The Angel Stone: A Novel (26 page)

“Mairi is alive,” I called to Nan and Una.

“Aye, and so is Tom, but barely.” Nan and Una were crouching over the miller’s son. In the glow of Nan and Una’s cloaks, his face was soaked with sweat. Nan took a fold of her tartan and used it to brush his tangled hair away from his face. He let out a low moan, his cracked lips working to speak, but all that came out was the sound
Mmmmaaa
, like the bleat of a sheep.

The girl stirred and strained toward the young man, her limbs trembling convulsively.

Mmmmaare …
Tom moaned again. He was calling Mairi.

“He wants her,” Nan said, struggling to keep Tom from getting up, “but he’s too weak to move.”

“I’ll bring her to him.” I bent down to gather Mairi in my arms. A fold of the luminous tartan fell as I did. I wrapped it around Mairi, and her trembling stopped. The glowing threads pulsed and molded to her frail body like a cocoon. I felt her relax in the warm folds.
What a strange thing!
I thought. I was holding my own ancestor. As I started to lift her up, though, something tugged her back. The girls’ hands were still intertwined. Gently, I disentangled their fingers, but Mairi’s hand thrashed in the air like a fish flapping against dry land. It thudded against me with surprising force. Only when I intertwined my own fingers with hers did she stop flailing.

I carried her over and laid her by Tom’s side. As I put her down, a length of the tartan separated from the cloak around my shoulders and coiled around Mairi. It seemed to pulse in the same rhythm as Mairi’s shallow fluttery breath.

“Mairi,” Tom said, turning his head toward the little girl.

“She’s here,” I told him. “And I think she’s getting better.”

I wasn’t just saying it to comfort him. Mairi
did
look better. The swelling around her throat was going down, the bluish tinge in her skin was replaced by a flush of pink, her breathing had deepened, and the pulse in her wrist had strengthened. The tartan was healing her.

“Wrap your cloak around Tom,” I instructed Nan. “There will be enough to surround him and still cover you.”

She did as I said, with Una’s help, and encircled Tom’s body with the glowing cloth. Just as it had with Mairi, the piece of tartan detached itself from Nan’s cloak and then fitted itself to Tom’s body. Within minutes, color returned to Tom’s face and the black swelling at his throat receded.

“Thanks be to the Lord,” Una murmured, crossing herself.
I was momentarily surprised by the gesture, as I’d come to think of Una as a witch who followed “the auld ways” instead of Christianity, but then I realized that there was no separation between the two for Una. She could follow the auld gods and the new, recite a psalm in Latin or a spell in Gaelic. It was all the same to her, but I didn’t think Reverend Fordick would see it that way.

I called her name, and when she turned to me I saw that, while the lines her grandson’s death had carved into her face were still there, now her skin was pink and her eyes had life in them. I took Mairi’s small soft hand, still intertwined with mine, and laid it in Una’s worn one. Like a bud opening, Mairi’s fingers released mine and opened up in Una’s hand. A tremor passed over Una’s face—a little struggle that I thought I understood. After losing all she had, caring about someone else opened her up to loss—the loss she’d already suffered and the possibility of more loss. I knew because that was what it felt like caring about William after losing Bill. I could feel her resistance in her old crabbed fingers. But then those fingers grasped Mairi’s hand with the fierceness of a much younger woman.

“Puir bairn,” Una cooed. “Una’s here to watch ye now. Close yer een and go to sleep.”

Obediently, Mairi closed her sightless eyes. So did Tom. I looked at Nan and she nodded. “It’s best ye bide here with the two of them to make sure they’re safe,” Nan said. “Callie and I will go visiting and see who else is sick.”

Una nodded but didn’t look up. She was gazing at Mairi’s face, stroking her tangled red hair back from her brow. As Nan and I went down the ladder, I heard Una singing softly. “Hush, hush, my bonnie sweet lamb,” she sang.

At the bottom of the ladder we were greeted with the body of Malcolm Brodie, my own great-something-grandfather.

“If I’d figured out how the tartan worked before—”

Nan tsked. “Aye, ’tis no use cryin’ o’er spilt milk, lass. Not when there are others who need saving. Half the village will have passed by here in the last fortnight to have their grain ground. There’ll be others fallin’ sick with the pest as we stand here ditherin’.”

The thought of more households besieged like this one turned me cold. How would we know where to go first? Would people die while we took care of others? We had no phones or Internet to track the contagion. And what if the pest was carried out of the town while we went from house to house? It could spread over all of Scotland …

“There’s too much to do for the two of us,” I said, turning to Nan. “We need help.”

“We can help.”

The voice came from the doorway. I turned and saw William, resplendent in his glowing tartan, like an electric Highlander. The plaid wasn’t the only thing that was glowing. His skin, hair, but most of all his eyes, burned with a fierceness I’d never before seen. What I saw in his eyes wasn’t magic or fairy dust—it was purpose and determination. This was the man he’d been meant to become before the Fairy Queen stole him.

“We?” Nan asked.

“Aye,” William replied, giving her a brilliant smile. “I’ve rounded up a few of the lads.” He stood back and Nan and I moved to the door. Outside was a small troop of Ballydoon men.

“What did you tell them?” I whispered to William.

“I told them we were going to save the town,” he replied. “They didn’t care how we do it.”

I turned to Nan, wondering if she was thinking the same thing I was—that if we told these men we were outfitting them with a magical tartan that could heal the sick and protect the
well, we opened ourselves up to charges of witchcraft. Nan’s forehead was creased, her solemn blue eyes raking the faces of each man. She looked less like the kindly middle-aged woman I’d come to know than a general surveying her troops. Under her stern regard, the men straightened their shoulders and stood up straighter.

“James Russell Gordon McPhee,” she called, as if the men did indeed stand across a battlefield from her. A pimply, gawky lad stepped forward, surreptitiously wiping his nose. “Can ye be trusted with the Order of the Plaid?”

“Aye, ma’am.”

“And do ye solemnly swear to uphold the honor of the plaid and to never divulge the secrets of the plaid to any save your brothers in the plaid?”

“Nay … I mean aye, I swear it.”

“Mmppff,” Nan huffed, looking at Jamie McPhee dubiously. But then she cleared her throat. “I do hereby endow you with the Order the Plaid.” She plucked the edge of her own tartan and measured out an arm’s length of it into the air. It separated from her cloak without leaving hers any smaller. Then she swirled the glowing plaid over Jamie McPhee’s shoulders. At first he only looked confused, but then a change came over him. He held his head up higher and squared his shoulders. A glow came into his sallow cheeks and dark-brown eyes.

“God bless ye, lad,” Nan said softly. Then she moved on to the next recruit. She repeated the procedure with each man. When Nan was done, the shambling motley crew had been transformed into a glowing honor guard. Nan regarded them with a look of fierce pride. “I declare ye all to be brothers in the Order of the Plaid, Stewards of Ballydoon.”

I’d thought that the Stewarts I’d met in Fairwick had inherited their ability through family, but now I saw that the origin
of their clan came from this small group of ordinary men who were willing to risk their lives to save their neighbors. Somehow it made them seem even nobler.

“There’s one more thing I must tell ye,” Nan said, the pride in her eyes wavering. “If we do this, the witch hunters will come for us.”

A tremor moved through the group, like wind passing over a field of grass, riffling their glowing tartans. It was only right for Nan to warn them of the danger, but I was afraid now that they would back down and disband. But then young Jamie McPhee stepped forward, his tartan glowing like a beacon.

“Then we’ll have to go for them first,” he said.

We split up into two groups—William and me with three of the men, and Nan with four of them—and went from house to house. When we found ailing folk—and we found plenty—we wrapped them in the tartan. When we were done, a man of the newly formed order stood at each corner of the house and stretched his arms out to his comrades on either side, making a protective shield to surround the house.

A few didn’t let us in. The MacDougals would not permit us into their fine castle—but we spread the tartan over it anyway. Nor would the Reverend Fordick let us into his manse. When we tried to surround it with the tartan, he came out brandishing a crucifix in one hand and the King James Bible in the other, and he ordered us “sinners, witches, and demons to be gane.”

Only those initiated into the Order of the Plaid could see the tartan. The people we helped didn’t know how we helped them. We brought salves and herbs and broths. We told them that the men who stood outside their houses were there to make sure no one entered with infection. When we’d gone to
every house, we joined back with Nan’s group. To cast the plaid over the whole village, she directed us to a spot along the town walls.

When we were done with the protective plaid, William and I walked back to our croft. We were both so tired we didn’t talk much at first. William put his arm around my shoulders and I leaned against him, grateful for his strength and warmth. I looked up at his face, which still glowed with the light of the tartan—and with something else. Today I’d watched him tending to the sick, carrying the bodies of the dead to burial, rallying the young men to seek out every household in the town and every ailing citizen. He was no longer the young boy I’d saved from the Fairy Queen. He’d changed shapes then—to a snake, a lion, and a firebrand—but now he’d changed into a man.

“Do you think the town will be safe?” I asked when we got to the top of the hill. For answer, he turned me around to face Ballydoon. For a moment it seemed the sun was rising, even though it was cold winter dusk. Nestled in the folds of the surrounding snow-rimmed hills, the village glowed like a handful of jewels cupped in a velvet cloth. All the colors of the tartan I’d woven with Nan and Una had spread throughout the town, burning like rubies, sapphires, emeralds, and yellow citrines. Rays of the jeweled light soared up into the sky and swirled together like the aurora borealis—beacons in the dark, shielding the town from harm and proclaiming its survival.

But above the town still loomed the ominous shape of Castle Coldclough, like a black crow perched over its prey.

“What do you think they’ll do when they see the tartan?” I asked.

“I think they’ll come for us—but not until tomorrow, the darkest day of the year. But we’ll be ready, because of you.”

I felt something cool kiss my cheek and then William’s hand brushing a snowflake away from my face. I turned and looked at him, his face glowing in the swirling snow like a lamp lit in a window. Snowflakes clung to his hair and eyelashes. “Not because of me,” I said. “You rallied the men.”

“Aye, but only because I had your magic tartan.”

I shook my head and stepped forward to brush the snow from his hair. “I wove the tartan by thinking of you.”

As our eyes met, I felt something click inside me, like a key turning over the tumblers of a lock. Unlocking something. I heard the words of the spell I’d said to become the hallow door.
I open myself to love
. For a second, I wanted to turn the key back. If I loved William, I would open myself to pain. I stepped into William’s arms and lifted my face to his. He pulled me to him, crushing me against his chest. His mouth latched on to mine so hungrily that for a moment I thought he
was
the incubus, come to suck the very life out of my flesh. But then I was returning his kiss with equal force. His hands slid down my back and pressed me so hard against him that my feet came off the ground and I thought we would fall, but we didn’t. We were surrounded by a cocoon of warmth and light. The tartan I’d woven out of my love—and that he wore, I saw now, out of his love for me—wound around us like a fiery cloud, buoying us above the ground and sheltering us from the now-driving snow. I felt as if we had been lifted above the hills—above Ballydoon and the horrible sickness we’d seen today, far away from the monsters we’d have to face tomorrow, and outside time itself, so that the man I kissed contained the man he would become, the man I’d someday love. But when I looked at him, I saw and loved only William.

•  •  •

There was a moment after we came back to the cottage when William paused uncertainly by the hearth, where he usually unrolled his sheepskin pallet, but I held out my hand to him and drew him upstairs to the bedroom. Outside, the blizzard raged, but in our bedroom William and I made our own heat, burrowed beneath soft layers of sheepskin and wool, like two animals gone to ground beneath the snowdrifts. We had been given this brief time together before we would have to deal with the nephilim. In the pale white light of our snow cave, he touched me and looked at me as though he was trying to memorize my body. I traced his long lean back, his hips, his thighs, as if I could read his future in the lines of his body. When he hovered over me, his face blurry in the dim snow-lit room, I felt for a moment that if I took my eyes off him he might vanish. He must have seen the fear in my eyes, because suddenly we were surrounded by the tartan glow. It illuminated his face, and as he came inside me he said, “I’m here with you, lass. I’m not going anywhere else.”

We made love surrounded by the tartan glow, the multihued threads binding us. By dawn we had woven something new between us, a tapestry of our history together—our past, present, and future—indelibly written on our skin. Outside, the world appeared to have been unwritten by the snow. Staring out the bedroom window past William’s bare shoulder as he slept, I entertained the hope that the world had vanished. Ballydoon, Castle Coldclough, Fairwick … I would have traded it all for a few more hours here in this room with William, watching the glow of dawn climb up his legs, gild the ridges of his ribs, wash up the curving muscles of his arms, and limn the planes of his face. But when the glow reached his face, he stirred and opened his eyes. He met my gaze and smiled.