RESCUED BY THE HIGHLANDER

by Preston, Rebecca

  Chapter 12

  Anna took a deep breath. Was there any point in resisting the idea that faeries were real, that magic had happened? Something about Maeve’s kind, patient face made her reluctant to argue with her. So instead, she played an old trick — asked the most open question she could in the hopes that Maeve would tell her what she most needed to know.

  “What’s going on?”

  Maeve laughed — a gentle, musical sound that echoed pleasantly in the little kitchen. It was cozy in here, with the residual heat of the great fireplaces that presumably cooked most of the castle’s meals still keeping the space warm. Anna sipped at her tea, waiting patiently for Maeve’s reply.

  “Well. A little history of this place, perhaps, will be most helpful.” She gestured around her at the castle. “This is the Loch Ness Sept of Clan Urquhart. The clan has watched over the lake for hundreds of years. We are about a hundred strong — half of us warriors, like the men guarding the gates, or Donal, whom you’ve met. Of the rest of us, many are occultists, herbalists or what the local people call witches. As you can imagine, we keep to ourselves as much as possible.” Her eyes gleamed in the low light of the kitchen, and Anna took a deep breath, trying to process and understand.

  “So, the castle protects the locals?”

  “The clan does,” Maeve said. “The castle was only built a few hundred years ago. The legacy of Clan Urquhart is older than that by far.”

  “But Donal said his name was Grant.”

  “Aye, the Urquharts themselves are fewer in number than they once were. The Grants took over the castle in 1509. Though the need for protection hasn’t diminished, the local people are less aware, these days, of the dangers that are out there. Funnily enough, that’s a sign of our success,” she added, smiling to herself. “It’s a problem we grapple with — something my husband wasn’t able to combat in his time, and something Donal will need to face, soon. The lack of gratitude from the locals is galling, but it’s also a threat to us… after all, if they begin to question our importance, it will only be a matter of time before our protection begins to falter.”

  “Protection from what, exactly?”

  “From the Unseelie Fae. We function as… a kind of supernatural liaison, I suppose,” Maeve explained, with another musical little laugh.

  “Faeries. You fight faeries. You’re like — the Ghostbusters for faeries.”

  Maeve smoothly ignored that little barb. “Not all faeries. The Seelie Fae we consider close allies. I myself spent some time with them as a girl. Like all Changelings, I was left with a blessing.” She touched one slender finger to the skin beside her left eye, which gleamed. “You’ve noticed my eyes aren’t exactly natural, of course?”

  “You’re saying — faeries kidnapped you and turned your eyes that color.”

  “In a way,” Maeve said thoughtfully. “They only take those who are in need of their protection, for some reason.”

  “Right. Maggie said something like that.” This was absurd — she may as well get the full story before she decided exactly how batshit crazy everyone around her was. “So — I needed protection, so they swiped me.”

  “Aye,” Maeve agreed. “And they brought you here for the same reason. For reasons that I’m sure will become clear in time, we needed you here. They work in mysterious ways, and we don’t always know, but we’ve learned over the centuries that we can trust them. They’re on our side — even if their methods don’t always make sense at first.”

  “Like dumping me in Scotland.” She paused, almost reluctant to bring up the next point. “In the sixteenth century.”

  Maeve’s eyes lit up. “So, it’s true. I didn’t believe Maggie when she said it. You’re from our future.”

  Anna opened her mouth, closed it again. What was she supposed to say to that? She’d been leaning pretty hard on the hope that this was all some kind of elaborate re-enactment… and while that hope was still there, it was fading fast in the face of all this evidence. This was just too elaborate to be a re-enactment. There were no out-of-character areas, no orange tags on weapons as was a legal requirement… it just didn’t make sense. So, if it wasn’t a re-enactment, it was a dream, right? An extension of the strange dream with the glowing figures. A very realistic dream, with unbelievable internal consistency… she tightened her hands around the warm mug of tea she was holding, trying desperately to find some kind of weak point in the illusion, something that would confirm once and for all that it was just a dream. Something she’d wake up from. But there were aches and pains throughout her body from her swim in the lake, a bone-deep feeling of fatigue, the warmth of the cup, the lingering feeling of the cold air… so many sensations. She never dreamed this realistically. Nobody did.

  Could it be true? Could it be actually, legitimately true that she’d been pulled through time and space by some kind of supernatural force? She didn’t want to believe it — felt her head spinning and reeling as she seriously confronted the possibility that the people around her were telling her the truth. But what else made sense? Occam’s Razor… when you’d eliminated the impossible, whatever remained, however improbable, had to be…

  “It’s the twenty-first century,” Anna said quietly, as if saying it with enough force would make it true.

  “We’re getting toward the end of the sixteenth,” Maeve corrected her gently, and whatever she did, she couldn’t bring herself to disbelieve her.

  “How?” she just whispered, then took a deep breath through her nose, inhaling the comforting warmth of the chamomile tea. Whenever she was stressed, or frustrated, or overwhelmed with work, it was chamomile tea that she opted for to soothe her frazzled nerves. Chamomile tea would keep her going. It was a lifeline, now — it felt like the only thing that was keeping her sane, in the face of a truly ridiculous sequence of events. She’d seen guys whose sanity had snapped like a twig in the face of war. She’d never known what it felt like from the inside. The tea kept her grounded — and so did Maeve’s silver eyes, shining at her with infinite compassion as the woman reached out with one gentle hand to touch her wrist.

  “The Fae dwell in a realm outside of our understanding,” Maeve explained softly. The kitchen seemed to close in around them, impossibly calm and quiet, like the eye of a great storm. Whatever was happening, Anna instinctively knew that she was safe here — knew that Maeve would keep her from harm. “Their home is outside of our linear grasp of time, and of space. When they reach for us, they can reach for us at any time. That’s why children so often go missing for years and return the same age. For them, only a few moments have passed… but for the rest of the world, it’s been years. In the same way, they plucked you from your bed, and dropped you here, hundreds of years in the past. For them, that’s a straight line. For us… not so much.”

  “Interdimensional time travel,” Anna said flatly. She’d read some sci-fi. Her brother had been very into it when they were kids and had always tried to get her to read his latest favorite… but she’d never been that thrilled. It was all so difficult to keep in order — all the different rules of the universes, the different kinds of magic and science… wasn’t there enough to be dealing with in the real world without having to learn a bunch of fake rules as well, she’d always asked him? But maybe she should have paid closer attention. But after all, how could she have been expected to know what kind of madness was coming for her? That her fate was to wake up at the bottom of a lake in Scotland, hundreds of years in the past? The kitchen was spinning, and Maeve squeezed her hand tightly.

  “I know it’s a lot to handle. But you will have all the time you need, okay? You’re welcome here as long as you need. You’re our guest, and your every need will be attended. And you’re in the best possible place you could be. In Castle Urquhart, there are dozens of occultists and herbalists… the people here are your best chance of understanding what’s happened to you, and what’s going to happen next.”

  Anna took a deep, shuddering breath, worried about the answer to her
next question. “Can I go home?”

  And Maeve shut her silver eyes, just briefly. She seemed to be considering what to say very carefully, and Anna felt her heart beating faster. Was there a way home? There had to be. She couldn’t just be trapped here, in nothing but the clothes she’d come in… and even those had been taken away and were in the possession of Maggie. “A way home… strictly speaking, yes.”

  Anna’s heart leapt. “Thank God. Well — in the morning, then, I’ll talk to the occultists, start working out a way home.”

  Maeve hesitated. “The thing about the Fae… they only take people who need to be taken. They’re infamous around here for taking away abused children from their families, for example. It took us a while to figure that out. A lot of people think they’re our enemies for that reason, not realizing what their motivation is for taking these children away… but in Urquhart Village, there are no abusive families, no beaten children. The cycle of abuse is broken by the Fae.”

  Anna didn’t understand. “What does that have to do with me?”

  “Do you have enemies, Anna? Is there someone in your time who wants you dead?”

  She stared at Maeve for a long moment. It made a horrible kind of sense, didn’t it? All of Billy’s gloating about his new toy… he couldn’t have been talking about the baseball bat he’d brought to her house. He’d had that for years, ever since he played in a reasonably successful league as a kid (something he never stopped bragging about.) Could it have been that he’d gotten his hands on something more dangerous than that? Could he have come back for her, in the morning, once her guard had dropped?

  No. This was all conjecture, and she had no time for it. She shook her head hard, dismissing those thoughts. Maeve was shrugging. “I don’t know what motivated the Fair Folk to do what they did,” she said softly. “But I know that I trust them completely. And in terms of finding a way home… well, I’d advise settling in here, first. At the very least, you’ll need some rest and some food. Then I can show you around, help you understand where you are and maybe to find a place here.”

  Anna opened her mouth to argue — and yawned instead. It was very late at night — dawn must be close, in fact — and she had to admit, she was in no fit state to find a way home right now. Especially if it meant swimming back into the middle of the lake. She gave an involuntary shudder at the thought. Not an option. Not in the middle of the night, at any rate. She could be patient, bide her time.

  “We’ll talk more,” Maeve said softly. “We’ve only scratched the surface… there’s so much more to this place, but you’re tired. The most important thing for you to know is… you’re safe here. We’ll protect you. And we’ll help you learn what’s happening to you.”

  Anna nodded gratefully. Whatever was going on, it felt good to have an ally like Maeve on her side.

  Chapter 13

  “I have a lot more questions,” Anna said finally, staring into her empty mug of tea. “But I’m worried that I’m too tired to process the answers properly.”

  Maeve laughed that musical laugh of hers, taking the teacup away and moving over to a low basin with it. No running water, of course, Anna thought — they must bring it in each day. Some kind of pulley system to pull it out of the lake? At any rate, a hassle. That was one thing she often thought about, even in the depths of excited conversations about what the medieval era must have been like — what about the inconvenience? Running water, electricity — these things were all so under-appreciated in her time. God, there she went, thinking of it as ‘her time’. Was she accepting that she was a time traveler? Was it really that easy to sway her mind to the ludicrous conclusion that she’d actually been pulled through time? But what other explanation was there? Wasn’t it even more irrational to assume that she was still in the twenty-first century, despite all this evidence to the contrary?

  She was pulled from these reflections by Maeve’s gentle hand on her wrist. The woman was waiting beside her, a smile in her eyes. “Come now, dear. I’ll show you to your room. The castle will be waking up soon, but don’t worry about getting up yourself — just sleep as long as you need, and we’ll make sure there’s some breakfast waiting for you no matter when you wake.”

  “That’s very good of you,” Anna said gratefully. “I know — I’m probably not the easiest guest. I’m still trying to figure all of this out.”

  “Of course you are. Just know that we’re friends, all of us here.”

  As if on cue, the kitchen door crashed open. Three men poured into the space, laughing and talking over each other in that way that young men had. Donal was one of them — she spotted her new friend straight away, his gray eyes crinkled up in laughter — but the other two were unfamiliar. One had copper-colored hair and a neat beard the same color — the other was built like a brick wall, with dark hair and intense black eyes. Both of the strangers were speaking to Donal — it became rapidly clear that they hadn’t spotted Maeve and Anna yet. No situational awareness, Anna thought with amusement. If they were recruits of hers, she’d give them a tongue-lashing.

  “— dove into the lake playing the hero like some idiot,” the dark-haired one was saying, jabbing Donal in the ribs. “It’d be just like you to drown saving some weird woman in trousers, leavin’ the whole Clan high and dry —”

  “Have ye never been in a boat before, is that it?” the other one was saying.

  He was a leaner man, and Anna spotted a bow slung over his back. A guard, then. One of the soldiers who guarded the wall. Maeve had said the army was about fifty strong — this man must have been one of them. He didn’t look like a particularly seasoned soldier — in his early twenties at the oldest, she reckoned, looking at his clear face. Some young men grew beards in an attempt to seem older. It never worked. The dark-haired man was clearly a little bit older, but not by much — perhaps his mid- or late-twenties, but no older than that.

  “Well, at least if you’d drowned like a damn fool, the tanist would’ve done an excellent job taking over in your — oh, wait, no, Malcolm’s your tanist, never mind, we’d all have been doomed.”

  “Still sore about that, Brendan? When d’ye think that little wound’s gonna heal? You’re like a bear with a thorn in its paw —”

  “Boys,” Maeve said suddenly, and her voice cut across the bickering like a whipcrack.

  Anna fought back laughter as all three men straightened their backs as though they’d been electrocuted. Maeve may seem gentle, she thought, but she had the power of a drill sergeant at her command. She was liking the silver-eyed old woman more and more. “Are you picking on your Laird?”

  “No, Mother,” said the copper-haired one, looking sheepish.

  “A little,” the dark-haired man said, more forthright.

  Donal elbowed him hard in the ribs and he winced but stayed standing straight, at attention like a soldier. His posture could’ve done with improvement, Anna thought, scrutinizing them both, but overall, not bad.

  “We have a guest,” Maeve said dangerously. “Where are your manners?”

  “Pleasure to meet you.” The copper-haired man started forward, reaching his hand out — Anna shook it, and he blinked at her in surprise, clearly not expecting that from her.

  What had she been expected to do — let him kiss it? Unlikely. It may have been the sixteenth century, but Anna wasn’t going to turn into some shrinking damsel just because the century had changed.

  “Malcolm,” he introduced himself, clearly deciding to move on from her unusual gesture.

  “Malcolm’s my little brother,” Donal explained, moving up beside them.

  Anna looked at the bandages on his arm, pleased to see they were holding still. She was still a little worried about whatever strange poultice Maggie had applied to the nasty wounds — hopefully the man was young and strong enough to fight off the infection that had seemed almost bound to eventuate from the injury.

  “Adopted brother,” Malcolm corrected with a glint in his eye.

  It seemed like an o
ld argument — the kind of thing siblings never let each other forget about. Yeah, they are brothers, alright. Anna chuckled to herself, thinking of the stupid decades-long arguments she still waged with her brother. An unexpected wave of homesickness hit her. She missed her idiot brother. She wished she’d called him more often.

  “I’m Anna Clarke,” she said, glancing down at herself then back up with an eyebrow quirked. “The weird woman in trousers.”

  Malcolm looked pained. “You heard that, then. Sorry. It’s just a little unusual, women in trousers, you know. They usually wear skirts. That’s all.”

  Anna glanced sideways at Maeve, who, sure enough, was wearing a dress. She fought down the old irritation — why don’t you wear a skirt, why don’t you wear makeup, why don’t you do something with your hair. Appearance, appearance, appearance. Was that all Donal had communicated to his friends about her? Nothing about who she was, what she’d told him about herself? Well, she supposed he hadn’t even believed she’d trained soldiers, so in a way, he didn’t know the first thing about her. Typical. Why did she feel such a strong sense of disappointment? Had she expected better of this man, just because he was good-looking?

  The dark haired man started forward, clearing his throat. He shook her hand readily, not making a big deal of it or attempting to kiss her hand instead, which she appreciated. He wasn’t bad looking either, she noticed, looking into his dark eyes. Burly, too — she liked men who looked like they could throw her around. She was yet to find one who could actually take her in a fight, of course, but the principle was there.

  “I’m Brendan,” the dark-haired man said, smiling at her. “Captain of the Guard here.”

  “I’m the tanist,” Malcolm put in quickly.

  Yeah, that was definitely a younger brother — always keen to one-up the people around him, as though he had something to prove. It was a common thing, she could tell by the way Malcolm gritted his teeth and Donal rolled his eyes, just a little, tipping her the slightest suggestion of a wink. She grinned back.