Part 2

Ian was aware of the cynical smile behind him. A nasty suspicious mind Alex had! It was a pity. What else could he be expecting of a poor wild waif like this? What sort of life must she have had? Then Ian remembered where he had seen her before: with that wicked old witch Mina. Och, the poor creature!

“’Tis hurt you are,” he said worriedly, to Kelpie’s relief. She had feared for a moment that she’d been too subtle altogether.

“Och, only a little,” she whispered, putting on a braw show of dreadful pain heroically borne.

“Now, do not be overdoing it,” drawled Alex.

Kelpie shot him a look which, had she been a properly qualified witch, would surely have caused him to break out with every loathsome disease known to mankind. Unfortunately the only effect of her venomous glare was that Alex’s smile broadened to an insulting chuckle. Och, what a beast he was, then, with the bony, freckled, jeering face of him, and the two jaunty tufts of red hair jutting upward just where horns ought to sprout! She was about to tell him so, and in great detail, but just in time she remembered her role and Ian, who was still showing his pity and dismay.

What a misfortune, he thought, that this should happen now, just when he and Alex were nearly home again after those long months away in Oxford, where he had been savagely homesick. They were about to get home early, and with very important news, and now this had to happen, not five miles from Glenfern.

“What shall we be doing with you at all?” he said. “We cannot just be leaving her here!” he added fiercely, turning on Lachlan, the blond _ghillie_, who, looking larger than usual on his short shaggy pony, had muttered something from behind.

“Give her a copper,” Alex said, laughing, “and see how quickly she’ll mend!”

Copper indeed! thought Kelpie. It was silver she was wanting. But she didn’t hide the gleam in her eyes quickly enough.

“I’ll show you,” said Alex. Slowly, tantalizingly, he drew a coin from his sporran and held it up. It gleamed silver, and Kelpie stared at it greedily. “See?” Alex chuckled and spun it toward her.

Quick as the flash of bright metal in the air, her brown hand shot out to catch it in flight—then dropped, and the coin fell noiselessly on the path. Kelpie sat staring first at it and then at her own shoulder with dismay that was, for a change, perfectly genuine.

“I—I _am_ hurt!” she said with astonishment and then hastily snatched up the coin with her good left hand before they should change their minds.

“Not too hurt to be picking up the silver,” observed Alex, but the gibe lacked his earlier light tone. Ian had already dismounted and was touching rather gingerly the filthy rags covering the shoulder in question. The lass frankly stank.

This time Kelpie’s face showed an honest flicker of pain. “I think it will be sprained, or perhaps out of place,” Ian decided and looked at Alex.

Alex looked back at him. “Well, so. And where does she live, then? Where are her people? Perhaps Lachlan could be taking her home.”

Ian shrugged. “I think I’ve seen her with Old Mina and Black Bogle. Is that so?” he asked Kelpie, who nodded.

Alex raised his eyebrows, not in the least surprised. It was logical that she should belong to the nastiest witch in Scotland.

“Will they be coming along, then?” Ian inquired, and again Kelpie nodded, so bewildered by her unexpected hurt and the pain that was now shooting sharply through her shoulder that she couldn’t really think clearly at all.

A glum silence settled on them, broken only by furtive and disapproving mutters from Lachlan. His duty was to be protecting his young masters, and now here they were consorting with witches, and he not able to prevent them at all, at all. He crossed himself.

Ian sighed with relief when the bent figures of Mina and Bogle appeared up the loch-side. They would take care of their lass, and he and Alex could be away home.

But it wasn’t that easy. Mina, after taking in the situation at a glance, burst into lamentations and curses that caused the ruddy Lachlan to go pale. “And is it our poor lass you have harmed, wicked beasts that you are?” she wailed, while Bogle stood like a massive old tree in disconcerting silence. “Ocho, ocho, whatever shall we be doing now? May the Evil Eye fall on all your cattle, and the pox upon yourselves, _uruisgean_ that you are!”

Ian himself recoiled, not from the curses, but from the evil that was in this horrible old woman. What a dreadful thing that a young lass should belong to such as these! It was wicked! And yet, what could he do? What could anyone do? Unhappily he stood and stroked his horse’s nose while Alex handled the matter.

Alex did handle it beautifully, with just the right mixture of indulgence, severity, and money. “’Twas no fault of ours that she fell, but altogether her own,” he told them. “Still, we are kind-hearted and willing to give you a bit of silver.” And when Mina would have demanded more, he fixed her with a stern hazel stare that caused her own pale, muddy eyes to waver and fall. It was all settled then, and Ian, feeling depressed, turned to mount his horse.

And then Black Bogle, perhaps feeling that they had been worsted in the bargaining, reached down and jerked Kelpie roughly to her feet by the injured arm.

The bit of brutality wrenched a choked cry of anguish from the girl. Ian whirled around, and Alex was off his horse in a flying leap and seized Bogle’s arm in a grip that had no gentleness whatever.

“Let go of her, you vile bully!” Alex snarled, red with fury, while Ian removed the sagging Kelpie from Bogle’s grasp. Lachlan, brandishing a steel dirk a foot long, loomed ominously behind....

When Kelpie was again able to take an active interest in events, she heard several voices: a cold, contemptuous one and a dangerously quiet one, Bogle’s growl and Mina’s whine, with dour grumblings in the background. More money changed hands, and then Mina bent over Kelpie, a cunning, complacent look on her face.

“The fine gentlemen will be taking you home with them to fix your hurt, and we will come to fetch you in the morning,” she said. “You will be properly grateful—and behave as I’d be wishing you to,” she added meaningly, and Kelpie nodded. She knew quite well what Mina meant—steal whatever she could lay hands on.

Then Ian’s concerned face was close to hers as he removed the grimy once-red sash from about her waist and gently bound the injured arm to her side. “And who’s knowing what further damage the brute will have done?” he muttered.

After that she found herself lifted to the fearful height of Alex’s horse and felt his hard young arm firmly around her. And at a slow walk they set along toward the fork in the path that led through the hills to Glenfern.

By the time they reached the top of the pass, Kelpie was feeling much better. She began to relish the adventure, and she stared with interest at the scene before her as they paused. Ian’s face was alight with joy, and Lachlan actually had tears in his eyes. A strange thing that was, she thought wonderingly, ignorant as she was of the love of the Highlander for his own hills. Kelpie knew no home but the ground she walked on.

The glen ran westward ahead of them, a long little valley cradled in hills that were just turning jewel-green with new bracken and showing dark with juniper and white here and there with birch trunks and unmelted snow. On the northern slope stood a weathered gray house which seemed large and grand indeed to Kelpie, and scattered along the glen were little rye-thatched shieling huts of unmortared stone, nestled into the hillside as if they had grown there. Farther down the glen was a wee loch of silver and blue, ringed with white birches and dotted with green islets.

“Loch nan Eilean—Lake of the Islands,” murmured Ian with his heart in his voice, and they rode on down the hill and along to the stables.

Alex lifted Kelpie down from the horse, looked at her oddly, and then with a grin forced open her left hand.

“You little devil!” He laughed. “You’ve picked my pocket!”

3. Glenfern

Kelpie perched gingerly on a fine brocaded chair near the door of the drawing room and gazed curiously at the scene before her. For house and glen had, on their arrival, erupted into a perfect frenzy of excitement, questions, tears, laughter, shouting, teasing, and hugging.

_Dhé!_ And was this the way most families were behaving toward one another? Kelpie found it baffling and achingly strange, and vaguely annoying; and on the whole she was glad enough to have been forgotten for the moment while she recovered her usual cool head.

Talk rose and surged in a mixture of Gaelic and English. Cameron of Glenfern paced back and forth, the rusty-red and green of his kilt swinging about strong knees. Lady Glenfern, smiling and anxious at once, sat in a carved oak chair, her harebell-blue skirts billowing about her feet. Two small kilted lads pranced with excitement, a bittie lass clamored to be away up in Ian’s arms, and a bonnie lass in green, perhaps near Kelpie’s age, clung affectionately to both Ian and Alex at once.

Through the open window Kelpie could see Lachlan standing in a ring of laughing and chattering clansmen, and it began to dawn on her that this was no ordinary homecoming. The lads had been away to school in a far-off place in England and had returned quite unexpectedly with important news.

“We knew that King Charles had fled London and set up his court at Oxford,” said Glenfern. “And you wrote that Montrose was there, awaiting permission to come and raise an army in Scotland for the King. Now you say he’s coming?”

“Aye so,” said Alex cynically, “but a bit late, now that Argyll has got all the Lowlands and some of the Highlands well under the thumb of the cursed Covenant! Were you knowing that the Covenant army has crossed the border into England and will be fighting along with the Parliament army against the King?”

“_Dhé!_” exclaimed Glenfern in dismay. “Is it too late, then? Why was the King waiting so long?”

Alex shrugged. “Och, King Charles has a grand talent for not seeing what he doesn’t like, and for doing the wrong thing altogether or the right thing too late.”

Ian, whose loyalty was a simple and wholehearted thing, frowned at his foster brother. “He’s our king and a Stewart,” he reminded him and then turned to his father. “At any rate, we were thinking we’d best come home while we still could—and perhaps join Montrose when he arrives.”

None of this meant a great deal to Kelpie, so she began looking around with greedy wonder at the drawing room. Och, the glowing fine old silver on the sideboard, the great portraits on the tapestry-hung walls, the grand, massive carved furniture worn smooth as silk by time and polish, and the damask draperies at real glass windows! It wasn’t fair that some people should have so much! They should be sharing it, they should, and it was up to Kelpie, she felt, to see to the sharing.

A small silver snuff box was lying on a table near her; an instant later, it wasn’t. Kelpie’s long slanted eyes flickered with satisfaction, but before she could so much as thrust her loot under her rags, a redheaded figure bent over her and a sinewy long hand grasped her wrist gently but with great strength.

“Really, Ian,” observed Alex lazily, “you must be paying more attention to your guest.”

“Ssssss!” said Kelpie, again wishing she could cast the Evil Eye on him. But instead the eyes of the entire family were now on her.

“My sorrow!” said Ian ruefully. “I was forgetting!”

“A shame to all of us, and she injured!” declared his mother, standing up. “’Tis only for the night, you were saying, Ian? Well, so, we will see to the shoulder—but not in the house, I think,” she added, looking at Kelpie’s filthy clothes.

“No,” agreed her husband. “Come away out to the wee room in the stable, which will do nicely, I think.”

And Kelpie, who had expected to be beaten and turned out for her theft, stared. They were daft, all of them! But presently she forgot their daftness because of the surprisingly painful business of having her shoulder tended. She gritted her teeth and cursed vigorously, and after it was over she was glad enough to lie down on the small cot in the stable-room and be left alone to sleep.

* * * * *

Kelpie awoke with an oppressive sense of being trapped. Blindly hostile walls and ceiling surrounded her, shutting out sky and wind. In sudden panic she would have leaped up and fled to the safety of outside, but the first movement brought the sharp, forgotten pain of her shoulder. She gasped slightly, blinked, and noticed a pair of dark eyes regarding her from a flower face. It was the wee bit of a lassie she had seen in the big house, who stood watching Kelpie with grave sympathy. She was a tiny thing, her body slight as it rose from the primrose bulk of her long skirts, but Kelpie was disconcerted. The gaze seemed to understand too much.

“Poor lady!” said the mite, shaking her honey-brown head sorrowfully. “Is it a sore bad hurt, then?”

Kelpie said nothing.

Light danced into the dark eyes. “Wee Mairi will kiss it and make it well.” Quite undeterred by thoughts of cleanliness, the child leaned over the cot and dropped a soft kiss on the bandages covering Kelpie’s shoulder, and then another on her cheek. “Now it will stop hurting, just, and you can be happy,” she announced. Crooking a small finger in the old gesture of calling down a blessing from heaven, she turned and trotted out, leaving a shaken Kelpie behind her.

Nothing like this had ever happened to her before! Children had always clung to their mothers, frightened of the witch’s lass. No one at all had ever kissed her and Kelpie, to her dismay, found that her eyes had filled with tears. Och, this would never do at all! She must be hard and strong, or else how would she ever survive in the world she knew? She closed her treacherous eyes and concentrated on subduing the weakness.

The weakness was just about subdued when she became aware of more company in the room. This time it was a pair of seven or eight-year-old lads with penetrating blue eyes set in identical tanned faces which were alight with passionate curiosity.

Kelpie, still shaken and very much on the defensive from her encounter with Wee Mairi, glared at them with frank hostility. They went on staring at her with unwavering interest. _Dhé!_ They were nearly as disconcerting as Wee Mairi—and there were two of them. Kelpie decided to take the offensive.

“Ssssss!” she hissed, baring her teeth and beetling her thick eyebrows menacingly. The bright eyes rounded slightly, but with increased curiosity rather than alarm.

“Were you crying?” asked one boy candidly.

“Are you a witch?” demanded the other.

Kelpie considered. It wasn’t in the least safe to be thought a witch. It could lead to all sorts of uncomfortable and fatal things. On the other hand, she had never known real safety in any case, and it would be pleasant to impress, or even frighten, these complacent lads.

“I am so,” she said with an intimidating scowl. “I can put curses on ye, or the Evil Eye whatever.”

They were unintimidated. “Show us!” suggested one hopefully.

“Alex was saying you cannot,” challenged the other.

“Och, just you wait!” said Kelpie darkly. “I will be fixing that Alex as ever was!”

“What will you do to him?” persisted the skeptic with morbid curiosity.

“What is your name?” asked his twin.

“Kelpie!” said she in triumph, and at last she had impressed them. For every Highland child knew that a Kelpie was a kind of fairy person, a water witch who wails at night by lochs and rivers for a victim, or cries for admittance at shuttered windows.

“I don’t believe it,” said the skeptical twin, but he said it halfheartedly.

“Ronald! Donald!” The green-frocked lass who was Kelpie’s age stood in the doorway, with a big-boned young woman behind her carrying a tray. “Och, naughty lads! Ye shouldn’t be bothering in here, and well ye know it!”

“She’s a witch, and a kelpie too,” reported one of them, unabashed.

“At least she says so, but we haven’t seen her put a spell yet,” added the other. “When will you be showing us one?”

The young woman nearly dropped her tray as she hastily tried to make the sign of the cross. Her young mistress looked faintly alarmed but stood her ground. “Be away, now,” she told the twins. “I’ll take that, Fiona.” She took the tray from the quaking Fiona and set it on a stool beside Kelpie’s cot.

“We thought you’d be waking up hungry,” she said and then looked at Kelpie apologetically, as if ashamed of her own good fortune and pretty clothes. “My name is Eithne,” she added, pronouncing it “Ay-na,” with the Highland lilt in her voice. “And the twins must not be saying such things—about your being a witch, I mean. Are you?” she asked, overcome by curiosity.

Kelpie already had hand and mouth full of cold venison pie and new-baked bannocks and had no intention of risking the rest of the food. She shook her head firmly and put on her most innocent and helpless expression.

“Och, no!” she mumbled truthfully around her bannock. “Not I!”

At this moment a gaunt black cat sidled through the open door, spat at Fiona, and with a joyful yowl leaped right on top of Kelpie. This was unfortunate, since black cats were known to have a fondness for witches.

Fiona backed up to the door, crossing herself furiously, and Eithne looked awed. “_Dhé!_” she whispered. “Dubh has never done that before for anyone!”

Kelpie looked at Dubh with a mixture of pleasure and irritation. She liked cats, but this one had timed his appearance poorly.

Dubh looked back at her, great topaz eyes glowing into hers steadily and inscrutably, and his purring filled the room.

“He is wanting some food,” suggested Kelpie lamely. But Dubh didn’t show the slightest interest in her meal. Instead, he arranged himself comfortably on top of her legs.

“Animals are always liking me,” Kelpie went on with better success. Eithne’s face brightened and cleared. Of course! And if animals liked a person, it was a sure sign that the person was to be trusted. Eithne, like her brother, wanted to think the best of everyone, especially of those whom life seemed to have treated unfairly. Besides, Kelpie interested her.

Presently she was seated on the edge of the cot, listening to the lurid tale of Kelpie’s life and even being shown some of the scars and bruises on the thin shoulders and back. Eithne was hot and shaking with shocked indignation. It was perfectly dreadful, appalling!

And Kelpie, rising to great tragic heights, played up to the most sympathetic audience she had ever had. The long ringed eyes fixed on Eithne’s brown ones were soft and luminous and oh, so innocent.

But the “innocent” eyes reminded Alex of Dubh’s, as he entered the room and got a good view of both pairs. He hadn’t been easy in his mind about Eithne’s being in here so long. Ringed eyes like that weren’t canny. The lass might well be a witch, at that, though likely too young to be very dangerous. All the same, his foster sister must be protected.

“Come away from her and out of here!” he ordered Eithne brusquely.

He should have known better. She whirled on him, round chin jutting out indignantly. “And will you be judging her unfairly, like all the villagers and all?” Eithne demanded. “Don’t deny it, Alex MacDonald! You’re thinking hard, suspicious things about her this very minute!”

Alex’s sunburned face looked disconcerted at this sudden attack, but only for an instant. “Oh, aye,” he agreed cheerfully. “I am that. And why wouldn’t I be, with the many reasons she’s given me already? Has she put a spell on you, _m’eudail_? Best be away to the house and see if Catriona can break it.”

Eithne stamped her foot, but it wasn’t easy to find a retort. “You—you talk like a Covenanter!” she finally flung at him scathingly and flounced out in a swirl of petticoats, Fiona behind her.

Alex scratched his red head, more confounded by her passion than by her rather shaky logic. He grinned wryly at Kelpie, who looked back at him in triumph.

“Poor innocent waif!” he jeered, putting one foot up on the edge of the cot, where Dubh spat at it. He rested an elbow on his kilted knee and stared at Kelpie with interest. She stared back through slitted eyes.

“Before you’re up and away again,” he said, casually, “I’ve a wee word to be saying to you, and it is this. Unlike Ian and Eithne, I’ve a nasty suspicious mind, I have.” He wagged his head sadly. “And I’ve a picture in my head of you away off tomorrow bearing every movable thing in the glen hid in your rags, and we sitting here without so much as a stick of furniture left to us.”

“Indeed, and I would never be doing such a thing!” cried Kelpie indignantly. “How could I be carrying it all?”

Alex laughed outright. Kelpie scowled. She had been cursed and beaten often enough, but she had never before been laughed at, and she didn’t like it.

Alex stopped laughing and grinned at her. “Well, so, and I’ve a soft heart in me, so I’ll be doing nothing about such matters as pocket-picking or a certain snuff box, nor will anyone else, I think. But”—and he leaned forward a little—“should anything else just happen to be missing when you leave, then you’ll be finding the hand of every Cameron and MacDonald, all through the Great Glen and Lochaber from Loch Leven to Loch Ness, turned against you.”

Kelpie showed sharp white teeth in a defiant laugh. “Are you thinking I’ve never heard threats before?”

“Aye, I’m sure you have, and most unpleasant ones,” retorted Alex. “But have you ever had one like this carried out, and two entire clans arrayed against you, and every _ghillie_ on the watch?”

Kelpie narrowed her eyes. He had her, just! And to have the Great Glen and Lochaber closed against them would be a sore handicap indeed.

“Sssss!” said Kelpie with deep sincerity.

Alex grinned again. “I’m not done,” he said briskly. “It seems that my foster sister has given you her friendship. You’re not deserving it, of course, but for Eithne that’s good enough reason for giving it. Now, I am fond of Eithne, and if you should be taking advantage of her or hurting her in any way, I shall see to it that you are punished—even if I must denounce you as a witch. Do you understand?”

It was a fearful threat, and Kelpie, used to bluster and invective, was unnerved by his very calm.

“_Nathrach!_” She spat “Remember, witches can curse! Shall I be putting the Evil Eye on you?” And she widened her slanted eyes until the dark and light rings were smoldering circles.

Alex laughed again, infuriatingly. “And if you haven’t already put the Evil Eye on me at least three times today, it must be that you have not got it at all. For you’ve wanted to, haven’t you? No, I’ll wager you cannot do it.”

“Mina can,” muttered Kelpie sulkily.

“Now that I’ll believe,” he agreed readily. “But even the Evil Eye wouldn’t save the two of you from being burned as witches, would it?”

Och, and he was so sure of himself! Kelpie saw suddenly that great cunning and apparent submission were her best weapons. “And if I am keeping the bargain?” she hinted, looking at his pocket.

“We’ve no bargain.” Alex corrected her mildly. “I’m no such fool. It’s just that I’ve been telling you in a friendly way what will happen if you should be stealing anything or hurting Eithne, that’s all.” And he sauntered out, his kilt swinging jauntily about his brown knees.

4. The Daft Folk

Kelpie slept heavily for the first part of the night and then awoke to stare restlessly into the stifling, closed-in darkness. How could a body tell the hour, shut in like this? She must be out into the free air and waiting when Mina and Bogle came for her.