Then there was the matter of her name. “Have you not a proper Christian name?” asked Lady Glenfern while Kelpie’s matted hair was being violently combed and plaited into two long, thick tails. Kelpie, unable to shake her head, and with eyes smarting from the pulling, made a sound that meant no.
“My sorrow!” remarked her new mistress. “A strange thing to be naming a lass for a water witch! Would you not rather be called something else? Rena, perhaps, or Morag?”
But Kelpie caught a glimpse of herself just then in the small mirror that stood on a table, and a fleeting shaft of panic shot through her. It wasn’t herself at all! Her face was a stranger, with the dirt off and the hair pulled back wetly to show all of her eyes and forehead and even her fawn-shaped ears. Dhé! If they changed her name as well, perhaps she would cease altogether to be herself and become someone else entirely!
“No!” she said vehemently. And the subject was dropped.
But when they gave her a fine-woven blue woolen dress of Eithne’s for her very own, and even something to wear under it, she began to take a more favorable view of the situation. And when, in the afternoon, she met Ian coming in the front door, he hardly seemed to know her at first. His eyes opened wide as he shook the heavy rain from his plaidie, and then he gave her one of his rare and sudden smiles that was like sunlight out of the drenching sky. Kelpie grinned back, preening herself frankly in her new finery.
“Och, aren’t you grand, just!” Ian said admiringly.
“Oh, aye,” agreed Kelpie, seeing no reason to deny it. “But I should have a pocket and a wee bit of silver to put in it,” she added hopefully.
Ian laughed at her cheekiness. “Perhaps some day,” he said. “But I know that you will not be stealing them, for you have said you won’t, and I trust you.”
There it was again! Kelpie shook her head in wonder. That wasn’t at all the reason she wouldn’t be stealing, and how could he be so daft as to think it? His warm brown eyes and the lovely chiseled, sensitive curve of his mouth quite melted Kelpie, and before she could stop herself she was warning him.