Sorcha thought she was still ill. Surely she couldn’t have heard those words.
“The fairy diamond is here?” she asked, just to make sure. “Here in this house.”
“Of course it is,” Harry Wyatt snapped. “Isn’t that why you’re here?”
Surely her journey couldn’t be over so soon.
The thought surprised her. She should have felt relief. What she felt instead was disappointment. She wanted another kiss from Harry Wyatt. She wanted to talk to him, to make him understand what he refused to. She wanted to see him smile. She wanted to see him smile at her. But now she wouldn’t have time.
“I was sent here to find it,” she said, her voice hushed. “But I didn’t know…may I see it?”
One of the great ruling stones here, in this prison of disbelief. The mother light of the faerie, hidden so long that the Dubhlainn Sidhe had despaired of it. Although wasn’t it just like men altogether to never have found the thing? They probably hadn’t even tried. One day on this side of the gate, and she was actually to see it.
She wiped her hands on the legs of her pants, trying to maintain a bit of calm. Harry and his grandmother seemed to be carrying out a completely nonverbal argument with no sure winner. Sure, Sorcha wasn’t entirely certain which one had the redder face.
“It’s just to pay my respects, don’t you see,” she wheedled, the weight of the false stone heavy on her hip. “After all, if it is the…fairy diamond, then it would be Dearann the Fruitful, she who brings us spring and children. She it is who ripens the harvest and brings mares to foal. Without her, the earth would not turn to summer.”
“Don’t let the local vicar hear you say that,” Harry Wyatt suggested. “He has this odd idea that God might be in charge of things like that.”
“Well, of course she is,” Sorcha said. “But even she uses a bit of help now and again. And her most lovely Dearann Stone is a bit of help. You see?”
Harry scowled. “She is a chunk of quartz,” he snapped. “And that isn’t anything to see.”
“Don’t be absurd, boy,” his grandmother snapped right back. “It’s a legacy from your great-great-grandfather.”
“Shares in a railroad would have been better.”
The old woman thumped her cane against the floor. “I understand your frustration, Harry. But since you never met him, I will not have you disparage my grandfather. Now, you can stay here and pout all you want. Mary and I are going to take the girl to see the stone.”
“We’ve just sat down to dinner.”
“It’ll wait.”
Harry slapped his napkin onto the table and got to his feet. “I’ll go along,” he said. “After all, I should probably keep an eye on the silver.”
He grabbed hold of his grandmother’s chair and turned it for the door, Mary jumping to her feet to follow. Sorcha backed out of his way just in time. Then she accompanied them down the hall.
Oh, and weren’t there more surprises along the way? How could she not have seen them on her way to this room? Sure, she had been so focused on seeing Harry Wyatt again, on once again flirting with that incredible attraction, that she might have overlooked the smallest bit of heaven in this prison.
But to have missed this, a world of murals, painted as if from her own memory, with tiny stars in the ceiling that looked so like sprites that she fought tears, and herds of moon-pale horses with the fairy light in their eyes pacing the corners.
She might be going home soon. She might be able to walk among her own trees and settle down on the grass with the children, dance in the great hall of a banqueting night. She might be able to reacquaint herself with every beloved fairy in the realm. But she would be doing it alone.
Being alone hadn’t bothered her so much before. She’d always trusted that she would find someone for herself, even when she’d pined for Darragh in her lonely little house in the glen. She’d believed that there would be someone to take the edge off her loneliness.
Never, though, could she have anticipated what it would really mean.
She’d never realized that men could be so…overwhelming. Even Darragh, with his storm-dark eyes and beautiful faerie body, had never struck her so. She’d seen him as a companion, a muse, mayhap, someone untouchable and worth worship. Never had she thought of him in the sense she suddenly did Harry Wyatt. And Goddess knew she’d never been afflicted with such stunning mind images with him or any male.
Sure, she should have learned better from her sister and her mother, but who knew a man could so set a woman’s blood to churning just with his scent, or that a fairy might want to offer up almost anything for one more kiss? Who could ever know how neatly a woman’s body could fit against a man’s?
She knew now. And so it hurt to follow the rigid back of the man she suspected she would carry in her heart when she returned to her land.
“Slow down, Harry,” his grandmother demanded. “The girl isn’t up for footraces yet. She’s still pale.”
“Ah, no,” Sorcha said with a big smile. “Aren’t I in the pink of health?”
No, she wasn’t. Not yet. She was still feeling a bit muddled from the mortal illness, her head echoing oddly and her chest tight. She felt trembly and uncertain, a foal on new legs, but she wasn’t sure whether that was left over from the illness, the cure or the surprise. She just knew she couldn’t allow Harry an excuse to cancel the trip upstairs.
“The walls…” she said.
“Beautiful, aren’t they?” Gran asked. “And see the horses? Nicholas said they were fairy horses he’d painted, but they’re our horses to the nose.”
Sorcha saw the intense longing on the woman’s face. “You don’t ride anymore.”
Harry brought his gran’s chair to a screeching halt. The old woman held him silent with a hand. “Not since I came a cropper at a five-bar gate about twenty years ago. Why?”
Sorcha looked again at the moon-pale horses on the walls. “Would you like to? If I can find the right horse, of course.”
“What the hell are you talking about?” Harry demanded.
“Ride?” Gran asked. “Do you see my legs?”
Sorcha nodded. “Ah, sure. But I’m thinking you have horses here who would do. Well, if they agreed, of course. Sure they’re fierce proud—”
“How dare you?” Harry demanded.
“No, truly…”
Gran stilled Harry with her hand. “We’ll talk about this later, child.” She sounded firm, but Sorcha saw the new light in her old eyes. She just smiled and followed as they walked on. And then, while she was still caught in the logistics of what she planned, Harry surely punished her for her words.
He came to a halt and stepped through a door, pushing his grandmother ahead of him, Mary on their heels. Sorcha had already followed before she realized that he’d just led her into a small box. Then the door slid closed.
“Oh, I…” She couldn’t breathe. Goddess, she was caught in a cage of metal. It seemed that Harry took up what little air there was, and there was a grinding noise that hurt her ears. Then, suddenly, the box moved.
“It’s an elevator, child,” the old woman said, as if that would help.
Sorcha kept nodding. She put her hands out before her, as if she could test the weight of the air. It pressed on her. It bound her, and she was terrified she couldn’t get—
The door opened onto another hallway. “Oh.”
Sorcha set tentative feet onto the carpet and pulled in the breath of her life. She almost went down on her knees in thanks. Such a prison, that little box was. So tight and airless. Not to mention that moving about. Straight up, and all on its own. That wasn’t a carriage a fairy could find comfort in. She stepped a bit closer to Harry, wishing she could fortify herself with his solid strength. Almost certain he would have none of it.
“You all right, girl?” Gran asked, peering closely at her.
“Aye.” She pulled in an unsteady breath, trying to calm her racing heart. “It was just a surprise. Sure, there’s nothing like it at home. So then, Cathal didn’t build such a thing.”
Gran laughed. “Good heavens, no. Harry was sweet enough to install it for me. Grandfather built…no. I’ll let you see it later, shall I?”
“Did he really live in this place of stone?” Sorcha asked. “I can’t imagine one of the fey people surviving here for long.”
“You’re laying it on a little thick,” Harry said.
His grandmother frowned.
“I’m sorry,” Sorcha said. “Laying what on, please?”
Harry never looked over at her. “I believe it’s called blarney.”
Sorcha grinned. “Ah, no. That’s where the cousins live, not us. We’re Sligo bound. Do you know it?”
“Never been there.”
“Harry doesn’t find Ireland as compelling as others do,” his grandmother said, with a peculiar look on her face.
“Ah, isn’t that a shame, then?” Sorcha said. “For there’s no sweeter air or kinder rain.”
Gran nodded. “That’s what I keep telling him.”
“She says I’ll run across family there,” Harry said with some disdain. “The kind that sits on flowers and plays the harp.”
“And so you might,” Gran said.
Suddenly the entire procession stopped. “If that were possible, don’t you think somebody might have succeeded sometime in the past sixty years?” Harry demanded, his face taut and impatient.
“Maybe they weren’t looking in the right places,” Sorcha suggested.
And wasn’t that a mistake, then? Harry shot her a look of pure venom. There was such resentment in him. Such fury and frustration. And yet, deep in the fire of that look was attraction. Hunger.
Suddenly Sorcha was swamped again by the mind-images. Harry bent over her, his eyes black with arousal, his chest bare and glistening with sweat, his hair tangled from her hands. She could smell the arousal on him, could hear the rasp of his breathing. She could feel the touch of his eyes on her own bare skin, and wasn’t it the most wonderful thing she’d ever known? She froze there in the middle of that great hallway, only feet from her goal, because she couldn’t look away from the hand Harry lifted in her own mind to touch her.
“We’ll never get there at this pace,” his gran snapped.
The images vanished like bubbles, leaving Sorcha even weaker than before, her heart beating hard in her chest, her hands itching for the touch of what she’d just imagined. What Harry had imagined, as well. She could see it on him, in the dilated pupils and flare of his nostrils. He was as aroused as she was.
“Stop that,” Harry said.
“Stop what?” Gran asked.
“Faith,” Sorcha breathed, a hand to her chest. “Now I know why my mother and sister are so addicted to the thing.”
“What thing?”
Harry turned and continued down the hall. “Nothing.”
Even as upended as she was, Sorcha almost laughed. You could call it many things. Never, in all the millennia of faerie existence, could you call it “nothing.” Indeed, didn’t her mother and sister Orla cherish the chance to invade a man’s mind and share such fantasies? Sorcha had never before felt the desire. Since meeting Harry Wyatt, she couldn’t seem to stop.
He was having none of it, though. He pushed his grandmother’s chair down the carpet as if mounting an attack. For a second Sorcha could do no more than watch him. For a second she completely forgot what they were doing here.
The Dearann Stone.
“Thunder and hailstones,” she cursed and walked on.
That was all it took to dispel the last of the fantasy. It was the house that did it, and it wasn’t something Sorcha liked at all. It was a great long hall they walked, hung in paintings and populated with statues, cold, dead things that looked like ensorcelled children. Sorcha shivered under the stares of them and wished herself away. She ached to have her feet on the grass again, even if the grass was cold and wet. This house simply bore in on her, even the rooms painted like her own world. And this hall was higher up, farther away from the earth and her comfort. It was no wonder someone had felt so compelled to paint it all over. How could a person feel the magic of the Dearann Stone past these walls?
Ah, the Stone. What would it feel like? she wondered. Her palms sweated in anticipation. Would it sing, or simply shine inside her? She only knew the power of the Coilin Stone, and that was masculine, a red, hard thrum that settled in a faerie’s chest like fire. Dearann had to be quieter altogether, didn’t she? Gentle, as a woman should be. As the earth was in the early days of spring, when the grass was so bright it hurt your eyes and the lambs gamboled on the green.
How could it have survived here, in this cage of rock? Sorcha called to it in her heart and heard nothing back.
“Sure, shouldn’t I be feeling it now?” she said to herself, her hand once again to her chest.
Harry seemed to falter a bit and turned his head, but Sorcha couldn’t read his expression.
“Feel it?” Gran asked.
“Aye,” Sorcha said. “Aren’t I the stone keeper? Isn’t it to me they speak, so I know who belongs to them? I’m the one sees them safe and settled on the right hand.”
Gran laughed, an abrupt bark of noise. “Girl, the Fairy Diamond would never fit on anybody’s hand.”
“Ah, no,” Sorcha admitted. “Dearann is meant for no less than the crown of the Dubhlainn Sidhe.”
Almost she said that they sore missed it. That the world sore missed it. But the time wasn’t right yet. It might never be the right time to let these mortals know the business of faeries. It was her own counsel she should keep, at least until she knew how she would deal with the Dearann Stone.
“The Dubhlainn Sidhe?” Gran asked.
“Fairies of the Dark Sword,” she said. “The masculine to the Tua feminine. The air fairies of the South.”
“Dubhlainn,” Gran murmured, as if testing it against her teeth. “Dubhlainn.”
Sorcha searched the well-worn features. “Is it familiar to you?”
Gran just shook her head. “I don’t know. Could my grandfather have been one of them?”
“He could.”
“He could also have fallen off a wagon of tinkers,” Harry muttered.
Sorcha smiled. “Sure, it must be exhausting to carry such a furious anger around with you all the time.”
Harry swung his gaze on her but said nothing. He didn’t need to. Sorcha saw the pain beneath that anger. The fear and loss that shouldn’t have been allowed within such sturdy halls.
He turned away when his grandmother reached up to pat his hand where it lay on her chair. “Pay no attention to Harry. He has reason enough to be surly. As much as I loved my husband and son, they squandered their birthright as much as any gambler on the horses and put our very home in jeopardy. But that’s what this obsession is all about, isn’t it?”
And it would kill Harry if he lost this place, Sorcha saw suddenly. This place he disparaged was as much a part of him as the hollows and dales of her home were to her. Ah, how could she hurt so for a mortal? It was as if it shimmered off him, this bone-deep fear. Fear of so much: the past, the future, the minute-by-minute present. How she wished she could ease that burden for him.
“Would you accept my apology, then, Harry Wyatt?” she asked. “My words were rash, and that they usually aren’t.”
He turned again, only a bit, as if afraid to betray too much. She saw it, though, the raw vulnerability that lived deep in the forests of his eyes. “I haven’t been much kinder to you,” he said. “We’ll forget it then, shall we?”
She had no choice but to nod. It didn’t relieve the pressure in her chest, though.
“Now then, girl,” Harry’s gran said, her voice brisk, “tell me about this stone-keeping business. What does it mean?”
Sorcha smiled. “Each fairy has a special place in our pantheon, gifts to give and enjoy,” she said. “Each fairy’s place is reflected in his or her raiment and silver-set stones.” She held out her hands. “Mine, as you see, are opal and spinel, the color of my raiment that of the early dawn sky. My sister Nuala, who would have been queen, carried peridot and amethyst, and wore peacock. The queen by right is given emerald, moonstone and iolite to guide her people.”
Gran leaned her head back to see Sorcha better. “What would my stones be?” she asked.
Sorcha couldn’t help but smile. “Ah, well, I’d have to carry you to the stones to see them sing for you, now, wouldn’t I? But if I could guess, wouldn’t I grace you with the strength of a ruby and the grace of a pearl.”
Harry’s grandmother nodded, seemingly pleased. “I like that. Indeed I do. And Harry. What would you see on his hands?”
“She wouldn’t see anything,” Harry said. “I don’t wear rings.”
“Oh, don’t be a spoilsport, Harry. Let the girl tell me.”
“Jade,” Sorcha said. “Onyx. And oh, I think the brightest chrysoprase. The color of spring, the cycle of the earth. For I think Harry well-rooted in the earth.”
“How do you know?” Gran asked.
Harry was suspiciously silent.
Sorcha shrugged. “Ah, well, it isn’t something I can define, I’m afraid, is it? I just feel it. It’s my gift, small as it is.”
“And Mary?” Gran asked.
Sorcha was pleased to smile again. “Ah, now, there are stones we don’t see much in this far north land. Aquamarine for the water, I’m thinking. Coral for beauty, moonstone for the sight. For you have it, Mary, don’t you?”
Mary said nothing. The shock in her eyes gave her away.
“Amazing,” Gran said. “I can see exactly what you mean. I can’t wait to see what stones you’d give my granddaughter Phyllida. Not to mention her children. Imps, every one.”
“How you come by this gift?” Mary asked.
Sorcha shook her head. “Where does any soul-gift come from? I simply know that it is a necessary task, and it is my honor to perform it.” She grinned. “Besides, it gives me the chance to stay with the children. And that is a great gift to me, altogether.”
“You teach?”
“Oh, aye. Our history. Our lore and lessons. The craft of faerie and the specifics of each child’s gift, so he may respect and cherish all.”
“An important job,” Gran said.
Sorcha shook her head. “Small gifts in a pantheon of majesty. But that’s just fine with me, for what would I do with a grander gift?”
“You mean you don’t want fame and fortune?” Harry asked. “A place on the evening news and a meeting with Oprah?”
Sorcha shuddered with the idea of it. “Fame?” she asked. “Ah, no. That’s for others. Mine is meant to be a quiet life.”
“Which is why you’ve dropped in on us like this?”
Harry’s grandmother stiffened. “Harold—”
“Why did you come here?” Harry demanded, stopping just shy of the last door on the hall. Beyond, great windows opened to the undulating land beyond. “If you really are a fairy, as you want us to believe, what brought you here now, after my family’s been on the hunt for you people for the last hundred years?”
For only a heartbeat, no more, Sorcha considered what she should say. What to give away to this man who could be so dangerous. Who had already taken the ground from under her feet. Why, I’ve come to steal your treasure. I’ve come to betray your hospitality, one of the greatest sins a fairy can commit.
“I’ve come to protect the Stone,” she said. “Just as I told you.”
“From what?”
“From Darragh. From destruction. From loss.”
“Then you’ll be glad to see it,” his gran said, slapping at Harry’s hand. “Right in this room, if Harry will just remember the concept of forward momentum.”
But Harry wasn’t finished glaring at Sorcha yet. “You know it isn’t a diamond,” he said to her. “We’ve had it tested, innumerable times, as it happens. It’s a hunk of quartz. It’s not worth stealing.”
Ah, if he only knew.
“I would be the last person to harm the Dearann Stone,” she said. “Now please. Could I see it?”
Harry looked as if he wanted to offer more arguments. Instead, he shook his head. “Fine. In here.”
“It’s the anteroom to my husband’s suite,” Gran said, her voice soft. “We’re leaving it here until the state rooms are restored and ready for its display. But till now it’s been where my father kept it, and his father before him, in a glass case that catches the afternoon light. It’s—”
Gone.
The three of them stumbled to a halt just inside the door of a high, fairy-green room that had a few chairs, two lamps, and a round mahogany table set right in front of the window, where the sun could seek out the Stone in its glass case and shatter its light across the room. A glass case that was now on its side. Empty.
The Dearann Stone was nowhere to be seen.