In the year of our Lord 1597, under a waning moon and the black frost of an early Lent, the burghers of Aberdeen chained a man in the dark beneath the Tollbooth. His name was Andras Macilroy, and they accused him of sorcery, lechery, and unnatural congress with the spirits of the wood.
They called him healer. They called him devil-born. But before the lash and flame claimed him, he told a tale no priest dared write, a tale buried under ash and alder root until now.
He was no priest, nor warlock—just a quiet man with dirt beneath his nails and strange words in his mouth. He lived on the edges of Seaton Wood, where the River Don winds thick and black beneath moss-covered boughs. Some nights he walked alone past the steeple of St Machar’s, gathering herbs the kirk deemed unclean.
Andras had no wife, no kin. But the sick found their way to him—some by rumour, others by instinct. He mixed tinctures and muttered in the tongue of the older hills. Those who paid in coin were healed. Those who paid in blood were changed.
He never told anyone of the woman.
She had come to him in a midsummer dusk, years before. The sun had barely set beyond Brig o’ Balgownie, and the air crackled with unseen lightning. He’d been trailing a stag through the fern-dark underbrush of Seaton Park, when he felt the world tilt—just slightly—like a door opening where no door had been.
She stood in the clearing, cloaked in blackthorn blossoms and mist.
She was beautiful. Horribly, beautifully so. Skin pale as new milk. Hair long and black as a raven’s fall. Her eyes shimmered like the Don at moonrise—deep, endless, hungering.
No words passed between them at first. She stepped forward. He did not flee.
“You are bold,” she said, voice like water through stone. “Or foolish.”
“I am neither,” said Andras. “But I am lost.”
She smiled then, and the clearing darkened. “Then come further in.”
So began his bondage.
She was the Queen of Elphame, ruler of the fae underworld. She claimed no name, only power. Her body was flame and cold, her mouth a chalice of honey and poison. When she took him, it was in silence, surrounded by her courtiers—pale as birch bark, antlered and watchful.
Sometimes she drew him beneath the catacombs of the Castlegate, through unseen doors in Mercat Cross where the very stone bled shadow. Other times she came to his thatch-roofed cell near the Don, wrapped in fog, smelling of violets and seaweed.
Their lovemaking was a ritual. A binding. A surrender.
His body became her altar.
His lips, her gospel.
She taught him many things.
To pluck foxglove from the graveyard behind St Nicholas Kirk, only when the moon was full.
To boil sea moss from Footdee with owl’s blood and bell heather.
To scry in bowls of river ice for the faces of the dead.
And to never, ever speak her name.
“You are mine now,” she told him. “And I will keep you well—so long as you remain obedient.”
He nodded, each time, shivering.
For her touch was ecstasy.
And her wrath, ruin.
Years passed. Andras healed dozens—some say hundreds. But strange things stirred behind his eyes. Children he delivered spoke fae tongues in sleep. Women he cured from barren wombs wept silver tears. Men who drank his draughts returned from war with no memory of blade or blood.
He did not age.
And people began to ask questions.
In late October of that cursed year, the pestilence returned to the burgh. Rats swarmed the Green. Bells tolled endlessly from St Clement’s, and folk began to suspect that the unnatural health of Andras Macilroy was the reason for the sickness of all others.
The kirkmen came with torches and fear, dragging him through muck and frost to the Tollbooth. He did not struggle.
They demanded confessions of pact and perversion.
Andras told them the truth.
“She is the Queen beneath your stones,” he rasped, lips split and bruised. “She taught me not evil, but power—old power. Before Christ. Before Rome.”
They sneered, called him mad. “A witch,” they declared.
“No,” he said, laughing through cracked teeth. “Not a witch. A bridegroom.”
They beat him. Burned his chest with irons. Still, he spoke of her:
“She rides beneath the roots of Seaton. Her court dances in the cairns behind King’s College. Her eyes are stars before they fall.”
“Liar,” they shouted.
“I have lain with her beneath the altar of your kirk!”
They sentenced him to death by flame. Not at the Castlegate—no. Too many superstitions. They took him to the Donmouth sands, where the river meets the North Sea, on the edge of Tillydrone. There, they built the pyre of wet pine and hung iron bells from it, to keep his soul from rising.
They lit it at dawn.
The flame struggled.
Then screamed.
The smoke turned violet. The air stank of roses and blood.
Andras did not scream. He sang.
A low, wordless chant older than Latin. Older than breath.
Some say they saw a woman on the far bank—tall, pale, and weeping. Others claimed her eyes caught fire, and the sea bent toward her.
When the flames died, his body was gone.
Only his shadow remained on the sand.
They tried to bury the tale. But the stones remember.
- Original tales adapted by Nick Kimber
If you enjoyed the story and would like to visit some of the places depicted then you will find a self-guided walking tour here