Enchanted (35 page)

“Simon?” she whispered.

He gathered Ariane’s living warmth into his
arms, felt the strength of her arms circling his neck.

“I give to you the gift of the rowan,”
Simon whispered against Ariane’s lips.

And the gift was love.

B
aron Deguerre stood at
Blackthorne’s moat bridge and saw the rowan’s triumph
riding toward him, borne on the backs of horses that followed
Ariane with neither lead rope nor groom to harry them into
obedience. Each horse carried a burden of sacks filled with spices
and silks, with gold and silver, with precious stones, with all
that had been taken from Ariane by treachery and betrayal.

But it was not the dowry that convinced Deguerre of
his defeat. It was the pommel of Simon’s sword, a crystal as
black and clear as Simon’s eyes. Held impossibly within the
crystalline midnight was a single luminous blossom.

Baron Deguerre looked at the rowan flower within
the sword, called for his horse and led his knights away from
Blackthorne Keep, for he knew no weakness remained there for him to
exploit. Nor would there be any in the future. Even Charles the
Shrewd had never discovered a way to undo love.

Carlysle Manor became part of Rowan Keep, home of
Ariane the Beloved, a woman whose hands drew joy from her harp and
whose gift assured that no child wandered lost and alone away from
the keep’s safety.

Simon’s sword came to be called the Rowan,
after the uncanny blossom encased within its black crystal pommel.
In time, Simon himself was called the Lord of the Rowan.

For it was Simon who had discovered what even the
Learned did not know…

The sacred rowan is a woman
born long, long ago, a woman whose refusal to see love cost first
her lover’s life, then the lives of her family, her clan, her
people
.

But not her own life. Not
quite
.

In pity and punishment she was
turned into an undying tree, a rowan that weeps only in the
presence of transcendent love; and the tears of the rowan are
blossoms that confer extraordinary grace upon those who can see
them
.

When enough tears are wept,
the rowan will be free. She waits inside a sacred stone ring that
can be neither weighed nor measured nor touched. She waits for love
that is worth her tears
.

The rowan is waiting
still
.

O
ne of the questions I am most often
asked by readers is “Your Western and contemporary romances
were so successful, what made you decide to write medieval
romances?”

The answer involves a true story that really is
stranger than fiction. I wouldn’t have dared to make it up,
because no one would believe it! Here is how it goes…

For twenty-six years I have been well and truly
married to the only man I ever loved. In addition to being husband,
lover, friend, and father of my children, Evan is my writing
partner. (We write as A.E. Maxwell and as Ann Maxwell.) Evan is
also a hardheaded contrarian who loves to argue so much he’ll
take either side of any issue.

In the course of doing research for
The Diamond Tiger
, Evan and I went to Britain. As
Maxwell is a Scots name, we decided to drive to Scotland. My maiden
name, Charters, is also Scots, a corruption of the name
Charteris.

Evan and I weren’t chasing family ties, we
just wanted an excuse to see a new piece of the world. We jumped in
our rented car and set off north, sitting on the wrong side of the
car, shifting with the wrong arm, and driving on the wrong side of
the road.

By the time we crossed the border into Scotland, we
were bored with super highways. We turned off into the first
country lane we found and began winding along the edge of a
windswept, shallow bay. When I spotted some distant ruins rising
out of the land, I was ecstatic; I had
been
wanting to photograph ruins, but everything I had seen so far in
Britain had been depressingly well kept.

We chased the ruins over roads that got more and
more narrow until we came to a Scottish National Trust site. The
site was closed for the season. But the ruins were there for all to
see—and photograph.

While Evan set off to read the historical plaques,
I started taking pictures. After a few minutes, Evan called to me
in an odd voice and waved me over to where he was. When I got
there, he simply pointed to the plaque. The magnificent red ruins
were of a castle called Caerlaverock [Meadowlark’s Nest],
which had been built in the twelfth century.

The castle had been the Maxwell Clan
stronghold.

Evan and I were stunned by the coincidence of time
and place and us. We hadn’t been seeking family landscapes in
Scotland; we hadn’t even known they existed. Yet here we were
in Caerlaverock…

When we finally left the castle, we were full of
questions. We collared one of the locals in a pub. He told us there
was a place called Maxwellton [Maxwell Town], near Dumfries. There
was a museum there devoted to Maxwell Clan history.

We went to the museum. While Evan admired the
assortment of weapons and armor, I wandered off to look around.
There was a map of all the clans. The Charteris Clan was there,
too, a tiny little fingernail clinging to the edge of the
Maxwells’ vast lands.

Beneath the portrait of a fierce-looking Maxwell
was a short history of the clan. Soon after I started reading, I
was laughing out loud. Evan came over, wondering what was wrong
with me.

When he started reading, he discovered what I
already had: the Maxwells were a Norman warrior clan that had
fought on the wrong side of every major battle after
1066…including the Spanish Armada. Three times an English
king took Caerlaverock after a very long siege, pulled down the
castle, and stripped the Maxwells of titles
and
lands. Three times an English king was forced to give back the
lands, the titles, and the castle to the Maxwells, so that the clan
could guard the western approach to Britain.

The fourth time Caerlaverock was pulled down, it
stayed in ruins. The lands and titles were given back to the
Maxwells, but not the right to “crenellate” (build a
castle).

The Maxwells were contrarians to a man.

And nothing much has changed in nine centuries.

Evan led me away from lost battles to the
museum’s archives. There he pointed to several huge,
leather-bound volumes. The books were Maxwell family genealogies
compiled in the nineteenth century. Intrigued, I began leafing
through them.

The longer I looked, the more silent I became. Each
page I turned took me farther back in time; and on those yellowed
pages I saw again and again a name from my own American childhood:
Charters.

From the first moment I had seen Evan in California
in 1963, I felt that I knew him in some impossible way. He had felt
the same. Now we understood why.

Maxwells and Charters have been marrying one
another for nine hundred years.

When I looked up from the ancient genealogies into
the green eyes of my very modern warrior, I knew that I would write
medieval romances.

And I have.

—Ann Maxwell (a.k.a. Elizabeth
Lowell)