“And listen to her now!” The hateful voice was a croak of derision, echoed by a snort from the bulky gray shadow that was Bogle. “She cannot crawl yet and she is wanting to run!” And this time the blow fell on Kelpie’s high, thin cheekbone before she could think to duck. “Look into the crystal, amadain!”
Kelpie considered further defiance and then decided against it. She didn’t really feel up to another beating tonight, and she did want to learn witchcraft. So she permitted Mina’s long gnarled hand to clutch her own so that Kelpie would be able to see what Mina did. For a seer could share his sight with another by touching him, and Kelpie, said Mina, was not yet ready to see alone. Night after night, for as long as she could remember, Kelpie had looked into the ball with Mina, describing what she saw, while the old woman questioned and corrected her.
“Now,” said Mina, and Kelpie stared into the luminous ball. First it clouded, then the center began to glow dully, and then a vague picture developed. Kelpie’s dark head bent forward on its long neck, and her eyes grew wide and fixed....
Two young men were riding along a loch-side on fine horses, with a blond giant behind them on a shaggy Highland pony. Bright tartan filleadh mór—the bulky great-kilts—beat heavily against their thighs and swung over their shoulders, and their heads were high with the proud confidence of the well-born.
Kelpie recognized one of them. Young Glenfern, it was, whose father was a minor chieftain of Clan Cameron, and who had once given her a farthing and a sudden compassionate smile that lit his grave dark-eyed face like sunshine. The smile had roused in Kelpie a strange sensation of joy and resentment combined, and the feeling came back now as she stared. There was gladness behind the composure of his face as he rode, and his dark shoulder-length hair lifted in the breeze. And Kelpie, ignorant of the eternal attraction of lad for lass, frowned at the pleasant pain of her own feelings. She spared no more than a glance for the other young man in MacDonald tartan, whose narrow face seemed composed of straight lines, whose freckles matched the blaze of his red hair, whose expression seemed to laugh at all the world.
“Who is that?” muttered Mina, peering. “What will they be to us? Do you know them?”
“No,” lied Kelpie, whose policy was to deceive Mina and Bogle whenever possible, just on principle.
“I would be seeing something of the King, or the war, or Mac Cailein Mor,” said Mina fretfully.
Kelpie spared her a narrow, speculative glance. Why was Mina so interested of late in politics? Of what benefit to her was the blaze of civil war sweeping through the remote world of England and even the less remote world of the Lowlands? As far as Kelpie could see, it affected them not at all—except, of course, that Mac Cailein Mor, Marquis of Argyll, Chief of Clan Campbell, was head of the Covenant army of the Lowlands and therefore a merciless hunter of witches. But then Mac Cailein Mor came into these Western Highlands only now and then, and merely to wipe out here and there a few of the clans whom he had always hated. A terrible fierce enemy he was, no doubt, and one deserving the Evil Eye—but what was he to Mina, at all?
“Is it still the lads riding, then?” Mina persisted. “And who will they be, whatever?”