James had been out riding on the Lord Mar's estate all day, and as dusk approached, he guided his bay gelding back towards the great house. His thoughts were full of the chambermaid, Susan. He thought of her warmly, of her blonde hair and her full figure. As he rode, he began to become aroused - dreaming of her fine, large breasts, which he longed to hold. He imagined her naked, her white skin against his, her blonde hair contrasting with his darkness.
In his musing, he took a long time to notice the oppressive heat and humidity in the evening air. He put of his cloak, leaving himself dressed only in the wrapped plaid of his simple country upbringing. Not for him the finery of the great Lords and nobility. He was an educated commoner, an architect and a tutor, son of a well to do farmer. Dark clouds were sliding in from the West, and there was no breeze at all. Fearing a storm, he guided his horse into the oak forest that stood near his path. Oaks so large and old that any lightning would surely prefer them to him.
It was darker under the great trees and soon the gathering clouds brought it to pitch black, extinguishing the half-light of Scottish midsummer.
"Damn, but I had not thought I would need a torch this night," he cursed to himself.
Between the oaks grew hawthorn, apple and deep banks of fern, and the path was narrow. Soon, he felt completely turned around and dismounted to lead his horse along the narrowing path. At this rate, he could still be picking his way forward by daylight.
Dimly, he began to make out a glimmer between the trees. Soft, flickering light silhouetted a stand of yew trees, their gnarled branches heavy with evergreen fronds. He approached cautiously, making the sign against the evil eye and drawing his dirk as he went. If poachers were about on Mar lands, they were sure to be hardy villains for to hunt here without permission was certain death. The little glade within the circle of yews seemed empty though, and he left his horse to step forward, cautious as a cat.
The enclosure of dense trees hid a small circle of manicured lawn, perhaps 20feet across. All around the edge, someone had set beeswax candles into the soft turf, and it was these that lit the light. At the centre stood a rough lump of stone, covered in moss and beside it a firepit filled with dark ashes. James stooped, and found the ashes cold and dead. The stone stood nearly waist high and he could see by the flickering candlelight that it was carved beneath the moss in an intricate pattern of spirals and lines. This was one of the old stones left by the earliest people of Scotland, or by the fairies some said. Again, he made the sign against the evil eye.
"Witches," he breathed. "Or the Old Folk!" For it was bad "geiss", luck, to speak the name of the fairies out loud.
Perhaps it was a soft whinny from his horse that alerted James or perhaps the crack of a twig underfoot. Maybe it was simply the intuition of a man who had lived all his life in the outdoors. Whatever, he spun in place, 18 inches of steel gripped ready in his right hand, only to stop in his tracks with his mouth hanging open like a dullard.
Before him stood a vision from the old tales that the Mar harper told late at night before a blazing hearth. A woman, a girl, stood at the edge of the glade as if sprung from nowhere. She could have stepped from one of the great oaks, a dryad fully formed. She was naked, and slim as a hazel tree, with long, wild hair the colour of autumn. Her only adornment was a fine gold chain about her neck, holding a single emerald in the hollow of her throat. Some two feet of the chain hung down between her pert breasts, to end pointing down towards her loins, highlighting her trimmed pubic hair.
