RESCUED BY THE HIGHLANDER

by Preston, Rebecca

  “How are you, Maggie?” she asked, rising to her feet.

  “Better for the warmth.”

  “Would you like something to eat? A cup of tea?” Hadn’t Anna read something about faeries once — that they were very interested in politeness and etiquette? That was often the source of their power over humans… that impoliteness on the part of a human, even a mild impropriety, would effectively put them into debt with the Fair Folk, who would then insist on all kinds of favors and tasks being carried out as a ways of squaring that debt. That was the source, if she remembered correctly, of the advice not to eat anything when you found yourself in the faerie realm. It wasn’t about the actual consumption of the food — it was about eating before you’d been invited to do so being a terrible faux pas, which could then be manipulated against you. Well, Anna wasn’t going to be caught being rude — even though from what she remembered Maeve saying, Maggie was only half Fae. Half was more than enough… and she clearly had some profound magical powers if her healing was anything to go by. Who knew how many of the old traditions she still kept? Did Donal owe her a debt, she wondered idly? He certainly deferred to her quite regularly.

  “Very kind of you, dearie, but I’ll not trouble you for sustenance,” Maggie said, oddly formal, confirming Anna’s suspicions that etiquette was of great significance. It hadn’t even occurred to her to check her manners back when she’d first met Maggie… but then again, what reason had she had, back then, to assume that something supernatural was going on? She’d been freezing cold and deeply disoriented… hopefully Maggie would cut her some slack.

  “I wanted to thank you,” Anna said, “for the herbal wraps you sent me. Did you get my message?”

  “Aye, I did, and you’re most welcome.” Maggie swung around on her chair and fixed Anna with one beady eye. “Do come and warm yourself with me.”

  She did feel a little chilly, she had to admit — the sudden influx of warmth into the room had brought her attention to how cold it had been beforehand. She peeked out the window, surprised to see a grey, overcast sky, threatening rain. It was a noticeable change from the comparably fine weather they’d been having, and she found herself feeling a surge of gratitude that they’d gotten the laundry done when they had. Blair ran a tight ship, it seemed, with a good sense for how to take advantage of the weather… was that supernatural, she wondered, or just good housekeeping? Very little difference, in the end, when you thought about it.

  Anna settled in a chair beside Maggie, sighing in contentment as the heat of the fire washed over her. It felt very, very good to be here, in front of the hearth. There was an odd spicy scent to the burning wood… was that one of Maggie’s additions?

  “I was amazed by how quickly the wraps cleared up my cold,” she admitted. “It was a blessing.”

  “Don’t worry about bein’ in debt to a faerie,” Maggie said bluntly, her eyes twinkling. “I’m only half. I don’t go in for any of that manipulation. Good instincts, though.”

  “I didn’t —”

  “I could see your mind ticking. You’re a clever girl,” Maggie said. “Good to keep across the debts you owe. It’s how we connect to each other, on some level. We do for others what they can’t do for themselves… and in turn, if you’re lucky, they do for you what you can’t.”

  “That’s a good way of looking at it,” Anna said thoughtfully. The fire was making her feel odd… very peaceful, but with a strong sense of clarity, like she could see and feel and think much more clearly than usual.

  “But people are making it difficult for you to help them, aren’t they?” Maggie prompted. They were both looking into the fire — it made the conversation feel simultaneously intimate and distant, like conversations you had on long car rides, your eyes on the road, but your attention on the person in the passenger seat. Anna wondered briefly how Maggie knew what had been going on, then assumed she had her connections in the castle… visitors and the like, messengers. Or possibly she just knew what was going on everywhere around the lake. Who could say?

  “They are,” she said, grimacing a little. “I helped Donal and his men protect a group of unarmed servants and kill a dangerous creature that was stalking the villagers, and they reacted as though I was the problem, not their stupid mistakes.”

  “Men are stubborn,” Maggie said thoughtfully. “Our work is to be more stubborn. Men are stubborn like stone or fire… they shatter, or blaze and burn out. Women are stubborn like water. Water can’t be destroyed. Boil it, it turns to steam. Freeze it, it turns to ice. Leave it to its own devices, it returns, unchanged.”

  Anna nodded. There was something very pleasing about that image.

  “And Donal needs you, for all that he doesn’t see it yet,” Maggie continued. “He needs your wits, needs your fire, needs your insight. He’s stubborn and impulsive. With you by his side, those will be strengths, not weaknesses.”

  “He doesn’t want me by his side. He doesn’t want me to even leave this room,” Anna said, exasperated. “He thinks women should raise children and do housework and nothing else. That fighting is just for men.”

  “We fight every day of our lives and don’t you forget it. But you want to ask me something, don’t you?”

  Maggie turned away from the fire and looked at her for the first time since she’d arrived, her dark eyes gleaming, the firelight flickering in time with her breathing, like a pulse, like a heartbeat. For a moment, Anna knew she was looking at a magical creature. And she knew what she wanted to ask.

  Chapter 44

  “Maggie, how do I get home?”

  Maggie chortled at that, a full-body laugh that seemed to shake her small frame where she sat, threatening to throw her off the chair — Anna even extended a hand to steady her, smiling despite herself at how amused the little old woman was by the question.

  “Home’s where you make it, dearie,” Maggie said finally, still chortling and dabbing at her tears of laughter with a filthy handkerchief she’d pulled from the recesses of her cardigan. “Home’s in the middle of your chest. You carry home with you wherever you go.”

  “It seems you carry a lot more than home with you,” Anna couldn’t help but observe, smiling a little as she gestured to Maggie’s cardigan.

  The woman hooted with laughter again, nodding in acknowledgement as she tucked her handkerchief away again in whatever strange little pocket it had been plucked from.

  “True enough, true enough. But my home, that’s in the middle of my chest where it should be,” she said firmly, thumping herself in the sternum hard enough that a hollow sound rang out through the room. “I’m home now. I’m home in my cottage. I’m home in the middle of the woods.”

  “Okay. I’m home. But how do I get back to my own time?” she tried again. “I came through the faerie mound at the bottom of the Loch, right?”

  “Oh, aye, are you planning on a swim?” Maggie enquired, a slightly mocking tone in her voice.

  “I mean… if there’s no other way. Is the gate two-way, or —”

  “That’s the wrong question to be asking, my sweet.” Maggie rocked back on the chair, kicking her boots up to warm them in front of the fire. “Wrong question altogether.”

  “What’s the right question?”

  “That’s the wrong question too,” Maggie chortled, rocking on the chair in a way that made Anna worried she was going to fall off it backwards and crack her head open on the stone floor… though something about Maggie suggested that she had ways of stopping that from happening, if she so chose.

  “Okay. Are there other burghs out there, within walking distance?”

  “Oh, absolutely. Still the wrong question, though.”

  “Maggie — I can’t stay here,” Anna said gently, hoping she could get through to the strange woman. Unlike with Maeve, Maggie seemed to react best to brutal honesty, so she disregarded her inclinations to hedge about and disguise her true intentions. “It’s too backwards. Precious few people respect me as a person, let alone as a woman…
nobody’s interested in what I have to offer, in what I could do for the castle… it’s been a wonderful visit, truly, and I’m so grateful for everyone’s hospitality, but I’ve caused nothing but chaos since I got here. Donal’s furious, Brendan’s plotting some kind of mutiny I think…”

  “Nothing but chaos? Weren’t you just telling me you saved a group of unarmed innocents from a wolf?”

  “Well, I did that,” she admitted, “but aside from that —”

  “And you’re making Donal think harder about who he is and the choices he makes, the way he thinks about women… I’d say that’s a good kind of chaos, myself.”

  “True,” she allowed. After all, she’d been consoling herself with a similar argument — even if Donal chose to treat her like shit, maybe if she fought hard enough, he’d wind up treating the next woman he ran into with more respect. It was like chipping away at a huge stone wall — she might not be able to knock the whole thing down in one blow, but she could certainly put a few cracks in for the next woman to have a go at. But it was exhausting work.

  “You’re not convinced,” Maggie sighed. “You still want to go back to your own time. Safe and sound, tucked up in your bed in your little home, that’s what you’re thinking, right?”

  “Right,” Anna said.

  “Leave the poor servants to their fate —”

  “The men of the castle are more than capable of guarding them,” Anna said, annoyed at the implication that she’d leave people to die. “So long as they don’t get carried away like they did the other night… I’m sure they’ve learned their lesson.”

  “And that’s the only lesson you had to teach them?”

  “Nobody will learn from me, Maggie,” she said, plaintively. She was starting to feel ridiculous — like a little child, complaining that none of the other kids would play with her.

  “So, you want to run away. Go home. You taught them one lesson, and that’s enough.”

  “Yeah, I do,” she said irritably. “I do want to go home. I was doing good work in my time — I was helping people, helping women learn how to defend themselves. There’s a domestic violence epidemic in my country, in my time. I was giving women the skills they needed to defend themselves, and the mental fortitude to get out of those situations.”

  “You were,” Maggie agreed, seemingly not surprised by anything Anna was telling her. Was that magic too, or was she just insightful? “You were doing good work. Shame it was all about to come to an end.”

  “What do you mean by that?” she objected. “I was doing great. My business was getting established — I was even thinking of quitting my part-time work so I could focus completely on the self-defense stuff…”

  “Can’t do much self-defense training when you’re dead, unfortunately,” Maggie chortled.

  Anna stared at her. “What do you mean?”

  “Why do you think the Sidhe brought you here, Anna?”

  “Who knows? They’re deeply mysterious, aren’t they?” Anna said irritably, a mocking tone creeping into her voice without her realizing it. “Nobody can predict what they’ll do or why, everyone just trusts that they’ll do the right thing, people spend their whole careers arguing about tiny little details of them… what’s the point trying to figure out what they want if they’re so mysterious, that’s what I want to know.”

  “I mean, I just talk to them,” Maggie said innocently, “but I see where you’re coming from.”

  That stopped Anna in her tracks. These creatures — these mysterious, advanced creatures, effectively aliens for how difficult they were to understand or get in contact with… Maggie just spoke to them? Anna believed it, of course. If she’d met anyone in her time here who was capable of talking to the alien Sidhe, it was Maggie. But why hadn’t she said anything about this earlier? Possibilities were beginning to open up before her, new pathways she hadn’t even considered. Why, through Maggie she could get a message to the Sidhe, asking them to spare her this frustrating medieval fate… asking them to take her home. Maybe she’d wind up owing them a debt, but that would be fine by her. She’d find a way to repay it. There was always a way. God, she was so close to being home she could almost taste it.

  “You talk to them?” she stammered, full of energy all of a sudden, almost wanting to leap to her feet with excitement. “Maggie, that’s amazing! Can you — could you ask them if they can send me home? If it’s at all possible?”

  “Oh, aye, they could send you home, no question,” Maggie said brightly. “Send you right back to the point in time you left from, tucked up cozy and warm in your bed, dreaming of the rest of your life to come. Then you’d have your head bashed in with a baseball bat.”

  Anna’s heart froze — then started pounding heavily in her head. She felt sick, all of a sudden, as though the image of the baseball bat had suddenly brought back all the unpleasant feelings that were associated with it — with Billy, whom she’d been working so hard not to think about, and with his rather unpleasant presence in her life. But how did Maggie know about any of that? Had the Sidhe told her? Had they been spying on her that whole night? Well, they must have missed the part where she’d scared Billy off with a sword and called the cops on him.

  “You’ve got it wrong, Maggie,” she said gently. “My ex came around with a baseball bat to threaten me, sure. But I scared him away. He slunk off with his tail between the legs. Last I knew the cops were on their way to pick him up.”

  “They didn’t find him,” Maggie said softly, and something about her voice caught Anna’s attention and silenced her voice. “He lay low, hiding out. Went back home, got the new toy he was bragging about and stashed it in his jacket so none would see. A sleek new toy, all black metal.” Anna’s heart was pounding. How did Maggie know all this? She knew it was true, somehow — somehow every word she spoke had the unmistakable resonance of truth. Call it magic, but Maggie was reciting something that had happened… whether in this life or another, it was impossible to say. “He came back. Broke through that broken door of yours, in the darkest hour before the dawn. Woke you up in your little bed, but it was too late by then, too late by far. Stood over you, the gun pointed. Four shots. And as you were bleeding out, he bashed your face in with the baseball bat, just for good measure.”

  “No,” Anna managed to whisper. “No —”

  “No!” Maggie clapped her hands together, and the sound surprised Anna so fiercely she almost fell off her chair with the shock. “Clever girl! You’re right! For you, it never happened that way. The Sidhe, you see, they see all things and none. They see what might be and what is, and they trim the threads of prophecy where they see fit, fix them in new places. Your bright shining thread would have been cut on that day… but they wove it into a new place. So here you are.”

  Anna’s heart was pounding. “If I go back —”

  “They can undo what they did, of course. Restore what would have happened, without intervention. But where would you be? Dead and buried, dearie. Dead and buried, your life reduced to one relationship with one man, who’d serve a life sentence for your murder, but what comfort would that be?”

  Anna stared at her. Her instinct was to refuse that any of this could be true — to claim it as conjecture, as myth, as a lie designed to keep her here. But Maggie was telling the truth. She knew that as plainly as she knew her own name.

  “Sorry,” Maggie said finally, shrugging her shoulders. “It’s hard, to know these things, to know the life you almost lived — or died.”

  “Why didn’t you tell me?” she whispered, her eyes threatening to fill with tears. “Why didn’t you tell me this when I arrived?”

  “You barely believed you were in Scotland, girlie,” Maggie hooted. “Was I truly going to overload you with the knowledge of your own barely-missed death? Even if you’d have believed me… no, you had enough to be getting on with. But now you know. For three reasons, the Sidhe brought you here. One, your impending death. Two, your particular set of skills. And three… Donal Grant.” />
  She shook her head, a little disoriented by that last point on the list. “Donal? What does he have to do with anything?”

  “More than you’d think, it seems,” Maggie chortled to herself. “You’ll find out soon enough. But the Sidhe care a great deal for Donal Grant and his line, that’s for certain. And they knew you were exactly what he needed.”

  They gazed into the fire for a long time. Anna kept thinking of questions to ask, then lapsing back into silence, not trusting herself to speak. There was a lot to process here — a lot to work through, now the full nature of her presence here had been revealed. Maggie seemed to sense that and got to her feet after ten minutes or so, tossing another log (how was she fitting so much under that ratty old cardigan anyway?) onto the fire as a parting gift before she left. Anna followed her to the door, wanting to be polite, despite her reeling mind. Maggie patted her affectionately on the arm with a hand that was surprisingly strong and warm for such a seemingly old and frail woman. How long had Maggie been alive? Anna wondered remotely. How old was she, truly? She’d have believed any number between ten and a thousand.

  “The right road’s a rough road, my sweet,” Maggie said solemnly, looking up at her as she squeezed her hands in hers. “You’ll have a rough run of it. But you’re strong, and you’re where you’re meant to be. It’ll turn out. Trust yourself.”

  She waved her goodbye as she shambled off down the hallway, noticing as she did that the chair that was supposed to be housing her guard still stood empty. She was free to wander the castle as much as she liked.

  But what was the point, now that she knew that going home was a functional impossibility?

  Chapter 45

  At a loss, she went and settled down by the fire again, her embroidery in her hands. The log Maggie had left on the fire was blazing with that peculiar warmth that had seemed to grant such clarity and peace while she was there… but Anna suspected that that effect had had something to do with Maggie’s presence, not the log itself per se. As it stood now, she felt as confused and frazzled as she ever had. She couldn’t go home. She just kept mulling that thought over, approaching it from different angles, trying to come to terms with it — but she just felt numb. It should be a painful thought, surely. She must have been in shock. She just kept trying to surprise herself with it — no home, ever again! No technology! No phones! No huge buildings! No television! No more abusive texts from her terrible ex-boyfriend…