Beyond the Highland Myst(773)

Jessi was choking on the bitterness of that pill herself. As each precious day slipped by, as Drustan and Dageus continued to shake their heads and say they’d still not found a way to save him, so, too, did her grip on herself slip.

Cian might have accepted his death as a necessity, but she never would.

Each night, at some point, she ended up in the darkened library, sitting in front of the computer, her hands clenched in her lap. The past few nights she’d not even dared to turn it on.

Because each day she was weakening. Ethics? What were ethics? She wasn’t even sure she could spell the word. Wasn’t in any dictionary she knew.

“What if it was broken when you were outside it?” she pressed.

“The same. ’Tis not the mirror I’m actually reclaimed back into, but that place in the Unseelie realm. When whatever hours of my freedom I was allotted that day expired, I would be returned there again, with no way out. Again, as the tithe could no longer be paid at Samhain’s end, we would die.”

“Oh, for God’s sake,” she cried, pulling away from him. Sitting up, she punched the mattress with a fist. “I’m surrounded by magic! The three of you are Druids. On top of that, you’re a sorcerer and Dageus was possessed by thirteen ancient, evil beings! Don’t any of you know a spell or enchantment or something that can undo this stupid indenture?”

Cian shook his head. “One would think so, but nay. The Keltar were chosen to protect Seelie lore, not Unseelie. Though some of us are wont to dabble with things best left alone, we ken very little of the ways of Dark Magyck, even less about the darker half of the Tuatha Dé Danaan.”

“There has to be another way, Cian!”

He sat up and grabbed her by the shoulders, his whisky gaze fierce. “Och, Christ, lass, do you think I wish to die? Doona you think if there were any other way to stop Lucan that I would seize it? I love you, woman! I would do anything to live! But the simple fact is, ’tis my very life that keeps Trevayne immortal, and nothing but my death can take that away from him. In time, he will find the Dark Book. He cannot be permitted to have that time. ’Tis not merely our lives at stake, ’tis the lives of many, ’tis the very future of your world. I can stop him now. Before long, no one will be able to.”

“And you can’t live with that,” Jessi said, unable to keep the note of bitterness from her voice. “You have to be the hero.”

He shook his head. “Nay, lass. I’ve never been the hero, and I’m not trying to be one now. ’Tis but that there are things a man can live with and things he can’t.” He took a deep breath, exhaled it slowly. “I told you I was tricked into the mirror and that much is true. But I didn’t tell you that I wanted the Unseelie Dark Glass too.”

Jessi went very still. “Why?” Was he finally going to tell her what happened to him so long ago?

“Lucan and I were once friends, or so I thought. I later learned he was naught but subterfuge and deceit from the beginning.”

“Didn’t you do that deep-listening thing to him?”

Cian nodded. “Aye, I did, for my mother cared naught for the man. But when a surface probe yielded nothing, I didn’t push. I arrogantly thought myself so superior in power and lore that I didn’t deem Lucan a significant threat. I couldn’t have been more wrong. I didn’t know that he’d sought me out deliberately to get the Dark Glass. Or that he was born a bastard, sired by an unknown Druid father on a village whore, and had been shunned all his life by other Druids. They refused to teach him, refused him entrance to their inner circle.

“What lore Lucan had managed to acquire before we met had been gained through violence and bloodshed. For years he’d been systematically capturing and torturing lesser Druids for their teachings. Even more powerful ones had begun to cede him wide berth. But he couldn’t overwhelm and take captive a Druid who knew the art of Voice, and he needed that art desperately.

“He learned of me somehow and came to Scotland, to my mountains where, isolated from so much of the world, I’d not heard of him. I learned later all of Wales, Ireland, and much of Scotland had heard tales of this Lucan ‘Merlin’ Trevayne. But not I. He befriended me. We began to exchange knowledge and lore, to push each other, to see what we could do. He told me of the Scrying Glass and, before long, he offered to help me get it if I would teach him the art of Voice first.”

“The Scrying Glass?” Jessi repeated.

“Aye.” He smiled bitterly. “Lucan lied about what it was. He said ’twas used to foretell the future in fine detail. That with it one could alter certain events before they ever happened. ’Twas an enticing power to me. Especially since I’d begun to wonder what my own life held. I’d begun to doubt there was a Keltar mate for me. After all, I was nigh a score and ten, quite old for a man to have never been wed in my century.”