Teresa Medeiros (20 page)

CHAPTER
16

C
astle Raven was open for business. Daybreak found its denizens scurrying in and out of the castle like a colony of industrious ants. With the ghost banished and their tiny lady freed from her tower prison, Colin’s people were eager to reclaim both their home and their lives.

When Tabitha had finally drifted into a troubled sleep the night before, Colin had been huddled over the baby’s basket, counting each of her even breaths. Tabitha had awakened at dawn to find him sprawled on his stomach on the floor of the tent, sound asleep. After covering him with one of the furs, she’d crept over to take his place, standing guard against the fleeing darkness.

Despite several eager offers, he still refused to relinquish the baby he’d christened Wee Blythe to any of the village women. He insisted on directing most of the repair efforts while carrying the baby in the crook of his arm like a squirming football. He wore Tabitha’s wire-framed glasses perched low on his nose and it was the very incongruity that made him so irresistible.

The village women had to settle for fussing over Nana. Accepting that her precious charge was safe at
last had done wonders for the old woman’s paranoia. The near madness she’d suffered in the tower seemed to be subsiding with encouraging haste, allowing her to accept Granny Cora’s offer to share a pipe beneath the refreshing shade of a willow.

Tabitha would have found their joy infectious if her own mood hadn’t kept veering between exhilaration and despair. Every time her gaze accidentally brushed Colin’s, she feared they would change the course of history by discovering electricity five centuries before Benjamin Franklin. The unspoken promise in his eyes sent heat sizzling through her, melting the core of ice around her heart and sending the runoff to pool in more provocative places.

But when he turned away to shout a fresh order at Ewan or Chauncey, despair gripped her. She knew she owed him the truth. Even if it meant risking the fragile bond that had grown between them. She had to tell him that she didn’t belong in his arms, in his life, even in his century. But she no longer knew if she could find the courage to leave him.

And what about her parents? If their plane had gone down over the Bermuda Triangle, her return to the twenty-first century wouldn’t bring them back. But if they were alive, her unexplained disappearance would break their hearts. They might live out their lives believing she’d been prey to a kidnapper or serial killer. She squeezed the amulet, almost wishing Colin had tossed the hateful thing down some bottomless well.

“Lady Tabby!” A fair-haired, baby-faced little boy with an irrespressible cowlick poked his head through an arrow loop set high in the castle wall. “Do come, Lady Tabby! ’Tis wee Lucy who needs rescuin’ now.”

“I’ll be right there, Thomas.” Tabitha rushed up the stairs and enhanced her reputation for daring heroics by
saving Lucy from a rather fierce-looking mouse who had cornered the baffled kitten on a window ledge.

As she emerged from the castle, crooning to the cat in her arms, Arjon dropped his bundle of singed tapestries to pinch back a sneeze. “Should have left the little monster for rat bait.”

“Shame on you, Sir Arjon,” she retorted, kissing Lucy’s fuzzy head. “It’s not very chivalrous to insult a lady.”

“I’ve seen him bed women with longer whiskers,” Colin called out from atop a pile of salvaged wood.

The worldly Arjon blushed and the women beating the soot from the heather-stuffed mattresses tittered. Colin winked at Tabitha over the top of her glasses, tilting her world on edge once more.

She absently deposited Lucy in an empty cooking cauldron, oblivious to the wicked arch of Arjon’s eyebrows.

“Jenny, you take care up there,” Magwyn shouted, distracted from scraping tarnish from a silver candlestick by the sight of her daughter scampering over the tower ramparts like a lithe little monkey.

Jenny just giggled and waved before lurching after the other children. Magwyn shook her head and went back to her chore. “I ought to give the child a sound thrashing, but I can’t resist her laughter after all this time. ’Tis music to my ears.”

Tabitha smiled, remembering the first time she had heard Colin laugh aloud.

But then Magwyn glanced back up at the ramparts, and her face went stark white. Tabitha followed her gaze skyward, shading her eyes against the morning sun. Fear plunged through her heart.

Jenny wasn’t laughing anymore. She was dangling from an outcropping of stone by her frail fingertips,
poised above a sheer drop of seventy feet to the cobblestones below.

Magwyn’s scream was the voice of every mother’s nightmare. The icy aria seemed to go on and on, freezing everyone in the courtyard with horror.

Everyone but Colin.

Handing the baby off to Nana, he raced for the tower. Tabitha knew he wasn’t going to make it. He was a hero, not a superhero. And when he failed, he would blame himself, just as he blamed himself for Regan’s suicide.

She could almost hear Jenny’s grunt of effort, feel the rough stone scraping the tender skin off her fingers, suffer her burning shame as the little girl wet herself for the first time in years.

As Jenny’s left hand lost its grip and clutched desperately at the air, Magwyn’s own fists clenched and unclenched as if she didn’t know whether to hide her face in her hands or shake her fist at the unforgiving sky.

Colin was just dragging open the outer door to the tower when Jenny fell. Oddly enough, it was Magwyn who went dead silent as Jenny’s shrill scream lacerated their ears. Colin turned to watch, his face awash in helplessness and horror, as the child plunged toward the ground, her arms and legs cartwheeling madly.

Tabitha did not remember grabbing the amulet. Could not have pinpointed at what precise second she abandoned her insecurities, overcame her repressions, and wished, harder than she’d ever wished in her entire life.

Jenny’s scream dwindled to a delighted, “Aa-a-a-a-h …!” as her fall slowed to a float. She drifted toward the earth, her skirt billowing outward like Mary Poppins’s parasol, and landed with feathery grace in Tabitha’s outstretched arms. Tabitha buried her face in
the child’s sweaty throat, cherishing the feel of her solid little body.

The child wiggled out of Tabitha’s fierce grip, drawing back to gaze raptly at her face. Her voice, husky from disuse, seemed to echo through the courtyard. “ ’Twas a bonny catch, Lady Tabby. Are you a witch?”

Tabitha swept her gaze around the ring of astounded faces. Colin slowly drew off the glasses, staring at her with the same baffled astonishment as the rest of them. She briefly closed her eyes to blot out his face, praying he would understand.

She could not lie to the hopeful child in her arms, nor could she go on lying to Colin. The past had become her present and he had become the only future she could envision. What better time than here and now to embrace the heritage she’d always denied? Here in this enchanted kingdom where knights in shining armor fought to slay the dragons of evil and the most powerful spell of all was true love. Tabitha almost wished her mother was there to witness her proud declaration.

She smiled tenderly at Jenny, but her gaze drifted over the child’s head, coming to rest lovingly on Colin’s bewildered face. “Yes, darling. I’m a witch.”

Silence greeted her words. A silence so profound Tabitha could hear the papery rustle of swallow wings in the chapel nave high above, the scrape of a dislodged stone as someone took an involuntary step backward.

Her glasses slipped from Colin’s limp fingers. His face went utterly expressionless. The tan bled from his swarthy skin, bleaching it white. It was almost as if her abrupt confession had turned him to a pillar of salt.

Tabitha’s second clue that something was wrong came when Magwyn tore Jenny out of her arms. “But, Mama,” the little girl wailed. “Falling was fun! Might I do it again?”

“Hush, child,” Magwyn said harshly. She backed away from Tabitha, wearing a mask of mingled horror and betrayal.

It didn’t take her long to realize Magwyn’s reaction mirrored that of the crowd surrounding them. Some were backing away; others were muttering beneath their breaths and tracing crosses on their breasts. She watched in helpless dismay as, one by one, faces that had been beaming at her only minutes before closed in on themselves, becoming the forbidding visages of strangers. Only Arjon’s eyes betrayed a flicker of sympathy, which was somehow more damning than the open condemnation of the others.

“Oops,” she whispered.

She’d made some colossal social blunders before, but this might even be worse than the time she’d stepped on the First Lady’s train at a presidential dinner given in her father’s honor. Or the time she’d called the wife of a potential multimillion-dollar client by his mistress’s name.

“Burn her!” shouted an old man, waving his palsied fist in the air.

“Aye, she’s a confessed witch. We must burn her,” Granny Cora echoed sadly.

“I thought you only burned heretics,” Tabitha said weakly.

Chauncey, ever helpful, chimed in. “We strangle witches.
Then
we burn ’em.”

The accusing mutters rose to shouts. Tabitha touched a hand to her throat, backing toward Colin without even realizing it. Jenny began to cry, her heartfelt wails only adding to the chaos.

“Enough!”

Colin’s shout silenced them all, even a startled Jenny. As he rested his hands on Tabitha’s shoulders, she
sagged against him in relief. She should have known he would never allow his people to harm her. He was her hero, her champion, her destiny—the man she’d crossed over seven centuries to love.

He caressed her fluted collarbones with a tenderness that made her want to melt into a puddle at his boots.

“I’m the one who brought this witch into our midst.” His soft, despairing voice rasped like steel on velvet in the tense silence. “ ’Tis my duty to burn her.”

CHAPTER
17

“T
his is probably going to hurt you much more than it will me.” Tabitha swiped her sweat dampened bangs out of her eyes with her bound wrists as she trudged up the steep slope behind Colin. “I told my daddy that once when he was planning to punish me for hacking into his bank account and making electronic transfers to Greenpeace, and he laughed so hard, he forgot to spank me.”

Colin’s face betrayed no sign of amusement. It was as still and resolute as it had been since that terrible moment when she’d confessed her secret.

She sighed, not knowing how much longer she could keep up her nervous stream of chatter. They’d been climbing the mountainside for most of the afternoon, yet he hadn’t uttered a single word. She’d been a victim of his brooding silences before, but this one was different somehow, like a deep, dark stream winding through an underground cavern. She might have thought she was marching heavenward alone if it wasn’t for the stout length of rope wrapped around her wrists and Colin’s fist.

Despite the cord that bound them, he hadn’t touched her once since passing his stern judgment. It had been
Ewan who wrapped the rope around her wrists at his master’s command, Chauncey who had given the other end of it into his hands. Tabitha had simply fallen into step behind him, keenly aware of the amulet bouncing between her breasts. Surely Colin must suspect the charm possessed magical powers. Yet he’d bound her wrists in front of her, leaving her fingers free to grasp it if she dared.