Gwendolyn rolled to a sitting position on the heather-stuffed tick, dismayed to find herself alone. She would rather have awoken with her youngest sister’s elbow jabbing her in the ear than learn that Kitty was on the prowl.
She threw back the sheet, scattering a stack of Royal Society pamphlets across the timber floor. The sheet was pocked with scorch marks from all the hours she’d spent reading by candlelight beneath its shelter. Izzy had always sworn that someday Gwendolyn would burn them all to death in their beds.
Gwendolyn eyed the bed on the other side of the loft, and was not the least bit surprised to find it empty. Even the Dragon would have been hard-pressed to murder Nessa in her bed, since she was most frequently to be found in someone else’s. Nor was Nessa always fastidious enough to require a bed. There were several strapping lads in the village who whispered that for a certain bonny Wilder lass, any haystack or mossy riverbank would do. As she threw a shawl over her nightdress, Gwendolyn could only pray that her older sister wouldn’t meet a dire fate at the beefy hands of some jealous wife.
Gwendolyn reached the splintery railing of what had been a minstrel’s gallery in the manor’s finer days just in time to see Izzy hurl open the main door. Ham, the tinker’s apprentice, stood framed in the doorway, his eyes gleaming with fear.
“The devil take ye, lad!” Izzy roared. “How dare ye come poundin’ on the door o’ decent Christian folk at this hour!”
Although visibly shaken by the sight of the stout maidservant with hair wrapped in rags, Ham stood his ground. “If ye don’t wake yer mistress, ye auld cow, the devil’s goin’ to take us all. He’ll most likely burn the village to the ground if we don’t give him what he wants.”
“And just what would that be this time?” Izzy demanded. “Yer scrawny gizzard on a platter? “
Ham scratched his head. “No one knows for sure. That’s why I’ve been sent to fetch yer mistress.”
Gwendolyn rolled her eyes. She never thought she’d have cause to rue her love of reading. But with Reverend Throckmorton away, she was the only one who could decipher the Dragon’s writing.
She might have crept back to bed and left Ham to Izzy’s mercy had her papa not chosen that moment to drift into the hall. He floated out of the darkness of his chamber like a ghost of the handsome, vibrant man she remembered from her childhood, his ivory nightshirt hanging on his wasted frame and his fine white hair bristling around his head like the spores of a dandelion. Gwendolyn started down the stairs without thought, her heart clenching in her chest. She wasn’t sure which was more painful—his helplessness or her own.
“Gwennie?” he called plaintively.
“I’m right here, Papa,” she assured him, catching him by the elbow before he could stumble over the dog as Izzy had done. The dog gave her a grateful look.
“I heard such a turrible commotion,” her father said, turning his rheumy gray eyes on her. “Is it the English? Has Cumberland returned? “
“No, Papa,” Gwendolyn replied, gently smoothing a grizzled lock of his hair. Alastair Wilder sometimes forgot his own name, but he’d never forgotten the ruthless English lord who had robbed him of his sanity nearly fifteen years ago.
“Cumberland’s not coming back,” Gwendolyn promised him. “Not tonight and not ever.”
“Are yer sisters safely abed? ‘Twouldn’t do to have their virtue stolen by those wretched redcoats.”
“Aye, Papa, they’re safely abed.” It was easier to lie than to explain that since so many of the clan’s young men had fled the village to seek their fortunes elsewhere, Glynnis would probably welcome a regiment of lusty English soldiers with open arms while Nessa welcomed them with open legs. It pained her to think of her sweet Kitty straying down that path. “ You needn’t fear Cumberland or his redcoats,” Gwendolyn assured him. “ ‘Tis nothing but that silly Dragon again, making mischief at our expense.”
A feverish tinge brightened his cheeks, and he wagged a finger at her. “Ye must tell them to do whatever he says. If they don’t, ‘twill surely be the ruin of us all.”
“ ‘Tis just what I was tryin’ to tell this stubborn auld…” Ham faltered as Izzy’s eyes narrowed. “Um… yer maid here. If ye’ll give Gwendolyn yer leave, sir, she can come with me and read the note the Dragon left for us. There’s some that say ‘tis written not in ink, but in blood.”
Her father’s fingers dug into her arm. “Ye must go with him, lass. And make haste! Ye may be our last hope.”
Gwendolyn sighed. “Very well, Papa. But only if you’ll let Izzy tuck you back into bed with a cup of goat’s milk and a nice warm brick wrapped in flannel.”
His face crinkled in a smile as he squeezed her hand. “Ye’ve always been my good girl, haven’t ye?”
It was a familiar refrain, one Gwendolyn had learned by heart while her sisters were out romping in the sunlight and stealing kisses from blushing lads. She was a good girl, a sensible girl, the girl who had held the struggling family together after her father went mad and her mother died giving birth to his stillborn son a mere fortnight later. Neither of them ever spoke of the cold, rainy night shortly after that when a nine-year-old Gwendolyn had found him on his knees in the side yard of the manor, trying to dig up her mother’s grave with his bare hands.
“Aye, Papa.” Gwendolyn brushed a kiss against his cheek. “You know I’d do anything for you.” She added under her breath, “Even slay a dragon.”
There was a storm brewing over the sleepy little village of Ballybliss. Although the steep mountain walls would shelter the glen from the full brunt of its fury, a taut expectancy shimmered in the air. The scent of the coming rain mingled with the briny tang of the sea. As Gwendolyn hurried toward the bonfire that had been built in the heart of the village square, the wind plucked flaxen tendrils of hair from her woolen snood and made her nape tingle with foreboding.
She hugged her shawl around her as a gust of wind whipped the bonfire into a frenzy and sent a cascade of sparks whirling into the night.
Gwendolyn was not surprised to find her sisters on the fringes of the milling crowd. They loved nothing so much as excitement, and in its absence had been known to craft some fine melodramas of their own with their ceaseless round of scandals, tantrums, and heartbreaks.
Glynnis hung on the arm of the silver-haired tinker, her cheeks flushed and her lips glistening as if they’d been kissed both recently and thoroughly. Unlike Nessa, Glynnis never allowed herself to be compromised until after the wedding. She’d already sent two elderly husbands to early graves, inheriting both their cottages and their meager belongings.
Nessa perched on a bale of hay next to Lachlan the Black, the younger son of the village smith. From the lazy ease with which he was nuzzling her ear, and the hay scattered through Nessa’s auburn curls, Gwendolyn deduced it was not their first tryst of the night.
It was sharp-eyed Catriona who spotted her. She came bounding off the lap of a freckled lad and ducked through the crowd until she reached her side.
“Oh, Gwennie, have you heard?” she cried, her raven curls bouncing. “The Dragon has sent another demand.”
“Aye, Kitty. I’ve heard. But I don’t believe. And nor should you.”
Her sister’s nickname had always suited her. As a curly-headed moppet, Kitty had liked nothing better than to take long, languorous naps and sip fresh cream from one of the Staffordshire saucers that had belonged to their mother. It was her more recent habit of curling up in the laps of strangers that dismayed Gwendolyn.
“No one knows what the note says,” Kitty confided, “but Maisie’s mother fears the Dragon might be developing a taste for human flesh. And Maisie believes he wishes to mate with one of the village lasses.” She hugged back a delicious shiver. “Can you imagine what it would be like to be ravished by a beast?”
Gwendolyn’s gaze strayed back to Lachlan, who had as much dark, curly hair growing out of his ears as on his head. “No, pet. You’d best ask Nessa about that.”
They were bo
th distracted by the voices rising above the wind.
“I say we give him whatever he wants,” came the wheedling tones of Norval, the village baker. Even in the firelight, his face was as pasty as an underdone yeast roll. “ Perhaps then he’ll go back to hell and leave us be.”
“And I say we march upon the castle and burn it to the ground,” roared Ross. The blacksmith’s eldest son and Gwendolyn’s longtime tormentor banged the wooden handle of his hammer on the ground. “Or do none of ye have the ballocks?”
His challenge met with nothing but awkward silence and averted eyes.
Ailbert the Smith stepped into their midst. While Ross was known for his bluster and Lachlan for his skillful wooing of the fair sex, their father was a man of action. His lanky form and stern visage commanded everyone’s respect.
He held aloft the sheaf of vellum, allowing it to ripple in the wind. It would have been found in the same place as all the other messages had been—pinned by a single feathered arrow to the trunk of the gnarled old oak that stood sentinel over the village.
Ailbert’s voice rang like a bell tolling their doom. “How much more will we allow this monster to take from us? He demands the best of our crops, our flocks, our finest whisky and wool. What will we offer him next? Our sons? Our daughters? Our wives?”
“Better me wife than me whisky,” one of the Sloan twins muttered, tipping an earthenware jug to his lips. The lady in question drove her elbow into his ribs, and he spat half the whisky down his shirtfront. Nervous laughter rippled through the crowd.
“Oh, ye’ll give him yer whisky, lad.” As Auld Tavis shuffled forward, the merriment died. The stooped gnome had been an old man fifteen years ago; now he was ancient. He pointed a gnarled finger at Ailbert. “And if he wants to lay with yer wife, ye’ll hand her over, too, and thank him when he’s done.” Tavis cackled, baring his shriveled gums. “Ye’ll give him whatever he wants ‘cause ye know bloody well ye brought it on yer-selves and ‘tis no more than ye deserve.”
Some of the villagers were shamefaced, some defiant, but they all knew exactly what he spoke of. Almost as one, they lifted their eyes to Castle Weyrcraig, the ancient fortress that had cast a shadow over their lives for as long as anyone could remember.
As Kitty edged closer to her, Gwendolyn’s own gaze was drawn to the castle. The gutted ruin perched on the cliff overlooking Ballybliss like some madman’s folly—crumbling towers stretching toward heaven, winding staircases descending into hell, jagged holes blown through the heart of the ancient keep. Gwendolyn had striven to be practical in all things for a very long time, but even her imagination was stirred by its vision of doomed romance and dying dreams.
The villagers might pretend to ignore its grim reproach, but no one had forgotten that terrible night fifteen years ago when the castle had fallen to the English. Not even the barricaded doors of their cottages had been able to muffle the roar of the cannons, the screams of the dying, and the damning silence that had followed when there had been no one left to scream.
Although there were those who had always whispered that the castle was haunted, it was only in the past few months that its ghosts had begun to wreak their havoc on the village.
Lachlan had been the first to hear the eerie skirl of bagpipes drifting down from the castle, although bagpipes had not been heard in the glen since the rebellion of ‘45. Soon after, Glynnis had spotted spectral lights flickering past the darkened windows that gazed down upon the village like soulless eyes.
Gwendolyn would have liked to claim that she had heard and seen nothing of the sort, but one bitterly cold February night when she was hurrying home from the apothecary’s with a poultice for her father’s eyes, an unearthly wail had frozen her in her tracks. She had slowly turned, transfixed by a melody that seemed to hearken back to another time. A time when Ballybliss and Clan MacCullough had thrived beneath the benevolent chieftainship of their laird. A time when the manor had rung with her father’s piping and her mother’s laughter. A time when all of their hopes and dreams for the future had rested upon the shoulders of one boy with a dazzling smile and eyes the color of emeralds.
The melody’s piercing sweetness had made her heart ache and her eyes sting.
She had seen no flickering lights that night, but as she had lifted her gaze to the castle’s battlements, she would have almost sworn she saw the shadow of the man that boy might have become had he lived. In the time it had taken to blink away her tears, he had vanished, leaving both him and his song no more than a wistful echo in her memory.
Soon after, Ailbert had found the Dragon’s first demand pinned to the trunk of the old oak.
“ ‘Tis the curse,” Ross muttered, robbed of his bluster by Auld Tavis’s taunts.
“Aye, the curse,” his father echoed, his stern face looking even longer than usual.
Lachlan tightened his protective grip on Nessa. “It don’t seem fair somehow that Nessa and I should suffer. We was little more than bairns when the curse was cast.”
Auld Tavis wagged a bony finger at him. “Aye, but the sins of the father shall be visited on the son.”
Murmuring their agreement, several in the crowd signed furtive crosses on their breasts. The Crown might have outlawed their priests and tartans, but not even fifteen years of ironfisted English rule could make them relinquish their God. Gwendolyn doubted either Tavis or the villagers realized he was quoting Euripides, not Holy Scripture.
Gently nudging Kitty aside, Gwendolyn stepped into the circle of firelight and said firmly, “Pish, posh. There’s no such thing as curses. Or dragons.”
The crowd erupted in boisterous protest, but Gwendolyn refused to be daunted. “Have any of you ever seen this Dragon?”
After a moment of pensive silence, Ian Sloan exchanged a glance with his twin. “I heard his turrible roar.”
Ham piped up. “I felt the ripple of his wings as he passed overhead.”
“And I smelled his breath, I did,” Norval added. “ ‘Twas like brimstone straight from the fires of hell. And the next mornin’, my field was scorched bare.”
“Scorched or torched?” Gwendolyn snatched the sheaf of vellum from Ailbert’s hand. “If our tormentor truly is a dragon, then how does he write these ridiculous demands? Does he grip a quill in his talons? Employ a secretary?”
“Everyone knows he can change from dragon to man at will,” an elderly widow insisted. “Why, he might even walk among us this verra night.”
As neighbor edged away from neighbor, casting glances rife with suspicion, Gwendolyn briefly closed her eyes, struggling to remember that somewhere in the world mathematicians were studying Euler’s Analysis Infinitorum, philosophers were arguing Adam Smith’s Theory of Moral Sentiments, and beautiful women with powdered hair and silk slippers were whirling around gilded ballrooms in the arms of men who adored them.
She turned to Ailbert, hoping to appeal to the man’s sense of reason. “I believe this ‘Dragon’ of yours is nothing but a cruel hoax. I think someone is taking heartless advantage of your desire to punish yourself for what can never be undone.”
Ailbert’s sullen face mirrored those around him. “No slight intended, lass, but we called ye here to read, not think.”
Gwendolyn snapped her mouth shut and the creamy sheaf of vellum open, revealing the familiar arrogant masculine scrawl. “It would appear M’lord Dragon is hungry. If it wouldn’t be too much bother, he would like a haunch of fresh venison, a jug of well-aged whisky…” Several of the men nodded their approval.
However devilish the Dragon’s threats, they could not fault his taste in fine liquor. “and…” Gwendolyn faltered, her icy voice melting to a whisper. “… one thousand pounds in gold.”
The gasps that greeted her words couldn’t have been more horrified. It had been whispered for years that one thousand pounds had been the price that someone in the village had been paid to betray their chieftain to the English.
Ailbert sank down heavily on a tree stump, rubbing his gaunt
cheeks. “And just how are we to come up with a thousand bloody pounds? Doesn’t he know those English leeches have bled every last shillin’ and ha’pence from our coffers with their fines and their taxes?”
“Oh, he knows,” Gwendolyn said softly. “He’s just toying with us, batting us around the way a cat bats around a fat, juicy mouse.”
“Before he gobbles it down,” Ross added glumly.
“And if we don’t deliver the gold?” Ailbert lifted his pleading eyes to Gwendolyn, as if she could somehow temper the Dragon’s threats with mercy.
As Gwendolyn scanned the rest of the missive, she briefly considered lying, but feared her eyes would betray her. “He says it will spell the doom of Ballybliss.”
Never ones to miss an opportunity for melodrama, Kitty burst into tears and Nessa and Glynnis abandoned their respective lovers to throw themselves into each other’s arms.
Ailbert rose from the stump to pace the clearing. “If we can’t give him the gold, there must be somethin’ else we can offer the devil. Somethin’ to make him leave us be for a while.”
“But what?” Ross demanded. “I doubt we could scrape up ten pounds between the lot of us.”
Suddenly Auld Tavis’s singsong croak mesmerized them all.
May the dragon ‘s wings spellyer doom
And his fiery breath seal yer tomb.
May vengeance be upon yer heads
‘Til innocent blood be shed.
It was a chant the village children had learned at the knees of their parents. It was the curse the clan’s own chieftain had laid upon them with his dying breath. It shouldn’t have made Gwendolyn shiver, but it did.
“What are ye sayin’, auld man?” Ross demanded, snatching Tavis up by the front of his tunic.
Ross’s bullying failed to dim the sly twinkle in Tavis’s eyes. “Every one o’ ye knows this Dragon is none other than the MacCullough hisself returned from the grave to punish those who betrayed him. If ye truly want to rid yerselves of him, then break the curse.”