The Angel Stone: A Novel (27 page)

“So you’re not a dream,” he said, reaching out for me.
Halfway to my face, his hand turned deep red. He twirled it in the light, a puzzled look on his face, then turned toward the window. Streams of crimson, yellow, and blue were pouring between the curtains and through the unglazed window. As William rose to his feet, his skin was bathed in light, as if he’d already put on his battle tartan. I watched him walk to the window, feeling as if I was watching him walk across a battlefield.

“They’re here,” he said, turning back to me, every bit of the boy washed out of his face. I’d lost that boy forever. Today would tell me if I would lose the man, as well.

We quickly dressed without speaking and went down to meet the brigade. There were more men than yesterday—at least two dozen—and they all wore the glowing tartan over their homespun breeks and shirts.

“Did Nan give the rest of you the tartan?” I asked.

Jamie McPhee stepped forward and shook his head. “Nay, we passed it one to the other. The witch hunters came this morning and took Nan and Una. They vow to burn the witches today at sunset. My ma’s one of them …” Jamie’s voice wavered, his brave façade of manhood faltering, but then one of the other men—his brother, I guessed from the family resemblance—clapped his hand on Jamie’s shoulder, and the tartan glowed more fiercely. Jamie straightened up, the tears on his face reflecting the blue and crimson glow.

“We’ll get her back,” Jamie’s brother said.

“Aye,” William said, “we will not let these monsters take our women. We’ll march against the bastards today!”

He pumped his fist in the air, and the two dozen men let out a deafening cheer. Their faces were all streaked with red and crimson now, like the war paint and blue woad tattoos
their ancestors the Picts had worn when they went up against the Romans. I had no doubt that they would have stormed Castle Coldclough right this minute, but, remembering the fate of those warriors—and several other doomed Scottish campaigns—I had another thought.

“What say you all come inside and we talk strategy over breakfast?”

Making breakfast for two dozen Scotsmen pretty much exhausted our meager stores, but as I scooped out the last bit of oatmeal from the bin, I realized that if our plan worked I might not be coming back to the cottage. William and I had convinced the men that it made no sense to storm the castle walls, since the whole village had been summoned to the castle for the burning. We would simply join the procession from the village. Once inside the castle walls, the men would form a cordon around the witch hunters. At my signal, they would isolate the other witch hunters and I would take the angel stone from Endicott. Once I had it, I would be able to destroy the nephilim.

“Are you sure you can get the stone off that monster?” William asked when the men left. “The last time you looked at the stone, you fell into a fit. I …” His voice faltered. “I thought I was going to lose you then.”

The look in his eyes told me the distance we had traveled from then to now—only seven weeks, but it felt as if we had known each other for a lifetime.
For many lifetimes
.

“I’ll get it,” I said, making myself sound surer than I was. “The stone draws on loss and regret, but I know now that everything I did has led to being here with you, and I wouldn’t trade that for anything.”
Even if I can’t stay
. The unsaid words echoed in the air between us. I knew from the shimmer in William’s
eyes that he was thinking them, too, but he only nodded and withdrew a soft leather pouch from his pocket. He handed it to me. “I had this made for you—an early Christmas present, since we may not have a chance to exchange presents later.”

“I was making something for you,” I said, “only it’s not done.” I went to the basket by the hearth and retrieved the scarf I’d been knitting. It was long enough, but I’d delayed finishing it because I’d somehow felt that, once it was done, I’d really be ready to go. Well, there was no point delaying now. I hurriedly cast off the stitches and tore the undyed yarn with my hands. As I broke the thread, I felt something break inside my chest. I gulped back the sob that had risen in my throat.
You have to be strong for him
, I told myself, as I wove the broken thread back into the scarf with the knitting needles. They were the wooden needles that William had carved for me, and I suddenly couldn’t bear to leave them behind. I tucked them into my knotted hair and turned to William to give him his Christmas present—a scarf that had turned as crimson as heart’s blood when I’d torn off the last thread.

“Ah, with this on I’ll feel like a knight wearing his lady’s favor into battle,” he said, wrapping the scarf around his neck. “I hope my present to you protects you, as well.”

I opened the leather pouch and slid a heavy piece of silver out of it—the Luckenbooth brooch, the two halves made whole.

“I had a traveling silversmith repair it when he passed through town a few weeks ago, so it would keep ye safe when you face that monster.”

Bound together, the two hearts formed a tear-shaped loop for the angel stone. I had guessed that the brooch was made as a receptacle for the stone, but I’d wondered why its maker chose the double-heart design. Now, as William pinned the
brooch to my cloak just over my heart, I felt a warmth spreading through my chest and I understood. It took two hearts, linked as one, to contain and overcome the grief inside the angel stone.

“Are ye ready?” William asked.

“Yes,” I told him. “As long as you’re by my side, I’m ready for anything.”

An hour before sunset, the village seemed as quiet as it had on the first day I passed through it, when everyone was hiding from the witch hunters. But I soon saw there was a difference. In almost every window hung a small scrap of tartan. The brightly colored bits of cloth waved in the wind like battle flags. Each family that would send one of their sons to carry the tartan to the castle had hung the banner, just as someday British families might hang a Union Jack in the window when their sons went to war. As we passed each house, the door would open and a young man would come out and fall into step behind us. Their mothers and sisters came, too. I even saw Jeannie MacDougal and Aileen join the crowd, their arms linked. By the time we reached the town gate, we had assembled a crowd. When I turned around and saw all their faces bathed in the glow of the setting sun and the tartan, I thought of what Nan Stewart had told me—or
would
tell me in the twenty-first century:
You’ll need a village
.

Well, we certainly had one.

The road to the gloomy castle plunged into a deep ravine and then climbed back up the steep, rocky ascent. As soon as I stepped into the abyss called Coldclough, I felt a deathly chill travel from the soles of my feet up my spine and understood why the place had been so named. Strangely, though, the snow that had fallen last night and blanketed the surrounding
countryside did not cover the ravine. It had either melted or—I felt with a queasy certainty—dissolved in midair, as if even the snow refused to touch this tainted ground. Certainly nothing grew from the black rocky soil on either side of the cobblestone path. The land looked as if it had been blasted by an atomic bomb. No bird or animal stirred through the wasteland. The only sounds were the footsteps of the villagers following me, but even those were muffled. Halfway down, I was seized by the fear that the entire population of Ballydoon had been swallowed by the gaping mouth of the ravine and I had been left alone.

I spun around and saw that William and the other men had spread their plaid over the crowd to shield them from the unnatural cold. William stepped toward me to envelop me in the tartan mantle, but I held up my hand to stop him and shook my head. Before I faced Endymion, I had to know all I could about the nephilim, and I understood now, as I turned and continued walking into the gorge, that this place held the key to who they were. The cold told a story. It was the cold of expulsion, of being cast out. It was the cold a baby would feel left naked on a mountaintop to die. It was the cold a lover would feel seeing love die in a beloved’s eyes. It was the cold I’d felt seeing Bill die. When I reached the bottom of the ravine, my teeth were chattering. The ground was covered with blackened and twisted vines. I knelt and touched one and found it was hard, cold stone. As I stared at them, I realized that the petrified vines had once been honeysuckle vines, like those that grew behind my house in Fairwick, surrounding the door to Faerie.

There had once been a door to Faerie here.

I wrapped my hand around the petrified vine and closed my eyes, searching for a remnant of the connection to Faerie but finding none. This door hadn’t just been shut, it had been
blasted out of existence, destroyed with a ravaging anger. Images flitted through my brain of beautiful golden creatures—elves—who came through the door and fell in love with humans. But when they lay with human women, the children they produced were horrid leathery-skinned monsters with distorted faces and bat’s wings and long claws. The elves took their disgust for their offspring out on the women, destroying whole villages for sport and then abandoning the monsters they had sired. They tried to return to Faerie but were cast out for the crimes they had committed against humans. Trapped, the elves were attacked by their own children, who hated them for making them feel like monsters. The last elf left shed a tear that encompassed all the grief and shame and regret of his entire race—and that tear turned to stone as the door to Faerie was obliterated. The stone was entrusted to a fairy—a doorkeeper fairy—because it was the only weapon that could destroy the nephilim, as they now called themselves. But even a fairy couldn’t control the power of the stone unless it was contained. The fey crafted a receptacle made of two linked hearts to corral its power, but then the doorkeeper fairy split the brooch in half to protect the human she had fallen in love with. When she faced the nephilim again, she could not use the stone’s power, and the nephilim took it away from her.

That was the stone that Endymion Endicott wore and that I would have to face and seize. The weight of it was so heavy on me that I thought I might not be able to stand up—but then one more vision flickered though my brain and I saw what I must do. I rose slowly to my feet. I was cold all the way through now, down to the bone, but it was the steely cold of resolve. Without looking back, I started climbing toward the castle.

The castle was actually a ruin. Fire-blackened walls jutted like broken teeth from the blasted rock. Fragments of statues lay in heaps about the walls, as if they had been pitched from the battlements and they were the petrified remains of the last invading army. The drawbridge was lowered, the portcullis raised, the doors wide open. I walked through into a wide courtyard lit by flickering torches. An enormous pyre stood at the center of the courtyard. Three women were tied to the stake. I recognized Nan and Una and assumed the third woman was Mordag. In front of the pyre, a long scaffold had been erected. More than a dozen more women stood on it, with ropes around their necks. Three cloaked witch hunters stood in front of the scaffold, their faces concealed by beaked masks. The firelight caught a glimmer at the throat of the middle figure. I felt the chill of the angel stone from across the courtyard.

He strode toward me, crossing the space in less time than should have been possible. I heard the flutter of wings behind him and saw their shadows loom on the walls behind the torches. When he was a few feet away he stopped abruptly,
the eyes behind the mask riveted on the Luckenbooth brooch. I touched my hand to it to reassure myself it was firmly pinned to my cloak. A spark of static electricity flew off it toward the angel stone. The nephilim tilted his head, like a crow considering a tasty bit of carrion.

“Ah,” Endymion crooned, with a smile that set my teeth on edge because he wasn’t smiling at me. He was smiling at the villagers behind me. “I see you’ve brought me another witch.”

“They haven’t brought me,” I said. “They’ve come with me to save their women and banish you from their village.”

Endymion turned his smile on me. “Are you sure, witch? I promised them that if they delivered you to me, I would spare the rest of their womenfolk. And they have delivered you.”

I began to tell him he was wrong, but then I recalled how the villagers had waited for me to pass their houses and fallen into step behind me. I had thought they were coming to fight the nephilim, but did I really know that they weren’t bringing me as a sacrifice?

I turned to face them. William stood closest to me. He moved toward me, but a woman took a step forward and grabbed his arm. I recognized Jeannie.

“Don’t you see,” she cried. “William, you’ve been enchanted by her. Once she’s burnt at the stake, you’ll be free!”

William shook off Jeannie and faced the crowd, enraged. “You fools!” he shouted. “Do ye think these are men who will honor their word? These are monsters. And how do you think they became monsters? By betraying their own and feeding off the betrayal of others!”

Had they? Had William picked something up in the ravine that I had missed?

I turned back to Endymion, and before his gloating smile could fade I reached out and laid my fingers on the angel
stone, reciting as I did a spell I’d learned from Wheelock to ward off regret and grief.
“Abi dolorem! Paenitentiam apage!”
Instead of regret and grief, I felt a swelling of warmth—the love the nephilim had felt for their fathers, a love so strong that when their fathers turned on them, the nephilim offered up sacrifices, first humans and then their own children, in a desperate bid to win back their fathers’ love. Those bloody sacrifices had turned them into the monsters they were now.

“And do you believe you are any different, witch?” Endymion sneered. “Wouldn’t you sacrifice this whole village for your beloved? And why not? They have turned on you. Sacrifice them, and I will make the Fairy Queen grant you and William safe passage through Faerie.”

“You can do that?” The words were out of my mouth before I realized that just asking the question meant I wanted to do it. He smiled, and the angel stone grew warmer under my hand.