A Little Magic

  "His great-grandmother. He said_they say_"

  The woman's smile widened. "They do indeed."

  Struggling for composure, Allena reached under her sweater, drew out the pendant. "This is yours."

  "It belongs to whom it belongs to and until it belongs to another."

  "Conal said he threw it into the sea."

  "Such a temper that boy has." Her laugh was light and rich as cream over whiskey. "It does me proud. He could throw it to the moon, and still it would come to whom it belongs to when it was time. This time is yours."

  "He doesn't want to love me."

  "Oh, child." She touched Allena's cheek, and it was like the brush of wings. "Love can't be wanted away. It simply is, and you already know that. You have a patient heart."

  "Sometimes patience is just cowardice."

  "That's wise." The woman nodded, obviously pleased, and helped herself to one of the berries in the pot. "And true as well. But already you understand him, and are coming to understand yourself, which is always a more difficult matter. That's considerable for such a short time. And you love him."

  "Yes, I love him. But he won't accept love through magic."

  "Tonight, when the longest day meets the shortest night, when the star cuts through with power and light, the choice you make, both you and he, will be what was always meant to be."

  Then she took Allena's face in her hands, kissed both her cheeks. "Your heart will know," she said and slipped into the mist like a ghost.

  "How?" Allena closed her eyes. "You didn't give us enough time."

  When Hugh bumped his head against her legs, she bent down to bury her face in his neck. "Not enough time," she murmured. "Not enough to mope about it, either. I don't know what to do, except the next thing. I guess that's breakfast."

  She wandered back the way she had come, with Hugh for company on this trip.

  The fog was already burning off at the edges and drawing into itself. It seemed that fate had decreed one more clear day for her.

  When the cottage came into view, she saw Conal on the little back porch, waiting for her.

  "You worried me." He walked out to meet her, knowing his sense of relief was out of proportion. "What are you doing, roaming away in the mist?"

  "Berries." She held up the pot. "You'll never guess what

  I andquot; She trailed off as his gaze tracked down to the pendant.

  "I'll never guess what?"

  No, she thought, she couldn't tell him what had happened, whom she had seen.

  Not when the shadows were in his eyes, and her heart was sinking because of them. "What I'm going to make for breakfast."

  He dipped a hand into the pot. "Berries?"

  "Watch," she told him and took her gatherings into the house.

  "And learn."

  He did watch, and it soothed him. He'd wakened reaching for her, and that had disturbed him. How could a man spend one night with a woman, then find his bed so cold, so empty when she wasn't in it? Then that panic, that drawing down in the gut, when he hadn't been able to find her. Now she was here, mixing her batter in a bowl, and the world was right again.

  Was there a name for this other than love?

  "You really need a griddle." She set the bowl aside to heat a skillet. "But we'll make do."

  "Allena.''

  "Hmm?" She glanced back. Something in his eyes made her dizzy.

  "Yes?" When she turned, the pendant swung, and caught at the sunlight.

  The star seemed to flash straight into his eyes, taunting him. Without moving, Conal took a deliberate step back. No, he would not speak of love.

  "Where are your shoes?"

  "My shoes?" He'd spoken with such gentle affection that her eyes stung as she looked down at her own bare feet. "I must have left them behind. Silly of me."

  "So you wander barefoot through the dew, pretty Allena?"

  Words strangled in her throat. She threw her arms around him, burying her face at his shoulder as emotions whirled inside her.

  "Allena." He pressed his lips to her hair and wished, for both of them, he could break this last chain that held his heart. "What am I to do about you?"

  Love me. Just love me. I can handle all of the rest. "I can make you happy. If only you'd let me, I can make you happy."

  "And what of you? There are two of us here. How can you believe, and accept, all I've told you and be willing to change your life for it?" He drew her back, touched a fingertip to the pendant. "How can you, Allena, so easily accept this?"

  "Because it belongs to me." She let out a shaky breath, then took one in, and her voice was stronger. "Until it belongs to another."

  Steadier, she took a ladle from a drawer and spooned batter into the skillet. "You think I'm naive, and gullible, and so needy for love that

  I'll believe anything that offers the possibility of it?"

  "I think you have a soft heart."

  "And a malleable one?" The cool gaze she sent him was a surprise, as was her nod. "You may be right. Trying to fit yourself into forms so that the people you love will love you back the way you want keeps the heart malleable. And while I hope to be done with that, while I'm going to try to be done with that, I prefer having a heart that accepts imprints from others."

  A patient heart, she thought, but by God if it was a cowardly one.

  Deftly, she flipped the pancakes. "What hardened yours, Conal?"

  "You've good aim when you decide to notch the arrow."

  "Maybe I haven't reached into the quiver often enough." But she would now. Movements smooth and unhurried, she turned the pancakes onto a platter, spooned more batter into the pan. "Why don't you ever speak of your mother?"

  Bull's-eye, he thought, and said nothing as she set him a place at the table.

  "I have a right to know."

  "You do, yes."

  She got out honey, cinnamon, poured the tea. "Sit down. Your breakfast will get cold."

  With a half laugh, he did as she asked. She was a puzzle, and why had he believed he'd already solved her? He waited until she'd emptied the skillet, turned it off, and come to the table to join him.

  "My mother was from the near village," he began. "Her father was a fisherman, and her mother died in childbirth when my own mother was a girl. The baby died as well, so my mother was the youngest and the only daughter and pampered, she told me, by her father and brothers."

  "You have uncles in the village?"

  "I do. Three, and their families. Though some of the younger have gone to the mainland or beyond. My father was an only child."

  She drizzled honey on her pancakes, passed the bottle to Conal. He had family, she thought, and still kept so much alone. "So you have cousins here, too?"

  "Some number of them. We played together when I was a boy. It was from them that I first heard of what runs in me. I thought it a story, like others you hear, like silkies and mermaids and faerie forts."

  He ate because it was there and she'd gone to the trouble to make it.

  "My mother liked to draw, to sketch, and she taught me how to see things.

  How to make what you see come out in pencil and chalk. My father, he loved the sea, and thought I would follow him there. But she gave me clay for my eighth birthday. And I andquot;

  He paused, lifted his hands, stared at them through narrowed eyes. They were very like his father's. Big, blunt, and with strength in them. But they had never been made for casting nets.

  "The shaping of it, the finding what was inside it and I was compelled to see. And wood, carving away at it until you could show others what you'd seen in it. She understood that. She knew that."

  "Your father was disappointed?"

  "Puzzled more, I think." Conal moved his shoulders, picked up his fork again. "How could a man make a living, after all, whittling at wood or chipping at hunks of rock? But it pleased my mother, so he let it be. For her, and I learned later, because in his mind my fate was already set. So whether I sculpted or fished wouldn't matter in
the end."

  When he fell silent, looked back at the pendant, Allena slipped it under her sweater. And feeling the quiet heat of it against her heart, waited for him to continue.

  Chapter 10

  "After me, my parents tried for more children. Twice my mother miscarried, and the second, late in her term damaged her. I was young, but I remember her having to stay in bed a long time and how pale she was even when she could get up. My father set a chair out for her, so she could be outside and watch the sea. She was never well after that, but I didn't know."

  "You were just a boy." When she touched a hand to his, he looked down, smiled a little.

  "Soft heart, Allena." He turned his hand over, squeezed hers once, then released. "She was ill the summer I was twelve. Three times that spring, my father took her on the ferry, and I stayed with my cousins. She was dying, and no one could find a way to save her. Part of me knew that, but I pushed it out of my mind. Every time she came home again, I was certain it was all right."

  "Poor little boy," Allena murmured.

  "He doesn't deserve as much sympathy as you think. That summer, when I was twelve, she walked down to the sea with me. She should've been in bed, but she wouldn't go. She told me of the stone dance and the star and my place in it. She showed me the pendant you're wearing now, though I'd seen it countless times before. She closed my hand around it with her own, and I felt it breathe.

  "I was so angry. I wasn't different from the other lads I knew, no different from my cousins and playmates. Why would she say so?