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NOTE:  In the third Highlander movie, Connor moved to Scotland with Alexandra Johnson and his adopted son, John, in 1994.  In my story-universe, Alex got pregnant via artificial insemination and gave birth to twins--Sara and Colin--in December of 1996.  Cassandra and Ramirez were friends and lovers from 500 BCE to 1542, and Connor and Cassandra were lovers from 1592-1630.  Cassandra and Richie met at Connor's house on New Year's Day in 1997.

This story takes place about one year after Duncan walked away from the barge in the last episode "Not To Be."  Duncan is still in his "beige" mood.
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Where dips the rocky highland
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I am in the Highlands again, a land of gray rock and rushing glen, a land of dark waters pooled between hills, pooled into narrow fingers of lochs, fingers belonging to no hand.  I know these rocks, these hills, these winds that carry the scent of the sea.  I was born to this land over four hundred years ago, born to the clan MacLeod, born to be a warrior, a leader of my people.

I am born to no one.  I have no mother, no father.  I am Duncan MacLeod, and I am immortal.

The wind shivers, sending secret whispers dancing between the tall and tufted reeds, raising ripples on the water of the loch, bringing the salt-tear taste of the sea.  I climb from the shore of the water, up into the forested hills.  I lie on my back on the earth, on layers of leaves, and the autumn sky blazes blue between thin-fingered branches, between leaves of scarlet, gold, and brown.  The oaks stand quiet sentinel, and peace comes dropping slow.

I am in the Highlands, and I have come home.

After a timeless time I hear it, high up in the air, a song, wordless and clear.  I follow the sound, as I have followed it once before.  I see her before I sense her, sitting by a narrow burn, her bare feet barely in the water, her hair unbound and flowing over a simple dress of green.  The song stops when she sees me, but neither of us is surprised.  Cassandra and I have met in the woods before.

"Are you an angel?" I had asked on that long-ago day when I was but thirteen, staring--and trying not to stare--at the woman all-unclothed before me.  She wore a gown of filmy blue and a veil across her hair, but I had seen her bathing naked in the pool, and naked she remained.  This was not how Father Andrew had described angels, but perhaps he had been wrong.  I could hope.  "Am I in heaven?"

"No, not for a long time yet," she had answered, smiling, and that has certainly been true.  There has been no heaven for a long time.

I walk to meet her by the stream, then stop as a large, black dog bounds from the trees, panting, ears pricked, eyes alert.  "Finn!" Cassandra calls.  "Friend."  Finn goes to Cassandra's side, still watching me.

I approach slowly, then let Finn sniff my hands and feet.  The dog is satisfied, but remains close by.  "No white wolf this time?" I ask Cassandra, and she laughs.  I have never heard her laugh before.  I have not heard her sing, either, not since that day long past.  She has found her voice since last I saw her nearly three years ago, at the christening of Connor's children, on that New Year's Day that had seemed so full of promise, so full of life.

"No," she says, still smiling, "no wolf."

"And are you the witch of these woods?" I ask her now, as I had asked her when I was thirteen.

"Some used to say that."  Her smile fades, and she lays her hand on my arm and names me.  "Duncan MacLeod of the clan MacLeod."

I used to be that.

"Come," she says and picks up her shoes, swinging them in one hand.  I tighten my pack, and we walk side-by-side through the ancient oaks, while Finn charges after squirrels and races before us.

I am in the Highlands, and everything has changed.
 

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There was a man whom Sorrow named his friend
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We walk past gorse bushes and brambles of raspberry, up from the shore of the loch.  She leads me past cheerful geraniums to the red-painted door of a white-washed house.  The village lies a mile or so farther down the loch; this house stands alone in once-farmed fields.

"Tea?" she suggests and sets a copper kettle on the electric stove.

"Have you lived here long?" I ask, wandering about the living room, looking at the books on the shelves, the embroidery frame in the corner, the harp on its stand near a stool.  Cassandra has been teaching music at a girls' school in the Highlands for several years now, but I have never visited her.

"No, I'm house-sitting for Annie Dyson, one of the other teachers at the school," she replies from the small kitchen, cutting apples into rounds.  "And pet-sitting," she adds, pausing to caress Finn's ears.  He wags his tail, then flops on the coolness of the gray slate floor.  "Usually I live in one of the dormitories as a house-mother, and I'll go back to that after the winter break.  Annie and her husband Lee will be back from Rome before Christmas, and Alex and Connor have invited me to stay with them for the holidays, as usual."

I nod, but say nothing.  I have not spoken to my kinsman Connor in ten months, not since I walked away from my barge in Paris, not since I walked away from everything--and everyone.

We sit on rush-woven chairs at a wooden table and sip tea, speaking of simple things, of the weather and the harvest and the day.  A tabby cat stretches on the kitchen windowsill, claws kneading air, then jumps to the floor and onto her lap. "His name is Mercutio," she tells me as the tom arranges himself comfortably and stretches out his neck so she can rub underneath his chin.  Bees hum outside, among the garden and the glade.

I sleep for a time, on a narrow bed tucked under low eaves.  When I wake, Cassandra is singing downstairs, and rain patters the window.  The crisp warmth of baking bread beckons, and I follow.  We eat at the same wooden table, soup and bread and salad, with brownies for dessert.

I am glad of the brownies, of the chocolate in them, in the same way I am glad of the computer against the wall and the glossy-colored magazines in the living room.  They are real, they are now, and too many things today are not.  I have sat at a wooden table with Cassandra before, eating bread and soup, when I was thirteen.

"Tell me of life in your village, Duncan," she had said to me then, the Witch of Donan Woods to the boy-man of the clan.  She had glimmered beautiful and fey before me, her bright hair veiled, her green eyes dark and knowing, while flickers from the fire wavered between us and cast shadows on us all.

I had spoken to her of my life, of my childish escapades, of my best friend and cousin Robert, of my mother's cooking and my father's lessons.

She had smiled at me across the table.  "And what do you want your life to be like, when you are older?"

I had told her everything--all my plans of being a clan chieftain, all my hopes of marrying Debra, all my dreams of honor and glory--and she had smiled through them all, knowing they could never be.

Before he became an Immortal, Richie had told me his dreams in just the same way--dreams of finding his father, his mother, dreams of having his own family someday.  I had listened and nodded, knowing they could never be, in just the same way.

Cassandra is smiling now, faintly, but her hair is loose and shining under the steady harshness of electric lights, and there is nothing fey or otherworldly in this kitchen of plastic and chrome.  Cassandra tells me to be at ease, that she will clean the dishes, and I move to the living room to sit by the window in an overstuffed chair, a glass of whisky in my hand.

On the table nearby lies a book, leather-bound, dark green and old.  Old for these days, that is, more than fifty years.  It is poetry by Yeats, his pennings of the Celtic spirit that never can be penned.  I flip it open, and on the speckled cover page are written two inscriptions, one old and faded, one recent and clear.

  For William Adamson, a scholar who neither shuffles nor coughs,
  nor rubs the carpet with his shoes.
     W. B. Yeats, December 12th, 1927.

Below that comes a slanting, spare hand I recognize, though I have seen it only in scribbled notes left on my refrigerator or on my door.

For C,
  "All changed, changed utterly."
    - M

"Methos gave this to you?" I ask Cassandra, startled into asking.

She nods once.  "Two years ago, in April."

"I didn't know you two were ...," I begin, but I cannot finish, for I do not know what they are to each other, these two ancient Immortals who have been master and slave, perhaps lovers in a way, then sworn enemy on one side and a lasting regret on the other.

"We're speaking to each other," she tells me.  "Or at least e-mailing.  I think he's in Germany now."  She grimaces as she stacks the dishes.  "He sends me the most atrocious puns."

"Me, too," I tell her, and I grimace now.  His puns are truly atrocious, spanning languages and centuries.  Only Immortals can completely appreciate them; I suspect he sends Cassandra more than he ever sent me.  She runs water for washing, and I go back to the book.  Some pages fall open easily, and those poems I read, wondering if they have been so marked by Cassandra or Methos or by both.  Tearstains spangle "Crazy Jane Grown Old Looks at the Dancers," and I murmur words with the murmured rain.

  / Did he die or did she die?
  / Seemed to die or died they both?
  / ................................
  / *Love is like the lion's tooth.*

I set down the book and reach for my whisky, that peat-smoke, heather-flower distilled essence of my past, that sharp bite that glows and fades, that leaves me wanting more.  Mercutio leaps to the arm of the chair, then surveys his territory before settling to sleep on my lap.  His fur lies soft beneath my hand.

Cassandra goes to her harp, to the music trapped in that tensed curve of wood and string.  Her head bends to the instrument, listening, and her neck and her arms are drowned in her long, bright hair.  She sings soft tones to herself, and graceful hands turn the key to tune the strings, hands she has said that Methos has broken.

I asked Methos about that, two years ago or more, when we first met again in Paris, in that cold wet spring after that long silent winter, before that hollow empty year, and the hollowness that has followed me ever since.

"She said you broke her hands," I told Methos, while he stared out the porthole of my barge, his back stiff, his face averted.  No need to say her name, we both knew who "she" was.

Cassandra has said more than that.  She has said that Methos had broken each finger, one by one, waiting in between for her to heal.  First one hand, then the other, over and over again, to tame her to his will.

She hasn't told me, of course.  Cassandra never speaks to me of what Methos had done to her when she had been his slave--never one time, never one word, except when she had labeled herself his "convenience."  She spoke only to Connor, my kinsman--her friend.

"Do you *know* what 'your friend' did to her?" Connor had asked me, enraged and sickened, unable to believe I could know and still claim Methos as a friend.

I didn't know precisely, but it didn't matter.  "He's not like that anymore," I insisted, sure of that.

Then Connor told me what Methos had done to her hands.  "That was just the beginning," Connor added.  "Then he would order her to touch him, to--"  He swore viciously and slammed his fist into the wall, unable to finish.

He didn't need to finish.  I was sickened, too, and suddenly I wasn't so sure.  Suddenly, it did matter.  Methos had told me of the raids and the rapes, of the "ten thousand" murdered, of the thousand years of bloodlust.  But this act of deliberate, repeated cruelty to a woman I knew--a woman I had made love to, a woman I had held in my arms while she cried in grief and fear, a woman whose hands had touched me--this act of torture leading to sex, this pleasure in another's pain....

This I had not *known*, not really.

I needed to know.  I needed to know exactly what Methos was, what he had been, what he might be.  I needed to know before I could ever hope to name him friend.

"She said you broke her hands," I had said to Methos, the first day he came to visit me after the long winter of silence, and then I stood there, waiting.

His hands clenched into fists, then clenched and unclenched over and over again, in time to the beating of my heart.  His heart, too, the heart of a man, of a Horseman, the heart of a man like me.

The word came, the word I had known would come.

"Yes."

Hard and angry it came, defiant and ashamed, coming between us as it had come between us before--shattering each of us, one by one, over and over again, with not nearly enough time to heal.

"Whatever she tells you I did," Methos spat out, his hardness hiding his softness, "whatever she tells you, the answer is 'yes.'  If not to her, then to someone else."  His eyes were like her eyes--like my eyes--wells of dark knowledge and dark pain.

So then I knew what he had been, and I saw what he was, and I saw what he might be--what I had been, what I might be.  I saw through to the hollow of his heart, the hollowness where my words echoed and re-echoed, reflections of rejections.  The ancient whispered words of sorrowed burdens faded to inarticulate moans, and then to an empty silence.

We could not bear that emptiness between us.  "Want a beer?" I had asked him, and we had lain back on couches and drank, speaking uneasily of easy things, until the uneasiness faded away, and the healing could begin.

Cassandra's soft tones fade, and she begins to play, the once-shattered hands swift and sure, graceful and commanding on the strings.  Connor gave her that harp, three years ago come Christmas-tide.  Connor gave her back her music, and now she plays for me.

The tune pulls me deeper, a low lilting lullaby, a rocking of the cradle on the waves.

"*Ushag vey ruy ny moanee doo, moanee doo, moanee doo*," Cassandra sings in the Gaelic.  She sings of the *ushag vey ruy*, the little red bird on the black moor, *ny moanee doo*.  Her words come swift and slow, a fast-ebbing tide that drags, that leaves me drowning in the sea.

I go to the window and look out at the gray-misted hills through the slanting rain, and Cassandra sings for me.

  / Ushag vey ruy ny moanee doo, oh, where did you sleep last night?

  / Out on a gorse bush dark and wide, dark and wide, dark and wide
  /   Swift the rain fell on every side.
  /   My sleep was hard last night.

My sleep was hard last night, and the rain has been swift and dark and cold.

  / Ushag vey ruy ny moanee doo, oh, where did you sleep last night?

  / Did I not sleep on a swaying briar, a swaying briar, a swaying briar?
  /   Tossing about as the wind rose higher.
  /   My sleep was hard last night.

The sea rises, the wind rises, and the voice goes on.

  / Ushag vey ruy ny moanee doo, oh, where did you sleep last night?

  / Did I not sleep on a white-topped wave, a white-topped wave, a white-topped wave,
  /   Where many a man has found his grave?
  /   My sleep was hard last night.

"Hush now," my mother says, her wool shawl scratching against my cheek, nestling me in her arms.  "Sleep now, my child, my son."  Her lips press warm against my forehead; my father sleeps nearby.  "Sleep, Donnchadh."

  / Ushag vey ruy ny moanee doo, oh, where did you sleep last night?

My mother sings for me, this song I have known all my life.

  / Wrapped in two leaves I lay at ease, lay at ease, lay at ease.
  /   As sleeps the young babe on its mother's knees.
  /   My sleep was sweet last night.

My face is wet with tears, and my mother's voice is gone.

Cassandra's once-broken, oft-broken hands continue, drawing forth music from dark wells of silence and pain, but I can listen no longer.  I leave the house and go out into the rain, past the dark gorse bush and the swaying briar, out to the white-topped waves.

She follows me to the shore.  "How did you know that?" I ask her, my back stiff, my face averted.

"Your Aunt Aileen taught me that song," Cassandra answers.

My Aunt Aileen, wife to my father's brother, mother to my cousin Robert.  Robert, my best friend.  Robert, my foster-brother.

Robert, the first man I killed.

Even then--even then--I brought my friends to death.  I walk on, and Cassandra does not follow me this time.
 

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I wander by the edge of this desolate lake
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The wind is rising, the rain is cold and dark and swift.  There is no moon.  It is almost autumn now, the dying of the year, but when I remember Robert, it is always in the spring.

It was springtime when we went together into Donan Woods, when we were both thirteen and eager to prove ourselves to be men, to hunt down the wolf that had been killing our clan's sheep.  "Come on, Robert," I had challenged him, "what do you say?"  He came with me to Donan Woods, laden with sword and knife and rope, two boys setting out on a grand adventure, a daring game.

But the white wolf found us first, and it came for me.  Even then, I had been the chosen one.  That was the beginning of the strangeness between us, the first rift.  I had seen the Witch of Donan Woods and been touched by magic, and Robert remained the same.

Ten years or more later, as spring gave way to summer, Debra gouged another rift between us, and Robert challenged me.  "You'll not make me a cuckold, damn you!" he said, his eyes wild with jealousy and hate, for Debra loved me, even though she was promised to him. "You've turned her heart against me!" he cried, and once again I was the chosen one.  "Draw your blade," Robert demanded, his own sword in his hand.

"We've been friends all our lives," I reminded him.  "Let me pass."

"Coward!" he spat and backhanded me across the face.

My cheek burned as the word hummed in my ears.  The clan stood watching, a silent circle, but I would not fight him.  "If you were not kin, you'd be dead where you stand," I snarled back, and then I turned to go.

My father came before me.  "You'll not walk away from this!" he commanded, and above all my protests and my mother's pleas, he insisted.  "No MacLeod could turn his back on such words."

And so I drew my blade, and I slew my friend.  Robert died in my arms, his blood on my hands.  His mother Aileen never spoke to me again.

I wander with slow steps along the shore, and I listen to the rain.  I know this rain, as I know this land, this homeland--this strange land.  I have wandered far, and I wander still.  A crumbled tower looms in the darkness, a ruined cromlech, a broken tooth in the gaping maw of war that has devoured this land.

I take some shelter there, for the rain comes harder, blinding me, but still I see their faces.  Robert was not the only friend to die at my hand, or to die in my arms--Bess, Gabriel, Michael, Tommy, Neferteri, Paul, Brian, Garrick, Charlie, Kamir, Sean, Jakob, Ingrid ...

Tessa.

Richie.

I burrow my head into my arms, my back to the world.

  / A storm-beaten old watch-tower,
  / A blind hermit rings the hour.

  / All destroying sword-blade still
  / Carried by the wandering fool.

  / Gold-sewn silk on the sword-blade,
  / Beauty and fool together laid.

Fool, wandering fool.  There is no point to this, I know.  Richie lies dead, dead at my hand, gold beauty gone, and I have made my peace with that, as best I can.
 

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And the girdle of light is unbound
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I spend the night by the loch, and my sleep is hard.  In the morning, Cassandra goes by on her daily run, Finn at her side.  She stops when she senses me.  "Go to the house," she says.  "Get dry."  It is a mother's voice, like my mother's voice, all no-nonsense and confident concern.

She and Finn continue running, and I go to the house and get dry.  Cassandra's brisk caring stays with her--and with me--all through the day.  She cooks for me, brings me tea, sits silently nearby and sews at her embroidery as the rain falls that afternoon.  The fire I have built flickers and warms, and peace comes dropping slow.

I have spent many afternoons like this in the Highlands, while rain fell and my mother sat sewing or spinning nearby.  We would talk, she and I, of things my father deemed unimportant, of things both grand and small, or I would sit silent and dream, while my mother watched over me.

Another woman watches me now, and I ask, "When did you come to the Highlands, Cassandra?"

She makes a few more stitches in the red flower she is embroidering, waiting, as she usually waits before answering.  "About 1520.  Ramirez and I left Spain and settled in Donan Woods.  He didn't stay long, though, a year or two.  He found the life of a hermit rather dull."  Three more stitches, and then the flower is done.  "He came back to visit me some twenty years later.  I told Ramirez the stories I had heard about Connor, and we set out to find him."  She knots the thread and snips it with her scissors, then selects a new thread, a dark green, and painstakingly threads her needle.

"And when did you leave?"

She starts on the stem of the flower, silver needle flashing.  "The spring after you 'died.'  Your Aunt Aileen came to my cottage and told me what had happened."

My aunt had led the clansfolk in driving me from my home.  She had thrown the first rock; just as my father had been the first to call me demon.  The others had followed their lead easily enough.

Cassandra was still talking.  "I went to find Connor and tell him you needed a teacher."

And then Connor had found me, as his teacher had found him, and both times, Cassandra had been watching, and waiting.  From the beginning Cassandra has been there, a shadow in my life, long before I was even born. She has been a fairy godmother, leaving me with my parents on a winter solstice night; a witch-goddess, seductive and enchanting on a warm spring day; a guardian angel, protecting me from Roland.  But when I had really needed her, she had not been there.

"I looked for you," I tell her, "after I left Glenfinnan."  After my father had banished me from the clan, denied me as his son, and left me wandering alone.  "I went to your cottage in Donan Wood."

She sets the needle into the cloth.  "I know," she says simply, then raises her eyes to mine.  "I told you to come to me, when you were thirteen.  I wanted to be there for you, Duncan, to explain to you what had happened.  I had thought you and I would wait in Donan Woods until Connor arrived."  She looks back at her sewing, the bright red still-stemless flowers scattered here and there, hanging suspended, like drops of blood in midair, like severed heads.  Cassandra says softly, "I had such plans."

"What happened?" I ask.

She picks up her needle again, but does not sew.  "I went shopping," she says brightly and attempts a smile.

"Shopping," I repeat.  It is a reply I would have expected from Amanda.

"Even witches need to eat," she says with a try for humor.  "I had gone to Inverness for supplies."  She shakes her head a little.  "I spent over a century in that forest, waiting for you, and then at the end, I wasn't even there."

"The best-laid schemes o' mice and men / gang aft a-gley," I say, quoting Robert Burns, hoping to lighten her mood, and my mood.

But Cassandra adds the next two lines. "And leave us naught but grief and pain / for promised joy."

There's a reason most people stop after "a-gley."  Joy--like life--is hoped for, never promised.  "It wasn't all bad," I tell her, and it is partly true.  "Connor found me eventually.  Besides," I say, realizing it now, "if I'd been with you, then I probably wouldn't have met the hermit and been warned about Ahriman."

"What hermit?"

"You don't know?" I ask, surprised, even though I have never mentioned the hermit to her.

"Tell me," she says and sets the needle down again, listening completely, as once she listened to a thirteen-year-old boy.

I am up and about the room, unable to keep still as I tell her of that night.  "He was an old man, in a cave.  He told me to come in and sit by the fire, share his food. He said he'd been waiting for me.  He knew my name, my clan, how long I'd been an Immortal, that Connor would find me soon.  I didn't have to tell him anything.  He said...."

"His words, Duncan," Cassandra says intently.  "Tell me exactly what he said."  Her voice slows and echoes in my mind.  "You're in the cave, with the hermit, by the fire.  What does he say to you?"

The words come from long ago, but they are there.  "When I asked him how he knew, he said, 'What we are is written in the wind, long before we walk this earth.'"

"There's more," she says, and she is right.  "Remember, Duncan," she commands, "remember it all," and I do.

I am in the Highlands, in a rocky cave, grateful to be out of the wind and rain.  My plaid is damp through, my furs dripping.  The hunk of rabbit meat is charred on the outside, sweet on the inside, and I suck the juices out as I chew.

The hermit crouches near the fire, wild-haired and wild-eyed.  "The bones!" he says.  "The bones will tell your destiny."  He grabs a handful and tosses them on the floor.  They lie there, a jumble of white stalks, a scattering of runes.  "Aye, you're blessed," he croons, "and you're cursed."

I have only known about the curse for two and a half years, ever since my father banished me, but I think the curse has been on me from the beginning, from when my mother--whoever she was--abandoned me, left me a foundling child.  There is no blessing in my life.

"When your time comes," the hermit says, "you must be prepared to face an evil beyond any you can imagine.  And evil is nor the color of black."  The red flames color his face with shadows.  "'Tis the color of blood."

He is mad.  This is mad.  I shake my head and back away.

"Every thousand years he comes," the hermit croons to himself again, "and he must be fought."  He looks up at me.  "Long ago, I did my part, but now the responsibility is yours."

"What responsibility?" I ask, bewildered, for none cares what I do.  "I have no clan, no people, no place."  I have nothing.

"But you have your destiny," he says as he stands and comes towards me.  "Raise that blade," he commands.  "Strike here!"  He lays a wrinkled hand on his own throat.  "Take my head!  Taste the truth of what you are!"

I shudder and turn to go, and he grabs at me, saying again, "Take my head!"  He pulls my sword to his neck, his wild eyes gleaming.  Warm blood spurts across my face and hands as his head leaps from that withered stalk of a neck, yet another death unbidden.  Sweet Jesu, what have I done?  "No!" I cry, an endless, hopeless No, and I stumble from the cave.

"Duncan!" Cassandra says urgently, her face close to mine, her hands on my cheeks.  "Come back."

I blink and look around.  I am in the Highlands, and I am warm and dry.  There is no hermit here, no Quickening about to strike.  I nod, and Cassandra drops her hands.  "You could have asked before you did that," I say sourly, taking my chair by the fire, reaching for the whisky.

"Yes," she agrees, going back to her chair.  "I should have.  I'm sorry."

I finish the whisky and pour myself more of the essence of my past, though right now I do not want my past.  It does not matter; the memories come of their own.  "That was the first Quickening I took," I say, remembering now, but not--and I am grateful for this--reliving.  I shudder again at the memory of that Quickening, then wipe it from my mind and go on.  "Connor found me that night.  He was nearby, and he saw the lightning."

Cassandra nods, but she is not listening to me now.  "A witch in the forest, a hermit in a cave, both waiting for the Highland Foundling," she muses, crooning in the way of the hermit, and then shakes her head, smiling a little to herself.  "Scotland is the place to be, I suppose."

"You sound pleased about this other prophecy," I say, but I am not.

"Pleased?"  She considers the word then shakes her head.  "Relieved, perhaps, to know that the whole prophecy wasn't simply something I had made up as an excuse, just because I couldn't bring myself to kill Roland."

Methos hadn't been able to bring himself to kill Kronos, either.  "We were brothers," Methos had told me a few days after I had taken Kronos's head, "in arms, in blood, in everything except birth.  If I judged him worthy to die, then I judged myself the same way."  Cassandra didn't have that kind of reason.

Or did she?  We have never spoken of Roland, except for that very first day, when she had told me that Roland had been her student and that he had tried to kill her.  Connor has told me that Roland tortured her once to get information about me, but that tells me nothing about their past.  "Why couldn't you kill Roland, Cassandra?" I ask her now, and she is silent for a time.

"I tried," she says finally, staring at the floor.  "Twice, even though the prophecy said that I shouldn't.  And each time, he ... each time, other people were hurt.  I wouldn't take that chance again, to have other people die because of me."

I know exactly how she feels.

"So, I followed the prophecy and I waited for you," she concludes simply.  "But sometimes I wondered...."  She shrugs it away and moves on.  "Hearing about the hermit and his prophecy does makes me feel a little better, because it means I wasn't imagining it all."

I know how she feels now, too.  Seeing things no one else can is enough to drive a man mad.

Cassandra goes to her computer and types, and in few minutes the Watcher symbol appears.  "Want to find out more about the hermit?" she asks.

"How did you get into the Watcher database?" I ask.

"I told my Watcher to give me her passwords."  Cassandra is already typing in the search criteria.

"And she gave them to you, just like that."  She slides a glance my way, and I remember--again--the power of the Voice.  I won't forget it anymore.  She may use a computer and drive a car, but Cassandra is still a witch.  She has just proven it to me--again.

"I think I found him," she says, looking at the screen.

"That didn't take long."  I pull up a chair.

"They hired a librarian to reorganize their database."  Cassandra moves over for me.  "It needed it."

"Timothy of Gilliam," I read aloud.  Joe Dawson has told me of these chronicles, but I had never known the hermit's name.

"'There are some who call me ... Tim,'" Cassandra murmurs, then looks up at me and grins.  "Monty Python and the Holy Grail."

I have to grin back, remembering that movie and the mad hermit named Tim who warned King Arthur and his Knights of the Round Table about an evil monster.  Richie and I watched the video together one evening, a few months after he had become an Immortal.  For weeks afterwards, whenever he received an injury during our sparring sessions, Richie would quote the lines, "I'm not dead yet.  I'm getting better."

King Arthur hadn't listened to Tim's warnings, any more than I had listened to Timothy of Gilliam's, any more than Richie had listened to mine.

I go back to the screen.  Timothy of Gilliam, Teutonic, first death in 590 AD in Fresia, trying to rescue a woman from robbers.  Deceased in the spring of 1625, victor:  Duncan MacLeod.

I don't feel like a victor.

"Ah, good," Cassandra says, clicking on a link.  "They've typed in his chronicles."

We read together of "Lord Timothy, a noble liege and valiant hero" until about the year 1000, when "the madness came upon him, and he lost his home and his family and everything he loved ... Satan afflicted him with demons that have made him mad."  Timothy wandered for two hundred years, then settled in Strathconan Forest.  He spent the next four hundred years waiting for me.

I walk away from the computer, and Cassandra turns it off.  The hermit's words come back to me once more, and I murmur to myself, "What we are is written in the wind, long before we walk this earth."

"Written in the wind, Duncan," Cassandra says from behind me, "not in stone.  Wind changes."

"Stone changes," I tell her abruptly, and I leave her house again.
 

----------------------------------------------------------------
Too long a sacrifice can make a stone of the heart.
----------------------------------------------------------------

I throw stones into the water of the loch, and the ripples from their passing spread and mingle with the ripples from the rain.  Most of the stones are smooth, rounded by eons of wind and wave, but some are broken in half, fractured, shattered.

Stone changes, but not easily.

"Look," Richie had said, that night in my barge, when Ahriman was afflicting me with demons that were driving me mad.  "Four hundred years ago, Cassandra said there was a prophecy about you defeating a great evil, right?  She knew who you were; she knew what would happen.  Maybe this is all meant to be.  Maybe you are the chosen one."

I hear Cassandra's voice again as I walk along the shore, as I had heard it that night in the barge.  "An evil one will come, to vanquish all before him. Only a Highland child, born on the Winter Solstice, who has seen both darkness and light, can stop him."  Her voice dies away, but the echoes and the ripples still go on.

"What if I don't want to be chosen?" I had asked, but it was too late.  My fate had been written in the wind, and in the stone, long before I ever walked the earth.

Cassandra comes outside, wrapped in a raincoat, Finn by her side.

"Were you there when the prophecy was made?" I ask her, my back to her still.

She stands beside me while Finn goes to chase the waves.  "Yes, I was there."  Her voice drops but she continues, forcing the words out.  "There were four of us, four priestesses."  She does not say their names.  "We went to the Cave of Prophecy, the night before--"  She tosses her hair from her face and walks with slow steps along the shore.

Some memories are best left buried.

I follow her now, and we walk in silence once more.  Finally, she speaks, her eyes distant, her words singsong slow, repeating that damned and damning prophecy yet again.  "An evil one will come, to vanquish all before him.  There will be a child, born with the sun, born in the north land, the high land, alone.  A child, and a man.  Darkness and Light will be his path, to challenge the Voice of Death."  She does not stop there, as I expect her to, but adds these words:  "Life is death and death is life, and all are bound by blood; yet he must walk alone."

"Was that part of the prophecy?" I ask.  "That last bit?"

She slides another glance at me, pushing back her rain-damp hair.  "Yes."

"You never told me."

"No," she agrees, but she offers no excuse, no explanation.

"How much more is going to be asked of me?" I demand, shaking as I ask, for I have nothing left to give.  I have nothing.

"The prophecy has been fulfilled, Duncan," Cassandra says, taking my face between her hands again, trying to calm me with her eyes and with her voice.  "All of it."

I want none of her witchery, none of her prophecy, none of her.  "The prophecy *you* knew about," I tell her, pushing her away.  "Timothy of Gilliam heard another."

And a gypsy woman saw yet another still, and that one will take my entire life to fulfill, to fill with emptiness.  *That* prophecy will take my life, will leave me naked and alone.

"MacLeod," the gypsy had called after me, in that dark night near the fires of her camp, "you will bury many women, but you will marry none.  You will always be alone. Do you hear me?"

I heard her then, and I hear her now.  I will always hear her, and I will always be alone.  "How many more prophecies were made?" I ask Cassandra, shaking still.  "How many more?"

"Duncan, you've done your part, just as Timothy had done his."

"So, I'm used up; is that it?" I demand.  "Burnt out?  Worthless?  They--whoever or whatever 'they' are--don't need me anymore?"  I want to hit something, but the beach stands empty, empty save for wind and rain and stone.  Empty save for her, this woman of wind and stone, this woman of prophecy and fire, this woman who has haunted my dreams and shadowed my life.

"What am I supposed to do now?" I ask her, bitterness scoring the air between us, deep rifts of anger clawed down on both sides.  "Wander off and hide in a cave for centuries, just waiting until I can give my head to the next champion who comes along?"

"You've already started to wander, Duncan," Cassandra points out, swift and sharp, a lioness's tooth to a lion's pride.  "Away from home and family, and everything you love."  She adds more softly, "Everyone who loves you."

I shake my head and turn away, but it is true.  I have cast myself adrift, with neither oar nor sail nor anchor, and the sea looms boundless.  The rain will fall swift tonight, *an nochd, agus gach oidche, gach aon oidche,* this night, and every night, every single night.

"Where are you going, Duncan?" she asks from behind me.

I do not know.

"You can stay here," Cassandra offers.  "For a time."

The wind gusts hard, and now the air braces me clear and cold, new-washed with the smell and touch of rain and the taste of stone.  Cassandra has haunted me in daydreams and nightmares from my earliest memories, yet she knows me in ways that go beyond knowing.

I need this time, this home port in the storm of my life.  We go in from the rain, and my sleep is sweet that night.
 

--------------------------------------
For I am running to Paradise
--------------------------------------

When I wake in the morning, both the rain and Cassandra are gone.  "Went to work," reads a note on the refrigerator. "Back at 5."  Then below that "Finn loves to run."

Mercutio curls about my legs, so I open the doorway to his kingdom, the garden behind the house, and the hills beyond that.  He stalks butterflies while Finn and I go for a run.  We climb the hills, past sheep pasture and farmland.  The day is fine, a final taste of summer, warm and spicy-sweet with grasses baking in the sun.  Finn bounds into a field of sheep, and I follow, shouting for him, for shepherds kill stray dogs.

But Finn is known here, the farmer whistles and calls him by name.  The man's greeting to me is not so friendly, a nod, a stare, a grim-faced glower beneath lowering gray brows.

"I'm Duncan MacLeod," I say to this epitome of a Scottish sheep-farmer, this tall, spare man in muddy boots and muddy trousers, this man with work-reddened hands and sun-faded blue eyes.

"Donald Cameron," he tells me, a name as Scottish as my own, then adds with equal Scottish bluntness, "This is not your dog."

"I'm visiting my cousin, Sandra Grant," I explain, using Cassandra's alias, and as good an explanation as any of our relationship.  "She's staying at the Dyson's house and taking care of Finn."  He nods and makes to go, but I am not yet willing to be alone, so I add, "That's a fine flock of Blackface.  Good wool this year?"

"Not bad," he admits, which means the prices are up.

"Do you sell the wool for carpets, or for Harris tweed?"

"Tweed, mostly," he says, and looks me over once again.  "Know a bit about sheep, do you?"

"My family raised sheep."  Finn is watching the flock wander, and he whimpers, paws twitching, ears perked.  "Here, Finn," I call, and he comes to me, but keeps watching.

"He's a Belgian sheepdog," Cameron says and spits into the grass.  "Damn fools keep him as a pet."

"I'll take him home," I offer, for an untrained sheepdog is more hindrance than help.

"It's best," he agrees.  "It's in his blood.  He can't watch without wanting to try."

Neither can I.  "Do you need a hand?" I ask.  "Around the farm?  It's been a few years, but I still remember how to pitch hay and muck out barns."

He stares then shakes his head, in both denial and disbelief.  "You'll not be wanting to do that on your visit with your cousin."

"I do," I say, and the want is suddenly fierce within me.  "My cousin's at work during the day, and I've not done farmwork for years.  I've not been back to the Highlands for years."  I look out to the sheep and the hills, the blue finger of the loch below.  "I've missed it."

Cameron and I lock eyes, and he must see the hunger there, for he slowly nods.  "Come back, then, after you've taken Finn home.  And wear shoes that will take a bit of mud, and more than a bit of sheep shit," he orders, with a disdainful look at my running shoes.

"I know," I say, grinning cheerfully.  "I remember."  I am in the Highlands, and now I feel at home.
 

---------------------------------------------
Come, heart, where hill is heaped upon hill
---------------------------------------------

That evening after dinner, Cassandra and I sit in the garden behind the house, listening to the birds and the wind.  My bones are tired, my hands are sore, and my soul is content with the day.  Cameron has said I can return tomorrow.  We will repair one of the fences in the high pasture, and I am invited to join him and his wife for lunch.  The work is good.

"I want to tell Connor you're here," Cassandra tells me, and my contentment wavers and flees.

I know I should say yes.  I should have already called Connor myself.  He is brother, kin, clan, the man who knows me best in all the world, the man I cannot face.

"He's been wondering where you are," she says, soft-voiced with urging.

I nod my agreement, but it is all I can do, and when she talks to Connor on the phone, I do not want to hear.

"He says you're welcome to visit him anytime," she tells me, coming back into the garden, but I have always known that.  Connor and I have always been welcome in each other's homes, to visit for a time, to stay for a month, to live for a year, and yet I cannot go to him, not now.

"How is he?" I ask, for I have wondered about him, too.

"Oh, busy with his farm, his family.  John is almost sixteen, and Sara and Colin will be three soon.  Alex has gotten a job at a museum, so Connor's in charge of them."

I nod, but it is unreal to me, this daily life of love and work, this rhythm of reality.  I cannot see Connor cleaning porridge off the table, finding socks and tying shoes, reading "Goodnight, Moon" over and over again.

"He misses you," she tells me, and it is another thing I have always known.  I miss him, too, but I cannot face him, not now.  He is too much of who I was, who I can never be again.  I cannot face Methos, either, for he was once too much of what I never want to be, and I am hollow at the core.

Cassandra and I sit and watch the dying embers of the day, far flung across the sky, till all is grayed to ash and blacked to soot, and the birds give up their songs.  The wind goes on.

"I'm going in," Cassandra says.  "It's cold."

It is not, not really, but I follow.  She plays her harp again, but does not sing tonight.  "Bedtime for me," she announces after an hour or so, and goes to her bedroom behind the kitchen.  I go upstairs to my room, to my narrow bed beneath the eaves.  Finn lies in front of the dresser on a woven rag rug, and his tail thumps on the pine-wood floor in greeting.  I bend down to caress his ears, and he sighs and puts his muzzle on his paws.

He is content, and so am I.  This day, this work--this life--it is enough, for now.
 

---------------------------------------------
With the earth and the sky and the water,
remade, like a casket of gold
---------------------------------------------

The work goes well, the weather stays fair.  Mr. and Mrs. Cameron invite "my cousin Miss Grant" to tea.  The days go by, the harvest is gathered, and I weave a straw man from the last of the sheaves.

"Haven't seen one of those in years," Cameron observes, stacking bales of hay in the barn.  "Nobody makes those anymore."

"My father always made them," I say, gathering more straw.

"So did mine," he says quietly and squats down beside me to help.  We struggle with it a bit, to get the arms in tight and not crooked, then lean it up against the wall.  "James always liked to help make these, when he was a lad," Cameron says.

His son James is in New Zealand; his daughter Bonnie has moved to Glasgow to work in an office there.  I have seen their pictures on the wall in the farmhouse, where Donald and Alice Cameron live now alone.

Mrs. Cameron comes to the barn and stops at the door.  "John Barleycorn," she greets the figure slowly, then gives the two of us a look.  "Well," she says, her gray eyes sharp in a thin-nosed face, a face that carries the weathered beauty of these hills.  "Well."  She goes to her husband and links her arm through his.  "Should we have a gathering, then?"  She smiles up at him, and it is sunlight on heather in those hills.  "Remember?"

Cameron smiles, too, and I look away, for a light such as that bring tears to my eyes.  "I remember, Alice," he says, with a clearing of his throat.

"I'll go call the folks hereabout," she says, with a pat on his arm, and calls back to me before she goes.  "Bring your cousin.  We'll have dancing tonight."
 

-------------------------------------------------------------
We come between him and the deed of his hand
-------------------------------------------------------------

There is music and dancing and food, and a bonfire at the level place near the barn.  The harvest moon hangs near full above us in the sky, shrouded in white strips of clouds.  Some of the folk have donned kilts and plaids, and the skirl of a bagpipe lifts high.  Cassandra and I join the dance about the fire, passing each other with quick smiles as we weave in and out, hand by hand, arm by arm.  The stamp of feet brings dust from the ground, and the flames bring smoke to the air.  I know this place, these people, this time of the year.  I have been here before.

The dancing and the eating continue until the singing begins, a tune well-known, and all around us join in.

  / There was three kings into the east,
  /   Three kings both great and high,
  / And they ha'e sworn a solemn oath
  /   John Barleycorn should die.

The straw man is paraded in, carried on the shoulders of the men, and the singing and the clapping go on.

  / But the cheerful Spring came kindly on'
  /   And show'rs began to fall;
  / John Barleycorn got up again,
  /   And sore surpris'd them all.

Donald Cameron draws me by the sleeve, away from the singing crowd, and six of us carry the straw man, now laid down upon his back.

  / They've ta'en a weapon, long and sharp,
  /   And cut him by the knee.

We heave the straw man onto the fire, and he begins to burn, golden straw going to black.

  / They wasted o'er a scorching flame
  /   The marrow of his bones.

The copper-haired girl next to me kisses me on the cheek and hands me a whisky bottle.  I take a welcome swallow, then pass the bottle on, and kiss her cheek as well.

  / And they ha'e ta'en his very hero blood
  /   And drank it round and round.

The flames flare high into the night, and all link arms about the fire.  Donald and Alice Cameron sing side-by-side, smiles wide and eyes bright, and the last verse comes loud and strong.

  / Then let us toast John Barleycorn,
  /   Each man a glass in hand;
  / And may his great posterity
  /   Ne'er fail in old Scotland!

The bagpipes pick up again, a drone that soon becomes a wail, and the dancing begins once more.  The girl who kissed me pulls me by the hand, her blue eyes merry, her laughter free, but the voices of the old men sound near.

"No rain yet, Tom," the one man says, "though they say it's due tonight.  At least I've done gathering my crop."

"And autumn almost here," the other responds, a short figure in a battered gray cap.  "We made the sacrifice in good time then.  John Barleycorn dies well, and should give us good crops next year, too."  He nods to the fire, where the head of the straw man burns last.

"What day is it?" I ask the girl, and she stops and shakes her head.  "What day is it?" I demand, and she tells me, still perplexed.  The singing has started again, another old Scottish song, and the girl with the copper hair begins to hum along.  I meet Cassandra's eyes across the fire, but she is not singing, and her eyes are sad, not gay.  Her hair streams unbound around her, and she stands with her arms down and her hands spread wide, a supplicant, a priestess in prayer.

"Will ye no' come back again?" the girl sings now, and the others sing it, too, a question with only one answer, an accusation with only myself to blame.

He will never come back.  His gold beauty is gone, sacrificed by some unholy god, blood spilled not on the earth for renewal, but wasted on a cold, barren floor for revenge.  I pull away from the girl and fling myself from the crowd.  The words follow me still.

  / Better loved ye canna be,
  / Will ye no' come back again?
 

-------------------------------------------------------------
We come between him and the hope of his heart
-------------------------------------------------------------

"Hey, Mac!" Richie had called, bounding into my antique shop seven years ago, waving a small plastic card.  "Check it out!  I'm legal!"

He grabbed Tessa by the hands and swung her around, narrowly missing an antique porcelain vase.  "Yessirree, I'm eighteen today!  The twentieth of September."  Richie planted himself on the edge of my desk and leaned forward engagingly, his eyebrows raised and his voice lowered.  "What do you say we go drinking?  Go see some girlie shows?"

"No," I said severely, and his grin faltered, his eyes suddenly unsure.  "For one thing," I told him, standing up,  "the drinking age is twenty-one, and for another ... Tessa and I have already planned a family celebration."

"You have?" Richie said, still unsure but now hopeful.  "A family kind of thing?  With cake?"

"With cake," Tessa assured him, laughing and gathering him in a hug.  "And presents."

Tessa and I had gotten him cake and presents for his next birthday, too.  One month later Tessa was dead, and Richie was an Immortal.  We hadn't really celebrated his birthdays after that.

Richie would have been twenty-five tomorrow.

I go out into the fields, to the cut stubble of hay, to the earth stripped of her bounty.  She gives to us, and we must give to her, in an ancient rite of sacrifice, our blood on her ground, our life for her life, our death for her death.  It hasn't always been a straw man tossed onto the fire.  Sometimes the man to be sacrificed is the champion of the local lord, or the lord himself.

And sometimes, the sacrifice is the lord's son.

I kneel down on the earth, take the soil into my hands.  It crumbles into dust, dry from the lack of rain, a good harvest gathered.  The sacrifice was well done, like another blood sacrifice two thousand years ago, for God so loved the world that he gave his only begotten son.

I am the champion, the chosen one, the Avatar.  I have destroyed the Voice of Death, averted the Apocalypse, fought the ultimate battle of good and evil by defeating Ahriman in the battle of Armageddon and saving the world from a thousand years of darkness.

What a load of crap.

Jesus went willingly, and I am not God.  I am Judas, and the kiss of betrayal is mine.

"Just tell me why?" Richie had asked me, on the floor on his knees, as I am kneeling now.  But he had been bleeding from the wounds I had made, in the arm, by the knee, to the heart.  I had stood over him with my sword in my hand, gloating, waiting, lusting for his life.  I had taken the Dark Quickening and taken the power, and I had taken Richie by the back of the neck and kissed the top of his head.  The kiss of a father, the kiss of benediction ... the kiss of betrayal, the kiss of death.

"Just tell me why?"

Richie hadn't died that night, but his Quickening is still mine.  I have sucked his very marrow from his bones, taken his very hero blood and drunk it round and round, eaten his body and his soul in a sacrifice of blood, consumed his life in scorching flames that give no warmth or comfort, only power.

"You knew you were killing Richie," the little man in Ahriman's tunnel had accused, but that was not true.  Ahriman had made me see enemies, and I had fought back in the way I knew how, with heart, and with faith, but mostly with steel.  Hearts can forgive.  Faith can restore.  Steel can only kill.

"Forgive me, Father," I have asked, "for I knew not what I did," and the forgiveness has come, with the peace dropping slow.  I feel it even now, as I bow my head to the earth, my hands flat on the ground.  I have been forgiven, and I have forgiven myself.  I had not wanted to kill Richie, not then.

But I did enjoy it.

"I think you liked it!" the little man of Ahriman had said, grinning, peeling me open to the bone, laying bare my most secret shame, the spectre that haunts me still.  Quickenings always mingle pleasure and pain, and some of us grow addicted to that dark thrill of conquest, to that sundering of souls.  Richie's Quickening had been sweet indeed, a fountain of searing power, all that I had imagined when he had knelt at my feet and begged me to tell him why.

"Is it because there can be only one?  Is that it?" Richie had asked me, but my reason for wanting to kill him on that night was a simple one.

It was because I liked it, and I was good at it.

But that hadn't been me, not really.  That had been the Dark Quickening, an alien influence, an evil from outside.

Or so I had thought.

"Richie-killer, Richie-killer, Richie-killer!" the little man had chanted, and it was true.  I killed Richie, and I enjoyed his Quickening, as I have enjoyed other killings and other Quickenings throughout the years.  And not just for vengeance.  Not just for need.  Not just for righting a wrong, or for protecting the weak, or because I was mad with battle-lust and rage, or for any of the other thousand excuses I have used in four hundred years.

My hands clench into fists, then clench and unclench over and over again, in time to the beating of my heart, the heart of a Horseman, the heart of a man like me.  There is a part of me that loves to kill, a part of me that takes pleasure in it, a part of me that is just like Methos, just like Kronos, just like all the other men I have known.

A part of me is evil, and it took Richie's death to bring that home.

Ahriman knew.  "I'm a part of you now," he had warned me, gloating.

"You always were," I had told him, for I could deny him--and myself--no more.  I whisper out into the night, "You still are."  The evil is part of me, forever, and I have accepted that, but now the darkness has come again.

Just tell me why.
 

-----------------------------------------------------------
From a world more full of weeping than he can understand.
-----------------------------------------------------------

"Duncan," Cassandra says from behind me, as I lie face-down on the ground.  "Come home."

I have no home.

I hear the rustle of her skirt as she kneels before me.  Gentle hands touch my hands; her lips touch my hair--a kiss of benediction, a kiss of peace.  "Duncan," she says again, "come home."

I have nothing.

Cassandra sighs softly as she lies down beside me, her hand clasping mine.  We lie there in the darkness on an empty, mowed field, lie there head to head, shoulder to shoulder, hip to hip, knee to knee, toe to toe--hand in hand.

Below us in that level place the music fades and the fire dies, and old men and young men and young girls are gone.  The rain comes then, as it must come, each drop dropping slow, and the earth is dust no more.  The ground beneath my face is already wet with my tears.

Cassandra turns to me, her hand still in mine, and I turn to her as well.  We face each other across the furrow, and she raises my hand to her lips, a kiss of forgiveness and hope.  "Duncan," she says, "come home."

We go to her home, a silent, shivering walk in the rain, and I let her undress me and dry me and put me to bed, shivering still, dressed now in warm clothes.  We sleep in her bed tonight, with Finn at our feet and Mercutio on the pillow, and Cassandra's arms close about me.  Her lips touch swiftly on my forehead; the wool blanket scratches my cheek.

"Sleep, Donnchadh," she whispers.  "Sleep now."
 

---------------------------------------------------------
Time drops in decay, like a candle burnt out
---------------------------------------------------------

I wake early, in the quiet time, when the light glows gray instead of gold, last night's rain gone.  "Happy birthday, Richie," I say to myself, and Finn thumps his tail and agrees.  Mercutio has disappeared, in the way of cats in the night, and Cassandra is still asleep beside me.  I lie in the half-light and think of Richie, and still I do not know why.

Why me?  Why Richie?  Was he fated to die from the moment of his birth--or even before--just as I was fated to be Cassandra's "Highland Foundling"?  Is everyone's life written in the wind?

And if you have eyes that can see the wind, what can you say?

On the day I had killed Roland, the day I had talked to the thirteen-year-old boy who would one day be me, Cassandra had asked me a question she has doubtless asked herself many times over the centuries.  "What could you have said to him?" she had said, while I had stared at the flame of a candle and thought of the man-child I had been.  "Don't feel?" she had asked.  "Don't grow?  Don't live with hope?"

I could say none of those things to my child-self, and neither could she.  Not to me, and maybe ... maybe not to Richie, either.

Cassandra wakes suddenly, her eyes alert and aware, and she sits up in bed, pulling the covers with her.  "Good morning," I venture, and she answers the same.  "Coffee?" I suggest, and we go to the kitchen, where Mercutio awaits his morning meal.

I wait until we are seated at the table, until Cassandra has stirred the sugar into her coffee, until Mercutio has started washing his paws on the windowsill and Finn has flopped in front of the refrigerator.  "Did you know?" I ask.  "Did you know Richie was going to die?"

She pauses, the rim of the cup touching her lip, then she drinks and set the cup down with careful deliberateness.  "Yes," she answers, as I knew she would answer.  "I knew."

I shove my cup away from me; hot coffee splashes on my hand.  "How?" I demand.  "When?"

She picks up her spoon again, stirs the coffee round and round.  "There was ... a shadow on him, when I met him at Connor's house on New Year's Day."  She looks at me with ancient eyes.  "I just ... knew, Duncan."

On that New Year's Day that promised much, I had thrown my arm about Richie's shoulders, laughing at a joke he had made, while Cassandra had watched unsmiling from across the room.  "Did you know I would be the one to kill him?" I ask, and this is what I really want to know.

She hesitates again, picking words like she is picking flowers for a delicately arranged bouquet.  "I knew ... that he was to be a part of the rest of the prophecy.  I knew ... you and he were bound together."

"Bound by blood."  My voice is hoarse with the harshness of the words.

She nods and shrugs slightly, a delicate movement of muscle and bone.  "As are we all."

Some more than others.  I push back my chair and pace in the small kitchen, while Mercutio watches with an uninterested stare, and Finn lifts his head in eager curiosity.  "Why didn't you tell me?" I demand, stopping my feet, gripping the back of the chair with both hands.  "You knew, and you said nothing!  You *knew*."

"What did I know, Duncan?" she snaps back.  "Yes, I knew Richie would die.  I knew Ramirez would die, too.  And there was nothing I could do to stop it."  She whispers now.  "Nothing."

"You could have told me."

"Told you what?" she replies.  "Told you, 'I have a bad feeling about this'?  Told you, 'Be careful out there'?  I didn't know how Richie would die.  I didn't know when.  It could have been years later, decades ... centuries!  And even if I had told you, there was absolutely nothing you--or anyone!--could have done to stop it.  Believe me, I *know*," she says, and three thousand years of bitter knowledge are distilled into that one word.  "One way or another, Richie was going to die."

"But you knew about the prophecy," I accuse.  "You knew it wasn't over."  I am pacing again, my hands clenched at my sides.

"Yes, I knew it wasn't over, but that was all I knew.  I knew only that a challenge was coming, not how or what or when.  I knew you and Richie would be a part of it, and I knew that somehow he would die.  What in *that* gives you any help at all?  What could you have done differently?"

"You should have told me," I repeat, certain of that.  "Maybe it would have helped.  Maybe--"

"And maybe it would have destroyed the world!  If you had known Richie was going to die, you would never have let him stay with you in Paris.  What else do you think Ahriman could have done to devastate you?  Kill another one of your friends?  Kill all of your friends?  Go after Connor or his family?"

I do not want to imagine.

"Or maybe Ahriman would have gone for the entire city of Paris," Cassandra says.  "Or the continent."  She says the prophecy yet again, those damning, strangling words, "Life is death and death is life, and all are bound by blood, yet he must walk alone."  She repeats the last word carefully.  "Alone, Duncan.  Alone."

I have been alone for a long time.

Cassandra breathes slowly, calming herself, then starts to explain.  "I told you what happened the last two times I went against the prophecy, how other people were hurt.  I could not take that chance again.  I knew my part in the prophecy was over.  I could say no more.  And it was the hermit's task to give you warning, not mine."

"But you didn't even know about him," I protest.  "For all you knew, I could have been going up against Ahriman completely blind."

"For all I knew, the challenge could have been just another Immortal," she points out, sharp and quick.  "And sometimes the finding of the answers is more important than the answers themselves."

That is true enough, and I am going to get an answer from her.  "Was Roland the Voice of Death, or was it really Ahriman?"

"I think," Cassandra says slowly, "that the Voice of Death referred to them both."  She leans forward, her eyes dark green and her voice like the wind.  "The prophecy spoke of both a child, and a man.  You defeated Roland with the innocence of yourself as a child."

Good must always triumph over evil, my child-self had said--and believed--but I had stopped believing long ago.  "Believe, and don't listen," my child-self had told me, and when I had fought Roland, it had worked.

She says now, "But you defeated Ahriman with the knowledge of yourself as a man."

I had had to listen to Ahriman, for he was--and is, and ever shall be--a part of me.  Methos had tried to teach me that, many times and in many ways, with his words and with his past.  "What I've done," he had said of his time with the Horsemen, "you can't forgive.  That's not in your nature.  Well, you accept it."

I had neither listened nor accepted, not then.

"We are all good and evil, MacLeod," Methos had told me half a year later, on a cold spring morning in a garden of precisely clipped bushes and raked stone paths.  "We all have rage and compassion, love and hate ... murder and forgiveness."

I had not wanted to believe it or accept it, either of him or of me, but it is the truth of what we are.  I have tasted that truth now, swallowed the bitter bile.  That truth is the fruit of the Tree of the knowledge of good and evil, and we who have eaten of it are cast from the living garden of Paradise to wander the earth forever, naked and alone.

"You needed both the evil and the good, Duncan," Cassandra tells me, coming to stand beside me, laying her hand upon my own.  "You are both.  As are we all."

Maybe not so alone.  I am not the only one to have eaten of the fruit of that tree.  Cassandra has spoken of her own darkness, of her own lust for power and control, and so has another whom both of us know.  "Methos, too?" I challenge her, still wondering what is between him and her.

Cassandra pauses, a longer pause than usual for her, then agrees.  "Methos, too."

I kiss her forehead as she had kissed mine, a kiss of understanding and peace.  "I'm glad you didn't kill him."

Her mouth twists, but it cannot be called a smile.  "So am I.  Now."  She grins suddenly, a dancing light of merriment in the depths of her eyes.  "Except when he sends me puns."

I laugh and take my seat again, and she takes hers.  "You know," I say, wrapping my hands around the warmth of my coffee cup, "the Voice of Death could have meant Methos, too."  Cassandra's head goes up, a lift of surprise, and I continue, "Don't these things usually come in threes, getting worse each time?  Roland, the Horsemen, Ahriman?  Although ... Kronos and Ahriman were both out to conquer the world, and Roland didn't do anything like that."

Cassandra says nothing, and I wonder suddenly what Roland was like as a student, why Cassandra ever took him on.  "Were you in Europe during the witch hunts in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, Duncan?" she asks finally.

"Yes.  I almost got burned at the stake."

"Did the hunts seem ... odd to you?  Like a society gone mad?"

"Mass hysteria," I agree.

She looks to the window, where Mercutio sleeps soundly, tail curled around paws.  "Roland used the Voice to influence people, to make them believe in witches.  A few words here, a whisper there, and the panic was on.  The potential for hate is always in people, of course.  He just ... pushed.  Maybe a few hundred thousand were killed in those hunts, not many, really, in the grand scheme of things.  But that wasn't the only time or the only place.  The elimination of the Canaanites by the Israelites three thousand years ago, the persecution of the Christians by the Romans two thousand years ago, the destruction of the pagans and their temples by the Christians fifteen hundred years ago ... Roland wasn't prejudiced.  He just liked to stir up trouble, and watch all the people run."

"Like poking a stick into an anthill."  My cousin Robert and I used to do that, on warm summer afternoons, two boys enjoying what power they had.

"Except when you take the stick away, the ants soon forget.  For humans, the hate and the fear remain.  For centuries."  Cassandra stares into her cup, her eyes hidden from me.

"Did you see him do that?" I ask, for one man with such power seems incredible.

"A little, during Nero's reign, at a banquet with senators and other important people.  I talked to them later, and I could tell that Roland had been influencing them, either to make money for himself, or to whip up hate against the Christians.  And then, right before he died, he had arranged for a letter to be sent to me, and it told me more.  He was ... quite proud of himself for what he had accomplished."

I might as well ask now.  "Why did you take him as a student, Cassandra?  Why did you ever teach him the Voice?"

Cassandra takes her time about answering.  "He wasn't always like that, Duncan," she tells me finally.  "I met him before he became immortal, and then he ... changed."

"Changed into the Voice of Death," I say grimly.  "It's hard to believe a few words can have such power, for so long, to change the world that way."

Cassandra lifts her gaze to mine, but stares unseeing, with eyes that see the wind.  "Yes," she murmurs absently, "words to change the world."

"But the Horsemen were death, too," I tell her, going back to the three-fold nature of the prophecy.  "Roland and the Horsemen and Ahriman all vanquished those who stood before them, and I challenged them all."

"Life is death, and death is life," Cassandra quotes, musing on that phrase.

"And Methos used to be death," I point out, "but then he saved our lives."

"And I started to become death," Cassandra says quietly, "when I wanted to kill all of them.  And he and I are certainly bound by blood, even if it's more of mine than of his."  She picks up her coffee again.  "Well, maybe," she admits, then leans forward, suddenly intent.  "When did you say that archeologist Landry found the statue of Ahriman?"

"Six months before I met him," I tell her, counting backwards.  "So, that would make it ..."

"November of 1996," Cassandra finishes grimly.  "When the Horsemen died.  When Kronos said, 'I am the end of Time.'  Maybe his death somehow ... woke up Ahriman.  Or maybe three thousand years ago, Kronos was the Avatar, but instead of defeating Ahriman, he joined him."

I rub my hand over my eyes, taking away some of the sleep still there, remembering the smile on Kronos's face just before I cut his head off, a smile of triumph and scorn, Ahriman's smile.  "Oh, this is ridiculous!" I exclaim.  "We're making ... connections out of nothing, spiderwebs of meaning."

Cassandra merely shrugs.  "Maybe.  The Horsemen did last for a thousand years, and Ahriman appeared to you as Kronos.  And about three thousand years ago, the Dark Ages began in the Mediterranean.  There was famine, plague, earthquakes, tidal waves.  The Sea People invaded and destroyed learning, art, culture, whole civilizations....  It was the end of a world."

"The end of your world," I say, and she nods.  "And you were there, just like you were with Roland and the Horsemen.  Then, and now."

"But not with Ahriman, not this century," she protests.  "You needed to walk that path alone."

"Yes, I did," I agree, seeing the necessity, the progression.  "You helped show me the good in a child, Methos showed me the evil that can exist in a man, while with Ahriman I needed to see them both for myself."  The finding of the answers was more important than the answers themselves.

"But Richie reminded me of the prophecy," I tell her, "and I thought of you while I was in the monastery, so you were there, in a way."  I had thought of Methos, too, and Connor and Darius and Ceirdwyn, and all the others I had known, all the others who had killed and then regretted it, all who had faced the darkness in themselves, and then come back into the light.

"And the Dark Quickening?" Cassandra asks.  "That should fit in there, too.  It needed to happen before the Prophecy could begin to be fulfilled."

"That was different."  I rub my eyes again, trying to remember the time I try to forget.  "The evil then felt ... alien, outside myself, as if the real me was just watching.  Methos brought me my father's sword to remind me of who I was, who I had been."

Who I could never be, not then, not now.  My mother had handed me that sword and named me "Duncan MacLeod of the Clan MacLeod," then bade me to use the sword to slay my father's killer, Kanwulf the Viking.  I had done so, but I had given the sword back to the clan, for it was not my birthright and never could be.  I had no right of birth.

But I kept the name, down through the years.  I am still Duncan MacLeod.  That I will keep, forever.

And I had used my father's sword again, when Kanwulf had returned, for he was as immortal as I.  There in Glenfinnan, another woman of my clan had named me, called me a legend, given me her blessing.  "Duncan MacLeod," Rachel had called after me, and I stood there with my father's sword in my hand.  "Maybe some legends are true."

Some legends are.

"What did you do with your father's sword, Duncan?" Cassandra asks, bringing me back, back to the now.

Rachel had given Methos that sword to bring to me; she had given me a weapon once again, and Methos had shown me the way.  "Methos took me to a sacred spring, underground," I say, and the words come slow, like the dropping of the water in that cave, a cave of curved arches and old passageways, a wellspring of peace, a place forgotten and ignored.  "I just ... stood there, in the water, with my father's sword in my hand."  I blow out all the breath in me, a complete and gusty sigh, and force myself to go on.  "I was just standing there, but it felt as if I were fighting.  The evil of the Dark Quickening had seemed alien, but when I fought it, it looked just like me.  It even said so.  'We're one, inseparable.'"

Some words are true.

"But then it told me I was nothing, and I knew that wasn't so.  I said, 'I am Duncan MacLeod of the Clan MacLeod,' and I took its head, and then it started to rain."

Cassandra is watching me, her chin on her hand.  "'Darkness and Light will be his path,'" she quotes, and that is true, too.

I am still walking that path, balancing on the edge of that sword.  As are we all, as we all must, every moment of our lives.

I put it all together, groping for words which I must hope are true.  "The Dark Quickening made me see that good could ... not conquer or banish evil, but tame it, keep it under control.  I needed to know that was possible before I could accept the evil as part of myself, before I could face Roland, and the Horsemen, and Ahriman."  And face myself.

"Well, three challenges is enough," she says firmly, "and the prophecy is complete.  I *know* that.  Besides," she adds, with a small smile of encouragement, "after saving the world, what else is there?"

"Has the world been saved?" I ask.  "I look around, and there's still war, still famine, still hatred and bloodshed.  What difference did it make?"

"What difference did Jesus make, and how long did it take before his message started to spread?" she asks.  "How much worse would the world be, if we didn't have that gospel of forgiveness, that ideal of love to strive for?  I know the religion of Christianity hasn't always followed his words, Duncan, but taking vengeance has often been considered a religious duty, not just an accepted social custom."  Her eyes go dark and far away.  "I remember religions that glorified death and pain, and gods who wanted to eat your soul."

"Not all of them," I object.  "Christianity isn't the only religion to preach forgiveness and love."

"No, of course not," she agrees.  "And Jesus wasn't the only great teacher in history.  But he did, and still does, change people's lives."  Mercutio joins us, leaping to the table and sniffing at the cream.  Dawn has come, and the cat's fur gleams gold in the narrow beam of sunshine.  Cassandra takes Mercutio into her lap and continues, "Society has changed, and is changing, Duncan.  Not everywhere, not totally, not yet, but slavery is condemned now, we prosecute war-crimes, and women are considered by law to be fully human.  I never thought I'd see any of those things.  I think the Christian message of each person's importance before God has had an enormous impact on European culture, and it's finally starting to show."

"And democracy and law have, too," I point out.  "It's all intertwined, though, isn't it?  Political thought is influenced by philosophy and religion.  And," I add wryly, "sometimes religion is influenced by politics."

"Yes," Cassandra agrees again.  "I liked Christianity before it became the official religion of Rome."

"So, the results of my fight with Ahriman might not start to show for centuries, maybe millennia?" I ask, taking no comfort in that.

"Why do you think the Avatars are Immortals?" Cassandra says, with another small smile.

"Including Jesus?"

"I don't know," she says, rubbing Mercutio under his chin.  "I was in Gaul that century.  Maybe Jesus did face Ahriman.  The timing is about right, and that's certainly how the story comes down to us today--Jesus accepted the evil onto himself and died to save the world.  But even if Jesus was an Immortal, he didn't know that, so when he died his first death on the cross, his self-sacrifice was total, as it needed to be."

"Did Richie's need to be?" I ask, and of course, this is the question I have been asking all along.

Cassandra's hands go still on the purring cat.  "To sacrifice means to make holy, Duncan."

"And to slaughter means to kill!" I burst out, shoving my chair back so that it lands on the floor with a crash.  Mercutio leaps all-ascramble for the safety of the window sill, and Finn whines from the floor.  I am standing in a sunlit kitchen, but I am in that night again, that darkness, near the silent, endless escalator that leads nowhere, within the raw moldy smell of damp concrete, caught inside that whirling maelstrom of fear.

Horton names himself Set, Egyptian god of darkness, and then the demon-Richie is there.  "I am Ahriman," Richie says, and his eyes gleam the color of blood.  He wounds me, in the arm, by the knee, to the heart.  "What's the matter?" he taunts.  "Don't want to hurt your little buddy?"

Kronos comes next, and then the three are doubled, six of them circling me, laughing at me, watching me with triumphant, scornful eyes.  I am trapped in a house of mirrors, but I did not know then that I am seeing myself.

I charge and whirl and beat them back with my sword, and they disappear, but the laughter goes on.  Then Richie is there and I charge once more, a single swift stroke.  The silence comes, the terrible silence in the hollow of my heart, a silence that has been with me ever since.

"He just stood there," I say blankly, "just stood there with his sword in his hand, watching, waiting...."  He hadn't made a single move to defend himself, even in that brief instant as I approached.  He hadn't even flinched.

"Like a lamb to the slaughter?" Cassandra suggests.  "Like a willing sacrifice?

I am already shaking my head.  "No.  No."

"Why not?" she says simply.  "Ahriman was sending you visions then.  Maybe Richie saw visions, too, a vision from a different source that told him his death was needed to help save the world.  Maybe he went to you willingly, knowingly."

"No."

"Would you have died to save Richie?" she asks, and we both know my answer is yes.  Greater love hath no man than this, that a man lay down his life for his friends.  I was ready to die to save Joe and Amanda; I would gladly have laid down my life for Richie.

"Would you offer your life to save the world?" Cassandra asks me now.

And again my answer is yes.

Cassandra has one final question.  "Do you think Richie would have done any less than you?"
 

-----------------------------------------
And still the starry candles flare.
-----------------------------------------

Cassandra leaves for work, and I call Mrs. Cameron and tell her I won't be coming to the farm today.  "Caught a chill last night, I suppose," she assumes, and she is right.  I go running with Finn in the forested hills, a longer trail than usual, and we pass by a church, a small building of gray stone, hidden deep in the glen.

"Wait here," I say to Finn, and he sits, his tongue hanging, his tail a-wag.  The church is dim; thin light streams though narrow windows high above the altar.  Dark beams cross the ceiling, and the stone floor is cold.

Holy Ground.

Holy Water, too, in a basin by the door, a wellspring of peace, long forgotten and ignored.  I anoint myself with water, head and hands and heart, a ritual of cleansing, a baptism in the faith.

Other symbols of faith are here--statues of Mary and Joseph in alcoves, the red candle ever-burning, a crucifix above the altar, Christ nailed to the cross.  A willing sacrifice, a voluntary death to bring life.  Does that make it better?  Does that make it right?

"I have no idea what I'm up against," I had said to Richie the night before he died.  No idea at all.

"I think it's 'What are *we* up against,'" Richie had corrected me, and he wasn't about to walk away, even when I told him to go.  "Hey, Mac," he had protested, "would you leave me hanging?"

And of course my answer had been--as it has always been--no.

Richie had laid his hand on my shoulder, the firm grip of a man, not a boy; my student no longer, but my equal, my friend.  He had offered me his protection and his promise, just as I had so often offered him mine.  "I'll be right there with you," he had told me, and I had been so proud of him then.  I still am.

Oh God, Richie, I miss you!  And I would give anything to bring you back, to tell you what I should have said then.

But I can't.

Perhaps Cassandra is right, more likely she is wrong.  More likely that Ahriman lured Richie to stand in front of me and wait passively for a killing blow, instead of God convincing Richie to be the sacrificial lamb.

I will never know.

But this I know--Richie loved me and he trusted me, and if he had been faced with the necessity, he would have given his life for mine, just as I would have given mine for his.  Richie was a true hero, a valiant champion, and a good friend.

Votive candles flicker before the alcove of the Blessed Virgin, and I add one more to the constellations there, then kneel to say a prayer, as I will every year on this day for the rest of my life.

"Happy birthday, Richie.  I'm proud of you."

I miss you.  I love you.

My son.
 

---------------------------------------------
Had they but courage equal to desire?
---------------------------------------------

I cook dinner for Cassandra and myself, chicken and pasta in a white cream sauce, but she is late coming home, and seems uninterested in food.  "No, it's good, Duncan, really," she protests and takes another bite, but she forces herself to chew.

"What's wrong?" I ask her, but she protests again that she is fine, that all is well.  I have asked much of her and given little, these last few weeks, and I want to help, but after dinner she is serene and smiling once again, and seems to need no more.

"Chess?" I suggest, and we play a game in front of the fire, talking of many things, laughing and at ease.  I win, and then she wins, as it usually goes, and she yawns and puts away the board.  The chess set is my Christmas present to her from a few years ago, a reminder of how she taught me to play when I was just a boy.  I reach for her hand as she walks by, and she stops and smiles, her fingers warm against my own.  "Ready for bed?" I suggest this time, for I do not want to sleep alone.  "Just sleep," I reassure her, and she agrees with another smile and a tug of my hand.  We go off to bed, with Finn trotting at our heels.
 

-----------------------------------------------
As cold and passionate as the dawn.
-----------------------------------------------

Again in the morning, I am first awake.  Cassandra's hair splays dark on the whiteness of the sheets, wingtip feathers stark against a winter sky.  She is beautiful, but I do not touch her, for hers is a solitary beauty, a beauty of stone carved by the wind.

She has not always been this cold.  She had kissed me long ago, the witch-goddess with the boy-man, kissed me with a feather touch that burned, that branded me as hers, a kiss that promised much and left me wanting more.

But Cassandra had told me to leave.  She handed me my sword, a queen arming her champion, and I had stood tall, her knight brave and true.  "Good must always triumph over evil," I had told her that day, when all the world had been plain to me, a game of chess in black and white.  "Did you not know that?"

Cassandra's smile had mingled sadness and hope.  "Maybe I just needed to hear it from you."

I had left then, but nearly four hundred years later, I had come home and found her waiting for me, as she always waited.  Cassandra spoke of an ancient enemy, of a prophecy, of dreams, and of me.

So I went to challenge the evil one, the brave knight protecting his queen.  "Good must always triumph over evil," my younger dream-self told me before the battle, when I was the one who needed to hear it.  I won that battle, took Roland's head and his Quickening.  I had triumphed over the Voice of Death.

Or so I had thought.

Cassandra murmurs and stirs, and her hand brushes against my own, a touch of warmth, but nothing more, not now.  But she did keep that promise of her kiss, the night after Roland died, a single night that seared us both.  I have held her in my arms, this woman of fire and wind.  I have whispered urgent words of passion into that softness at the nape of her neck, that hidden place beneath her hair, and heard her gasp in want and need.  I have felt her sweat-slicked body move hard against my own, and we have clasped each other tightly, mingled with desire.

Cassandra wakes abruptly, eyes open, completely aware, and I stretch and yawn and look away.  "Morning," I mumble, and she answers me the same.

"Sleep well?" she asks, sitting up against the headboard, pulling the blanket with her against the chill in the air, against my gaze.

"Mmm," I say, sitting up beside her, staring at my toes.  "You?"

"Equally 'mmm'," she replies, smiling a little, but now she is watching me.  "You haven't been with a woman since you started wandering, have you, Duncan?"

"Cassandra--," I protest, drawing the blanket closer, but she is right, of course, this woman who knows me in ways beyond knowing.  Amanda bade me farewell in Paris, and since then, I haven't been interested.  Casual encounters with women I barely know would offer me nothing but soulless release, and my soul has been trapped enough.  Even this morning, remembering the night with Cassandra, I'm just ... not interested.

"I always find the first decade of celibacy to be the most difficult," she observes casually.  "After twenty or thirty years, sex seems somehow remote."

"Now that's reassuring," I mutter, finding no ease or comfort in this conversation.  Talking about sex while I'm in bed with a woman is nothing new, but talking about not having sex....

"It's not uncommon, Duncan," Cassandra says.  "Immortals often have times of celibacy."

It's uncommon for me.  "And how long do these times last?"

"It varies.  Methos mentioned fifty years."  Cassandra busies herself plumping up the pillow behind her as she says, "The longest for me has been over three and a half centuries."

Over three and a half centuries without sex?  I open and shut my mouth, trying to imagine such a feat, and finally venture, "I guess when you started again it was ... quite a night."

She darts a flashing glance of merriment my way.  "You should know."

I manage only a weak, "Oh."  She had told me that night we had spent together had been special to her, but I hadn't fully realized why.  It had, indeed, been "quite a night."  And quite a morning.

"Thank you," she tells me, reaching for my hand, and we touch as we have not touched all night.

"I'm glad I could help," I say, not knowing what to say, but it is true enough, and we smile at each other before we let go.  "Have you ... I mean ... are you still ...?" I try to ask, floundering.

"Not lately, no," she says.  "Not since I found out the Horsemen were still alive, not since Bordeaux."

The Horsemen had raped her in Bordeaux, and that was nearly three years ago.  The brave knight had deserted his queen, gone off with a wave and a lie, and left her to face the three of them alone.  She has told me she does not blame me, told me it is not my fault, and I know that it is true, but the real truth remains.  I lied to her, and I shattered her faith in me.

"Be gentle with her," Connor had told me, when he had entrusted her to me and asked me to take care of her, in a way that he could not, married as he was.  I had accepted that responsibility, in the same way I had accepted the responsibility for Richie.

Exactly the same way.  I failed them both.

"Breakfast?" she asks cheerfully and tosses back the covers, hurrying to pull a sweater over her shirt against the chill air.

"It's not only because of the Horsemen," she tells me as we walk into the kitchen, and that helps, a little.  Helps me, not her.  "My therapist calls it 'attachment avoidance' and 'problems with intimacy'," Cassandra says, slicing bread for toast.  "I find it difficult to trust someone enough to let them get close to me, either physically or emotionally."

"You and every other Immortal on the planet," I say, pouring the water for the coffee.

"Every time a woman reaches out to touch you, do you wonder if she's going to hit you?" she snaps, slamming down the knife, her anger sudden and sharp in the air.  "Are you worried that your lovers--mortal or immortal--will suddenly decide to kill you while you're in bed together?  How many times have you revived to find some man already fucking you, while other men stand around and watch, waiting for their turns?"

"Jesus, Cassandra ...," I begin, appalled, but she is already out the door and gone.
 

--------------------------------------------------------
Laugh, heart, again in the gray twilight.
--------------------------------------------------------

I find her walking barefoot by the roadside, slicing at tall grasses with a stick while Finn runs on ahead, disappearing into the mist that lies over the land.  "Cassandra--"

"Bad session with my therapist yesterday, Duncan," she says shortly, whacking at another withered stalk, taking off the ripe head, scattering its seeds.  "And a bad dream last night.  I shouldn't take it out on you."

"I didn't know."  I didn't know about her past, but I realize now that Connor does.  I have never seen Connor reach out to touch her, and he always stands at least three feet away.  And I didn't know about her dream or her therapist, but her silence of last night is explained.

"I didn't want you to know," she tells me.  Another dew-damp stalk of grass offers up its seeds to her anger, and then another, and another.  "It's not ... I haven't...."  She gives up on that and slashes at yet another blade.

"Do the dreams still come every night?" I ask, remembering that week we spent hunting the Horsemen, when night after night Cassandra would wake in petrified fear, unable to move or cry out, frozen as stone, cold as the wind.

"No, maybe once every month or two.  But I had one last night ... and the night before that."

"Because of me being in your bed?" I demand, and at her averted nod, I am appalled again.  "You should have told me!"

"I didn't want you to know," she tells me once more, her face in profile solitary and stern.  "It's not your fault, and it's nothing you've done.  I need to learn to deal with this."

To deal with nightmares, with centuries of abuse, with terror that leaves her naked and alone.  I have never been raped, not in body, though the Dark Quickening and Ahriman felt like rapes of my soul, but even if I had been, I still would not fear the strength of a woman in bed, the way Cassandra--and all other women who have been hurt--must fear the strength of a man.  And yet she has opened her home to me, let me sleep in her bed these two nights past, let me touch her, hold her hand.  "Maybe I can help, Cassandra," I say, wanting to help her heal, as she is helping me.

"I'm tired of needing help!" she flares, whirling on me, the stick half-raised in her hand.  "I'm tired of being pitied, of being weak, of being incompetent, of needing a *champion*--," and she spits out the word, as though its taste is bitter on her tongue, "--to protect me!  To *help* me!"  Her eyes narrow and she raises the stick to strike, then she blinks once and backs away, dropping the stick on the ground.  "I *hate* that," she whispers fiercely.  "I *hate* what I've done with my life."  The fierceness fades to sorrow as she adds more slowly now, "And I hate what I've done to you."

I step forward, wanting to hold her in my arms, and realize too late that she has gone frozen in fear again.  "I won't hurt you, Cassandra," I tell her, as gently as I can, even as I move away.

"I know," she whispers, her ancient eyes still sorrow-filled.  "And that makes it even worse."

Worse, to want the comfort offered, and yet be afraid.  Worse, to want to trust and be unable.  "Were you worried that I might hit you, when ...?"  When I touched her in the dance at the gathering, when I reached for her in the dark of the night just past, when I made love to her three years ago?

"Every time I'm near you, Duncan," she tells me.  "Every single time."

Jesus.

"But don't take it personally," Cassandra says and adds with that whip-lash of sarcasm she wields so well, "I feel that way around you and every other Immortal on the planet.  And every other man."

The lash stings me into hot denial.  "I would never--"

"Have you ever wanted to hit me, Duncan?" she breaks in, but she already knows the answer is yes.

"There've been times I was angry at you, Cassandra," I admit, "but I would never--"

"No," she interrupts me again, then agrees quietly, her anger and her sarcasm gone, "you wouldn't.  But you have wanted to, and so I'm ... cautious around you.  That's not unusual, either; I've read the reports.  Battered women and children always have to deal with it.  My therapist told me she's seen it dozens of time."

"Why don't you just use the Voice, Cassandra?  Protect yourself with that?"

"How fast can you hit me, Duncan?  How long does it take you to strike?  I might be able to block it, but I don't have time to speak."  She shakes her head and looks away.  "And many times, you never even see the blow coming, because it comes from someone you trust."

Richie hadn't seen it coming.  But then, neither had I.

"And even if not ... the Voice isn't all-powerful, Duncan.  I can't use it in public; people notice.  I can't use it if I'm gagged.  I can't use it on more than one or two people at a time, and I couldn't use it on Roland or Methos or Kronos at all."  Her eyes go haunted once again, that nightmare remembered, relived.

Cassandra closes her eyes and breathes deeply, a ritual of cleansing, then offers me a smile and her hand, offers me her trust.  "I'm sorry, Duncan," she says, and her fingers are cool against my palm.  "It's really not you.  It's me.  I've got ... some problems, I know.  I've been in therapy for three years, and I'm going to need a lot more.  I thought I could handle having you here, being close to a man, but...."

"It's all right, Cassandra," I say, though nothing can ever be "all" right, for either of us.

"It's the betrayal of trust that hurts the most in the long term, I think," Cassandra says as we walk, hand in hand.  "For a long time I couldn't tell the difference between love and hate, between comfort and pain.  When someone says 'I love you' and then hurts you, which do you believe?  Maybe it's how they show they care, maybe the hate you feel for them is really love, maybe if people *don't* hurt you, it means they don't care at all.  Or maybe the only kind of love you deserve is the kind of love that hurts."

The kind of love that kills.  The kiss of a Judas, the lie of a friend, the violence of a lover, a parent, a son.  After such a betrayal, who do you trust?  How can you ever trust again?

"The therapy is helping," Cassandra says.  "I *know* the difference between love and hate now, but I don't always *feel* it, not right away."  She whistles for Finn, and we turn to walk back to the house.  "And I know we all get angry, Duncan.  I know we all feel that urge to strike out, to hit back."  Her lips twist in that familiar, bitter smile.  "After all, I just did it to you, and that's certainly not the first time I've wanted to hit you."

"Me?" I ask in mock surprise.  "Charming, helpful, wonderful me?"

"Annoying, interfering, wonderful you," she agrees with a smile, then pats Finn on the head as he comes to her side.

"Cassandra," I begin, for I know one small joke will not settle this, "if you want me to leave, I'll go."

"No."  She stops and faces me, holds tight to my hand, as the dawning light comes aglow around us.  "No, Duncan, please stay.  I want you here."

"I'll go back to sleeping upstairs."

"Maybe, at first, but ... I do need to learn how to deal with this.  And I do need your help, if you don't mind."

"At your service, m'lady," I say, sweeping her a gallant bow, and she curtsies in return.

"Thank you, Duncan," she says, with one of her rare golden smiles.  "I want to learn how to trust again, and I can't think of a better person to do it with."

"Sure about that?"  I'm not, not at all.  Sometimes lately, I haven't even been able to trust myself.

"Yes."
 

-----------------------------------------------------------
And hope is less dear than the dew of the morn.
-----------------------------------------------------------

I stay with Cassandra and work at the farm, as the nights close in and winter draws near.  I sleep in her bed, and after a time, she lets me hold her when she wakes from her dreams, as she holds me when I wake from mine.  We are tired, both of us, tired in body and soul, and we sleep ten or even twelve hours a night.  The dreams slowly fade, and the warmth and the comfort deepen, but only into friendship, for we are both learning how to trust again.

Some days I cook elaborate meals for her, and some days she cooks for me, and some days neither of us is hungry at all.  We go running together in the morning or practice sparring with swords, and in the evenings we sit quietly, talking or listening to music, reading books or playing chess.

"How long do you plan to stay in Scotland?" I ask her on a day much like the others, in the long twilight of a Highland afternoon.

Cassandra carefully sets a bookmark and lays her book on the table, yet another science-fiction novel.  "Dune" the title reads, and it seems apt enough, for the cover of this one features a huge, toothed worm in a desert of sand, with tiny human figures on the ground.

"At least ten more years, I think," Cassandra says, "maybe fifteen, if I can 'age' myself so no one notices.  I don't want to have to find a new therapist, and I need the time to heal.  There aren't many Immortals around here, so I don't have to worry about that, and, of course, Sara and Colin live close by.  Children grow so quickly, and I like being able to see them at least once a month."

I am godfather to those children, and I have not seen them in over a year.  Soon, I tell myself.  I will go soon.

Cassandra has a question for me.  "Why did you leave Paris and start wandering?"

"An Immortal named O'Rourke kidnapped two of my friends, but he offered to spare their lives if I gave up my head."

"And you were going to do it," she says with no surprise.

I shrug.  It seemed the thing to do at the time.  I had nothing to live for, and so no reason not to die.  I still have no reason.  Even in that odd dream I had had that day, that vision of a life unlived, I had seen only my past, only the things I had done, nothing of what I do now.  And so I do nothing but wander, and wait.

"Methos helped me get out of that little predicament," I say, and she rolls her eyes ever so slightly at the mention of his name.  I grin and keep going.  "After that ... I didn't want to put my friends in danger again, and I just needed some time to be alone."  It has been a long seven years since I rejoined the Game.  "So I left."  It is that simple.  "After a while, I found myself here in the Highlands, just like you, needing a place and a time to heal."  It has been just over a year since I left, I realize with surprise, another empty year.

"And what are you going to do after you heal, Duncan?" she asks.  "What do you want?"

I haven't thought that far ahead.  "Do you know what you want?"

For once she does not pause, but answers with a certainty I have never seen in her before.  "Oh, yes.  I know.  I'm going to start a school for girls."

"What will you teach there?  Music?  Dance?"

She shakes her head and picks up her book.  "Politics."
 

------------------------------------
A twinkling of ancient hands
------------------------------------

"Christmas is the Saturday after next," Cassandra tells me over dinner three weeks later.  "The Dysons are coming back this weekend."

And so I must leave.  I still have nowhere to go.

"I'll be going to Connor and Alex's for the holidays," she says.  "I know they'd love to have you there, too."

"I was thinking of doing some skiing," I say, my cheerfulness a blatant lie.  "Maybe in Switzerland."

Cassandra eats her spaghetti and says nothing.  Nothing about my not having seen my godchildren for over a year, about missing their birthday party yet again.  Nothing about celebrating my birthday, or about going to the Solstice Stones with Connor, or about spending Christmas with my family, or about celebrating Connor's birthday with him on New Year's Day.  She says nothing, but I can hear it just the same.

"I'm not ready," I tell her, and the words come hard.

She nods and shrugs and eats the last of her food.

"I don't know...."  I met her eyes, eyes of patience and pain, and I force myself to continue.  "I don't know where I'm going, Cassandra.  I don't know what I want."  I don't even know who I am.  Connor will see the emptiness in me, the hollow of my heart, and he will try to fill it, wanting only to help.  He will bury me in his strength and in his love, and I will never find myself again.

Cassandra nods once more, and we finish the dinner and the washing-up in silence.  Afterward, instead of going to her harp, she goes to her bedroom and comes back with a package wrapped in green cloth.  She sits at the table in the kitchen, and I join her there, in the rush-woven chairs where we first sipped tea.

"Richie gave these to me when we met at Connor's house three years ago," she says, untying a ribbon of white, revealing a deck of Tarot cards.  "A Christmas present for a witch."  She looks at me, amused.  "I suppose he could have gotten me a broom."

"He might have," I say, imagining Richie doing just that.  "Have you used them?" I ask, for Cassandra seems to know more of the future than she wishes.

"Only once," she says, shuffling the cards, the green and black and white lines on the backs of them flashing.  "With him.  And now with you, if you like."

"I don't ... Do you believe in those?" I demand.

Cassandra shuffles a bit more, the edges of the cards a blur.  "I know there are patterns in the universe we can't see.  We've developed machines to help us sense the patterns of energy and magnetism.  We can measure temperature and pressure.  With film, we can change how time seems to flow, so that we can see a flower bloom, or the movement of a bee's wings.  We can use telescopes to see the farthest galaxies, and microscopes to see inside a molecule.  And everywhere we look, we find patterns."

She lays the cards quiet on the table between us.  "But other patterns remain hidden, or inaccessible, at least to our conscious minds.  Patterns of life and death, patterns of the future, patterns of the past.  These cards can help us recognize those patterns, can help us see the things we never really looked at before."

"So, do you believe in them?" I repeat.  "Can they tell the future?"

"You mean, do they tell you what you should do?  Do you ever let anyone tell you what to do, Duncan?"

"Sometimes," I defend myself.

"Really?" she asks, eyebrows lifted.  "I think I'll ask Connor about that."  She cuts the cards into three piles, neatens the edges as she speaks.  "I doubt you'll find anything in the cards you don't already know.  They just help bring the pattern into focus, help you to see."

She leans back in her chair and waits, and I accept the challenge and restack the deck, then push it to her.  Cassandra draws cards from the pile one at a time and lays them on the table, three in the center, four around those in a circle, then four more in a straight line.  She touches the last card with her little finger, a man looking out to sea, then hm-mms to herself and lays down three more--a man staring at three cups while a fourth hovers behind him, a card named Judgement, and a card named Death.

"Do you know much about the Tarot, Duncan?" Cassandra asks, and when I shake my head, she starts to explain.  "The cards are rather like the modern playing decks--four suits, each with ace through ten, but with four court cards instead of three: king, queen, knight, and page, instead of king, queen, and jack.  And there are twenty-two extra cards--the Major Arcana--cards of power."

"Like this one?" I ask, pointing to the card at the top of the circle, the High Priestess, a woman with a crystal ball in one hand and a book in the other.  Cassandra nods, and I say, "Is this you?"

"That seems almost too obvious, doesn't it?" Cassandra says, and smiles as she adds,  "Besides, I've never used a crystal ball."  Her face grows serious again, and she hm-mms once more.  "It could be me, but it could also be the intuitive side of you, your subconscious knowledge.  A feminine aspect of your personality, even, the anima instead of the animus."

A wellspring of peace, forgotten and ignored.

"The suits are different, too," Cassandra says, back to her explanation, "swords, cups, wands, and discs instead of spades, hearts, clubs, and diamonds.  There are several interpretations, but in this deck, the swords stand for thought, the cups for emotion, the wands for energy, and the discs for material things or work."

"There seem to be a lot of discs," I comment.  "The Eight's at the bottom, and then there are three all in row over here: Five, Page, and Ace."  I grin across the table at her.  "Must be all that work I've been doing on the Camerons' farm."  I look again and notice something else.  "But the Ace of Discs is upside down, and so is the Ace of Cups."

"Yes.  They are."  Cassandra isn't grinning.  "Aces are cards of beginnings.  A reversed ace is an opportunity missed, a reluctance to start something new."

"And these others that are reversed?" I ask, for the Page and the Five are also upside down, and so are the Moon, the Knight of Cups, the Four of Cups, and Death.

"Reversed cards usually have the opposite--or at least a diminished--meaning of the upright cards."

"So, for Death, that's good, right?" I look again at the final card, a hooded, faceless figure in a long, red robe, holding a black flag emblazoned with a white rose.

"Death is a card of great change, not necessarily a card of ending.  Reversed, it means unpleasant changes, a difficult transition, depression, or resisting the inevitable."

I grimace, for that part of the pattern is all too clear to me already.  "This is another card of rebirth, and it's not reversed," I say, tapping the Judgement card, an unclothed woman rising like Phoenix from the fire.

"True," Cassandra agrees.  "And the one next to it, the Four of Cups reversed, is a card of new relationships, new possibilities."

I shrug and lean back in my chair.  "So, what does it all mean?  Half the cards say Go, half the cards say Stay."  Cassandra just looks at me, waiting, and I grimace again as I realize that I've been doing the same.  "So, what does it mean?" I ask in frustration, knowing already the pattern of my past.

"The cards in your past say, Stay.  The cards in your future say, Go.  Step out onto a path of new possibilities.  The Fool is in the center, the heart of it all, and he is about to step off a cliff into the unknown.  This Eight of Discs here at the base--," and she points to a boy industriously carving a circle of wood, "--says you're well-prepared.  The Fool and the High Priestess and the Moon say you have hidden strengths and insights, hidden even from yourself.  You *know* what you need to do; you just refuse to see it."

I look again at the cards, at the bright colors and the pictures, and wonder just what it is that I'm supposed to know.

"The Three of Wands is the first outcome card, and it's a man watching his ships come in, good business, good partners.  The three that I put down last are the enhanced outcome.  The Four of Cups and Judgement both foretell a new life.  Even Death-reversed is a card of change, though not necessarily pleasant or easy."

That is hardly a surprise.

"But these other cards--," her fingers touch lightly on the Five and Page of Discs reversed, the Five of Swords, the Knight of Cups reversed, the Moon reversed, the Aces reversed, "--these are cards of entanglement, of entrapment.  The world is too much with you.  You need to let go, of your possessions, of your past."

"So, I should be a fool?" I ask with over-ready sarcasm.  "Step off a cliff and whistle while I fall?"

"You've stepped off cliffs before, haven't you, Duncan?" she asks, and she is right.  "Besides, what have you got to lose?"

I have nothing.
 

------------------------------------------------------------------
What need have you to dread the monstrous crying of the wind?
------------------------------------------------------------------

The wind beats whiteness into the waves, whips my face with stinging sand.  Moonlight glimmers on the waters, from a moon half-gone and sinking in the west.  Half-light, half-dark, darkness into light, light gone into darkness, and still I do not *know*.

Finn runs on into the darkness, an all-black shadow in a half-black night, and I am running, too.  Running to nowhere, running to nothing.

Running in the dark, running to the dark, running myself to death.

Methos knows.

    / Endure what life God gives and ask no longer span;
    /   Cease to remember the delights of youth,
    /    travel-wearied aged man;
    /   Delight becomes death-longing if all longing else be vain.

That poem by Yeats had Methos's writing by it, but nothing I could read, a scribble in ancient Sumerian wedges or something equally obscure.

Damn him!  And damn Cassandra, too!  Always watching me, those two, always waiting and knowing and ... what?  What the hell do they want me to do?  "Let go," she had told me.  "Let it be," he has said.  They are old and I am young, and so we speak in different tongues, but, my God! what else do I have to give?

Love, home, family, friends ... I have walked away from all of those, cast myself out naked on the roads, like some ancient banished man, and the only thing I have left of myself is my name.

Finn barks at the waves and dashes in, the foam licking white at his black fur, until only tips of ears and snout can be seen.  I plunge in after him and gasp at the cold, but I swim on, for the moonlight lays a silver path upon the waves, and I will walk in the darkness no more.  My legs and arms grow heavy, and the air burns cold in my nose and shudders its way into my lungs.  Cold water can kill me, I know, for I have died this way before.

Delight becomes death-longing, when all longing and belonging be in vain.

I roll over onto my back, my arms outstretched upon the waves, and I lie in the white shadow of the moon, eyes half-closed to the moon half-round above.  The silver path is a fool's road, a trick of the light, a trap.  It leads nowhere but to deeper waters, and I will swim no more.

The pall of death comes deadly slow, ice flames licking round my heart.  A death-bed of water, cold rocking to and fro, and no voice of the mother to ever call me home.

It is enough.  Let it go.

Let it be.  Let me be.

Let me go.
 
 
 
 
 
 

----------------------------------------------------
I will arise and go now, and go to Innisfree.
----------------------------------------------------

The ground is hard beneath me; the rocking is no more.  The air is cold and full of water, a spray upon my face.  Warm wetness follows cold wetness, an anxious licking on my nose, a rough tongue from silky fur.  Finn has dragged me from the waters, and he is overjoyed.

Delight becomes life-giving if all living be for life.

I clasp my arms around him, feel the beating of his heart against the beating of my own.  The cold wind stings and burns and changes, and I know what I must do.

Fool, wandering fool, you have wandered too far, and home is never that far away.
 

-------------------------------------------------
Empty your heart of its mortal dream
-------------------------------------------------

The solstice sun flares bright today, though the wind blows cold, here at the top of the hill.  Cassandra and Alex have stayed at the farm with the twins, but Connor is beside me, and his son John is beside him.  The three of us watch the rising of the sun, watch the light lift free from the grasping of the stones, and we sigh in quiet wonder as the sun rises higher, a rebirth of light into the darkness of the year.

John wanders off to the pine trees, and Connor and I are alone.  "I'm moving to New Zealand," I tell Connor, and for once I have caught him by surprise.

"A woman?" he guesses, and for once he is wrong.

"A sheep farm.  I bought it yesterday."  My birthday present to myself.  Everything else I own has been sold, and the money put into trust funds or given to charities.  I keep only my sword and what money I think I will need for the next few years.  I'm going to have to work for a living again, go back to the rhythm of reality, for the first time in many, many years.  "It's good to keep busy," Methos has said, and his words are wise and true.  I know what I want now, and I know where I'm going, and I have finally decided who I am.

Connor is grinning at the mention of sheep, and I hand him a card with my address.  He reads the top line.  "Mark R. Johnson.  Is he the manager of the place?"

"In a way," I tell him, and somehow this is harder than I thought it would be.  "That's me."

Connor jerks in surprise, and I am grinning now.  Twice in one day I have surprised him, and that is rare indeed.  He laughs aloud and slaps me on the back, and then he slaps me down to size.  "It's about bloody time, Duncan.  It's only been a hundred years since I gave you that advice."  A century ago in Nantucket, Connor had told me to adapt, to leave my name behind, to *let go*, and I had told him no.

He looks at the card again, and then he looks at me.  "It's a fine name, Duncan.  A proud name."

A name that will blend, and yet a name with meaning.  I have been Duncan MacLeod, a dark warrior of the children of Leod, and now I am Mark Johnson, a warrior son of John, or Ian in the Scottish way.  Mark Richard Johnson, a tribute to my father and my son. Connor does not need to ask my middle name; he knows.  My new name links me to what I have been, to what I can be.

Connor pulls me to him in a hug, our wind-chilled flesh still solid and warm, and this is home for now.  "Happy birthday, Mark," he tells me, and the name sounds odd, yet that will pass, with use and time.

And other things have passed as well.  "MacLeod," the gypsy woman had told me, "you will always be alone," but I am no longer MacLeod, and I need no longer be alone.  All the prophecies have been fulfilled, my tasks completed, my duty done, and I am free to go.

John goes running down the hill, all long legs and easy motion, a man-child, a youth who dances in the wind.  Connor and I follow laughing, running in the dawn of the year, dancing in the winds of change.

Let it be, and let it go, and let it be again.

--------------------------------------
All changed, changed utterly:
And a terrible beauty is born.
--------------------------------------
 
 

=================
ABOUT THIS STORY:  Selena  challenged me to write about Ahriman and include the AAA arc in my story-universe.  At first I told her not just "No," but "Argh! No, no, no.  Back!  Back, you evil woman!!" but then a discussion on the HWRC list about Cassandra as an archetype gave me some ideas, and there I was, writing about episodes I had avoided watching for years.   Thank you, Selena, for this and many other things, both symbolic and real.

Someone (sorry, don't know who) on the HIGHLA List wrote an intriguing post about Duncan kissing Richie on the head in the fight scene in "Something Wicked," and I would like to thank her for that idea.

I would also like to thank my beta-readers Genevieve (who caught and threw back some dangling participles), Bridget Mintz Testa (who reads everything I write), and Vi Moreau, the Voice of Skepticism, who told me it didn't make any sense to her and demanded that I fix it.  Thanks to listen-r and Jennifer Campbell, who found the correct Methos quotes, and to Robin Tennenbaum, who discovered a teleporting cat and a two-headed dog, and told me to make it clear.

Thanks to Marianna Nystrom, my harp teacher.  Her CD "Celtic Dreams" is available through http://www.handstoharps.com/.

HIGHLANDER AS MYTH:  Perhaps one of the reasons many people find Highlander so interesting is the mythological components, the universal archetypes and themes present in the characters and the episodes.  In "Changed Utterly" the Christian symbolism and the pagan Sacrificial King are the most obvious, and there are also elements of Parseval and the Grail Myth.  Duncan was raised in the Christian faith, and the legend of the Holy Grail permeates much of European literature.  (While I was writing stories about the Horsemen ("Fury" and "Long Have I Waited"), the Greek myths seemed most appropriate for Immortals such as Methos and Kronos and Cassandra, who had lived through those times.)
=======================
All the scene headings are from poems by Yeats.  If you're interested in knowing which ones, write to me at darkpanther@erols.com.
=======================
The lullaby is "Little Red Bird of the Lonely Moor."  It is actually from the Isle of Man, not the west coast of the Scottish Highlands.  "Ushag vey ruy" is a robin, "ny moanee doo" translates as "of the black moor."
=======================
The song "John Barleycorn" is by Robert Burns and is about the making of whisky.  The word "whisky" comes from the Gaelic Uisge Beatha  (there are various spellings of this), which translates to "water of life."  The full text of the song is available at <http://www.acronet.net/~robokopp/scottish/johnbarl.htm>.
=======================
The number of people killed during the European witch hunts is not known precisely, but recent historical research indicates the death toll was much less than the nine million dead sometimes quoted.
=======================
The science-fiction novel that Cassandra is reading is "Dune" by Frank Herbert.
=======================

OTHER STORIES RELATED TO THIS STORY

By now, I have quite a collection of tales in my story-universe, and most of them intertwine in some way.  (More of those patterns that are hard to see.)  In my story time-line, "Changed Utterly" comes between "Hope Triumphant: Healer" and "Hope Triumphant: Sister".  If you're curious about some things referred to in this story, go here for a guide to the stories

All my stories can be found on my webpage at  <http://users.erols.com/darkpanther> and at the 7th dimension achives.

===================

The tarot deck described is the Robin Wood Deck.  It has the same symbolism as the Rider-Waite Deck, and the Celtic Cross Spread was used (that seeming appropriate for the Celtic Scot).  Rhiannon Shaw graciously interpreted the cards for me.  She did not know the circumstances of the story, only that the reading was for Duncan.  The cards laid out were the cards that came from the top of the deck; I didn't choose them.

Here is Rhiannon's reading in full.

--------------
 The Center:
--------------
SELF - The Moon, rev.:  Illusion, disguised actions, hidden worry & unseen dangers.
PRESENT CIRCUMSTANCES - 5 Swords:  Defeat, triumph for one's enemies, loss of possessions, a need to accept failure and move on.
CHALLENGE - The Fool:  New beginnings, a new cycle, hidden talents. Optimism untainted by history, purity of purpose, impulsive acts. Unexpected and unplanned events may occur.

-------------
The Circle:
-------------
BASIS - 8 Discs:  a steady worker, a sound base for the future, satisfying and productive labor.
RECENT EVENTS - Prince Cups, rev: an impractical person, all thought & no action, selfish, secretive, and unhelpful; a lover of arts & beauty with no skill for creation.
GOAL: The High Priestess: - insight, particularly into problems; hidden knowledge and intuition; secrets. A change for the better, the favorable influence of a woman.
NEAR FUTURE - Ace of Cups, rev:  repressed emotion, self-interest, a poor choice of partners.

----------------------
The Straight Path:
----------------------
SELF - 5 discs, rev:  hard work to overcome problems; change your attitude or use more imagination in facing opposition
FEELINGS - Princess discs, rev:  fighting progress, lacking foresight, mistrusting change, unadventurous and interfering.
HOPES AND FEARS - Ace of Discs, rev:  obsessive greed, clinging to the past, fear of death or change.
OUTCOME - 3 Wands:  a good partnership, looking forward to a promised venture

------------------------
Enhanced Outcome
------------------------
4 Cups, rev - novelty, new experiences, making the most of opportunity

Judgement - new doors opening, possibly spiritual. Renewed energy, decisions leading to improvements.

Death, rev - Unpleasant changes, a difficult transition, depression and despondency. Prolonged upheavals.

----------------------
Overall impressions:
------------------------
Disc on disc on disc, with even the swords and wands referring to possessions and entangling alliances, then enhanced by the Major Arcana and the inverted Aces. Fives are cards of setbacks and losses, and the reversed aces are warnings of misplaced opportunities and lost chances. The World is too much with you.

THE READING:  Like the Fool, you stand poised at some edge, debating whether to walk the cliff face or step into the unknown. Like the image, you do not move, and yet you must. Contradictions layer themselves in your cards. Your base is solid, sound, well-planned and made (8 Discs), yet hidden from most (the Moon), and indeed, in some ways from yourself (the Fool). You have faced down defeat and must move on (5 Swords), despite feeling inadequate. The resources are there, both within you and available to you. You have depths you haven't tapped (the Fool) and insights waiting, if you'll but look (High Priestess, 5 Discs).

Think, don't react. You've felt too much, and thought too little, and done even less. Too many cups entangled with discs is feelings for the material, but there's no constructive thought as shown by the lack of wands, and even less action: the only sword is in the center.  You're stuck in a rut, feeling the same things again and again without looking up and out.

Widen your view; look at everything going on around you, not just your problem. The Five of Discs is a party of people walking through the snow, not seeing the gold coins lying a few feet from them because they won't look up from their feet. -Look- at things. Actually -see- them. The answer is neither what you expect, nor where you think to find it. The High Priestess and the Fool are cards of knowledge already held, simply unread or unexamined.  Your environment drags at you, pulling you down until you mistrust change, fear the past and the future both. Surround yourself with active friends who will help you embrace the world and enjoy it.

This is a very odd reading -- it threatens to go either way. In one outcome branch, you choose wisely and accept stable partnerships, good friends, increasing knowledge (3 Wands). In the other outcome, you choose poorly, calling down broken alliances, misfounded trust, and more self-doubt in your capacity to choose.

All I can say is, keep your eyes open. Opportunities are coming (4 cups, Judgement, 5 Discs, High Priestess, the Fool) and will serve you well -- if you see them, and choose them. Think; don't brood. And then act, rather than wait too long. Cliff faces have a way of giving under your feet if you stand too long. (Death, rev, Ace Discs, rev)

Interesting indeed.  Poor baby -- that one really kind of sucks.  Some odd impressions/snippets that went through my mind on working this? The Prince of Cups reversed reminded me a great deal of Walter Graham, esp. when he killed Claudia Jardine to preserve her music since he had none of his own. The Moon reversed is any immortal, I think.  And that phrase, the world is too much with us, ran litany through my mind the entire time.

Overall, if I were Duncan getting this, I might decide it was time to take back up with another immortal and go walkabout for a few years.  That maybe he's gotten too settled in Paris/Seacouver and needs some changes, and that maybe some good company for the process, some one to kick him in the butt when he broods too much, and dare him to try new things, might be good. Connor, maybe? Of course, I'm not at all sure Duncan believes in tarot cards, either. (g)
 

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Thanks for reading through to the end!  - Parda at darkpanther@erols.com