“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.”
CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE
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,
I will be with you
When the salt spray fans the shore,
I will be with you
When the wind blows the heather,
I will be with you when the dove sings her song,
Sing ba la loo laddie, sing ba la loo dear
Hush, hush, my bonnie sweet lamb.”
Nan’s eyes were shining when she came to the end of the song. For a few moments, the only sound in the room was the pedal knocking against the floor and the whir of the spinning wheel.
“What happened to her?” I asked. “William’s mother … your sister.”
“Ah, Jenny. The pest carried her away, along with William’s father. William was only a wee lad. I took him to live with me and did my best, but it’s never the same, is it?”
Having lost my own parents when I was twelve, I knew that well. “At least he had you. I went to live with my grandmother after my parents died, and she was not half so kind. I can see you really care for William.”
“How could I not, him looking so much like my poor little sister.” Nan’s voice grew hoarse, but instead of lapsing into silence, she sang the lullaby again, this time in a stronger voice, as if she were singing it for her lost sister. I thought of Bill singing that song more than three hundred years later—remembering it across time and all the shapes he had assumed—and felt an electric charge that ran from the back of my neck to the tips of my fingers and down the thread I was spinning … which began to glow a brilliant crimson. I looked over at Nan to see if she’d noticed. She had stopped spinning and was staring not at my thread but at hers. It was glowing a deep emerald green.
“The color of Jenny’s eyes,” she whispered. “That’s what I was thinking on.”
I plucked a length of the scarlet thread from my bobbin, and Nan, understanding, unspooled an equal length of hers. We held them alongside each other—the red and the green thread, my love for Bill and hers for her sister—and they clung like socks just out of the dryer and then coiled around each other, forming a multicolored thread. Nan gave it a tug.