Juliet Dark - The Angel Stone

“I know you’ve been working so hard,” I said. “I wanted to do something for you.”

“That’s very kind of ye, lass, but you shouldn’t trouble yourself. I see you’ve been spinning with Nan …” He cast his eye toward the spinning wheel. The yarn had stopped glowing after a little while. I wasn’t sure yet how to make it glow again, or how we would make a magic tartan, but Nan had promised to come back tomorrow for us to spin some more.

“Yes, she taught me to spin,” I said, spooning out a bowlful of stew. “And I told her about the angel stone. We think we might have a way of getting it.” I told him about the magic tartan that the Stewarts had used in my time.

“You mean it’s like a pen you’d make for your sheep—only made out of glowing thread?” he asked skeptically.

“Yes, and in my time the Stewarts were able to use it to keep the nephilim out of the circle long enough for me to open the door …” I paused, wondering what had happened after I’d disappeared from the circle. Had the tartan held—or had my friends been overwhelmed?

“You’re back with them, aren’t you?” William said softly.

“What?”

“Worrying about your people.”

“Yes,” I admitted. “I’m sorry.”

“You don’t have to be sorry, lass. I understand. I’ve been thinking how ye being here must be a wee bit like me being trapped in Faerie. It isn’t the place you’re meant to be, is it?”

“No,” I admitted, taking a quick swallow of the ale Nan had brought.

“Aye, I suspected as much. I know verra weel what that’s like. In fact, I have a wee confession to make.”

“Oh?”

“Aye. When I was taken by the fairies seven years ago, I wasn’t in the Greenwood just to see what would happen there on All Hallows’ Eve. I was on my way out of town, heading for Edinburgh.”

“You mean you were planning to leave Jeannie at the altar?”

William blushed. “I know it’s no’ honorable, but, aye, I saw what my life would be like tied to her and the MacDougals, and I knew that I wanted something different. I wanted …” He leaned forward, his eyes shining in the candlelight. “My plan was to go to Edinburgh and ship out aboard a merchant vessel, although I would not have been averse to joining up with a band of pirates if I happened upon them. I suppose that sounds foolish.”

“How old were—are—you?”

“I was nineteen when I was taken, so I suppose I’m twenty-six now, although sometimes I feel I lived a hundred years, not seven, in Faerie.”

He was a year younger than me. At nineteen, the age when he’d run away from Jeannie, I was in college at NYU. My biggest decision was what class to take and what major to declare.

“I guess you got an adventure after all,” I said.

“Aye, but not the kind I wanted. Being slave to the Fairy Queen wasn’t so different from marrying Jeannie MacDougal after all. So I understand what it’s like to feel trapped. I want you to know that what happened between us that first night …” He blushed and looked away. “Well, I understand you were most likely thinking of your fellow from your own time—Bill, ye called him?”

“Yes, Bill,” I said through a tightness in my throat.

“And I know I look like him, even that someday I’m supposed to be him, and that’s why you … er … might have confused the two of us. But I know I’m not him and this is not your time and place … so you needn’t fash yourself about me. I won’t stand in your way. I’ll help you get the stone you need from those bastards, and after we’ve run them out of Ballydoon I’ll help you get back to your own time, to your friends.”

I stared at William. I’d spent the whole day working up speeches to explain how I couldn’t get attached to him because I had an important mission and would have to leave when it was accomplished. And he—for all intents and purposes a nineteen-year-old boy who’d run away to join the pirates—had beat me to it. Clearly if he could be practical enough to see we shouldn’t fall into each other’s arms, I should be.

“Thank you, William,” I said, the words feeling as cold in my mouth as the cooling stew. “I appreciate your understanding and your offer of help. We’ll need it. Nan and I are going to learn how to weave the tartan to protect us, then we’ll need as many men and women as we can find to carry the tartan to the castle. I’ll use the brooch to get the stone away from Endicott, then I’ll destroy the nephilim and free their prisoners. It will be dangerous.”

“A raiding party against a castle guarded by a host of winged monsters?” William grinned. “It sounds better than being a pirate any day.”

The days seemed to move faster once William and I had made our pact to work together to defeat the nephilim. We may not have been a romantic couple, but we were united in a shared mission. He proved to be a far better roommate than most of the ones I’d had in college, one of whom had borrowed my clothes and left them in stained clumps on our suite floor, and another who hacked into my Facebook account and posted spurious nude photos on it. William was courteous and neat, sleeping each night on a sheepskin pallet by the fire, which he rolled up when he left in the morning. Most mornings he rose before I did and headed out to milk the cow. When I heard him go out, I got dressed and made our breakfast. He’d have built the fire up and drawn a pail of water from the well, so all I had to do was set the oatmeal to cooking over the fire and make the bannocks, which I’d discovered were the mainstay of the local diet.

Soon after William left with the flocks, Nan would appear on the doorstep with her basket of wool and sundry gifts of food. I had the feeling that she waited until William was gone to give us some privacy, although I’d tried a number of times to make clear to her that our relationship was platonic, lest she get the idea that I was planning to stay in Ballydoon or that I was taking advantage of her nephew.

“I’m not blind or daft,” she complained one day when I’d pointed out for the eleventh time the pallet where William slept. “I can weel enough see that a city-bred lass such as yourself would have no truck with a simple country boy such as young William—although he’s a good lad now that he’s gotten his silly notions of being a pirate out of his head.”

I laughed and broke the thread I was spinning, which I was trying to get to glow again. We’d spun baskets full of wool, attempting to replicate the glowing multicolored thread I’d spun the first day, without success. Nan had me trying a hand spindle now. “You knew about that?”

“Och, aye, when he was a wee boy he used to make ships out of bits of wood and scraps of my best linen and launch them on the Boglie Burn while singing shameless sea chanteys he’d picked up hanging around the tavern.”

I laughed at this image of a young William, which brought to mind how Liam would collect twigs and stones on his walks in the woods and bring them back to Honeysuckle House. The story also reminded me of a song I’d heard Bill singing once.

“Did any of those chanteys sound like this …” I hummed the tune. The words had been in another language I couldn’t reproduce.

The thread broke in Nan’s fingers and her face softened. “Och, that’s no sea chantey but only a lullaby my sister used to sing to him when he was a bairn.” Picking up her thread, Nan began to sing, keeping time to the rhythm of the song with the foot pedal of her spinning wheel. She sang it first in Scots and then in English.

“Hush, hush, my bonnie sweet lamb .

Tho’ my ship must sail in the morning ,