She’d clapped and sparkled delighted eyes at him. “Sounds like an adventure!” But then her face had sobered as though she’d remembered something particularly distasteful.
“What?” he’d asked anxiously.
“Only that … I think I’m supposed to marry someone else.”
Dougan snarled, shaking her wee shoulders. “Who?”
“Mr. Warrington.” She continued upon seeing the anger and puzzlement in his eyes. “He—he worked with my father and is the one who left me here. He said that when I’m a woman, he’ll come to collect me, and we are to be married.”
A cold desperation stole into his blood. “Ye canna marry anyone else, Fairy. You belong to me. Only me.”
“What do we do?” She fretted.
Dougan thought furiously as they trembled against each other in the arid library, the threat of a future separation driving them together. Suddenly, he was struck by genius.
“Go to bed, Fairy. Tomorrow night, instead of meeting me here in the library, let’s meet in the vestry.”
Dougan had waited for her in the vestry with the only memento of his family he’d ever owned. A scrap of Mackenzie plaid. He’d bathed and scrubbed and yanked the tangles out of his straight black hair before tying it back with a string.
Farah’s unruly curls poked around the heavy doors to the chapel, and when she’d spied him standing next to the altar, only illuminated by a lone candle, the brilliance of her smile had preceded her down the aisle. She wore her simple white nightdress that pleased him to no end, and her bare feet poked out from the long hem with her every step.
He offered his hand to her, and she took it without hesitation. “You look very fine,” she whispered. “What are we doing in here, Dougan?”
“I’m here to marry ye,” he murmured.
“Oh?” She looked around curiously. “With no priest?”
“We doona need priests in the Highlands,” he scoffed gently. “Our weddings are bound by many gods rather than just one. And they come when we ask, not when a priest says.”
“That sounds even better,” she agreed with a fervent nod.
They knelt facing each other in front of the altar, and Dougan wrapped his faded plaid around their joined right hands.
“Just say what I say, Fairy,” he murmured.
“All right.” She looked up at him with those eyes, and Dougan experienced a pang of love so intense and ferocious it felt as though it didn’t belong in this holy room.
He began the incantation he remembered from watching once from behind his mother’s skirts when he was young.
Ye are blood of my blood, and bone of my bone.
I give ye my body, that we two might be one.
I give ye my spirit, ’til our life shall be done.
Farah needed a bit of prompting to remember all the words, but she said them with such fervency that Dougan was touched.
Slipping a ring of a willow herb vine onto her finger, he recited the sacred olde vows with perfect clarity, but translated them into English for her sake.
I make ye my heart
At the rising of the moon.
To love and honor,
Through all our lives.
May we be reborn,