She was a Seacliffe Grant and she’d stand tall against her foes.
She just wished she knew who they were.
* * *
“I heard you mumbling, lassie.”Her aunt Nettie joined her, plunked a sack of dried and silvered seaweed on a bench beside the window. A small, slight woman with a whirr of iron-gray hair and light blue eyes, she was the sister of Alanna’s late mother. “’Tis wasting your breath, you are. Thon lovers are a bard’s tale, nothing more. All know it and so do you, I’m thinking.”
“I don’t know one way or the other.” Alanna took a clump of seaweed and draped it across branches of red-berried rowan already fastened to the top of the arched window. She selected more seaweed – another Seacliffe holiday tradition, the sea tangle gathered at ebb tide and coupled with the sacred rowan, believed to ward off evil. Hoping so, she did the same with this batch, arranging the seaware to spill down both sides of the window.
Satisfied, she dusted her hands and turned to her aunt. “Knowing isn’t necessary. I feel the truth here.” She pressed a hand to her breast, ignored how her heart still beat way too fast. “Even if Torrad and Kadlin only existed in the fancy of some long-ago talespinner’s heart, all the many souls who have shed tears for them, have surely given them life.
“At the least, in the Otherworld.” Alanna believed it with the depth of her soul. “Yule does the rest, the magic of the ancients.”
“Pah!” Aunt Nettie plucked a curl of seaweed off Alanna’s sleeve, dropped it on a red-glowing brazier. “The ancients are as gone as thon bit of tangle ash,” she said, glancing at what remained of the seaweed curl. “Magic has ne’er helped the Grants and it willnae do so this Yule either – no matter how many cups of ale and crumbled bannocks you cast into the sea.”
“The idea is to honor the old ways.” Alanna turned back to the window, braced her hands of the cold, gritty stone of its ledge. She understood her aunt’s rejection of suchlike. After all, she’d seen much hardship, buried many beloved souls, and she’d toiled more than anyone Alanna knew, always struggling to keep Seacliffe from falling out of Grant hands.
Alanna strove to do the same.
But she wanted more.
A strong sense of duty kept her back straight and her shoulders squared, but resolve didn’t banish the cold of long and dark winter nights. Only one thing could do that, and – dangerous as such desires might be - she wasn’t quite ready to abandon her hopes, her belief in wonder and love, the true and abiding kind that bound theYuletide Lovers.
“Yule is upon us,” she said, and inhaled deeply of the chill sea air, let the crashing of the waves fill her ears, and her heart. “Those who have gone before us, every soul to ever call this place home, gathered sea tangle, rowan, and mistletoe to decorate this one tower chamber as our seafaring ancestors did.
“Even if we fill the hall below with holly, ivy, and evergreen boughs, whatever other trappings we have, here in this room, our ghosts feel welcome.” She sighed, sometimes feeling like a ghost herself, always yearning for times past, ways and customs long put aside.
“Our lost ones are at peace here,” she finished, hoping so, anyway. “They know we remember them.”
“There be no haints here, or anywhere.” Aunt Nettie jutted her chin.
“Some would disagree.”
“More would say there’s too much of your mother in you.” Her aunt asked. “Out with the fairies, she was. Always seeing and hearing things what weren’t there. Proved her downfall, didn’t it? Like as not she was following a swirl of mist, thinking she was chasing a green lady or mythical fawn when she walked off into a bog, ne’er to return.”
“Perhaps she was,” Alanna spoke plain. She didn’t add that more than a few at Seacliffe had seen green ladies, odd mists, and other inexplicable things over the years.
This was her battle.
And so she stood straighter, clasped her hands before her. “My mother was sure she saw such things.”
“Aye, and where did such fool notions land her?”
“Not in a good place,” Alanna admitted, reaching down to scratch the ears of the aged gray cat who appeared out of nowhere to press against her skirts, clearly wanting attention or food. “Even so, I doubt she’d change a thing about the life she had, or what she believed. She left us too soon, as did my father, but no one can say they weren’t happy. Such love as they shared is a rare gift.”
Aunt Nettie sniffed. “They were fools, both of them.”
“Perhaps.” Alanna scooped Gubbie into her arms and straightened, cuddling her now purring pet against her breast. “’Tis said love makes a soul foolish.”
And so does keeping stinky old cats in your bedchamber, Aunt Nettie grumbled under her breath.
Or so Alanna suspected, her ear tilted more to Gubbie’s purrs and mewls than her aunt’s fussing.
Aunt Nettie didn’t like cats.
“His breath smells fishy,” she complained, proving it.
“He eats herring.” Alanna smiled. “Salmon when we are lucky enough to get some.”
