Sacrifice

by Heather McCollum

  Anna shook her head. “My only power lies in muting Drustan. I don’t have any magic, not like you.”

  Merewin began to fade, but her gaze connected with Anna’s. “I am not talking about you. I’m talking about your daughter.”

  Chapter Sixteen

  “A baby,” Patricia said, smiling.

  “A very powerful baby,” Matilda added.

  Anna sat by the hearth in the great hall in a high-backed chair. It was a good thing it had a back because without one, she’d have fallen over onto the floor. As it was, she was having a hard time breathing evenly.

  Matilda had changed, and Winston sat with William and Hamish at the table discussing the stables.

  “I hadn’t felt the baby the last time I touched you,” Matilda said, holding Anna’s hand. “But that was, I don’t know, a week ago perhaps.” She lowered her voice. “When was the baby conceived?”

  “And out of wedlock,” Patricia said, shaking her head but smiling. “Scandalous, Anna.”

  “He considers them wed,” Alicia said.

  “But does she?” Matilda asked, her cheeks flushed. The women looked at her, but Anna couldn’t remember the question. The world swam before her. It could be the pregnancy or a mild form of shock.

  “I’m going to have a baby,” Anna said and let her other hand run along her stomach. She’d been feeling nauseous and tired, but it was too soon.

  Matilda closed her eyes and touched Anna. “The baby is healthy, but seems to be getting bigger as we speak,” she said, her brow furrowing. She looked at Anna. “When was this bairn conceived?”

  Anna met her gaze. “Two weeks ago, a few days more, when we were trapped in the blizzard.” Or two days later by the stream.

  Matilda’s lips squeezed shut and then opened. “This bairn is at least two months along. The fingers and toes are developing, her organs and circulation.”

  “I’m going to have a daughter,” Anna said.

  “One full of magic,” Alicia said and glanced at her sister. “And I guess she’s coming sooner than normal.”

  “Much sooner,” Matilda said and passed a look with Kailin. “Didn’t Drakkina say that the final battle looks like it will occur when this bairn is born?”

  Kailin pushed against Anna’s shoulder as if preventing her from falling out of the chair. “Now that the pregnancy is established, every prophesy Drakkina sees in her scrying bowl has to do with the baby.” She sat down opposite Anna and took both of her hands. She smiled encouragingly, almost like she was talking Anna off a ledge. “Your baby has a lot of magic in her. She can help us win against the demons.”

  Anna blinked back the pressure she felt behind her eyes. “And Drustan. You think she will kill her father.”

  No one said anything, and Anna looked to Matilda. “I know he didn’t intend to hurt you.” Matilda’s lips pinched tight again, but she nodded. Anna’s gaze swung to Kailin. “He has a good heart. He regrets hurting the people he’s hurt. That is part of why Semiazaz’s plan looked so good to him. Drustan could bring those people back, give them a chance at life that his touch stole. He wouldn’t try to hurt someone. I know it like I know my own heart.”

  Kailin sighed. “I hope you’re right. And I hope you got through to him when you spoke about Semiazaz’s plan being all wrong.”

  Anna tried to remember exactly how they ended when they talked by the stream. They’d been so close, Drustan all but saying he’d tell Semiazaz he wouldn’t cooperate. But then when she’d returned from using the necessary where Drakkina had appeared, Drustan had been distant and angry.

  Anna’s chest tightened, twisting off her breath momentarily. Had Drustan overheard Drakkina? Did he think she’d slept with him with the purpose of foiling his plans? He’d been angry then, and tonight Hamish said he’d left the bailey in a fury without bothering to find her inside. What would make him leave again without speaking to her?

  Anna dropped her face into her open hands. Pregnant with a magical baby. The unwed part was the least of her worries. “I need to go to him, speak to him,” she murmured, her warm breath against her palm.

  “Absolutely not!” Drakkina’s voice rang through the hall, making Anna jump, her head shooting upward. The woman’s ethereal form drifted around their small group near the hearth, little dragonflies zipping and weaving through the air. Anna frowned at the little insects. She’d seen dragonflies in the castle before. Were they Drakkina’s minions?

  “The baby is the key to success in the final battle,” Drakkina said. “You cannot risk her by going away from the protection of these walls.”

  “How can these walls protect her against Drustan?” Matilda asked. “He’s been inside despite yer wards.”

  “My wards will keep Semiazaz and his coven from coming within. They are the ones we must keep from Anna,” Drakkina said. “They know the prophecies as well as I.” She tapped a long, clean fingernail against her pale lips. “But Drustan is too volatile now. I will work to ward the keep against him as well.”

  Anna met Drakkina’s gaze. “He didn’t do this, the stable collapse. I know he didn’t.”

  “You said he was angry,” Kailin said. “Last week after your picnic. Do you have any idea why?”

  “He may have overheard a conversation I had with Drakkina that day.” Anna frowned fiercely at the apparition. “You made me sound very guilty and manipulative. I hope to God he didn’t hear that.”

  Drakkina seemed to suck her lips in, her eyes hardening into little pale blue pebbles. “I have not seen you since that night at the cave in the blizzard.”

  Anna shook her head, dizziness seizing her again. Leaning back, she let the chair hold her completely up. “We spoke by the stream.”

  “What did you say?” Kailin said.

  Anna felt her face flame. She’d despised the incident, felt guilty even though she hadn’t slept with Drustan at the witch’s bidding. Had there been a small part of her though that did in an effort to save the world? She blinked at Kailin and wet her parched lips. She opened her mouth and closed it, not sure how to start.

  “Drakkina asked me to sleep with Drustan the night of the blizzard, to make him love me and save the world,” she blurted out.

  Patricia gasped. “That’s why you—?”

  “No,” Anna said before her sister could finish. “No, and that’s what I told you”—she looked to Drakkina—“at the stream. But you kept twisting what I said, making it sound like I was just acting like I cared for him. That I was a sacrifice to save the world.”

  Kailin stared at her. Matilda cursed in Gaelic. Alicia fiddled with her braid, and Patricia dropped into a chair, her fingers rubbing her head. “And you think he heard,” Kailin said. “At the stream.”

  “I don’t know. I whispered, and the stream was loud, but he acted different when I returned.”

  “And like I said,” Drakkina held out her arms as she hovered slightly above them. “I was not there. Whoever spoke to you was something else.” Her face said quite plainly who she believed it to be. “Was there a scent of death in the air?”

  “I don’t know. There was a breeze, but yes, I thought some animal must have died in the woods.”

  “Semiazaz,” Kailin said. “And his demons. They staged the scene for Drustan to overhear.”

  “Then I have to talk to him,” Anna said, pushing out of her seat.

  “No,” Drakkina said again. “You and the babe must stay safe. He may be a lost cause now.”

  Anna turned to the woman. “He is not a lost cause.” Each word came succinctly in front of the next, like soldiers lined up to battle. “He is a caring, tortured man who has been abandoned far too many times. I will not abandon him now. He is the father of my child, his heart is good, and…I love him,” she blurted out.

  They all stood silently for a long moment. Drakkina’s voice held compassion, but it didn’t make up for the words themselves. “Unfortunately that doesn’t matter anymore.”

  ****

  Drakkina
bent low over the copper bowl filled with mountain water. “Show me something Earth Mother, something to help me prepare them.” She swirled the water by rotating the bowl, its bottom scraping against the granite of the slab she sat upon in the center of the ten soaring stones.

  Over the last three weeks, she had visited all the sisters and their mates in their own time periods, warning them of the coming battle. With each week, the baby inside Anna seemed to grow the equivalent of a month. Since the clearest prophecies now revolved around the birth, the battle couldn’t be more than a few weeks away.

  Drakkina lowered her head and squeezed her eyes shut. She had prayed to the Earth Mother for centuries, justifying her actions, and begging for help in the battle, and for wisdom. But she remained silent to Drakkina.

  As she leaned over the bowl, she felt such tightness in her imagined chest, as if her ribs would burst. So sorry, so very sorry. What a fool I’ve been. “Dearest Earth Mother, I beg for forgiveness.” The words tumbled out with her grief. “I was a rash, stupid woman to go against your warning not to bind the demons and Semiazaz. I have been trying to undo my wrongs for more than three thousand years.”

  Drakkina let the regret she held tightly in the center of her being release slowly, permeating her essence. Instead of stuffing it away, she gave in to her sorrow. She’d been alone so long, angry and determined to fix everything all on her own. She’d manipulated Gilla’s daughters, forcing them to find their mates instead of just letting things happen. Just like she’d thought to conquer Semiazaz by forcing him to endure the demons he’d brought forward.

  The pressure of tears ached in Drakkina’s eyes, and she finally let them seep out. In the silence of the in-between temporal dimension, the plip of her tear echoed out from the water in the scrying bowl. “You were right, Earth Mother, and I ruined so much and so much more will be destroyed if Semiazaz wins. Please tell me what to do. I need you to help me fix this.”

  The breeze blew through the mist surrounding Drakkina. She felt the coolness of it mix with the particles that made up her body, a freshness like an icy drink of clean water over a dry throat. Drakkina breathed it in through her mouth, a half gasp, half whimper coming from her. She opened her eyes to stare down into the swirling water, rings still circling out from her tear, rippling at the edges of the bowl.

  Her reflection stared back, yet the face glowed with a golden beauty, a serenity, and power that transformed the visage into someone else. The lips moved.

  I hear your prayer. The whisper floated on the breeze moving the mist. You have learned much, especially from Gilla’s daughters. Look inside you, my child, for the answers.

  “Earth Mother,” Drakkina said on a breath. “I have no answers.” She thought of the prophecies, the one with Anna’s newborn baby, sitting at the center of the sacrifice, Drustan slicing through its potent life force. “What can stop ultimate evil?” She shook her bent head.

  Love. Only love.

  “But how?” Drakkina looked closely at the image, watching the spark in the eyes change back to her own flat, blue orbs.

  Great love, requires great sacrifice. Love will win. Let it happen.

  The words faded into the mist, the cool breeze sliding off to somewhere Drakkina could not follow. She slumped over, her face in her hands, and let the tears soak her palms. There in the mist, alone, always alone.

  ****

  Anna paced before the fire snapping in her bedroom hearth. She rubbed at her lower back that arched to support the largeness of her stomach.

  “I need to see him,” she said to Patricia who sat needlepointing on a large circular hoop of fabric.

  “It’s not safe,” Patricia repeated the words that had been said a thousand times in the past six weeks since the stable incident.

  If Anna heard that phrase one more time, she just might blacken the eye above the mouth that uttered it. “Don’t you think it’s also not safe to let Drustan, a man who could destroy reality as we know it, stew in some mistaken idea that he’s not worth being loved?”

  Patricia set the needlepoint on her lap. “Drakkina says that you have to keep the baby safe. That really, she is the key to saving everything.”

  “Everything except Drustan,” Anna said, feeling the press of tears behind her eyes. What must he be feeling? They still weren’t sure why he may have attacked Matilda and Winston, except that Winston said that Matilda looked strangely like Anna at one point. Upon further questioning the embarrassed man refused to say more. Could Drustan have mistakened Matilda as Anna in the stables? The whole incident was a mystery, from Matilda swearing she heard Winston say Anna’s name to the skewered rabbits left outside.

  Anna stood at the narrow window overlooking the forest that met the mountains behind Kylkern. She should have gone after Drustan immediately. But the shock of being pregnant, accompanied by the onset of nausea and extreme exhaustion, had delayed her. And now she was the size of a hot air balloon.

  Each day there were discussions about the final battle, led by Kailin. Drakkina brought in each of Kailin and Drustan’s sisters and their mates, at least in spirit, their bodies transparent like the witch’s.

  “So much talk, but few answers,” Anna mumbled. She lay her hands over her round belly and felt the butterfly kicks of her growing daughter. It was all happening so fast that her body hardly had time to respond. Matilda sent pulses of healing energy into Anna daily to help her muscles relax and her organs shift, something that would occur naturally if she’d taken eight months to grow this big instead of barely eight weeks.

  Winston hadn’t noticed the first week, but very soon it was evident that she was growing unnaturally fast. William and Matilda had to reveal the family secret to the doctor. Now he spent his days following Matilda, watching her heal with magic and shaking his head. Matilda seemed to have forgiven him for uttering Anna’s name in the stable after he asked her to marry him. They still hadn’t figured out where they would live or what they could do to leverage Matilda’s gift without revealing her to the world.

  Patricia set the needlepoint hoop down in her seat as she stood. “I think it is time for the evening meal. Let us go down and see who has shown up today.”

  As they rounded the corner into the great hall, frustrated voices lobbied back and forth.

  “If they are mist, what use is my war axe?” came a booming voice.

  “And the Viking has returned,” Patricia whispered to Anna and took her arm. Merewin’s husband, Hauk, the great Viking raider from tenth century Denmark, had scared Patricia so badly the first time Drakkina had brought him here that she’d hidden in her room until Anna assured her he was gone.

  “He’s honorable and powerful,” Anna reminded her. “Both traits we need right now.”

  “How does Merewin put up with his fierce frown?”

  In actuality, the ancient seafarer reminded Anna a bit of Drustan with his solemn features and large muscles; although, all the warriors that were the mates of Drustan’s sisters had the same fierce expression whenever the final battle was mentioned. Which was every single day.

  “Merewin seems to handle him just fine,” Anna said, referring to the stubbornly strong woman who had saved Matilda with her magic. The woman was feisty and spoke her mind. Anna actually liked her a lot.

  Patricia and Anna stopped just inside the great hall. The room seemed crowded with ghosts hovering just a foot off the floor, their feet shrouded in a mist that seemed to follow them as they moved. Anna counted quickly. “They are all here,” she whispered.

  Drustan’s sisters stood close to one another near the table where their husbands hefted weapons and frowned. Kailin was the only sister of this time period and therefore looked two decades older than her twin Katell, whom they called Kat. Yet Anna could tell the beautiful women were twins with their light auburn hair and matching blue eyes. The only real difference between them, aside from age, was the burn scars along Kat’s right cheek. Anna wondered why Merewin hadn’t smoothed the scars away. Perhaps
Kat didn’t mind them.

  Kat also dressed very differently from the other women. Being from the twenty-first century, she wore pants like a man, but much tighter and molded to show her curves. They did not make her look masculine at all. Did all women of her century wear such trousers? Anna would love a pair.

  Serena, the first born to Gilla, stood quietly, probably reading everyone’s mind. She was empathic and could read emotions and thoughts. The ability made Anna nervous even though Kailin told her that Serena avoided eavesdropping. Serena also had beautiful wavy auburn hair, but her eyes were a strange blue that really looked more violet. Anna thought the tapestry depicting Serena had merely faded, showing her eyes to be purple in color. Apparently not.

  Drakkina hovered closer to the men, all of them in varying examples of huge and brawny. “The demons will bring creatures of the forest to battle,” Drakkina said. “Your war hammer can take out a wolf, can’t it?”

  At the mention of the wolf, Anna’s breath caught. Tenebris. Of course he would be with Drustan. Tenebris would never attack them.

  “So we are to kill any beasts that come within the stones,” Serena’s husband, Keenan, asked, brandishing his long sword. Keenan was also a Highlander with an uncanny resemblance to his great-grandson, William Maclean.

  “Yes, I’ve seen you fighting animals in the prophecies,” Drakkina said.

  Keenan frowned and sheathed his sword. “Prophecies are difficult to read. They may look one way and really mean another.”

  “The prophecy that you lived under, Keenan, revolving around the Maclean family a century ago was written down, not seen,” Drakkina replied. “I’ve seen the animals, the details of the battle.”

  Keenan frowned, unconvinced, and Serena wrapped her arm through his.

  “Your job in the battle,” Drakkina said, gazing at the men, “is to protect your mate, keep her alive.”

  Hauk snorted. “A daily task at which I am well practiced.”

  Merewin’s leg moved under the drape of her simple dress, and a grimace flickered across Hauk’s face.