Alex grinned flippantly at her, but the angles of his face seemed softened, and his voice as well. He seemed to be laughing at her and at himself too. “Perhaps, mo chridhe, it was for the same reason that you spoke out when you needed only to stay still. Can you answer me your own question, Kelpie? Why did you come forth?”
“I was daft, just!” she retorted promptly. “And,” she added, remembering, “there was a thing in me pushing where I was not wanting to go.” She frowned.
“There has been a thing in me too, this long while,” said Alex softly, and for an instant he saw her as she had appeared from the shadows to face Argyll—intense then too, but heartbreakingly brave, nearly tearing him apart with joy for her gallantry and with despair for its result. And he had not known, then, the full horror of what she was facing, that she was giving herself up to be burned as a witch.
She was regarding him with annoyance. “I think it was a spell, whatever,” she announced accusingly.
Alex looked at her oddly. “Aye so, a spell,” he muttered with a wry twist to his mouth. “And I with a fondness for merry, fair-haired lassies, like my sweet Cecily in Oxford. And now she will have to marry Ian, just, though perhaps neither of them will mind much. I have never cared for witches!” he told her plaintively. “And especially not black-haired ones, with dark, pointy faces, all uncanny eyes. It’s never a moment’s peace I shall have again; but ’tis a terrible, strong spell you have put on me, and I cannot break it. Och, there’s no way at all out of it, but I shall have to marry you, just!”
“Marry me!” Kelpie’s shock reached to the very soles of her feet.
“Ou, aye,” answered the outrageous lad, wagging his head sadly. “And a dreadful life it will be, never a doubt of it, wed to a wild wee water witch. But marry you I must, for I cannot help myself.”
“I can, then!” Kelpie sizzled with outrage. “Did you never think of consulting me? Were you thinking I would—Dhé! I’d sooner be wedding the sea horse in Loch Ness, or Argyll himself! And the very conceit of you to be thinking it! ’Tis a spell indeed I’ll be putting on you! Wait until I learn the Evil Eye, and then see will you not be begging my mercy, and with the horrid spots all over you, and—”
Alex silenced her by the simple expedient of putting his lips firmly over hers. When at last he lifted them, it was to laugh into her startled and indignant eyes with the old mockery.
“I’m thinking,” he said, just as if she had never uttered a word of her last speech, “that I shall have to be taking you out of Scotland altogether, or sooner or later it would be to the stake with the both of us. And in any case, what else could I be doing with the gypsy wanderlust in your feet?”