Page 1 of Beyond Dreams

Prologue

The seer’s cottagesat at the bottom of the mountain where it met with the loch. From either direction, coming at it from the mountain above or staring at it across the loch from the front, it was the only thing man-made that eyes could fall upon. There was nothing else around. Hugh MacHeth was fairly certain Sidheag, the seer, both planned it and preferred it this way. And as quietly as he or any other might come, the woman was never surprised, only lanced a person with her shrewd black eyes, never failing to give the impression she’d foreseen their coming hours if not days before, mayhap had known of their desire before they had themselves.

Hugh grumbled internally as he descended the slope, coming from the other side of the mountain’s peak, where sat Hewgill House, the stronghold of the MacHeths. Rare was the occasion when he enjoyed visiting the seer. More often than not, he departed when the business was done and with a keen desire to scour himself forcibly to cleanse her presence from his person. Like the creeping fingers of a fog coming over the crest of the beinn, so too Sidheag’s sinister company seemed to claw and saturate a person. He never quite departed her company as whole as when he entered, he was sure.

Harrumphing, Hugh wondered if she readthatin him as well.

Aye and were it not for the fact that his troublesome sister, Ceri, was missing—for several days now—he’d have had no reason to seek out the old woman. Frankly, he wouldn’t have cared what became of his sister save that he rather needed her since he promised her in marriage to the MacQuillan at the beginning of the year and the time was drawing near.

Already, that contract was under duress, since Ceri had—between the time he as chief had signed his name to parchment alongside the MacQuillan’s scratch and now—managed to get herself with child. Again. It was early enough yet and the vows were to be made soon enough, though, that he had some hope that they might be able to conceal that very small and damning fact until vows were said, and the marriage was an achievement and not only a hope.

Once upon a time, the MacHeths would have considered no such pact, would have lorded over the lesser MacQuillans their own might. They’d have carried on as they had, doing as they wished along this vast swath of land in the northwest of Scotland. If they came upon sheep or cattle and wanted them, they’d have taken them. If they wanted women from the MacQuillan village to warm their beds or children of the same to serve the MacHeths, they’d simply have seized them. Och, but those days were gone now, the MacHeths’ influence and power declining, the glory years now centuries old and decades done, while the MacQuillans were only getting stronger.

Backed into a corner of his—and that of his predecessors’—own making, Hugh had little choice in the matter and had himself approached the matter with Duncan MacQuillan, a wedding pact and peace. The man needed no such contract, might have only run his formidable army roughshod over the MacHeths and taken anything or all that he desired, might have violently subjugated the MacHeths into good behavior. But then never had Hugh met a warring man who didn’t grasp at any peace he could get his hands on. Likely, the MacQuillan had only agreed to the idea to be able to concentrate on what, by all accounts, mattered most to him: Scotland’s freedom. For his part, Hugh’slittle choice in the mattermeant that he had been coerced—warned—by the mormaer, the MacHeth of Skye, Red Dougal, to make peace with the MacQuillan, who had become a formidable knight or some renown and consequence to Robert Bruce.

Hugh cared about as much for the directive as he did for Duncan MacQuillan’s reasons. Once the contract had been signed and the proposal sent to the bishop for approval, Hugh had recalled his sister from the convent in the borderlands where she’d spent the last seven years of her life at their father’s behest. He’d been as shocked and dismayed as any when she’d come. Gone, the unruly child sent to the nuns so long ago—and no convent bred lass was this who’d returned. Ceri was more wild and now wicked and too beautiful to remain only a pawn of men. He’d sensed it right from the start. She knew it as well. She heeded no one, not him or his brothers; she did as she pleased with some intent—he’d never believe otherwise—to thwart every plan and intention of his, as if she would get back at him alone for their father, now gone, having banished her years ago.

So then he wasn’t entirely shocked when Ceri had announced, with malicious glee he recalled, that she was carrying a child. ’Twas only a ploy, meant to escape her fate, though it had not since she’d miscarried soon after throwing the news in his face. Only a ploy, he knew, since she’d shed no tear over the lost bairn. And here she was, carrying again, so pleased to inform him that she couldn’t name the father but might be able to narrow it down to either five or six possibilities.

But now...missing.

Knowing his mood would not improve unless the hag had fair good news to impart, Hugh reached the door to her hut and rapped sharply. A chill ran down his spine when came the immediate answer of, “Come, Hugh the MacHeth.”

He pushed open the sagging door and ducked his head as he stepped inside. As ever, his nostrils were attacked first, the aroma of this overly warm hovel never failing to produce a wrinkling of his nose. God only knew what she boiled in that squat kettle hanging over the fire built on the ground in the middle of the one room cottage. There squatted the hag, crouched compactly near the small fire, her pointy chin sitting on one of her knobby knees. She was as she ever had been, old, timeless, but seeming to have aged little in the last twenty years, gray of face and hair and being no larger than a lass of ten and two by his reckoning. He glanced around, always half expecting that ghouls and goblins lived here as well, somewhere in the shadows, and that he was only ever one wrong word away from being consumed, torn apart, or ravaged—whatever fiends of that ilk did to humans.

Naught but two minutes in the hag’s hut, befuddled as ever by the odd surroundings, Hugh was forced to catch up. He’d been transfixed as always by what dwelled inside the hovel with the witch, including numerous bird claws and beaks dangling from strings in many places around the place; a collection of straw stuffed dolls, no bigger than his hand and outfitted in rags, sat in a floppy basket fairly close to Sidheag; a cage sat in a far corner, a linen shroud covering the top half, a skittering sound heard within; near to his left foot lay the abandoned skin of a snake, brittle and flaked into many pieces.

He stared hard at the old crone, whose eyes were mesmerized as they beheld the boiling liquid in the pot, trying to process what she’d just said, disbelieving her exact words. “And what is it yer meaning?” He asked gruffly, his bushy brows drawn as slanted lines angling down into his eyes.

“Only so many meanings ye can attach todead?” Sidheag said.

“But she canna be dead and how’s she supposed to wed?”

“She canna wed. I’ve said she’s dead, have I nae?”

“Canna wed,” he repeated slowly, churning on this, his face scrunched with bewilderment while he tried to stave off the panic that clawed to be heard and known.

Still, the hag did not look directly at him. “Nae, she’s dead.”

“But I saw Ceri just—”

“Saw her ye did,” she countered, “but nae more ye will. She’s dead.”

Coming out of the stupor provoked by this news, his mien hastened to exasperation. “Aye and will ye cease with it already. How many times will ye saydead?”

“’Nough so ye understand.”

Only belatedly did he wonder, “The child took her then, the devil’s bairn? Birthing come early and done her in?”

The old woman shook her head. “Sure and that’d been kind, eh?” Lazily, she tossed herbs into the fire and not the kettle. The flames hissed and squealed, the orange glowing white briefly. “Tossed from her mare and nae onto the ground but over the cliffs. The sea spit her out this morning.” She worked a crooked finger with some industry against a bit of food stuck between her teeth. “Or mayhap the devil returned and brought her home,” she guessed, inspecting with a frown that which she’d recovered from her teeth. “Soul is gone in any case, and all of us better off for it. But the body will come home to you this day.”

Mystified and more than only a wee alarmed, Hugh turned and stared out through the open door, which provided a rectangular view of those very moors in the distance, beyond the clear blue water of the lochan. “Dead, ye say,” he mused once more.

“Aye, eternal like.”

“But I need a bride to give to the McQuillan.”

The woman harrumphed with fine humor. “Aye and ye might have passed off the devil’s bairn as his, but ye’ll nae be fooling that one with a corpse for a bride.”

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