Page 90 of Crown of the Fae King

I hoped Urban wasn’t right about war coming. But if he was, I hoped it wouldn’t come here…

“Have ye any idea how old I am?”

I took a deep breath and brought my attention back inside the truck. “No idea. Thirty? Thirty-five?” I hadn’t wanted to know if I was older than him.

“I was born in 1935.”

I did the math, then laughed. “You’re eighty-eight?” In comparison to everything I’d been through, believing him didn’t require much of a stretch. “I can’t imagine how old your sisters are. I thought maybe seventy.”

“Over a hundred now.”

“Wow.”

“We grew up in Muirsglen. Although our parents had been born of witches, they couldn’t quite handle my brother and me, so they left us to our sisters and never came back. I don’t blame them. We were…trouble.

“I met my wife when I was nineteen. She came from Wyoming to stay with family. We fell in love immediately. But Walter fell for her too, and when she chose me, he…didn’t take it well. To make a long story short, he lured me into an enchanted tunnel and sealed me inside. They searched the tunnel but couldn’t find me. Eventually, Ivy went home…and had our daughter alone.

“Sixty years later, Walter came back and tried to extract my power from the tunnel. In point of fact, if anyone were to be given the nickname of Ambition, it would have been him. But to Walter’s surprise, I’d grown more powerful than he could have ever imagined. When he opened that tunnel, I escaped, and he fled. Faked his death, which was quite a trick, considering the connection between us. Six years ago, he came back, looking for his granddaughter, Soni. She was aThird, so her power was substantial—”

“And she gave him her power, which then broke the contract, right?”

“Correct. Though she was compelled to do it. We went to the Grandfather, who helped us make the transfer. He never hinted at the consequences, and I’m sure he set it all up from the beginning. I just can’t imagine why.”

“So…when you escaped the tunnel, you found Ivy again?”

“I did. She was on death’s door. Cancer. Alone in a hospital. Because of what happened to me and the powers I took from the tunnel, I was able to make her young again…and adjust her memory. We literally started over, at the beginning, in our twenties.”

“What about your daughter?”

“By then, she’d gotten along in years herself, had no contact with her mother. I saw no need to complicate matters there. The life Ivy had led was not a happy one. I am determined to make up for that with her current one.” He shrugged. “I put a dead woman in Ivy’s place, at the hospital. No one was the wiser.” He stared at the road for a bit. “In any case, I told you that to tell you something else…”

“What’s that?”

“Before we get to Muirsglen, I want you to understand the source of my powers. It didn’t come from the Grandfather. It came from that tunnel. And when I tell you where the tunnel came from, maybe you’ll understand why I am not…a fan…of the Grandfather, or the Muir witches of the past. It does make it a little harder to care about the current ones. My family excluded, of course.”

“Do I want to know?”

“I need you to know. I want you on your guard when we get there.”

I inhaled deeply and braced myself. “Okay. Tell me.”

“At the endof the ninth century, the witches found themselves relegated to the Black Isle with Picts to the south and east, Scots to the south and west, and Norse to the north. The tunnel was created between them and Scots to the west—the clan’s great secret. They tended to turn up unexpectedly, which added to their mystique and kept other clans from underestimating them.

“It worked for half a century, until a vicious chieftain to the west tortured that secret out of a man.

“One day the guard posted at the far end of the tunnel came running out to report that an army had gathered outside the entrance, that they planned to take the clan by surprise in the morning and feed them all to the fishes of the firth.

“The chieftain—our Seanathair—gathered every witch in the village and combined their power to curse the tunnel itself. Any man that entered the far end and exited in Muirsglen would lose ten years of age…and the memories of those years. Any man going the opposite path will gain ten years, but not regain his memories.

“That army forgot ten years of training, lost ten years of muscle, wisdom…age. What foe couldn’t be bested as a child? And what better punishment for a fleeing enemy than to age him quickly without benefit of wisdom? Enemies that couldn’t explain what was done to them?

“There was a chant we learned as children. Takes the years, dries the tears, quiets laughter, lulls the fears. They were lambs to the slaughter.”

“That’s…barbaric!”

“Isn’t it? Granted, it did save the clan. But now, knowing the Grandfather who instigated it was the Grandfather I knew, I am certain he could have devised an alternative. Could have sealed that army inside the tunnel and let them die as men.”

“I may be sick.”

---