldclough and guarded by a squadron of those cloaked bastards. The whole town is terrified of them, everyone afraid to speak up in the kirk session lest they’re accused next. And when someone does speak, they’re struck dumb. I went to the kirk session on Sunday and watched Donald McCreavey try to speak up for his sister, but he fell on the floor in a fit. The minister said he’d been possessed by a demon and had him taken to the dungeons to join his sister. He was babbling all the while about all the sins he’d committed, how he’d stolen from the collection plate and watched the girls swimming in the burn naked. Harmless things, but he took on like he was the devil himself.”

  “It’s the stone,” I said, guiltily thinking how much worse than Donald McCreavey’s were the stains I had on my own conscience. “It makes you remember all the things you’ve done wrong—and makes them worse—until you feel like your own guilt is crushing you.”

  “That’s why
you were gasping for air?” he asked. “But what could you have done …” He stopped as the blood rushed to my face. “Oh,” he said, “did it have to do with me—or who I became?”

  “Yes,” I admitted. “I’m afraid I caused you a lot of pain.”

  William smiled crookedly. “I imagine I deserved it—and I can’t imagine whatever you did to me wasn’t worth the time I got to spend with ye.” He reached across the table and took my hand. “Dinna fash yourself, lass.” As he squeezed my hand, I remembered how I’d felt his hand in mine during my vision.

  “That’s how I was able to break the angel stone’s hold,” I said, looking down at his hand. “You put the brooch in my hand …”

  “Aye.” He reached under the collar of his shirt and pulled out a leather thong. Hanging from it were both brooches. “I was unpinning your shawl when you started thrashing about, so it was in my hand when I grabbed yours.”

  “I saw it in my hand in my vision, and the witch hunter saw it, too. I could tell he was surprised—and frightened. When I laid it on my heart, I was able to break the angel stone’s hold.”

  “Then you ought to be wearing it now for protection,” he said, pulling the thong over his head. As he leaned closer to put the thong over my head, I smelled heather. A sprig was in his hair. I pulled it loose … and was flooded with the memory of the dreams I’d had of making love in fields of heather and the sprigs I’d find in my bed afterward. Perhaps he was remembering those dreams, too, because he blushed as he saw the flower in my hand.

  “Och, aye,” he mumbled awkwardly, “that’s a queer thing. I fell asleep on the hillside today and awoke to find myself surrounded by heather, though it’s too late in the year for the stuff to be flowering.”

  I thought about the beds full of flowers I’d awoken to back in Fairwick and wondered what William had been dreaming about. I looked down so he wouldn’t see me blush and fingered the brooch he’d put around my neck. I fitted the two hearts together. I remembered the part from the ballad of William Duffy when the fairy girl breaks her brooch in half and gives one half to William.

  “Tell me what Cailleach—the first Cailleach—said to you when she split the brooch in half,” I said.

  “Keep this as a token of my love,” he said, so quickly that I guessed he had repeated the lines many times. “My heart will be halved until we are together again. And …”

  “There’s something else?” There wasn’t anything else in the ballad.

  “Aye, she said that when the two halves were joined again, nothing could hurt us. What? What does it mean?”

  “It means,” I said, holding the two halves of the brooch up together, “that I have an idea how to get the stone and destroy those bastards. But I’ll have to speak to your auntie first.”

  CHAPTER TWENTY

  The next morning, after William had left with the flocks, Nan appeared on my doorstep. I wondered how William had gotten word to her so soon that I wanted to see her, then, looking past her up the hill, I saw the smoke of a bonfire rising in the still, cold air and realized they must have arranged a signal for her to come. The signal wouldn’t have told her of my purpose, though. She was carrying a basket with food for us and another large basket full of unspun wool, which she said she’d brought for us to spin.

  “We haven’t time for that,” I said, trying not to sound as irritable as I felt. I hadn’t slept well the night before, agitated by thoughts of how to steal the angel stone—and by thoughts of William asleep in the next room.

  “’Twill calm you,” she said, giving me a keen look that took in my agitation. “You’re as skittered as a cat that’s misplaced its kits.”

  That was true enough. I’d asked William to send for Nan so I could tell her what I’d figured out about the power of the angel stone, but now that she was here I wasn’t sure how much I should tell her. Her friends and neighbors were being rounded up as witches. Would she trust me—a stranger—to know how to help Ballydoon? Or might she turn me in to the witch hunters to save her relatives and friends? I supposed it wouldn’t be a bad place to start by going along with her request.

  I helped her pull the large spinning wheel from the corner and set it up near the fireplace—the only place in the house that stayed warm now that the days were getting colder. Nan placed the basket of wool under the wheel and explained that Mordag had already combed and carded it. The stuff resembled a cloud of dirty white cotton candy and felt, when I stuck my hand in it, faintly sticky. Nan took a handful of it and, with a series of quick and mysterious finger movements, drew out a thread, which she fixed to the bobbin of the spinning wheel. As Nan pumped a pedal with one foot, the wheel began to spin, drawing more of the creamy thread onto the bobbin. I watched, mesmerized, as the amorphous blob yielded a solid thread of yarn.

  “Here,” Nan said after a few minutes. “You try.”

  She showed me how to pull the wool back in one hand while pinching the thread between the fingers of the other with just enough slack to let the spinning wheel twist the yarn, but when I tried, it was like sticking my hand in a cloud and trying to wrest something solid out of it. Like trying to pull a rabbit out of a hat. No wonder the old wives who wove were sometimes taken for witches.

  After I’d failed at several attempts, Nan made a sound low in the back of her throat—a sort of mmppff—and wrapped her own worn and capable hands around my weak and clumsy ones, guiding my fingers in the pulling and pinching motions. When she took her hands away, I could still feel their touch guiding my fingers in the same motions, coaxing a thread out of the clumps of wool and onto the spinning wheel’s bobbin.

  “Hey!” I said, delighted at the sensation of making something solid out of so much fluff. “This is fun!”

  “Mmppff.” Nan made the noise again and sat back with a hand spindle to work on another clump of wool. “Glad ye like it. There’s a barn full of the stuff Mordag left unspun when they took her.”

  “Oh,” I said, my fingers fumbling at the thought of Mordag and the others trapped in the dungeons of Castle Coldclough. “Have you had any news of her?”

  “They say she confessed.”

  My fingers snared in the wool and the thread broke. Nan clucked her tongue, whether over my clumsiness or Mordag’s confession I wasn’t sure, and showed me how to twist a new thread onto the old. When the wheel was spinning again, I asked Nan how Mordag came to be accused.

  “Are you asking me if she is a witch?” Nan asked.

  “It doesn’t matter to me. Even if she is a witch, she doesn’t deserve to be locked away in a dungeon and tortured.”

  “Nay,” Nan said, dropping her spindle from her hand to pull out a long thread of yarn. “That’s true enough. But Mordag’s no witch. She’s only a wisewoman who uses her plants to heal folks and animals alike. She has a deft hand with the wee beasties. Three years ago, when the blight wiped out most of the local flocks, Mordag kept her own flock alive. She offered to tend the MacDougal flocks, as weel, but Hamish MacDougal was too proud to consult a wisewoman. All the MacDougal sheep perished, which drove up the price of wool next season. It made Mordag a rich woman—but a hated one. I told her she ought to leave off healing, but she wouldna say no to anyone in need.” Nan shook her head and wrapped a skein of yarn around her arm, twisting it into a knot and dropping it into a basket. She’d woven twice as much with her hand spindle as I had with the wheel. “She brewed a special dip for Fergus MacIntire’s sheep last spring, and a few of them died. Fergus accused her of hexing them. Mmppff. Like as not the creatures died from Fergus skimping on their feed.”

  “But why has she confessed?”

  “Why do ye think? That man ye saw on the cart? The one who wears the moonstone pinned to his cloak? That’s Endymion Endicott. He’s a famous witch finder. Any man or woman he interrogates ends by confessing. By the time he’s done with them, they confess to crimes committed in their dreams. They confess to all the petty acts we each think of doing but don’t. Mordag admitted that she had seen the au
ld folk riding in the moonlight on All Hallows’ Eve. Same as we all have in these parts. Mordag didna know that the judges didn’t see any difference between the devil and the fey, but the real devil was that monster Endicott, who tortured her into confessing. By the end, he had her sayin’ that she’d kissed the devil’s arse. But she wouldna name any members of her circle, so she will not be given the mercy of a quick death. She’s to be burned alive three days before Christmas Eve.”

  I shuddered but somehow kept the thread moving through my fingers—as though I had to do something to keep the horror of Mordag’s fate at bay. Nor did I want to look at Nan when I asked her my next question.

  “Not that it really matters,” I said, trying to keep my voice casual, “because where I come from it’s not a crime … even if anyone believed in it … so I just wondered …”

  “If I’m a witch?” Nan asked, looking up from her spindle.

  The thread broke in my hand and I met Nan’s gaze. “Well, you see, I am, so if you are …”

  “Aye, I suppose you could call me a witch. My gram said we were wisewomen and buidseach. I wouldna ever do harm to anyone. That is one of the verra first rules I learned at my gram’s knee.”

  “An’ it harm none, do what ye will,” I quoted the Wiccan credo from one of Moondance’s bumper stickers. “Although I’m not sure all the witches I know abide by that rule.” I thought of my grandmother and the curse her grandfather had put on Nicky Ballard’s family.

  “Nay, not all do, but the harm they do always comes back on them.”

  “Thricefold,” I said. “Yes, I’ve heard that, too. I wonder how many of those convicted and killed by Endicott are actual witches.”

  “I do not know for sure. Some of the accused belonged to our circle and some did not.”

  “Your circle?”

  “Aye, our spinning circle, ye ken. Perhaps you’ll join us when ye’ve gotten your strength back.”

  “And this witch finder—Endicott—do you think he’s a nephilim?”