Page 1 of Highlander's Sinless Nymph
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Edward MacAlpein moved with the easy grace and wary step of someone who had been raised in the wild and rugged hills and woods of the Scottish Highlands. His footsteps were sure and deliberate, moving steadily, always placing his heel to the forest floor first. He was careful to never use the same route back from his excursions two days in a row, as he did not want to leave any trail to follow.
He picked his way through the tangled beech trees, his broad muscular frame pushing easily through the brush, using his sword every now and again to clear a particularly stubborn bramble.
He was a tall, strong young man, with shoulders so wide and a chest so deep that he looked as if he could pull an ox-cart. His sandy blonde hair, grown to shoulder length since he had been sent out on his mission, was currently hidden under the hood of his travel-stained cloak.
As he stalked through the beech wood, he sung softly under his breath, whilst overhead the wind in the leaves of the trees acted as accompaniment.
“I am a prisoner far from home,
But if ye’ll only steal the key,
I’ll take ye where the grass grows green,
And make of ye a great lady.”
Dusk was falling over the wooded hill country of the English Middle March like a soft spell as he walked. Gradually, as the sun dipped westward, the shadows in the beech forest lengthened. The shadow of each gnarled, ancient tree ran into the one next to it until they pooled like ink around the boles.
Edward scratched at his stubbly beard as he moved through the copse. Despite the loveliness of the fading afternoon, it seemed that his mind was set on taking him down a melancholy track. That song, that had sprung unbidden to his mind just then, had been one that his father, the Laird of MacQuarrie, had been particularly prone to sing to his wife.
Ah, Mither, how I miss ye. A year has passed, and yet the wound is as fresh and as raw as if ye were taken from us yesterday.
With this thought, the cold melancholy that seemed to fill the pit of his stomach warmed, grew hot, and hardened, like tempered steel.
Aye, she was taken. “Taken” is the word right enough. I shall take that which is due the MacQuarrie clan in return––vengeance.
Edward MacAlpein was, as his name suggested, the son of Tormad MacAlpein, the Laird of the MacQuarrie clan. There was a simple and good reason that the son of a Scottish Laird was out, over the Anglo-Scots border, in the rugged country of the Middle March. He had been sent out to track down and observe the man who had kidnapped and murdered his mother; a Captain of the English army, a certain Adair Bolton.
At the thought of the man who had so callously and savagely abducted his mother and put her to death, Edward’s usually warm brown eyes went cold. He gritted his jaw and smiled a bitter smile, vowing silently to avenge Aisla MacAlpein’s memory for what might have been the millionth time.
As the night’s chill started to creep out of the ground, a mist began to rise off the tributary of the River Rede that flowed through this particular copse. The rising haze diffused the rays of the last couple of hours of daylight, sending fingers of golden sunlight spearing through the black trunks of the beeches.
It was Edward MacAlpein’s favorite time of the day. It was the changing of the guard, when the sun gave up her place in the sky to her cousin the moon.
Edward’s mother had always told him that twilight was the stretch of time in which the sun, hidden behind the horizon, exchanged the news of the day with the moon, who was on his way to rise. He pushed through a tangle of ferns and stepped deeper into the mist that was rising quicker off the river now.
The smell of damp pervaded the air as Edward moved closer to the River Rede. Beechwood sickeners––a toxic, brittle, red-capped toadstool found only under beech trees––carpeted the forest floor. Edward spotted a few of the rather gruesome, and aptly named, beefsteak funguses growing from the sides of a couple of the older trees.
“There was a farmer’s son,
Kept sheep all on the hill;
And he walked out one May mornin’
To see what he could kill.”
He chanted this old rhyme now, as he moved on through the wood, trying to calm the sudden angry pounding of blood in his ears by listening to the sounds of the birds settling down to roost for the evenings. It was a trick that his father had taught him for if he was ever stressed or out of sorts.
“Listen to yer surroundin’s, lad,” he would tell Edward, “and try and identify every livin’ beast and bird that ye can hear.”
Edward could hear the sleepy trilling of a pair of wood warblers, the last tired taps of a woodpecker in the distance, and the sporadic song of what he half-guessed to be a hawfinch near at hand.
“And sing blow away the mornin’ dew
The dew, and the dew.
Blow away the mornin’ dew,
