Primal Moon by Brooksley Borne

The moon hung low to the ground
and bright white against the cloud-splotched sky. Like the great
moon goddess Hathor herself was gazing at Aziza through a crown of
crow feathers. The night was as black around the glinting orb as the
light was silvery on her copper skin. Hard to believe it was the
same moon that hung in the sky over Cairo. She wanted to climb up a
beam to it and have it spill her back home.
    Fairies menaced her. She
flicked them like scarabs. They were trying to tell her something.
She shouldn’t be there. She shouldn’t be doing what she
was doing.
    That Aziza hated everything
about her new land made the unnamed pull from deep within her to this
forbidden spot that much less deniable. It was a place where she
found her only peace and warmth and soothing. Her only comfort, it
was the only place she didn’t feel alone, for reasons she could
not name. She was called to it by an inner, ethereal voice but
restricted from it expressly by an outer, lowly voice. Forbidden to
come to the woods by a beastly laird. Uh .
    The men of her home were
sophisticated, smooth-skinned and seemly. This place crawled with
blunt, uncouthed, unshaved, gigantic barbarians. And despite an
order to the contrary by the legendary giant king of the beasts,
Laird MacDunna himself, Aziza came to this forbidden spot every
chance she got.Well, an order by proxy. Aziza never
actually met the laird, though she belonged to him.
    She kept a running rant in her
head, rehearsed daily, of a tirade she was going to unleash onto the
laird at first sight, if and when he actually made it home to her.
Her speech was like a well-sharpened weapon she was going to pierce
him with. She had it down cold. She was often heard muttering it to
herself as she went about her dreary business. It was because of the
laird that she was there in Scotland instead of Egypt. It was
because of him that she was alone.
    So lonely.
    Aziza bowed, flat as she could,
praying to the moon in hopes that it would requite her with passage
back home. Or to send her a prince to take her away from this. To
make it better. On nights like these when the sky was so ripe, the
first chance she found to creep into the breach of the great black
woods, she took it. The drive was insane lest she answer it. It was
what she imagined the draw to a lover to be. Like the beckoning of
the great and charismatic and handsome sultan himself, the grand
vizier Ayyubid Saladin by whom she had been chosen to marry. Aziza
sighed with the very thought of him.
    Then her stomach sharpened with
disappointment.
    The sultan gifted her to his
respected foe, Richard the Lionhearted who foisted her off to some
barnyard animal Scottish knight noted for his breastly brawn but
lamb-like loyalty. She had never met the grand vizier, nor the king
and never this oafish rudimentary creature who had the callousness to
not even show. To keep her waiting for him for over a year while she
was left stranded among crude conditions, among creatures farthest
from the civilization to which she was accustomed.
    Aziza hated her Scotsman with
everything she had. She savored each practice of her little
soliloquy that would let him know one day just how much she loathed
him and why. She wanted to go home. Back to Egypt.
    She lay in the forest litter,
mottled by shadows and moonlight, not finding her ease in celestial
supplication. She was being nipped alive by blasted fairies buzzing
and their bites were starting to itch. Just as she was about to
abandon her endeavor and call it a night, she spied shadowy figures
stealing into the trees. She crouched against the springy pine
needles and observed in secret.
    In the spotlight cast from the
sky, she beheld a line of young clan women dressed in clan finery,
heeding the escort of hooded men. In the center of the line wearing
a green, gossamer gown that looked like a dream, like it was meant to
be worn by a fairy or perhaps a bride was the woman Aziza knew to be
betrothed to the laird’s