Warrior of the Highlands by Veronica Wolff, now you can read online.
Prologue
Campbell stared at the woman. She seemed an ill-used and wizened creature, despite the fact that she was likely not much older than his forty-three years. The moon's watery light picked out but a few white strands marbling her red hair, and yet her body was hunched into a rigid bow, fat and muscle stretched thin and tight on her bones.
He shifted. He'd have the woman get on with her ritual. His clansmen would look in horror at such black witchcraft, but the trepidation he'd initially felt was waning, and Campbell grew piqued with each passing minute. He resented sitting on the ground like some rustic, his back aching, with small rocks biting into his palms every time he adjusted his weight on the cold, packed dirt.
He tried to take her measure. It had taken coin aplenty to track the witch down, but her reserve planted the seed of doubt in his head: Was she truly one to be feared, or was she merely some shrewd carlin adept at parting men from their purses?
Though he stared openly at her, Campbell could get no more than a passing glance of her face full-on. Her eyes focused on a place in the far distance and didn't deign rest on him, always wavering ever so slightly as if she were blind, though he knew she was not. She moved in the darkness like a cat, and Campbell saw clearly how those who knew of such things told of witches choosing the detested animal as their familiar.
He would see if this Finola had powers. And he would burn her himself if she wasn't the sorceress she claimed.
Finola. His skin crawled. Campbell knew the name meant “white shoulder,” and it thrust intimate and unwelcome images into his head. Fragments of ivory skin. The fall of red hair onto a pale shoulder.
He gave himself a shake. Perhaps it was the dark arts at work. Perhaps she had the power to shift shape into some fiendish consort for Lucifer himself. Unthinking, he spat into the ritual lire to exorcise such thoughts.
Finola's gaze shot up to meet his. The flames set her green and yellow eyes to glowing, and Campbell imagined he saw evil glimmering there, like an oily shadow sliding just beneath the surface. He'd hoped to catch her in a glimpse head-on, and now he just wished her to look away.
His voice cracked in the darkness. Anything to break the spell he felt chilling through his flesh down into his bones.
“When will you begin, woman?”
The sinister glare receded like a retracting membrane from her eyes, and what was left was simply Finola regarding him with distaste. “You yearn for your enemy like a spurned child. Your impatience makes drudgery of a simple task.”
He pursed his lips. Impatience indeed.
There was a task at hand - he need not suffer the scoldings of some witch woman.
His clan harbored a long-running feud against Clan MacDonald. But it was Alasdair MacColla who'd raised the stakes, using his Royalist battles as an excuse to douse Scottish soil with the blood of untold numbers of Campbell sons.
And it was MacColla he'd destroy.
“I paid you good coin to help me ruin him.”
Campbell's bravado was met with impenetrable silence. The witch merely set back to work, using her thumbs to mold the final touches on the clay figure lying before her. “You desire MacColla,” she said finally. “And so here he is.”
She leaned back to reveal a crude effigy, the reds and browns of the Highland earth packed together in a featureless, calico likeness of a man.
“The corp creadha. The clay body of your enemy MacColla.” She retrieved a handful of silken black strands from a pouch at her waist and systematically worked clumps into the crown of the tacky clay. “The hair of the sister recalls the man.”
And then Finola struck fast, like a snake, reaching over to grab Campbell's hand, slicing his palm with a tiny steel blade.
“How dare ”
“You will silence your tongue, or I will exact your silence from you.” For the second time, the witch's eyes met his.
Campbell's mouth went dry. The first traces of true fear seeped into him shuddering up his spine, leaving his blood chilled in its wake. He would remember his purpose here. Remember what he was about. He was a man of stature who could kill this Finola with but a word. And he would use whatever it took - use her - to ruin MacColla once and for all.
She spoke again, but this time her voice was hollow, otherworldly. “We come in the night to a place where three streams meet.”
Squeezing his hand with surprising strength, Finola pulled Campbell close to the corp creadha, drizzling his blood over the eye sockets she'd hollowed from the clay. “That the enemy sees the blood of your hatred.”
Finola pulled a bone from the sleeve of her cloak, dull and yellow brown where the meat was scraped clean from the blade of a lamb's shoulder. “We place the speal upon the heart of your enemy.” Firelight licked red shadows along the surface of the bone, placed on the torso of the clay corpse. “That the enemy feels the blade of your vengeance.”
Power thrilled up Campbell's spine, dissolving his apprehension. He would strike the deathblow to MacColla and Clan MacDonald. The blade of his vengeance. Campbell gave a small smile at the sound of it.
She took tongs from the dirt at her side and began to extract charred river stones from the flames, placing them one by one around the effigy. “That the enemy burns in the flames of your destruction.”
Aye, burn MacColla. Campbell would annihilate him. Their clans had feuded over land and power for generations. But with the war that now raged through Ireland and the Highlands, the rivalry had curdled into something venomous. Something murderous. Burn.