Once Upon A Highland Legend Read online

  Once Upon a Highland Legend

  Tanya Anne Crosby

  2nd Edition, July 21, 2014

  This novella was previously published in the anthology The Winter Stone, April 21, 2014

  Published by Oliver-Heber Books, LLC

  All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be used or reproduced or transmitted in any manner whatsoever, electronically, in print, or otherwise, without the prior written permission of both Oliver-Heber Books and the author, except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles and reviews.

  PUBLISHER'S NOTE: This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author's imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, business establishments, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

  Once Upon a Highland Legend Copyright © 2013 Tanya Anne Crosby

  Dedication

  To all who still believe in faerie tales.

  Praise for The Guardians of the Stone

  “Enchanting landscapes, breathtaking betrayal, and heartwarming passion herald Tanya Anne Crosby's triumphant return to ancient Scotland.” –Glynnis Campbell, Internationally Bestselling Author

  “Tanya Anne Crosby is a master of her genre …” –Laurin Wittig, Internationally Bestselling Author

  “Tanya Anne Crosby returns to writing historical fiction as only she can: superbly and beautifully.” –Suzan Tisdale, bestselling author of Rowan's Lady

  Praise for Tanya Anne Crosby

  “Crosby’s characters keep readers engaged…” –Publishers Weekly

  “Tanya Anne Crosby sets out to show us a good time and accomplishes that with humor, a fast paced story and just the right amount of romance.” –The Oakland Press

  “Romance filled with charm, passion and intrigue …” –Affaire de Coeur

  “Ms. Crosby mixes just the right amount of humor … Fantastic, tantalizing!” –Rendezvous

  “Tanya Anne Crosby pens a tale that touches your soul and lives forever in your heart.” –Sherrilyn Kenyon #1 NYT Bestselling Author

  TABLE OF CONTENTS

  Title Page

  Dedication

  Praise

  The Legend

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Chapter Ten

  Chapter Eleven

  Chapter Twelve

  Chapter Thirteen

  Chapter Fourteen

  Chapter Fifteen

  The Winter Stone

  Books By Tanya Anne Crosby

  About Tanya

  The Legend

  of the Winter Stone

  Once upon a time, in a place time forgot, the last Pict King was betrayed by one he loved. Mourning his ignoble death, the Mother of Winter wept with grief, her icy tears shattering as they fell to earth. One did not. This pale stone she gave to the Guardians of the Old Ways, so that by its light all truths might be known.

  This is the tale of the Winter Stone…

  Chapter One

  Kingussie Scotland, Present Day

  “Are ye in Kingussie for the festival, lass?” the shopkeeper asked.

  Blinking, Annie Ross peered up from the crystal she held in her hand, momentarily disoriented. It took her a muddled instant to recall exactly where she was—in a curio shop on High Street, waiting for her cousin to arrive. It wasn’t like her to be so spacey. “No, actually…heading up to Devil’s Point.”

  The old woman gave her a bit of a smirk but didn’t comment; still Annie sensed she was amused by the choice of phrasing.

  Okay, so she was actually headed to Bod an Deamhain. She and Queen Victoria’s consort had something in common. Even in this twenty-first century, Annie had copped out, using the more modest name for a nearby mountain peak. The literal translation for anyone who knew better, was the “demon’s penis.” Apparently, despite the fact that vaginas now had plays named after them, Annie still couldn’t say the word penis to strangers. But how ridiculous was that? She was a scientist after all. She blamed her pang of modesty on the skirt she was wearing. Somehow, it seemed entirely inappropriate to utter the word penis while wearing a short, plaid schoolgirl-type skirt that might have been better suited to a fetish poster than a Catholic schoolgirl.

  As though to affirm her thoughts, the shopkeeper’s gaze swept down to the hem of Annie’s borrowed skirt. “American, are ye?” she asked, lifting the brow of her one good eye. The other had a patch over it.

  Annie frowned. For some reason, the question left her feeling a bit defensive. As though only an American could wear such a getup, right? Well, her cousin—the previous and current owner of the skirt—was Scots to the bone, thank you very much.

  Annie heaved a sigh. Unfortunately, her bags had been lost on the way to Kingussie and she’d had to borrow a clean shirt and a skirt from her cousin Kate, who didn’t appear to own anything longer than six inches. For that matter, Kate’s blouses didn’t seem to have enough buttons either, and Annie had had to use a safety pin to keep her breasts from public display—not that her skirt length was any of the shopkeeper’s concern, however.

  Thankfully, Annie didn’t much care about clothes one way or another. If it covered her bits, and kept her from getting arrested for indecent exposure, if it didn’t smell like the boozer sitting next to her on the plane, well then she didn’t care what she wore. Her own wardrobe was quite practical, and her long black hair usually found its way into a careless ponytail—the horsetail, her ex used to call it. That was why he was her ex—and not as Kate liked to put it, that Annie had commitment phobia. She was hardly afraid of men; she just had no patience for one-way relationships.

  “My family’s from here,” she offered as she studied the crystal in her hand.

  “Aye? Whereabouts?” the shopkeeper asked. “Ye dinna sound much like a Scot. I do hope ye’ve brought something warmer for the climb, lass,” she said, chattering on. “The wind’ll freeze your paps.”

  Annie wasn’t entirely certain what paps were, nor was she inclined to ask, but she lifted the arm her sweater was draped over, hoping it would be enough to convince the old woman to put away her maternal genes.

  “Humph!” the shopkeeper declared. “Ye’ll catch your death w’ that! Ye’ll need something warmer, dearie. We’ve tartans for sale,” she suggested. “Certainly, one of the lot will match you’re wee skirt.”

  Nice sales pitch, lady, but no thanks, Annie thought. “Thanks,” she said, and went back to inspecting the crystal.

  Bod an Deamhain was probably an eight-hour climb, but Annie didn’t intend to go all the way up today. Only as far as she needed to go in order to survey the surrounding area. But she didn’t volunteer that information because it wasn’t anybody’s business. She’d had enough of people trying to talk her out of it, including her cousin. “I’ll be fine,” she reassured.

  “I’m sure ye will be,” the old woman replied, and fell silent—finally—while Annie went back to examining the strange rock in her hand.

  Unlike the rest of the crystals in the basket on the display case, this one was perfectly and unnaturally round, as though it had been created from a mold of some type. But it was heavy—not plastic. Testing its weight in the palm of her hand, she examined the striations at its center—milky ribbons. The first time Annie had peered into it, it had seemed colorless, though now it seemed to be turning a slight green…changing colors…like a mood stone. She glanced up to see that the shopkeeper was watching. The woman’s one
good eye flicked back and forth from the crystal in her hand to Annie’s face…as though waiting for some reaction.

  “Pretty,” Annie remarked.

  The shopkeeper nodded agreement.

  Minerals weren’t precisely Annie’s forte, but she did like them, and in a way, it was how she had begun her career. As a child, she had completely annoyed her parents by collecting every ugly rock she had encountered. A visit to Mammoth Caves had been her childhood version of Disney World. And in a way, it still was, though as far as careers went she had taken an entirely different path. Archeology and Linguistic Anthropology were the cornerstones of her studies. Currently—as always—she was obsessing over the origins of Lia Fàil, otherwise known as the Stone of Destiny. It was the subject of her senior dissertation, but while it had netted her a passing grade for the thoroughness of her research, her professor had deemed it completely unoriginal and took off points.

  Apparently—according to Professor Van Know-it-All—everyone was obsessed with the stone. Except that Annie wasn’t simply obsessed, she was consumed. Her father had been too. She came by her obsessions honestly, and perhaps after all these years, she was simply trying to find a connection to her parents. She missed them both terribly and somehow it seemed that visiting the past through its artifacts blurred the lines between life and death…maybe a little.

  As for the Stone of Destiny, she wanted to prove once and for all that the stone now on display in Edinburgh Castle wasn’t the original—a gut feeling that just wouldn’t die. But to do so she had to find some sort of physical evidence. Unfortunately, the currently acceptable theories had all found dead ends…except for one. For years Annie had been drawn to a particularly obscure report of a sighting near Kingussie, which also happened to be her father’s birthplace—a happy coincidence, because Annie had been making yearly treks here since her childhood and she knew the area very well.

  It made sense to her that the stone was hidden somewhere. Truly, if you were the abbot of Scone and the enemy was at your border, and you had three months to prepare for his arrival, knowing full well that he intended to steal Scotland’s most valued symbol of freedom, would you simply leave it in plain sight? Not to Annie’s way of thought. Who would do nothing and simply wait until Edward arrived? Not Annie. She would have hidden the stone somewhere in the hillside. And, in fact, the sandstone in the stone on display in Edinburgh had been quarried somewhere near Scone, while the original was supposed to have Biblical roots and had been hauled all the way from Ireland—supposedly. If that were true it would have been made of something entirely different. In general, there were just too many stories surrounding the stone, hinting at its inauthenticity, for there not to be some shred of truth in the legends…somewhere.

  She kept hearing her dad whisper in her ear: “Where there’s smoke there’s fire, Anniepie.”

  “Amen,” she muttered.

  “What’s that, lass?”

  “Where did you get this?” she asked the old woman, holding up the stone now, curious over its makeup.

  The shopkeeper’s green eye sparkled. “Well, as legend would have it, these are the crystalized tears of Cailleach Bheur.” She waved a hand over the basket.

  “Cailleach Bheur?”

  “Aye, she was—is—the Mother of Winter, guardian of all the Highlands,” she explained. “These tears were born of her heartbreak, and she gave one to the keepers of the Old Ways, so that by its light all truths might be known.”

  “Interesting,” Annie said. She hadn’t heard that one before. Was she supposed to believe someone cried perfectly round tears the size of a golf ball?

  The old shopkeeper was still watching her, and she would have walked away to avoid further conversation but the crystal held her transfixed. The others in the basket looked nothing like this one. She turned it in her hand, fascinated by its strange properties. It seemed to glow…as though it had its own energy source, but Annie couldn’t see any seams in the crystal that might indicate it could be opened and a battery inserted—or even that one might have been placed inside and then sealed. Tapping the crystal carefully on the display case, she wondered if it was plastic. It looked and felt like solid quartz.

  “Careful w’ that,” the old woman cautioned, her voice sounding as old as time itself. “It’s precious.”

  Precious.

  Annie smirked, flashing on Tolkien’s ring, described exactly that way by those obsessed with it. But this was just a rock, she reasoned, and she wasn’t obsessing over it. In fact, she already had enough obsessions. She didn’t need another. She set the crystal down gingerly into the basket and walked away to examine a display of pamphlets, wishing her cousin would hurry. Late Kate, they called her. She peered up at the clock on the wall: 10:17. Late again—as usual—which certainly had been a good thing yesterday while Annie had had to stick around the airport to fill out missing-bag reports. But this morning, it was simply annoying, because Annie couldn’t wait to get up into those hills.

  Down the street she could hear the sounds of festivity beginning as people congregated for the coming parade. She wanted to get out of here before then. Apparently, there was a heritage festival going on to celebrate the town’s historic presence. Annie thought maybe Kingussie had been established sometime during the Eighteenth Century, and a glance at a pamphlet verified the fact. Before then, it had been nothing but pinewoods. Originally called Ceann a' Ghiùthsaich, Kingussie was Gaelic for “head of the Pine Forest”—the forest being the vast Caledonian pinewoods that had once witnessed King Arthur’s battles and the demise of the Picts—incredibly romantic histories that had been at the center of a million bedtime stories all shared by Annie’s father. The ancient woods, formed after the last ice age, were nearly vanished now. Annie read somewhere that they were down to something like thirty-eight sites, all spattered across the Highlands. The land surrounding Bod an Deamhain was nearly devoid of trees now, though Annie would have loved to see it the way it had appeared a thousand years ago.

  She stared hard at the crystal, wishing with all her heart that she might have seen it for herself, and realized suddenly that she had unconsciously returned to the basket and had retrieved the crystal. This time while she held it she thought she detected threads of pink.

  It was changing colors.

  Mood stones were made of thermo tropic liquid crystals that responded to changes in temperature, altering the molecular structure so that light reflected through it as various colors—a bit like a prism. But this wasn’t exactly like a mood stone. The colored striations were too deep to be reacting to her body temperature, and the colors were vague, almost like an aura. She had never in her life encountered such a curious mineral.

  She could feel the old woman’s one good eye burrowing into her. “Are ye by chance a Chattan?” the shopkeeper asked.

  “Ross,” Annie said. “My father was born somewhere down the road,” she added, quite a bit distracted.

  “Raigmore?” the woman persisted.

  Annie met her gaze. The color of her eye was a little brighter than Annie’s, but green just the same. “Dunno. How much is this crystal?”

  A tiny wry smile curved the old woman’s lips. “’Tisna for sale, lass. As I said, ’tis precious.”

  Annie blinked, noting the orange price stickers on all the other crystals in the basket. Annoyed, she set the crystal down again, and managed to refrain from asking why it was in the basket to begin with if the woman didn’t intend to sell it.

  “However…I’ve a feeling ye were meant to have it,” the shopkeeper announced before Annie could turn away.

  Annie’s brow furrowed. If it was an attempt to wrangle more money out of the silly tourist, it wasn’t going to work. She wasn’t exactly your normal tourist anyway. “Thanks. I’m no longer interested,” she lied.

  “Ach, ye mistake me, lass.” The shopkeeper hurried over to pick the crystal up out of the basket and reached across the counter, handing it to Annie. In the woman’s hands the striations see
med to turn green again. “’Tis yours for the taking, if ye’ll have it.”

  Still Annie hesitated, not entirely certain she understood. But the scientist in her did a tiny little leap of glee. “You’re giving it to me?”

  The woman nodded. “If ye wish.”

  “But I thought—“

  “The Winter Stone chooses who it wishes to keep it, it chooses ye.”

  Annie stared at the crystal in the shopkeeper’s hand, blinking. The color now seemed to bleed into the rest of the crystal and even outside its translucent casing, casting a slight green hue on the woman’s face in the dim light of the shop. The shopkeeper’s green eye appeared all the greener by its light. Perfectly bizarre. Still Annie didn’t reach out to take it yet, because she couldn’t ascertain any logical reason why the woman would simply give it to her.

  “Really?”

  The woman nodded, her twinkling gaze almost as unnerving as the changing colors of the crystal.

  Still insisting that she take it, the woman pushed it closer and Annie finally accepted it. “Thanks,” she said. “That’s sweet of you.” But the instant she wrapped her hand about the crystal, she felt a sudden jolt down the length of her arm, and the crystal’s colors altered sharply to shades of red and pink and back to green. Startled, Annie’s gaze flicked back to the shopkeeper’s.

  The woman lifted a wiry white brow. “Fae magic,” she offered with a wink.

  Annie might have laughed at the explanation…she might have…if she could have formed a single rational thought over the reaction—hardly imagined, because the shopkeeper had witnessed it as well. It hadn’t hurt, really, just a little zap like she sometimes got from static, only slightly stronger. “You should let me pay you,” Annie insisted, a little dumbfounded.