A Kind of Magic (20 page)

called her by name, Maddie was puzzled. There hadn’t been any formal introductions when they’d come in, Rowan and she had just started pouring out their complaints to the house’s occupant.

“You know my name?” Maddie asked the other woman after Rowan sat down.

“You know about me?” It seemed ridiculous that the White Lady would have heard about her arrival and incarceration at Cape Wrath all the way out here on this isolated crag.

“Of course she knows about you. She brought you here with her magic,” Rowan said.

“I did no such thing,” the White Lady countered.

She took Maddie’s hands. Rowan did not think Maddie noticed that what the wisewoman was doing was studying her palms. She would see the gesture as one of comfort and of reassurance. Perhaps it was meant to be those things as well, but Maddie was maddening in her deliberate blindness to the true nature of the world.

“These are strong hands,” the White Lady said after a few moments. “Strong but gentle. Fit for hard, skilled work as well as cradling a bairn.”

Maddie blushed, inordinately pleased by the woman’s words, though she didn’t know why she should be. “I’m an engineer,” she answered. “I like to build things.”

The woman looked up at her, a sharp glance through pale lashes. “And you’d like to have children as well.”

“Well—yeah. I guess.”

The White Lady shook her head. “Such diffidence hiding such longing. Though not hiding it very well.”

“Wait a minute,” Maddie protested. “I don’t want to be rude but I don’t think my emotional state is really any of your business.”

“Your wishes and dreams are very important. They’ve shaped where you are now.”

Maddie blinked to keep back unwanted tears but they spilled over anyway. Her voice was tight with both pain and bitterness when she answered, “Stuck in the past with a man who hates me?” She wiped her cheeks. “That’s just bad luck and physics.”

Rowan clenched his fists and hid his pain in silence. How could she think he hated her?

The White Lady gave him a hard look. “What have you done to show her otherwise?”

He shifted uncomfortably. “I married the lass.”

“Not because you wanted her.”

He stood up. “Because you told me to.”

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Maddie stood as well. “What?” She pointed at the White Lady. “You’re the one. The prophecy person.”

The White Lady looked calmly up at them, her hands folded in her lap. “That I am, lass. Prophecy and portents, spells and potions, those are the things I trade in.”

Maddie felt a dull ache in the pit of her stomach. She sighed. “And for a moment there I thought I’d found somebody sensible.”

“Ah, but you’re a relentlessly practical one,” the White Lady told her. She leaned forward a bit. “Tell me, did you not once wish, speaking only to the deep dark waves, to find a way to remain in the Highlands forever?”

Maddie shrugged. “Well yeah, but that was when I’d only been in Scotland for a couple of weeks and hadn’t gotten fed up with the food and weather yet.” She narrowed her eyes at the other woman. “Wait a minute. You’re just guessing I said that, right?”

The White Lady ignored her skepticism to ask another question. “And did you not ask for someone just like the man you wanted who didn’t want you?”

“Just like?” Rowan asked. “Better is what she’s got.”

“Do you think so, Rowan Murray?” the White Lady asked.

“I do.”

“Did you make the wish?” the White Lady asked her.

Maddie blushed. She couldn’t bear to look at either of them. She scuffed her foot across the dirt floor. “Maybe,” she admitted.

“She thought I was someone named Toby at first,” Rowan told the White Lady. “So it sounds as if she got her wishes to me but doesn’t want to pay the price.”

“Perhaps she doesn’t know that magic has laws, just the same as her science.”

“Magic isn’t real,” Maddie asserted. She looked angrily between the two Highlanders. “Wishes don’t really come true. All right, I made them but I’m too practical to—”

“They came true whether you expected them to or not,” the White Lady said. “The question is, who answered your pleas and what do you owe them?”

“I thought you sent her to save my clan,” Rowan added.

The White Lady shook her head. “I did not bring her here. I only knew that the first woman you met on the way home was the one you needed.”

“Is she?”

“Answer that yourself, Rowan Murray.”

Maddie touched the chain on her throat. “The question is, how do I get this thing off before it electrocutes me?” She glared at Rowan. “I don’t want to take any more chances of his playing practical jokes with it.”

Rowan answered her glare with one of his own. “I would never harm you, woman.

It is the fair folk,” he insisted. “They are hunting you.”

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Maddie knew the way to madness lay in agreeing with him but she decided to go along with his delusions for the moment. He really did believe in magic, maybe she if she listened to him with an open mind she could figure out what was really going on by applying a logical interpretation.

“All right,” she said. “Let’s say these fairies are hunting me. Why?”

Rowan rubbed his jaw thoughtfully. He glanced at the White Lady but she seemed more interested in stirring her supper pot than the conversation. Then he looked at the entwined chains of gold and copper that circled Maddie’s throat. “Perhaps they want that back. Did you steal it from them?”

“No I did not steal it from them,” was her indignant reply.

“How did you get it?” the White Lady asked. “Is it yours?”

“Well, no, it’s not exactly mine. It was, well, maybe it is stolen, in a way.” While the others looked at her, Maddie sat down and attempted to explain. “It came from an archaeology dig. That’s when scientists, historians, find old—things, places. Like burial sites and such.”

“Treasure hunting?” Rowan asked. “Grave robbing?”

“No! It’s a way to study history.”

“Was the necklace found in a grave?” he asked.

“Yes,” she conceded.

“A fairy grave?”

She bit back her skepticism and asked, “Are there such things as fairy graves?”

He touched the dagger on his belt. “Oh aye, even the immortals can die under the right circumstances.”

“Their bodies can, at least,” the White Lady clarified.

“That’s good enough for me,” Rowan said.

“About this grave,” the White Lady said to Maddie. “Could it have been a fairy grave?”

Maddie thought back to the details of the dig she’d been working on during her vacation. “It was a strange site,” she admitted. “At least that’s what the archaeologists said. They were puzzled by a lot of the grave goods and the positioning of the cairn and the fact that the grave hadn’t seemed to have been disturbed, but that there wasn’t any skeletal remains in it.” She swallowed hard and forced herself to add, “Does that sound like a fairy grave to you?”

The White Lady nodded. “Oh aye, most certainly.”

“Right.”

“And the necklace, were you the one who took it from the grave?”

Maddie shook her head.

“Hmm. Were you the first person to wear it?”

“Kevin insisted. He was kind of obsessed about it, actually.”

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“The curse or blessing was working through him. It should have taken effect on the first one to put it on.” The White Lady came nearer to Maddie and peered closely at the necklace, though she didn’t touch it. “This obviously was made to respond to a woman’s touch.”

The White Lady touched a strand of Maddie’s red hair and traced a line of freckles across her nose. “You have the look of Scotland about you, though I sense you were born far away.”

“My family came from Scotland originally.”

The White Lady nodded. “So you had the wishes, the will and the right blood to activate the spell.”

“I don’t know anything about spells, I just know it’s dangerous,” Maddie said. She looked accusingly at Rowan. “I want it off.”

The White Lady stepped back and folded her arms. “Then take it off.”

“I can’t.”

The White Lady looked at Rowan. “Take it off.”

Maddie jumped backward with her hands at her throat. “No way!”

“I can’t take it off,” Rowan said to the White Lady. “I tried when she was unconscious.”

“You did what?” both Maddie and the White Lady demanded. Maddie was surprised to hear the White Lady sound as appalled as she did.

“I thought the fair folk were hunting her, tracking the necklace,” Rowan told them.

“I was going to toss the necklace in the loch after I killed the Questing Beast but it wouldna come off.”

“And a good thing you didn’t succeed, laddie,” the White Lady declared. “That would have gotten you both killed.”

He held out his palms and Maddie saw the burns on them for the first time. “So I suspected,” he said.

Maddie looked from his hands to his face. She was startled, both by his injuries and his look of concern. She didn’t know what to think about what he’d done. Had he tried to hurt her? Was she actually sure of what had happened back at the lake? She remembered soaring pleasure that had been on the verge of taking her out of herself, of blending her soul with his. Then horrible pain had plunged her down into darkness.

Had she misread the situation? Had something else set off the necklace? Had her own insecurities transmuted actual events into a false sense of betrayal?

She didn’t know.

“That’s why I brought Maddie here,” Rowan went on. “It needs your magic to keep the fair folk from taking my wife from me.”

“It needs magic,” the White Lady told them, “but not mine.” She looked at Maddie.

“Do you want it off?”

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“Yes.”

“And you, Rowan, you want her to be free of it?”

“Aye.”

“It is good you both want it off for it will kill her if not returned to its true owner.”

Maddie didn’t believe in curses but she knew the necklace somehow carried some sort of strong electrical charge. “I don’t want to go through what I felt earlier ever again.”

“It will be worse next time,” the White Lady said.

Maddie nodded. “It has gotten worse every time it’s been touched. At first it was just a tingle, now it’s hundred thousand volts.”

“Then it has to come off,” Rowan said.

The White Lady smiled. “Indeed.”

“You’ll help.”

“Not I. Rowan, take off Maddie’s necklace.”

“I already told you I cannot.”

“Ah, but only you can.”

He glowered. “How?”

“Yeah?” Maddie questioned. “How?”

“It looks to have a simple clasp. He has only to undo it.”

Rowan stepped in front of the wisewoman. “Is there a trick to it then?”

“Aye,” she agreed. “It is a matter of trust, of strength of will and the deeper thing between a man and a woman. If you share these things, then the necklace will come safely off.” She picked up a basket and went to the door. “I’m going to pick herbs in the moonlight,” she told them. “I’ll expect you to have the necklace off by the time I return,” she told Rowan. “Or for the Murrays to build me a new house if you have not.”

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“Did she mean what I think she meant?”

“About love?” Rowan answered.

Maddie shook her head. “No, about the place blowing up if the necklace isn’t taken off correctly?”

“Aye, I think she meant that as well.”

Maddie had been paying more attention to the White Lady’s words than to Rowan’s, now a startled shiver ran up her spine. At the same time a tightness clutched at her heart. “Did you just say love?”

“Aye.”

Maddie looked at the blank face of the door that had closed behind the White Lady rather than at the man beside her. “She didn’t say anything about love.” Rowan put his hand on her shoulder. It was large, warm. Possessive? She wasn’t sure whether she was threatened or comforted by the touch of it. “Does it hurt?” she asked.

“It does,” he acknowledged. “No more than I can take.”

She gave him a sideways look. “Are you babbling stoic warrior stuff?”

“Of course.” He gave her one of his devastating, fleeting smiles. “It is a warrior’s duty to be stoic.”

“And you do the duty thing better than anyone I’ve ever met.”

“I’ll take that as a compliment, wife.”

“You do that.” Wife. What did he really mean when he called her wife?

Trust, Maddie thought. It’s a matter of trust. It was more than that. The insight was sudden and frightening. It wasn’t just a matter of trust, though that was hard enough to come by. It was about belief. About love. She glanced around the witch’s cottage and attempted to logically take one concept at a time, for she wasn’t up to taking them all in at once. Not yet and maybe never. Rather than letting her emotions slide away from the point, she forced herself to concentrate.

After a few moments she said to Rowan, “I believe that you believe.”

“You must believe in the magic yourself,” Rowan answered, understanding just what she’d meant. “It’s not enough otherwise.”

She had to trust him. She had to believe in magic. And then there was that love thing. She knew she certainly felt something strongly for Rowan Murray. Was it love?

“Those are some pretty tall orders.”

Maddie stared into the fire, very aware of Rowan when he moved to stand behind her. The pot bubbled and steamed, throwing a rich herbal scent into the close, warm air.

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Maddie took deep breaths and tried to steady her nerves. The herb scent went deep into her lungs, tickled the back of her throat and seemed to clear her head. It was sort of like camphor for the brain, it seemed as though it helped her to think. Only while the thoughts that came to her were clear, they were not necessarily orderly.

They tied her in knots and left her in a welter of confusion. She knew she couldn’t afford to be confused. Something told her that what happened in the next few hours was going to determine the course of the rest of her life, that Rowan and she would walk out of here with things settled or that they wouldn’t walk out of here at all. This premonition was foolish but she believed it in the depths of her mostly practical soul.