Free Fairy Tale by Jillian Hunter Page B

stables, his order to be let outside obeyed with comical swiftness. His stallion had been found at the moor by a shepherd and curried (by Marsali) only hours ago, the last demand he had made of the exhausted woman before dismissing her for the night. No doubt she would sleep like the dead until dawn, when he intended to awaken her with a fresh list of demanding chores. He chuckled softly at the prospect.
    He rode without thought to his destination, contempt hardening his face at the black piles of rubble littering the roadside where English soldiers had begun to clear cottages to build their military road. He was not insensitive to the Highlanders’ feelings nor unmoved by the sight of this destruction. But he could see little point in men sacrificing their lives for the inevitable thrust of progress into even these remote wilds. And he had more than enough experience in the British army to predict the Jacobite cause would die a violent death.
    He swore it was not intentional, but suddenly he found himself staring down at the thatched stone cottage in the tangled beech copse where he had been bo rn , where his mother and the vicious bastard she had married had died, violently, on a Beltane night over two decades ago. He slowed his horse, unprepared for the dark emotions that swept over him, the painful lure of the past.
    He had lived an incredible life since then, he had been feted in foreign courts; he had won the hand of a gently bred English lady and the sponsorship of her politically influential father. He had risen from the tomb of personal tragedy.
    But when he dismounted and walked inside the forlorn abandoned cottage, he bec ame an angry and abused eleven- year-old boy again, and all the glory he had achieved dissipated like mist.
    The door behind him gaped open, its broken crossbar hanging at the exact angle from when Kenneth MacElgin and his retainers had kicked it, drawn by the sound of Duncan’s aunt sobbing hysterically for help. Even the breath of the nearby sea could not cleanse the remembered stench of blood, ale, and peat smoke from Duncan’s nostrils. He closed his eyes, assailed by repressed grief and unspent anger.
    Aye, for all the honor bestowed on him, for all the years that had passed, as he stood in that dark cottage, he was a child again, caught in a nightmare of deadly violence, and escape was no easier now than it had been then.
     
     
    D uncan lifted his head, the dark circle of his thoughts broken by the vibrations of a rider galloping across the ridge that overhung the cottage. Deliberately not looking down at the floor where he had last seen his mother lying, lifeless, he hurried outside to the sunken yard and looked up in amazement at the figure that seemed to fly like an otherworldly being across the tree-shadowed path.
    Marsali. Damnation, it was that girl again, flagrantly disobeying his orders to remain inside the castle until he gave her permission to leave. Anger welled inside him, a welcome distraction from the torment of his memories. Was she running away, fed up with her punishment and suspecting he had even grimmer chores planned? Had she followed him here to flaunt her defiance?
    He strode toward his own horse, smiling unwillingly at the absurd memory of her sliding down the ladder in the great hall to fall on her rump, unbalanced by the weight of the enormous tapestry she had singlehandedly hauled down.
    The look of fury she had shot him.
    He mounted and cantered around the cottage, remembering the private ways of childhood, the hidden paths he had discovered years ago to avoid Fergus’s drunken rages. She had to be heading for the cove, with its honeycombed caves and rock archways, a place of secrets and shadows. His smile faded. In the old days the cove had provided an ideal trysting spot for lovers. He’d met more than one village maid there at midnight himself. He had no reason to believe human nature had changed that much in twenty years.
    A sultry summer night. A young