The Bride & the Beast Page 3

  As Ross lowered Tavis to the ground, Ailbert’s eyes went cool and distant. “Innocent blood,” he murmured. “Perhaps a sacrifice of some sorts.” As his gaze slowly traveled the pallid circle of faces, his wide-eyed niece, Marsali, clutched her newborn babe to her breast.

  “Oh, for God’s sake!” Gwendolyn cried, wishing she had Izzy’s talent for creative blasphemy. “Is this what the monster has driven us to? Contemplating human sacrifice?”

  Ross, who had just fathered a baby girl of his own on the fourteen-year-old lass he was betrothed to, snapped his fingers, his ruddy face brightening. “Innocent blood. A virgin!”

  Ross’s eyes narrowed as he scanned the crowd. Most of the girls in Ballybliss wed shortly after they reached the age of twelve. His gaze briefly lingered on, then quickly passed over Glynnis and Nessa, before lighting on Kitty.

  “Oh, no you don’t!” Gwendolyn exclaimed, shoving her sister behind her. “ You’ll not make my baby sister fodder for some mean-spirited swindler!”

  Kitty gently disengaged herself from Gwendolyn’s grip. “It’s all right, Gwennie. They couldn’t feed me to the Dragon anyway because I’m not… I mean… Niall and I”—she ducked her head—”well, he said there’d be no harm in it.”

  Gwendolyn’s heart sank. The freckled lad who’d been sharing his lap with Kitty flushed scarlet, then ducked into the shadows.

  “Oh, kitten,” Gwendolyn said softly, reaching to correct one of her sister’s wayward curls. “Didn’t I strive to teach you that you deserved so much more?”

  “Don’t be angry,” Kitty pleaded, pressing Gwendolyn’s palm to her cheek. “I just didn’t want to end up like…” You.

  Although Kitty faltered, Gwendolyn heard the word as surely as if she’d said it aloud. Blinking back the tears that stung her eyes, she gently, but firmly, withdrew her hand from Kitty’s grip.

  She crumpled the Dragon’s vellum in her fist, wishing she’d never been fool enough to leave her cozy bed. Even her father’s fitful sanity was preferable to this madness.

  Wheeling on Ross, she slapped the ball of paper against his chest, despising his smirk even more than when they’d been children. “Good luck finding a virgin in Ballybliss. You’d be more likely to find a unicorn. Or a dragon!”

  As she turned away, a peculiar silence fell over the clearing, broken only by the sound of Kitty’s sniveling. Even the wind seemed to be holding its breath.

  Gwendolyn turned back to find herself facing a gauntlet of cool and assessing eyes. Faces she had known since childhood had closed into the forbidding masks of strangers.

  “Oh, no,” Gwendolyn said, taking an involuntary step backward. “Surely you don’t think you’re going to…”

  Ross looked her up and down, assessing the generous curves that were such a stark contrast to the willowy grace of her sisters. “The Dragon could live on that for a while, couldn’t he?”

  “Aye,” someone else muttered. “He wouldn’t trouble us for a very long time if he could make a meal o’ her.”

  “She might even eat him if she got hungry enough.”

  As Kitty’s sniveling rose to a wail and Glynnis and Nessa began to shove their way through the crowd in a desperate attempt to reach Gwendolyn’s side, the villagers began to advance on her, looking more like a mob with every step.

  “Oh, no you don’t!” she cried, beginning to take two steps for every one of theirs. “I’d make a dreadful sacrifice for your stupid Dragon because I’m… I’m…” She frantically cast about for a reason why they shouldn’t feed her to a dragon that didn’t exist. Shooting Kitty a burning glance, she blurted out, “I’m not a virgin!”

  That startling revelation gave them pause. Even Glynnis and Nessa looked taken aback. “Why, I’m the most wanton strumpet in the village. You can ask any man here.” Gwendolyn’s shawl slipped from her shoulders as she flung a finger toward Nessa’s latest beau. “I’ve even bedded Lachlan. And his father!” That desperate claim elicited a strangled gasp from Ailbert’s dour wife. But the mob was in motion again as they exchanged disbelieving glances.

  “And Glynnis’s last two husbands! And Reverend Throckmorton!” Breathing a silent prayer of thanksgiving that the sweet little man wasn’t around to hear that particular confession, Gwendolyn whirled to run. If she could only reach the manor, Izzy could doubtlessly hold off even the bullish Ross with nothing more than a rolling pin and one of her Medusa-like glares.

  Gwendolyn had barely taken three steps when she crashed into the smothering softness of Marsali’s ample bosom. As she slowly lifted her eyes to meet the woman’s maternal smile, Gwendolyn realized it wasn’t the men of Ballybliss she had to fear, but the women.

  Chapter Two

  AS THE VILLAGE WOMEN prepared Gwendolyn for the Dragon’s pleasure, the sound of weeping nearly drowned out the rumble of the storm outside the shuttered windows of Marsali’s cottage. Kitty bawled the loudest, while Glynnis sobbed into her handkerchief and Nessa used the hem of her gown to dab away each glistening teardrop before it could fall. It wouldn’t do for Lachlan to see her with a reddened nose or swollen eyes. Gwendolyn’s sisters’ more passionate protests regarding her fate had quickly subsided when they realized they were both outweighed and outnumbered by Marsali and her cronies.

  Gwendolyn gritted her teeth as Kitty emitted a particularly piercing wail. “You’re so noble and brave, Gwennie! To sacrifice yourself for us all this way.”

  “Perhaps Lachlan will compose a song in your honor,” Nessa offered. “His fingers are quite nimble on the strings of a clarsach.” From the dreamy half-smile that broke through Nessa’s gloom, Gwendolyn deduced they were quite nimble elsewhere as well.

  “Aye, we shall never forget you,” Glynnis vowed with a watery sigh.

  “I doubt you’ll have the chance,” Gwendolyn said firmly, “since I have every intention of being back in my own bed come morning.”

  But Marsali and her mates had other ideas. Each time Gwendolyn tried to rise from the stool they’d set before the fire, they shoved her back down. They’d already dragged off her practical woolen gown and stuffed her into a white linen garment more suited to a virgin sacrifice.

  As the other women tugged away the drab snood and unwound her coil of braids, Granny Hay peered into her face. “Her mother was such a beauty. ‘Tis a pity the lass isn’t comely like her sisters.”

  The old woman’s words caused Gwendolyn only the faintest sting. She’d long ago resigned herself to being the smart sister in a family of legendary beauties.

  Granny seized her lower lip and peered into her mouth. “She does have sweet dimples and bonny teeth, though,” she said, baring her own yellowing stumps.

  “And lovely golden hair,” said Marsali, raking her grimy fingernails through the shimmering mass. Her own mousy brown locks hung in lank, unwashed strands around her face.

  “If only she weren’t so fat,” snapped Ailbert’s wife, still smarting from Gwendolyn’s attempt to claim her husband as a lover. Gwendolyn had to bite her lip to keep from pointing out that the portly woman outweighed her by more than eight stone on a dry day.

  “ ‘Tis just as well ye were chosen, lass,” Marsali said gently, casting a doting look toward the cradle in the corner where her baby daughter slept, safe from the Dragon’s greedy claws. “After all, ye’re nearly twenty-five years old. Ye’ve little enough hope o’ finding a husband at yer age.”

  “I’m younger than both Glynnis and Nessa,” Gwendolyn pointed out.

  “Aye, but Glynnis has already buried two husbands and Nessa can have her pick of any lad in the village.”

  “Perhaps Auld Tavis would take Gwennie to bride,” Kitty suggested hopefully.

  Gwendolyn shuddered. “No thank you. I’d rather be eaten by a dragon than gummed to death by that old scoundrel.”

  As Marsali spread Gwendolyn’s hair around her shoulders in a gleaming mantle, a crack of thunder shook the cottage, making them all jump. Gwendolyn folded her hands in her lap to hide their sud
den trembling.

  “You needn’t worry about Papa,” Nessa assured her. “We shall look after him.”

  “The last time I gave you charge of him,” Gwendolyn said, “his nightshirt caught fire when you went off with the butcher’s nephew and left him sitting too close to the hearth.”

  Glynnis lowered her handkerchief. “But this time she’ll have me to help her.”

  “You’re the one who let him go charging off into the blizzard to fight invisible ‘redcoats’ wearing nothing but a short kilt and a claymore. He nearly froze to death before I could find him,” Gwendolyn reminded her sister.

  She twisted her hands together, fighting a flare of panic. It was painfully obvious that Kitty didn’t need her anymore, but what would become of Papa if anything were to happen to her? It wouldn’t take more than an hour for Izzy’s short-tempered bellowing to reduce the confused old soul to tears.

  “There’s no such thing as a dragon,” she mumbled beneath her breath. “I’ll be home in time to spoon Papa’s morning porridge into his bowl.”

  A loud crash shook the rafters, giving Gwendolyn a violent start. But it wasn’t until she saw the mingled guilt and dread on the ashen faces of the other women, however, that she realized the crash was not thunder, but the clamor of fists pounding on the door.

  They’d come for her.

  Although they had bound her hands in front of her, Gwendolyn marched grimly along at the head of the mob, refusing to be dragged. The wind whipped her hair across her cheeks in stinging cords. Lightning crackled across the sky and thunder rolled and swelled like the hungry growl of some great beast’s belly. Although she’d steeled herself for its arrival, she still flinched when the first cold drops of rain struck her face.

  The fat drops made the mob’s torches sizzle and sputter, and Gwendolyn could smell the stench of damp pitch.

  Ross and Ailbert marched on either side of her, herding her along the steep, narrow path that twisted its way up the cliffside. Gwendolyn gazed straight ahead, until the forbidding shadow of Castle Weyrcraig fell over them.

  The fortress crowned the cliff, eerily beautiful even in its decay. On this night there were no lights flickering through its hollow rooms, no ghostly wail of bagpipes to welcome them. Yet the place that had once been Gwendolyn’s cherished castle of dreams had become the stuff of nightmares, filling her with dread. Ailbert swore beneath his breath and even Ross’s beefy limbs betrayed him with a tremor. As they shoved her back into motion, Gwendolyn stumbled for the first time since they had seized her.

  As they left behind the sheltering walls of the glen, the full fury of the storm broke over them. Rain lashed at Gwendolyn, plastering the thin linen robe to her body and soaking her to the bone. The wind set up a shrill howl as the driving rain extinguished the last of the torches, leaving them in near darkness. Hastening their steps, the villagers scanned the sky, as if expecting their doom to swoop down out of the churning clouds on wings of flame.

  Ross gave her a harsh jerk, and Gwendolyn went down hard on one knee. She ignored the sharp pain and forced herself to keep moving, fearful the mob might trample her. Their panic had become a palpable thing—a metallic bitterness at the back of her throat. She didn’t know whether to be terrified or thankful when the remnants of the iron gates that had been shattered by English cannon fire nearly fifteen years before emerged from the shadows ahead of them.

  This time it wasn’t Gwendolyn, but the villagers who faltered.

  Until this night, all of the offerings to the Dragon had been left outside the gates. Except for a handful of lads bold or foolish enough to accept a dare from their less courageous peers, no one had passed between those gates since that bleak morning fifteen years ago when the villagers had carried the bodies of their laird and his family down the hillside.

  For a moment, Gwendolyn believed she might be saved. Believed they would not dare to breach the unholy sanctuary of the castle courtyard.

  But that was before Ross wrenched one of the gates right off its rusty hinges. Rain coursed like tears down Ailbert’s gaunt cheeks as he shouted, “Let’s have done with it, then!”

  Gwendolyn began to struggle in earnest as they drove her through the gates. She had time to collect only a few scattered impressions—stone walls covered with damp lichen; a headless statue of a woman garbed in flowing marble; a set of broad flagstone steps leading up to a splintered door.

  Once they’d dragged her into the heart of the courtyard, it didn’t take Ross long to find a hole in the crumbling, weed-choked cobblestones. Lachlan handed him a sledgehammer and with one mighty swing, Ross drove a tall stake into the ground.

  Ailbert secured Gwendolyn’s hands behind her, cast a rope around her chest, waist, and thighs to bind her to the thick shaft of wood, then muttered, “May God have mercy on yer soul, lass.”

  “If you leave me here, it won’t be my soul needing mercy, but yours,” she bit off through her chattering teeth. “Especially if I perish from exposure and you return to find nothing but my bones.”

  “The Dragon’ll be pickin’ his teeth with ‘em before the morn,” Ross snarled.

  Before she could spit in his face, the sky exploded. A forked tongue of flame descended from the heavens, followed by the thunderous crack of a serpentine tail.

  “ ‘Tis the Dragon!” a woman screamed. “He’s comin’ for her!”

  A mighty roar seemed to pour from the throat of hell itself. Its deafening clamor went on and on, sending the villagers fleeing into the night and leaving Gwendolyn at the Dragon’s mercy.

  Gwendolyn could not have said when she closed her eyes and began to scream. She only knew that the terrible roar died at the exact same moment as her scream.

  She slumped away from her bonds, going limp with terror. The rigid stake pressing against her spine was the only thing keeping her on her feet.

  It took her several long minutes to realize that the rain had died to a gentle patter, more melancholy than threatening. It took her even longer to screw up the courage to open her eyes.

  When she did, she discovered that her only companion was the headless statue of the woman in the corner, looking as forlorn and abandoned as she felt. She swallowed around a knot of panic. At least she still had her head.

  For now.

  That little girl’s voice came from somewhere in the past—from a time when she had believed that flickering will-o’-the-wisps haunted the marshes and bogs, that squat bogies could transform themselves into handsome men just long enough to lure innocent maidens to their ruin, and that a boy with eyes the color of emeralds might mistake her for an angel.

  She searched the shadows, realizing with a start that she was not alone after all. Someone… or something… was watching her.

  Although it cost her the very last crumbs of her strength, Gwendolyn forced herself erect, refusing to meet any monster, real or imagined, while cowering in terror.

  “I don’t believe in you, you know,” she called out. Embarrassed by the hoarse croak that emerged from her throat, she tried again. “This is 1761, not 1461, and I’m not some ignorant peasant you can intimidate with your superstitious nonsense!”

  When only the whisper of the rain greeted her defiant words, she wondered if perhaps her sanity had snapped somewhere during that torturous journey to the castle.

  She shook a sodden string of hair out of her eyes. “I’ll have you know I’m a student of science and rational thought. Whenever Reverend Throckmorton journeys to London, he brings me back pamphlets from the Royal Society for Improving Natural Knowledge by Experiment!”

  A gust of wind swirled through the courtyard, snatching away her words and raising the gooseflesh on her arms. There. In the corner to her left, something had moved, had it not? Even as she watched, some formless shape was beginning to separate itself from the shadows. Her entire body began to quake with a bone-deep chill that had nothing to do with the rain or the cold.

  “You don’t exist,” she whispered, praying that if she said
it often enough, it would be true. “You don’t exist. You’re not real. I don’t believe in you.”

  Every instinct urged her to close her eyes and make the thing that was slowly emerging from the darkness go away. But the same damnable curiosity that had once prompted her to dip one of Izzy’s hair rags in a flask of oil and light it—while Izzy was wearing it— wouldn’t even allow her to blink.

  In the end, it wasn’t the stark ebony wings that rippled around the magnificent breadth of his shoulders or the silvery smoke streaming from his nostrils that proved to be Gwendolyn’s undoing. It was his face—a face more terrible and beautiful than any she might have imagined.

  That face was the last thing she saw before her eyes rolled back in her head and she slumped into a dead faint.

  Chapter Three

  AS THE MAN WHO CALLED himself the Dragon gazed with stunned disbelief upon the offering the villagers had left for him, the lit cheroot tumbled from his lips and hissed to its death in a puddle of rainwater.

  “I know you’ve earned a reputation for making women swoon,” his companion remarked, stepping out of the shadows and cocking one sandy eyebrow, “but never before at the mere sight of you.”

  The Dragon began to circle the stake, his long, black cloak billowing around his ankles with each step. “What in the holy hell possessed them to bring me a woman? All I wanted was a haunch of venison and a jug of whisky to warm my bones on this miserable night.”

  “I’d be willing to wager she’d warm your bones.” His friend appreciatively eyed the woman’s full breasts and ample hips. “She’s what my outspoken great-aunt Taffy, who was once the mistress of George I, would call a ‘good breeder.’ “

  She appeared to be wearing some diaphanous length of fabric that was more shift than gown. Rain had plastered the garment to her skin, leaving little to a man’s imagination. The shadow of one dusky nipple peeped shyly out from between the sodden strands of honey gold hair that spilled over her breast.