“Wrap your cloak around Tom,” I instructed Nan. “There will be enough to surround him and still cover you.”
She did as I said, with Una’s help, and encircled Tom’s body with the glowing cloth. Just as it had with Mairi, the piece of tartan detached itself from Nan’s cloak and then fitted itself to Tom’s body. Within minutes, color returned to Tom’s face and the black swelling at his throat receded.
“Thanks be to the Lord,” Una murmured, crossing herself. I was momentarily surprised by the gesture, as I’d come to think of Una as a witch who followed “the auld ways” instead of Christianity, but then I realized that there was no separation between the two for Una. She could follow the auld gods and the new, recite a psalm in Latin or a spell in Gaelic. It was all the same to her, but I didn’t think Reverend Fordick would see it that way.
I called her name, and when she turned to me I saw that, while the lines her grandson’s death had carved into her face were still there, now her skin was pink and her eyes had life in them. I took Mairi’s small soft hand, still intertwined with mine, and laid it in Una’s worn one. Like a bud opening, Mairi’s fingers released mine and opened up in Una’s hand. A tremor passed over Una’s face—a little struggle that I thought I understood. After losing all she had, caring about someone else opened her up to loss—the loss she’d already suffered and the possibility of more loss. I knew because that was what it felt like caring about William after losing Bill. I could feel her resistance in her old crabbed fingers. But then those fingers grasped Mairi’s hand with the fierceness of a much younger woman.
“Puir bairn,” Una cooed. “Una’s here to watch ye now. Close yer een and go to sleep.”
Obediently, Mairi closed her sightless eyes. So did Tom. I looked at Nan and she nodded. “It’s best ye bide here with the two of them to make sure they’re safe,” Nan said. “Callie and I will go visiting and see who else is sick.”
Una nodded but didn’t look up. She was gazing at Mairi’s face, stroking her tangled red hair back from her brow. As Nan and I went down the ladder, I heard Una singing softly. “Hush, hush, my bonnie sweet lamb,” she sang.
At the bottom of the ladder we were greeted with the body of Malcolm Brodie, my own great-something-grandfather.
“If I’d figured out how the tartan worked before—”
Nan tsked. “Aye, ’tis no use cryin’ o’er spilt milk, lass. Not when there are others who need saving. Half the village will have passed by here in the last fortnight to have their grain ground. There’ll be others fallin’ sick with the pest as we stand here ditherin’.”
The thought of more households besieged like this one turned me cold. How would we know where to go first? Would people die while we took care of others? We had no phones or Internet to track the contagion. And what if the pest was carried out of the town while we went from house to house? It could spread over all of Scotland …
“There’s too much to do for the two of us,” I said, turning to Nan. “We need help.”
“We can help.”
The voice came from the doorway. I turned and saw William, resplendent in his glowing tartan, like an electric Highlander. The plaid wasn’t the only thing that was glowing. His skin, hair, but most of all his eyes, burned with a fierceness I’d never before seen. What I saw in his eyes wasn’t magic or fairy dust—it was purpose and determination. This was the man he’d been meant to become before the Fairy Queen stole him.
“We?” Nan asked.
“Aye,” William replied, giving her a brilliant smile. “I’ve rounded up a few of the lads.” He stood back and Nan and I moved to the door. Outside was a small troop of Ballydoon men.
“What did you tell them?” I whispered to William.
“I told them we were going to save the town,” he replied. “They didn’t care how we do it.”
I turned to Nan, wondering if she was thinking the same thing I was—that if we told these men we were outfitting them with a magical tartan that could heal the sick and protect the well, we opened ourselves up to charges of witchcraft. Nan’s forehead was creased, her solemn blue eyes raking the faces of each man. She looked less like the kindly middle-aged woman I’d come to know than a general surveying her troops. Under her stern regard, the men straightened their shoulders and stood up straighter.
“James Russell Gordon McPhee,” she called, as if the men did indeed stand across a battlefield from her. A pimply, gawky lad stepped forward, surreptitiously wiping his nose. “Can ye be trusted with the Order of the Plaid?”
“Aye, ma’am.”
“And do ye solemnly swear to uphold the honor of the plaid and to never divulge the secrets of the plaid to any save your brothers in the plaid?”
“Nay … I mean aye, I swear it.”
“Mmppff,” Nan huffed, looking at Jamie McPhee dubiously. But then she cleared her throat. “I do hereby endow you with the Order the Plaid.” She plucked the edge of her own tartan and measured out an arm’s length of it into the air. It separated from her cloak without leaving hers any smaller. Then she swirled the glowing plaid over Jamie McPhee’s shoulders. At first he only looked confused, but then a change came over him. He held his head up higher and squared his shoulders. A glow came into his sallow cheeks and dark-brown eyes.
“God bless ye, lad,” Nan said softly. Then she moved on to the next recruit. She repeated the procedure with each man. When Nan was done, the shambling motley crew had been transformed into a glowing honor guard. Nan regarded them with a look of fierce pride. “I declare ye all to be brothers in the Order of the Plaid, Stewards of Ballydoon.”
I’d thought that the Stewarts I’d met in Fairwick had inherited their ability through family, but now I saw that the origin of their clan came from this small group of ordinary men who were willing to risk their lives to save their neighbors. Somehow it made them seem even nobler.
“There’s one more thing I must tell ye,” Nan said, the pride in her eyes wavering. “If we do this, the witch hunters will come for us.”
A tremor moved through the group, like wind passing over a field of grass, riffling their glowing tartans. It was only right for Nan to warn them of the danger, but I was afraid now that they would back down and disband. But then young Jamie McPhee stepped forward, his tartan glowing like a beacon.
“Then we’ll have to go for them first,” he said.
CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR
We split up into two groups—William and me with three of the men, and Nan with four of them—and went from house to house. When we found ailing folk—and we found plenty—we wrapped them in the tartan. When we were done, a man of the newly formed order stood at each corner of the house and stretched his arms out to his comrades on either side, making a protective shield to surround the house.
A few didn’t let us in. The MacDougals would not permit us into their fine castle—but we spread the tartan over it anyway. Nor would the Reverend Fordick let us into his manse. When we tried to surround it with the tartan, he came out brandishing a crucifix in one hand and the King James Bible in the other, and he ordered us “sinners, witches, and demons to be gane.”
Only those initiated into the Order of the Plaid could see the tartan. The people we helped didn’t know how we helped them. We brought salves and herbs and broths. We told them that the men who stood outside their houses were there to make sure no one entered with infection. When we’d gone to every house, we joined back with Nan’s group. To cast the plaid over the whole village, she directed us to a spot along the town walls.