Free Shana Abe by The Truelove Bride Page B

never get the one thing that it turned out he desired most. And he was not a man to take his inclinations lightly.
    Her chin dropped down and stayed there. With a subtle shifting of his arm he leaned her back against him until her head rested against his shoulder. Her hair was the only brightness around them.
    The devil came with smoke and sulphur to the glen, and he brought forth the wicked faerie and held him in chains of fire in front of the laird.
    “What would you have me do?” the devil asked.
    “Revenge!” called out the laird, holding his poor lass in his arms.
    So the devil took the faerie with fiery hands and twisted and turned him, shouting shrieks and spells until it wasn’t a faerie any longer, but something else, black and burnt. And the devil tossed him onto the side of the mountain where he burned deep into the rock and melted there, gone forever.
    “Now,” said the devil. “My payment.”
    And it was only then that the laird realized what he had done.
    When she was asleep it was easy to forget the fire in her eyes, a fire he provoked. It was easy to think about how she might have been if they had met under different circumstances, his own version of a fairy tale. She would have been trusting but strong, clever but kind beneath all that beauty. And he would have never, ever left on any crusade for any man or god.
    “I find I have too many souls right now,” said the crafty devil. “Yours will only crowd my halls. I will take something else from you. I will take your children away from you, and your children’s children, and their children and their children, aswell. They will be banished from you and with them all your golden days, and your clan will languish without them, and your lands will be barren, and your animals will drop.”
    The laird cried out but what could he do? He had called on the devil and now his people would pay the price.
    She wasn’t that heavy against him. Marcus thought it would be no problem to ride the rest of the day with the sleeping Avalon in his arms, to ride off into eternity with her relaxed before him, the sweet softness of her hair flowing down over her hips to brush and curl against his leg.
    The laird wept and begged for mercy but the devil would have none of it. Only when an eye opened in the sky did the devil stop laughing, and from the eye came a ray of sunlight, falling down only on our dead lady.
    Perhaps she was up in heaven right then, entreating the Lord to have pity on her true love. For this was the Eye of God in the sky, and He had taken an interest in the laird’s fate.
    Now, the devil knew what this meant, that God was listening and noticing, and the devil knew what he had to say. But it filled him with spite that he had to soften his curse, and he spat the final words to the kneeling laird.
    “This curse will last one hundred full years, until there comes from these children a lass with the mark of your lady, a daughter of your clan to wed the laird. Until she returns you will not prosper, not you or any of yours.”
    And because he was the devil, he added one more thing before being swallowed up whole by the ground:
    “And she will be a warrior maiden who will know your deepest hearts and thoughts. And she will hate your very name.”

    T hey ended up camping in a woods so tight with trees that they had to scatter the campsite. Even this was to their advantage, however. The plentiful trunks and branches offered ideal protection. Marcus had a watch set up to scout the perimeter of the camp and put Lady Avalon squarely in the middle, where she could be seen from all sides.
    There was a stream nearby, cold black water, and he had taken her there himself after untying her hands, watching her slake what had to be a tremendous thirst, watching the water dissolve and sweep away the dried blood around her wrists.
    It pained him somehow, the sight of that blood against her white skin, and he didn’t want it to. She wasn’t really harmed. The ropes had