Free Fairy Tale by Jillian Hunter

eyes like Eun, she thought in resentment, pivoting slowly as total silence blanketed the hall. Her clansmen regarded her with varying degrees of embarrassed amusement, trepidation, and relief that their chieftain was temporarily, at least, overlooking them.
    Word had spread through the castle like wildfire that the MacElgin was capable of anything. Only that afternoon he had ordered the men to rewash all their sweaty plaids, another grave insult to Cook, who had already supervised this month’s washing. He had forbidden women to pop bare-breasted out of herring barrels, and he had banished Effie’s pet piglets to the castle yard.
    But the penultimate insult was the punishment he’d inflicted on brave wee Marsali Hay, making her his personal servant—Marsali, a blue-blooded descendant of Olaf the Black himself, King of Man and the Isles. Marsali, who had lost a father, lover, and two brothers in the space of three years. Marsali, with her easy laughter and unwavering loyalty. It was an af front to what piddling little the clan held dear.
    “I am waiting, Marsali.”
    Her hackles rose at his tone of voice. She anticipated trouble, that somehow she was about to become the brunt of his black sense of humor. She reminded herself that she was submitting to him for a reason, that her patience would bear the fruit of peace for the clan.
    As she approached his chair, she screwed up the courage to look him straight in the eye. The midnight-blue intensity of his gaze took her off guard. Heat suffused her face, but she held her head high, struggling to subdue the impact of his stare, which warned he had something horrible in store.
    Duncan subsided back into his chair as Marsali returned in reluctant steps to the table, her small face set in a scowl of irritation.
    “You have dropped your serviette again, my lord?” she inquired in a tone that suggested she’d like to strangle him with it.
    Duncan waved the white linen napkin limply in her direction. “No, it’s right here.”
    “Your wine goblet is too heavy to lift?” she asked, the dangerous glint in her eye growing brighter.
    He leaned back in his chair, long muscular legs out- sprawled like an indolent conqueror’s, studying her in cold unblinking silence. Marsali stared back, positive now that she and Colum had made a severe metaphysical miscalculation. This man could not possibly be the link to bringing peace and prosperity to the clan, born to the position or not.
    Aye, he reveled in the role of chieftain tonight, his tall handsome frame emphasized to advantage in a costume he’d evidently found in his father’s wardrobe: white ruffled shirt of fine lawn and black velvet knee breeches, white linen hose encasing his muscular calves, the MacElgin plaid pinned to his broad shoulder with a silver brooch encircled by Chinese amethysts. His long black hair fell loosely, framing his handsome face. It struck Marsali as a cruel irony that someone graced with such devastating physical appeal had been cursed with an utter absence of emotional depth. But there it was. The sad truth.
    “There is another draft on your neck, my lord?” she asked in a falsely solicitous voice.
    Duncan raised his goblet to his lips to conceal a wolfish grin. He was enjoying himself immensely. The woman’s spirit added incredible spice to his efforts. Spice. Ah, that was the word for her with that warm sun-kissed skin and that small lithe body, its sensuality ill-concealed by her drab gown. He would have dearly loved under other circumstances to take advantage of her subservient role.
    He cast a casual glance around the hall, struck anew by the overt hostility that engulfed him. Hate him or not, he’d be willing to wager this was the first night since his father’s death that his clansmen were behaving like human beings. Hope, albeit dim, rose inside him.
    “Marsali, you will fetch the ladder and remove the tapestries from the wall. I find the smell of mold offensive while I’m