Daughter of Light and Shadows
An absolutely magical fantasy romance
Anna McKerrow
Books by Anna McKerrow
Daughter of Light and Shadows
Queen of Sea and Stars
Contents
Prologue
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
Chapter 17
Chapter 18
Chapter 19
Chapter 20
Chapter 21
Chapter 22
Chapter 23
Chapter 24
Chapter 25
Chapter 26
Chapter 27
Chapter 28
Chapter 29
Chapter 30
Chapter 31
Chapter 32
Chapter 33
Chapter 34
Chapter 35
Chapter 36
Chapter 37
Chapter 38
Chapter 39
Chapter 40
Chapter 41
Chapter 42
Queen of Sea and Stars
Hear more from Anna
Books by Anna McKerrow
A Letter from Anna
When thowes dissolve the snawy hoord
An’ float the jinglin’ icy boord
Then, water-kelpies haunt the foord
By your direction
An’ nighted trav’llers are allur’d
To their destruction.
Robert Burns, ‘Address to the Deil’
For Laura
Prologue
1590, North Berwick, Scotland
Grainne Morgan stood on the rough wooden stage at the edge of the stinking harbour. She was exhausted; she had been made to stand inside a dank, dripping cell with no room to sit down for three days until she was hallucinating from lack of sleep; dirt streaked her torn grey dress. Still, she would not confess that she had done anything wrong.
Today, the sun – usually the source of joyful wisdom in her gentle worship of the wild landscape – was her enemy for the first time. It was Midsummer, usually a day for feasting and celebration, but today the heat was oppressive; she had a harsh red burn across her nose and across her bare white shoulders.
Tears streaked her muddy face; her long black hair had come undone from its neat plait and was plastered to her neck with panicky sweat. Next to her, five other women from local villages stood lashed to the same rough-hewn poles. Three of them were unconscious, hanging forward from the pole by their wrists. One of the unconscious was only a child: nine years old and there to implicate her mother.
In the crowd that jostled to get a better view, the friends and family that had known Grainne since she was a babe held each other’s hands tight and looked away, grimacing. Not to attend might mean that they condoned Grainne’s actions, and the minister had made it very clear that there was no shortage of stakes for those who communed with the faeries.
Confess! Confess that ye are a witch and receive God’s absolution! The local sheriff was a barrel-chested, bearded, thick-set man wearing the colours of King James, who believed that Grainne and the others were responsible for raising winds to shipwreck him at sea.
Grainne shook her head. She knew she was close to death; she could see her faerie guides waiting for her, forming a line from the wooden stage over and out to the sea to the distant faerie city of Murias. They held out their hands to her as the sheriff’s hot grasp encircled her neck. Confess, and ye shall go to your death godly. Not as the Devil’s whore, he muttered in her ear; she felt him harden as he pressed up against her from behind. Bile rose up into her throat but she choked it down. She would not be disgraced any further.
‘I am no whore. I am Grainne Morgan, Beloved of the Fair Folk!’ she spoke into the jeering crowd before the sheriff’s thick fingers could cut off her speech. She called upon all her remaining strength and reached her hand out for the faerie closest to her – a green shimmer in the air, tall and ancient – feeling its spectral touch on her fingertips. The faerie energy entered her, just as it had done so many times before, and she felt warmed and enlivened by it.
‘You do evil today by taking the name of the Fair Ones in vain! They are no devils; they are our own angels, the light ones that are a part of our lands. That have always been in the streams and rocks and trees and moss, since before there was Man, and certainly before there was this village.
‘They wait for me, though you cannot see them. Aye, I do not go to my death. I go to live in the hills for ever; in the far castles of the Fae that are sweet mead and fresh bread and dancing for all eternity.’
Startled, the sheriff’s hands loosened; Grainne watched the faerie that now stood next to her uncurl his fingers from her skin. She had seen this moment; she knew it, had known it in dreams, and she knew that she would suffer no more in this world of pain. Just moments stood between the end of her life in the worldly realm and her life in the faerie one. But she had one more task before the faeries would take her away for ever. She raised her chin and drew in a deep breath, summoning all her power.
‘But they will curse you, you men that bring pain to this land of magic! I curse you! In the name of the Kings and Queens of Falias, Gorias, Finias, Murias and the Shining Castle of the Moon! In the names of earth and stone, air and winds, fire and hearth, water and sea, I curse you! Let no more the Fair Folk help you. Let a blight be on this land!’
Grainne watched as the waves outside the harbour walls rose and roiled higher and higher. The breath had almost left her, and her eyes blinked shut. Her body slumped against the ropes that held her upright to the stake. But the water rose higher and higher, and the crowd turned and ran from the impossibly high tide which rolled and crashed over the boats and the walls towards them.
As she died, Grainne was no longer aware of the flood that came over the harbour, or the screams of the villagers who had come to watch her burn as they now ran for their lives.
And as she left her body, she held out her hand for the faerie in the water, who had gills like a fish, and whose blue skin was slick like an eel. Its eyes were not human and held no compassion for the drowning around them, but it grasped Grainne Morgan who felt herself become fluid like water, too. She knew that the other women – and Joan, who had been denied the years to grow into one – would be taken by the Fair Folk, as reward for their faithful honouring of the Fae. The Fair Folk would not let their favoured humans be strangled and burnt.
She went willingly and, as the faerie took her hand, the Fair Folk of Murias, the Faerie Realm of Water, led her in their dance over the waves to the distant castle, and she was at peace.
Chapter One
The shop was called Mistress of Magic, and Faye Morgan ran it like her mother had before her.
As Faye turned the sign to ‘open’, she watched as, across the other side of the small road in the Scottish village she’d lived in all her life, the elderly minister cast her a baleful glance and refused to return her friendly wave. Ignoring his response – or lack of it – she kept the polite smile plastered on her face and turned back to look at her inheritance.
The tall stone hearth, blackened on the inside and topped with the original stone mantle, remained from the days when the shop had been a house. Generations of Morgans had sat in the same tin bath before the fire of a night time, watching the sprites in
the fire dance, listening to stories of the faeries; of the kelpies and selkies, and of women that fell in love with beautiful faerie kings and bore their half-fae children.
The hearth was also where grandmother, and her mother before her, had sat and received the villagers with all their ailments and worries: had dispensed medicines, wisdom and fortunes for those that preferred the old ways. Faye still did.
Her mum, Moddie, had made the downstairs of the house into the shop in the 70s. Flower power had made its way even up here to a tiny village in Fife; stubbornly, despite some of the villagers telling her that no-one would come, Moddie had filled the windows and wooden shelves with crystals, her homemade incenses, books and tarot packs. Faye remembered being a child, standing behind the glass counter, her nose just over its top, watching Moddie – Modron, an old name for such a young soul – talking to her customers about astrology, spell casting, runes in the full moon.
Perhaps it was the magic that made Faye a shy child; the fact that she could see the wind, could smell a storm coming, and watched the different colours of the customers’ auras fluctuate as they had their palms read or picked up the crystals that sat in little baskets along a table by the window. Though Moddie was not shy at all; before she died, grandmother sometimes took Faye’s hand and told her she had more of her father in her blood than her mother. But that was all anyone ever told her about her dad.
She never knew him; he had disappeared just before she was born, and Moddie never spoke of him. She said nothing at all but, sometimes, if Faye asked, she got a haunted look on her face. All Moddie would say was that he had had to leave Abercolme: no more than that… except once. Once, Faye remembered catching Moddie unawares; she’d been a little tipsy, maybe, and Faye had come downstairs, woken by a bad dream. Moddie had been sitting at the kitchen table with a friend of hers, a woman from the little coven she ran at the shop – Faye couldn’t remember her name, they’d moved away quite soon afterwards. There was a half-full bottle of wine on the table between them, and Moddie’s cheeks were flushed.
Faye had dreamed of her father; only, in the dream, all she could see of him was a looming shadow. She described the dream, held in Moddie’s warm embrace, sniffling into her mother’s comforting soft flannel shirt.
Ah, well, that’s all he’ll ever be, sweetheart, Moddie had replied, stroking her hair. A shadow. He didn’t want us, child, so don’t waste another tear on him. And, to her friend, she had said, That’s one mistake I’m never making again. Almost killed me.
Almost killed me. When Faye had gone back to bed, she had stared at the ceiling for what felt like hours with the phrase turning around and around in her head. What did Moddie mean? Had her father tried to kill her mother? Was she the daughter of a murderer? A picture began to form in her eight-year-old mind: a tall man, made of shadow; a scowling man, a man who wanted to hurt Moddie.
The next day Faye asked Moddie what she had meant, but her mother shook her head impatiently. Nothing, little goose. Turn of phrase. There was no more explanation than that, except being told not to worry. He wasn’t ever coming back.
Now that she was an adult, Faye suspected that her father had been one of Moddie’s hippie friends: too irresponsible to be a father; someone here and gone on the wind. Perhaps it had been drugs; perhaps things had got violent. Either way, the Morgan women kept their own surname and their own counsel.
Faye watched as the elderly minister made his way down the street. Grandmother had been quite good friends with the minister in her day; Moddie said that he was often invited in for tea and cake, and a talk about God and angels in front of the fire.
Faye sighed, and looked up at the old blackboard behind the counter which read Support Your Local Witches. She smiled to herself. She remembered Moddie drawing the message in chalk when Faye had been perhaps five or six. Minister Fraser had taken offence to Moddie conscripting some members of his congregation to her witchcraft group which had started meeting at the shop on Friday nights. He’d written a rather nasty piece about Moddie and the evil she was apparently wreaking at the shop, and published it in the village newsletter, entitled Support Your Local Church.
Grandmother, who was still alive then, had rolled her eyes dramatically.
‘Such an impertinent fellow. Not like Minister Crowley,’ she had sighed. ‘Now, there was a learned man. Do you know what the wisest people in the world know, Faye?’
‘No, Grandmother.’ Faye remembered her excitement at the prospect of learning what only the wisest people in the world knew. To Faye, her grandmother was absolutely one of the most knowledgeable people in the universe.
‘The wisest people in the world know one thing, my darling girl: that they know nothing,’ she had sighed, and got up to make a pot of tea. ‘Always remember that, Faye. There are more things in heaven and earth than can be dreamed of. And many of them are stranger than you can ever imagine.’
Faye reached for the piece of chalk she kept next to the counter and traced over her mother’s words, then, remembering grandmother, added: There are more things in Heaven and earth than can be dreamed of. She smiled at the memory.
An hour after she’d opened for the day, Annie swept in regally. Faye looked at her watch in slight irritation, but only slight. A struggling actress, Annie’s work came and went, hence her job in the shop, which Faye could be flexible about if Annie had to disappear at a moment’s notice.
‘Morning,’ Faye said, only a little pointedly, as Annie unwound her rainbow-striped scarf and unbuttoned her long orange coat. She wore vintage designer pirate-style boots on top of some black PVC leggings, with a sweatshirt covered in sewn-on patches of toadstools, frogs and elves. Her ears were pierced several times over and she wore one long skeleton earring that grazed her collarbone. Her hair was short and, this week, bright blue.
‘Early voice class, my sweet dahhh-ling,’ Annie trilled in her actress-y accent; it was almost perfect, but there was a rumble of Scots underneath. Faye smiled, she found it impossible to be angry with her oldest friend for long. ‘Tea? Let’s have a tea. It’s absolutely Baltic out.’
‘Just made one. Kettle’s still hot.’
‘Mahh-vellous. God, that voice teacher’s a lunatic, aye. Spent two hours lying on ma back, just doin’ vowel sounds.’ Annie slipped back into her usual accent. ‘Sorry, sweetheart. Won’t be late tomorra.’
‘That’s okay.’ Faye waited for Annie to come back to the shop floor, tea in a multi-ringed hand. ‘I’ve got to go and pour some candles. Can you mind the shop?’
‘Aye, nae worries. Pour some love ones for me.’
Faye smiled. Annie’s constant search for Ms Right had become an obsession long ago. She described herself as a hopeless romantic, but in Faye’s opinion she was far from needing any help at all.
‘Is that wise?’
‘Aye, well. I need somethin’. Feel like I’m gettin’ to the bottom of the pool. Not like there’s that many lesbians in Abercolme.’
Faye grinned.
‘If there were any new ones, I’m sure you’d know about it,’ she said, pulling out a bag of organic soy wax flakes from the store room. ‘I’m going to do these in the kitchen, so you can’t come in for another cuppa for a while.’
‘Aye, fine. The healing and protection ones have been popular too recently. Mind ye make more of those.’ Annie sat down behind the counter, set her tea on it and picked up Faye’s tarot cards, shuffling them absently. She started laying them out and Faye peered over her shoulder as she walked past, going to the store cupboard for her stock of essential oils for the candles.
‘Love reading?’
‘Aye. No brainer.’
‘Yeah, well.’ Faye frowned at the cards. ‘Not much there though.’ Annie had laid out the centre of a Celtic cross formation, the most common kind of layout for an overall picture. As she laid the final four cards in a column alongside the central cross, Faye laughed. ‘Oh. Spoke too soon,’ she said, as one of the Kings came out, followed by The Lovers. ‘N
ot one for you, though. A King? You going straight after all these years?’
Annie sighed, picked up the cards and stuck them back into the deck. ‘Reshuffle,’ she said, cutting the pack three times and halving and sliding the cards into each other repeatedly. ‘Obviously they were still tuned into your energy. I’m not in the market for a man. Dunno what ye see in them, sweetheart.’
‘No, neither do I, most of the time.’ Faye sighed and opened the store cupboard, selecting rose, lavender and neroli oils. She closed the cupboard again and started to clear space in the kitchen for her work. She was well aware of the fact that to make a good love-drawing candle, she had to create the atmosphere of love as best she could as she made them, but it was difficult when she’d never truly been in love herself. Not like Annie, who fell in love every other week.
Faye put a CD into the player and the haunting and otherworldly music filled the room. She lit some rose and benzoin incense in a heart-shaped earthenware holder and shook the wax flakes into the big heatproof glass bowl she’d placed on top of a large casserole pot with boiling water in the bottom. As they melted, she closed her eyes and sang to the music; to the heart-filling and heart-breaking melodies that spoke of love so brilliant it was difficult to look at directly; at passion so intense it could crack foundations: a house, a tower, a mind…
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