Lord of Horses by H L Macfarlane

Author:H L Macfarlane [Macfarlane, H L]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Macfarlane Lantern Publishing
Published: 2019-11-29T22:00:00+00:00

Chapter Seventeen

Murdoch

“Sorcha, just what are you – Sorcha?”

Murdoch didn’t know what to do. One moment he was relaxing in the bath, allowing himself to quite literally dissolve in the water as his mood lifted drastically, and the next…

Sorcha had come crashing through the door and fallen straight into the tub. Going by the look on her face it hadn’t been deliberate; she was pale and surprised. And frightened, Murdoch realised, going by how much her pupils had contracted. But the very first moment she’d fallen into the bath Sorcha had been wearing a decidedly different look on her face.

She’d almost appeared charmed.

“Sorcha?” Murdoch ventured again. When he tried to help steady her Sorcha merely collapsed with her back against his chest, shaking slightly as she looked up at him through her eyelashes.

“I’m – I saw things,” she whispered. “Heard things.” Murdoch held a hand to her forehead; she was deathly cold, so he wrapped his arms around her to pull her even closer to him.

“What kind of things?” he asked. “Where did you see them?”

Sorcha didn’t respond at first. She dropped her head back down to stare at the steaming, frothy bathwater swirling all around them. “…the mirrors,” she finally admitted. “In the mirrors, and in the water jug, and in the windows, and in every shadowy corner I see them.”

It was Murdoch’s turn to feel his very core turn to ice. “The Unseelie,” he said through gritted teeth. “You are seeing the Unseelie, Sorcha.”

“I…thought it might be them,” she said. She fidgeted with the collar of her sodden bed-shirt; Murdoch imagined it wasn’t particularly comfortable to wear in a bath. Sorcha glanced back up at him. “Lachlan warned me about them when I told him about being followed through the streets.”

Murdoch stiffened. He tightened his grip around Sorcha’s waist. “You never mentioned anything supernatural about your being followed to me,” he bit out tersely. “Why did you tell Lachlan, when he is hundreds of miles away?”

“I do not know.”

She trusts him more than me, Murdoch realised. Down here, in an unfamiliar place dealing with unfamiliar people, she trusts her faerie more than me. And I have made it worse for her by staying distant. What can I do now to be the one she will rely on?

Sorcha turned her head to stare at the doorway, growing pale once more. “They keep following me. They beg me for songs. I don’t know what their intentions are. What am I to do, Murdoch?”

“Well you can stay in the bath with me, for one,” he said, an idea finally blooming in his mind.

She frowned. “And what will – how does that help me?”

Murdoch released his iron grip of her waist in order to trail his fingertips through the water; Sorcha followed the patterns they made with her eyes. “So long as there is no competition for a particular body of water,” he explained, “a kelpie automatically claims dominion over it. The Unseelie cannot touch you in here.”

When the water began to darken and swirl around them Sorcha gasped.

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