Warrior's Bride (37 page)

  "What are you thinking about?" Douglas asked as his hands cupped her cheeks and he tilted her face up to look into his eyes.

  "Glass and stones." Her mind was whirling as if she were still dancing just from the look of love in his eyes. "What did you do with the two halves of the Seer's Stone? You are now their guardian. How will you keep them safe?"

  "Curious that you should mention those two things— glass and stone—in the same sentence." He tipped up her head to the ceiling, to what must have been a thousand glass bulbs that hung suspended overhead. Each brilliantly colored bulb caught and scattered the light from the giant torches that hung from the walls, bathing the room in a profusion of prismatic light. "The best place to hide things is in plain view of everyone."

  Her gaze snapped back to his. Had he encased the stones in a sea of glass and added them to the rest of the decorations? "You didn't." "I did."

  "But will the stones still hold the same power, encased as they are in glass?" she whispered.

  "Who needs a Seer's Stone? If I want to know the future, all I have to do is look into your eyes." He smiled then, his expression far lighter than she'd ever seen it, free of the shadows of his past, free of obligations, free of duty, filled only with love and joy and anticipation of the future ahead.

  She smiled in return as the light of the colored globes highlighted his dark hair with its one streak of white. "The future looks very bright, indeed!"

Afterword

  As is the case with much of fiction, a little fact and a little fantasy went in to creating
Warrior's Bride.

  The original idea for the story emerged while researching Scottish tartans, when I read a story about a woman named Lady Grange. In 1725, Lady Grange was kidnapped by her husband, who wished to be rid of her, and his friend Lord Lovat, who wrongly assumed she knew too many political secrets about the Jacobites. They took her to the Isle of St. Kilda, where she was imprisoned for more than six years.

  Even though it was common knowledge that Lord Lovat, along with her husband, had engineered the kidnapping, no inquiry into the extraordinary circumstances was ever made, and long before any rescue attempt, she died of neglect and loneliness.

  Desiring justice, even through the pages of fiction, for Lady Grange, I gave her a daughter to see this through and to make the lonely days of isolation not seem so despairing.

  The destiny stone featured in this book was also a real stone that did not have a name. As legend has it, a seventeenth-century visionary named Cuinneach Odhar (Kenneth MacKenzie, from Uig on Skye), who was referred to as the Brahan seer, used a small white divination stone to foretell the future. The stone was passed on to him from his mother, who had acquired it from a Viking princess.

  With the pebble pressed against his eye, Cuinneach foretold everything from outbreaks of measles in the village to the building of the Caledonian Canal, the Clearances, and World War II. His visions brought him widespread fame, but it also resulted in his untimely death when the Countess of Seaforth summoned him after her husband was late from a trip to France. Reluctandy, he told the countess that he saw her husband in the arms of another woman. At this, she flew into a rage and ordered him to be thrown headfirst into a barrel of boiling tar.

  Before his execution, which took place near Brahan Castle on Chanonry Point, Cuinneach made his last prediction: When a deaf and dumb earl inherited the estate, the Seaforth line would end. His prediction finally came true in 1815 when the last earl, who was indeed a deaf mute, died.

  I chose to take the brutal end for this unfortunate seer and turn his fate around. I changed his name to Brahan MacGregor and gave him the gift of sight with the use of the Seer's Stone.

  One last historical note: Robert II, King of Scotland, sired twenty-four children with four different women, two of whom were his mistresses, two of whom were his wives. I chose to give him an additional child with his mistress Marion Cardney for the purposes of this story.

  That the Black Wolf of Scotland, Isobel, or Brahan never existed in history is a fact. It was my goal, within the pages of Warrior's Bride, to give these characters and the real people their creation issued from a chance to find a happy and more fulfilling end to their own personal stories.

Discover Other Books by Gerri Russell

Other books in The Stones of Destiny Series

The Warrior Trainer

Warrior’s Lady

Brotherhood of the Scottish Templars Series

To Tempt a Knight

Seducing the Knight

A Knight to Desire

Border Lord’s Bride

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