Four Times the Trouble, Four Times the Charm

Dreams, parchments, riddles and revelations

          That night Diana had a dream. It was not her usual nightmare either. She saw the four of them dressed in strange clothing. They were in the village, inside a double ring of stones. Their horses were with them and they had drawn their swords and raised them to the sky before they placed them into the center ring of stone. They were chanting something but it was hard to make out over the howling of the winds around them. The night sky was wrent by a flash of lightning. They began walking in a counter clockwise direction as the inner circle began to glow. Lightning flashed all around them and the wind howled as they walked but the raging storm never touched them. Suddenly the storm stopped, the glow faded from the stone circles and they stopped walking. They picked up their swords a re-sheathed them. They stepped out of the circle of stones into a thick forest and found it was just getting dark outside. They rode from the forest and found a farmhouse under attack. They rushed in and dispatched the marauders quickly. The farmer and his family were grateful for their help and shared a meal with them. The farmer had been surprised that there warriors were women. The farmer had his son show them to a cottage hidden in the woods where they lived and protected the farms by night. Diana rolled to her side and the dream changed. They had been living in the cottage in the woods for a while and they had been signaled that there was a farm under attack and while they were away, some men had gone to the cottage and awaited their return. The four women had returned, weary from their battle and had let their guard down. They walked right into the trap as the men surrounded them and disarmed them. As they were bound and their hoods pulled from their heads, one of their captors asked, "What are we going to do with these women?" The biggest one looked down into her eyes and grey-green eyes flashing in amusement said, "What do ye think? We're going to have us some fun." He knelt down on one knee and grabbed a fist full of her hair at the back of her head, tipping it back. He leaned down to her and grinned.

          Diana woke with a start. She was gasping and soaked in sweat. It had felt so real. She looked over to the windows and saw lightness gracing the sky. She got up and went into the kitchen, put some logs on the griddle side and lit them. Once they were going well enough she slid the steel plate into place and put a kettle of water on for coffee. She added the instant coffee to it and looked in the basket Joshie had brought over the night before. She found some ham and eggs, onions and potatoes as well as a block of lard. She smiled as she saw the fixings for a nice breakfast. She diced the potatoes, ham and an onion, scrambled some eggs. She then added lard to two frying pans. She put one to the side so the lard would melt slowly and the other one she had over the heat. Once the lard melted she added the potatoes and fried them then added the onion and ham she stirred them together and moved them off the heat. She added the eggs to the other pan and cooked them to a nice fluffy consistency. The coffee was done so she moved it to a warm spot to keep it that way. Once everything was cooked and ready, she moved the other pan to the side so it would keep warm but wouldn't burn. Diana helped herself to a plate of food and a large cup of coffee. She added the powdered creamer to her coffee and sat down at the prep table to eat. Devon came stumbling into the kitchen as Diana was eating. "Yum, coffee, ham, potatoes and eggs. Just what I need" she said as she helped herself to breakfast. She smiled at her sister crookedly. Diana shook her head chuckling. "You slept well last night" Devon said to her sister. "How did you know?" Diana asked. "Because you didn't wake up screaming" Devon replied. "It's actually the second time since we've been here in Scotland that I haven't woken up like that. The first time we were at the inn and I started to have the dream but someone called my name and it pushed back the darkness. This time it was different" she said and went on to tell her sister the details of her dream. Devon just listened and nodded her head. "It felt so real like it was actually happening that it woke me up" Diana concluded. They finished up eating and washed out their dishes. "You know your dream may have to do with your translations of those parchments" Devon explained. "It could very well be the reason. I always did have a vivid imagination" she said. They went back into the Hall and while Diana went back to work on the last parchment. Devon woke the others so they could eat. After eating they went to go map out the castle starting from the top battlements and working their way to the dungeons if at all possible. They wanted to stay away from Diana as she worked on the last parchment. Devon found a small recessed door on the second floor at the end of the hallway on the left side. She pulled out the keys and ignored the ones they already had tagged and found one that had a corresponding symbol to the door. She unlocked the door and found a spiral stairway that went up and down. They climbed up and came out on the battlements. They looked around and took pictures. The view was spectacular and they could see for several miles in a wide arc. Then they realized something unusual about the shape of the castle, it was almost triangular in shape. It had three sides that they could see but where the third side should be was in the face of the mountain. One side dropped off a steep cliff several hundred feet to rocks below. The last side faced out over the valley below and was the entry way to the castle. From this vantage point they were able to see how impenetrable the castle really was, especially if the battlements had sentries and archers posted every twenty feet. The great hall was literally one whole side of the castle on the lower level the second level was where the rooms were that they had checked out yesterday extended into the inner area of the castle in a wedge shape. They mapped out the floor plan of the rooms below them and noticed there were spaces unaccounted for. "But wouldn't that area be taken up by that secret room in the bed chamber and the rest be the garderobe in all the other rooms?" Devon pointed out. "Yeah you're right" Marian said. They went back to the spiral staircase and near the bottom they found another door leading to more rooms that went back into the mountainside and as they went through they knew that this was where the servants were quartered as there were no locks on the doors. These they added to the maps as well. The outer hallways were probably used to house guests or villagers if the need arises like an attack. Devon took a look at the stonework of the walls. They were cut with peg and hole construction and the cracks were filled with a very hard compound that she had trouble getting a sample from. It was like the modern day cement used in today's concrete. This castle was becoming more of a riddle that she wanted to uncover.

          Downstairs, Diana was hard at work on the translations. The writer had been highly intelligent and by using so many different languages it had kept the parchments from being deciphered too easily. Diana finally finished her translation of the final parchment and it had been done in the language of the trees called ogham. People saw these lines on posts and most people couldn't tell you what they had meant unless you had studied under a professor that knew this ancient writing. She put the pages in their right order and scanned them into her computer to save them in case something happened to her hand written notes. She started reading the translations through. The first page told of an ancient legend about the stone circles and the four swords. The second page foretold of the four women who stepped into the village circles on the eve of the Hunter's Moon and step out of the forest circles. They help the people of the land to win a great battle with their enemy and then the four women stepping into the forest circles and coming back out of the village circles. The people's enemy comes back with reinforcements to find everything being burned and one captive tells them that the land was cursed with a plague. The enemy flees the burning land, never to return. The remaining villagers become the caretakers of the land until the Laird's return. The last page describes the four women and gives their names. Diana read this and felt dizzy. The names listed in the parchment were the names: Marian MacDonald, Maris MacDonald, Devon MacLaughlan and Diana MacLaughlan. "This is utterly impossible!" she exclaimed. These parchments, if they were real, were telling them that they would go back in time to the year eleven ninety two. 'It couldn't be, could it?' she wondered as her hand shook. "Have faith and by the grace of the old Gods anything is possible" a soft male voice said on the breeze. Diana looked around and saw she was still alone. She shook her head, thinking she had imagined it. The voice whispered to her again, "Believe." Diana paled. She read the last paragraph out loud, "Hidden in the Mantle of power, you will find the scrolls of the swords. Use the small key, it holds the answer." Diana took her keys out and located the small one, she studied it. It would fit into a small case, chest or open a cabinet or a drawer. She re-read the part about the key again and realized that the word mantle had been capitalized. "A Mantle of power usually signifies a cloak or cape showing a person's right to rule but you don't need a key to open it. What else would be considered something of power?" she said out loud. She looked around the room and her eyes locked onto the massive fireplace and the mantle above it. "Of course, fire is the true power in its most primal form and the mantle is above the power of the fire, its cloak so to speak" Diana said as she stood up to her full six foot height and walked over to the fireplace in the great hall. She examined it carefully but found no keyhole in it. There were dozens of fireplaces in this castle. She looked down at the other keys in her hand. She realized that the keys are for to the study and the bed chamber and who they belonged to were the Laird's chambers, the man of power. She fairly flew up the stairs. "Smart woman" the soft male voice said with a touch of humor. She ran down the hall and thought she heard the wind chuckle and smiled as she opened the door. She went over to the fireplace and felt along the bottom, the sides and the top but found no keyhole. She still had one more place to try and unlocked the bed chamber door. She went over to the mantle and felt along the bottom, sides and as she felt along the top, right in the center she found a hole. She said a quick prayer, put the key in and gave it a twist. She heard a soft click and the top opened. She pulled out a bunch of parchments. Some still had their was seals on them. Diana took off her sweater and placed it on the table. She carefully laid the parchments on the sweater then folded the sweater around them. She carefully cradled the bundle as she carried them down the stairs to where she had been working. Diana pulled on a pair of gloves and went through them one at a time. Some of them were accounts of livestock and crops, land grants, missives from father to son and one from some so called king demanding his immediate surrender of all lands and title if he didn't comply with the king's commands. There was even a marriage contract. The last thing she came across was several rolled up parchments tied together with a ribbon that was falling apart. She carefully unrolled the papers and read through them. They were written in Arabic and explained how the swords were to be placed in the village circle, in what order, what was to be changed, how many steps were to be taken in the circle and even what day it had to be done and the direction to walk in. Diana sat back so hard that her bottom missed the chair and smacked into the floor. She was still holding the parchment in her hand as she lay there and read the signature at the bottom. 'It couldn't be possible. He was just a figment of someone's wild imagination. The signature was the person thought to be Merlin the Mage. Diana's mouth went dry. If this was for real then this was proof that he actually existed, and was what people had thought he was, and honest to everything sacred, wizard.