Dropping to his hands and knees, Ben began combing the heather for it.
“Did you hear me? She’s fifteen. She’s dead.”
“I heard you.” Two minutes later he plucked the knife from a clump of heather. It gleamed darkly, a pattern of whorls in the steel catching the strange gray light, so that the blade seemed to ripple and undulate almost as if it were alive. “Jesus, Kate,” he said, staring down at it with a low whistle. “Where did you say you found the girl?”
“On the hilltop.”
He was suddenly terse. “Show me.”
“We need to call the police.”
He was gazing upward through the mist. Slowly, he shook his head. “Are you sure she’s dead?”
“I saw her.”
“Did you check her pulse?”
“She’s dead.”
“You said her throat was cut. But there’s no blood on this knife.”
“So maybe the killer used another….” My voice trailed off. There hadn’t been enough blood around the body, either.
I began running back up the hill. Ben followed.
It didn’t take long to reach the summit. For a moment we crouched just below the rim, listening, but all we heard was wind in the grass. Silently, Ben eased out the sharp-edged black pistol I had never seen him without and cautiously peered up over the edge. After a moment, he jumped up and strode over. I followed.
The cairn was there, and beside it the fire ring. But where the body had lain, nothing was visible but grass.
Other than Ben and me, there was no one, living or dead, atop the hill.
5
“BUT SHE WAS HERE,” I said. “I found her. Over there. By one of the pits. It was only a few minutes ago.” I pointed toward where I had seen her.
His gun drawn and ready, we slowly circled the hill just below the rim, Ben bending to look at the grass as we went. When we’d come full circle, he peered over the edge once again. “Stay here.”
Bent low to the ground, he slid silently across the grass, glancing into each of the pits in turn. At the last one, he straightened, motioning me over. They, too, were empty of everything but grass and wind.
“She was here,” I insisted.
Ben crouched down to the ground, scanning the grass with a tracker’s fine eye. “I see no sign of it,” he said after a while, sitting back on his heels. “A few footsteps—but nothing like the weight of a body.”
“She was here,” I said again. “It was Lily. She was dead.” I glared at him for a moment in silence, and then, feeling the hot swell of tears, I turned on my heel, speeding back down the hill.
“Where are you going?” he asked as he caught up with me. “Back to the house,” I said shortly. Lily would be there, or she would not. “And you?”
“I was looking for you. Now that I’ve found you, I don’t exactly know.”
I stopped. “You knew I was up here?”
“Lady Nairn told me that she’d told you not to come up the hill. So it was the first place I looked.”
“Not funny.”
“But accurate.”
Trained in some branch of the British special forces that he’d never identified to me in all our time together, he’d left it to found a high-tech security company. “As in guns,” he’d told me when we first met. “Not stocks and bonds.” That Lady Nairn would need someone like Ben made sense. The moment the merest hint of her show got out, she’d be hounded by paparazzi. No doubt she’d worried about Sir Angus’s collection as well, at least the part that she meant to move down to Hampton Court and back.
But it was Lily who had needed protection, I thought. And had not had it. Ben hadn’t even known who she was.
By the time we got down to the lay-by, dusk was quickly fading to dark. Ben drove me back to the house in silence.
I leapt out of the car as soon as it came to a stop and raced inside, taking the stairs two at a time, up one flight and then down a wide passageway toward the sound of the party. I’d completely forgotten about Lady Nairn’s dinner.
The company had already gathered in the old great hall, now laid out as a comfortable drawing room, filled with sofas and chairs, a fire of some sweet-smelling wood crackling in the immense fireplace. I scanned the room for Lady Nairn; she was holding court among three men in front of a long bank of windows. “Where’s Lily?” My voice felt ragged in my throat.
Around the room, conversation faltered and the clink of glassware and ice stilled as everyone turned to stare.
Lady Nairn’s eyes flickered across the room in the direction of a grand piano in a far corner. A man bent over it, laughing. Jason Pierce. Registering the silence, he straightened and turned, revealing Lily in green velvet at the keyboard, flushed with delight. “Oh,” she said. “It’s you.”
I felt a wash of loose-limbed relief, followed by a flush of confusion. The dead girl wasn’t Lily…but in that case, who was she?
At the piano, Lily launched into the dark, downward sweep of Bach’s Toccata and fugue in D Minor. “By the pricking of my thumbs,” she chanted, “something wicked this way comes.” flat-footed and heavy, silence smothered the room. “The play,” gasped a small white-haired woman, clutching at a silver cross on a chain around her neck. “You’ve quoted the play.”
“Worse than that,” said Sybilla fraser, her fingers wrapped gracefully around a champagne flute. “She’s quoted the witches.” Sybilla was draped in fiery silk that set off her golden hair and skin; her eyes were smoldering. She was, if anything, more beautiful in person than on-screen.
But I could not get the girl on the hill out of my head. Neither Ben nor I had found any trace of her. Maybe she’d been a dream. Or maybe I’d left someone up there, dead or dying, alone on the hill as darkness fell.
I turned to leave, only to find that someone had stepped into the doorway behind me, blocking my way. The gray-haired fury from the hill. In dark accusation, she raised her arm to point at Lily. At least, most people in the room seemed to think that she was pointing at Lily. But from my vantage, she was pointing straight at me. “You’ve brought evil into this house,” she said, her voice a low rumbling growl. For a moment, no one moved.
“The curse only works in a theater,” said Lily, rising. When no one answered, her bravura faltered. “Doesn’t it?”
“As of today,” said Sybilla, “this house is a theater.” She pointed at the door.
“Out.”
“Christ, Syb,” protested Jason. “She’s just a kid. And it’s not like we’ve started rehearsals. You don’t have to do the bloody fiend-like queen thing yet.”
Sybilla’s eyes flashed. “You, too. Out.”
“Fiend-like queen?” he scoffed. “You think that counts?”
Behind Sybilla, a large man with a paunch and grizzled ginger hair balded into a tonsure rose to his feet. “A quote’s a quote, laddie. And as the lady says, I gather we’re to rehearse in this room. Informal-like, but, still, rehearsal’s rehearsal. So out with the both of you.”
“Hell,” said Jason. Brushing by me and then past the gray-haired woman, he flung himself out the door. Eyes spitting fire, Lily followed.
The gray-haired fury never moved. With Lily gone, she was now clearly pointing at me.
“Does either of them ken the ritual to counter the curse?” asked the ginger-haired man of no one in particular.
It seemed an easy way out of the room. “I’ll show them,” I said. As I came to the old woman, she leaned in close. “Put it back,” she said in my ear.
Put it back? Did she know about the knife? And if she knew about the knife, did she know about the body? “Did you see anyone on the hill this afternoon? A body?” I asked, low enough that no one else could hear.
She shook her head. “It’s the blade you should be worried about,” she said, and then she scooted me through the door in Lily’s wake. Behind me, it closed with a resounding thud.
“You believe all that voodoo twaddle?” growled Jason out in the passageway.
&
nbsp; “It’s about respect, not belief,” I said shortly. “Tell that to Medusa in gray,” Jason retorted. “Auld Callie,” said Lily. Standing there in a green dress with faux-medieval trumpet sleeves, her flame-red hair floating about her face, she was near tears of fury. “She’s playing one of the witches. The kids in the village think she is one.”
Auld Callie, I thought suddenly. That’s the name of the woman who found Sir Angus.
“I thought I saw you this afternoon,” I said to Lily. “On the hill.”
“Well, you didn’t. You just saw Sybilla make a fool of me. And my grandmother let her.”
Had I been dreaming? Or was there someone else out there? The only way to find out was to go back. I started down the passage.
“Oh, no,” said Jason, grabbing my arm. “You’re not going anywhere till you get us out of this.”
His grip tightened. It was going to be faster to give in and show him how to exorcise the curse than to argue. Under my terse direction, Jason turned three times clockwise and then pounded on the door to the hall, asking to be let back in. Sybilla opened the door. “Fair thoughts and happy hours attend on you,” he said as he stepped back through it. Sybilla gave him a smile of incandescent triumph, and then, without acknowledging Lily at all, she shut the door behind him.
“Cow,” shot Lily. She spun around three times and crossed to the door, her knuckles pausing a few inches out. “What should I say?”
I glanced anxiously down the corridor. “You have to quote from one of the lucky plays. Jason went with Merchant of Venice. Why don’t you do Midsummer?”
She shrugged. “Sure.”
“An old standby is Hand in hand with fairy grace, will we sing and bless this place.”
She looked back, her sea-green eyes alight with mischief. “You should have said that up on the hill. It’s a fairy hill, you know.” Before I could respond, she rapped sharply on the door, which opened to reveal Lady Nairn.
“Enter, Lilidh Gruoch MacPhee,” said Lily’s grandmother, and Lily stepped through the door, pulling me with her. Around the room, the gathered company strained forward to hear.
Exhaling sharply, Lily blew a strand of red from her face, fixed Sybilla with her gaze, and began to speak:
What you see when you awake,
Do it for your true love take;
Love and languish for his sake.
Be it lynx, or cat, or bear,
Leopard or boar with bristled hair:
In your eye, whate’er appears
When you wake, it is your dear:
Wake when some vile thing is near.
Whirling on her heel, Lily strode from the room, slamming the door so hard that the antlers rattled on the walls.
The company stood stunned. She’d known, of course, what to do, I realized. One would, growing up in this house. Her question to me had been no more than a tease; she’d known exactly what she meant to say. She’d altered a few bits here and there, remembering sense rather than exact phrasing, but the words were recognizably Oberon’s—the king of fairies to his sleeping wife, Titania, the fairy queen. A love trick, you could say, if you were in a charitable mood. A magical practical joke with razored humiliation at its core, though, would be more accurate.
“But that’s not a blessing,” quavered the woman with the silver cross. “That’s another curse.”
Sybilla rose, coolly surveying the company, her eyes coming to rest at last on Jason. “And how does the curse end? Oh, that’s right: Titania waked, and straightway loved an ass.” Sweeping across the room, she disappeared through a narrow door onto a balcony.
With a groan, Jason strode after her. “Gallus lass,” said a deep Scottish voice. The ginger-haired man.
“Sybilla or Lily?” snapped Lady Nairn. She wore her hair swept back again today, and she was again in black, this time in a pantsuit.
“Take your pick,” the man said with a grin. “‘Gallus,’ from ‘gallows,’” he said in my direction. “A compliment in Scots. Cheeky, mischievous, daring.”
“As in ‘worthy of hanging,’ if you want to be literal about it,” said Lady Nairn darkly. “I will be raising gallows myself if we begin shedding actors before we ever get to rehearsals…. Kate, meet the gallus Eircheard.” His name sounded like Air Cart, though with the breathy back-of-the-throat “c” at the end of loch and Bach. “The king’s loyal servant Seyton in our production. And also the doomed King of Summer in the Samhuinn festival. Emphasis on ‘doomed.’”
He winked at me. “Marching merrily—if a wee bit hirplty-pirplty—to the sacrifice.” He took a few steps toward me, extending his hand, and I saw that he had the rolling gait of someone with a lifelong limp. One foot was encased in a strangely shaped and heavily built-up shoe.
“Eircheard,” Lady Nairn went on, “meet Kate Stanley. Whom you may not monopolize until you have given her the chance to escape upstairs and freshen up.” To me, she added, “I laid something out on your bed. I hope it fits.”
He raised his drink in my direction. “Slàinte mhath,” he said. “When you’re suitably tarted up to be given a drink, you can toast me back. I’ll teach you how.” His eyes bright with laughter, he turned away.
Before anyone else could stop me, I slipped out, running downstairs and out into the night.
6
I’D JUST REACHED the lane when a car turned into it up ahead and drew alongside me. It was Ben.
“She’s not there, Kate.”
I started walking again, and he jumped out of the car and caught me by both shoulders, spinning me around to face him.
“I saw her,” I said stubbornly. “Not Lily, obviously—but that doesn’t mean she wasn’t somebody else.”
“That’s why I went back.”
I blinked. “You…?”
“Went back,” he said. “Checked every inch of the hilltop and as much as I could of the surrounding slope, just to be sure. She’s not there…. She was a nightmare, Kate.”
“She was real. And the gown that was draped over her was real, too. I touched it…. It was blue. It had weight. It had sound, for Christ’s sake.” It had cascaded back over her with the dry, rattling sound of rain in the desert.
“They do, sometimes.”
I let him drive me back up to the house, watching him as he drove. He’d battled demons of his own, once, in the aftermath of some operation-turned-bloody-fiasco in Africa. I’d never learned the full details, only bits and pieces as his worries about me had come out, after I’d seen a few gruesome sights myself in the wake of searching for a killer two years before. I caught my breath. Was that what he was worried about? That this was some kind of delayed reaction to that experience?
“It wasn’t a hallucination,” I said defensively as we walked across the terrace. At a bench near the door, I stopped and sat down, blinking back tears. “I mean, the knife is real.”
“Another reason I went back.” He pulled the blade from his knapsack and laid it on the bench. Its pattern of coils and scrolls gleamed in the moonlight. “You have no business going up there alone, Kate. No jacket. No flashlight. And no weapon. For Christ’s sake, if she is real, there was—and maybe is—a killer up there. If you want to go back, at least ask me to go with you.”
“Where I need to go, actually, is Birnam Wood.”
He sat down on the bench, the knife between us. “Kate—we need to talk.”
I stiffened. “Not now.” I’d been afraid this was coming.
“I—”
“Not now.” I wanted to think about the knife. About the girl on the hill, dreamed or real. About the manuscript and Sir Angus’s mysterious death. About anything but our parting. “What are you doing here, anyway?”
“Consulting.”
I was used to the half truths and tangents that were all he could or would tell me about the black hole of his career. The secrecy at the center of his life was the only thing I’d hated about him, even though I understood it. “for Lady Nairn,” I said, working it out for myself. “
Did Athenaide put you up to this?”
He smiled noncommittally.
Just then a slim figure walked around the corner of the terrace. Lily, still mad at the world, by the look on her face. “Hullo,” she said sourly. “Didn’t expect to find you two out here.”
“We were just going in to dinner,” I said.
“Then I hope you’re quick-change artists. Gran’s a stickler for dress in the evening. Show up in jeans, and she’ll turn you away hungry at the dining room door.” Catching sight of the knife glinting on the bench between us, she sucked in a quick breath. “Bit Tristan and Isolde, don’t you think?”
Ben sighed and rose. “Would you like me to keep it under my wing?” he asked me with a nod at the knife. “Or do you mean to wear it in to dinner? Presupposing that there’s not a weapons check, along with a dress check, at the door.”
“This is Gran’s house,” said Lily. “Jeans, no. Daggers, yes. Though that’s usually with kilts.”
“I think the company’s jittery enough,” I said, handing the knife back to Ben, “without giving them reason to wonder whether they’ve got a mad slasher in their midst.”
He dropped it back in his knapsack. “See you inside,” he said, striding up the stairs and into the house.
Lily plopped down beside me. “So tell me…why do you even like this stupid play? I mean, all Shakespeare does is rip off the old myths, stain a good king’s reputation, and shove a really interesting woman out of the way.” She kicked at the stone pavement. “Who in their right mind would just let a creature like Lady Macbeth fade out, offstage? I get my grandparents’ obsession, living where they do, and with Gran’s past on the stage and all. But why you?”
I took a deep breath and forced my thoughts in her direction. “I’ve loved Shakespeare since childhood, I suppose. Loved the stories. And it was mostly encouraged by my family. But Macbeth—that was different. That was rebellion. My mother hated it. Wouldn’t allow a copy of it in the house. So I went looking for it. Naturally.”