by Lynn Kurland
He was mad.
But he kept his arms around Léirsinn of Sàraichte just the same and was damned grateful for that red-haired gel who was willing to follow him into that madness. It was absolutely not what he’d expected and far more goodness than he deserved, but he wasn’t going to look a gift horse in the mouth. They would do what needed to be done with whatever wit and cleverness they could both muster.
“Should we go?” she asked, finally.
“Probably so,” he agreed. He released her, then waited for her to settle herself in the saddle before he tried to swing up behind her. He had to jump aside to avoid being bitten by his horse. And all was as it should have been.
Bad horse, astonishing woman, no magic.
He supposed many important quests had begun with far less.
The next Nine Kingdoms novel featuring Acair and Léirsinn is coming in the summer of 2017. In the meantime, turn the page for a sneak peek at the next Lynn Kurland novel,
Ever My Love,
due out in early 2017.
There were, Emma Barton had to admit, several benefits to learning how to drive on the left while in Scotland: fewer cars; fewer pedestrians; and more sheep who seemed to have absolutely no compunction about sunning themselves on tarmac.
Also, more room for almost having driven off the road while being distracted by the scenery.
She felt very fortunate that she’d eased off to the left instead of to the right, which would have left her in a long, winding river. She took a moment to indulge in a bit of deep breathing, then righted her car and continued on her way up the road toward the forest in front of her.
She paused, then considered. The forest road didn’t have any no trespassing signs posted, but she wondered if it might be wise to figure out where she was before she wandered onto someone’s private property and found herself mistaken for a grouse and shot on sight.
She pulled off the road, such as it was, and checked her phone. She had no signal, so she was obviously going to have to settle for physical maps. At least that way she could very reasonably claim ignorance if she wandered where she shouldn’t have. She mapped out a route in her head, tossed the map in the passenger seat, then opened her door. She promptly stepped into a puddle that had to have been at least a foot deep.
Hopefully that wasn’t a sign.
She took a deep breath, climbed out of that puddle and her car both, then locked the door. She put her phone in her pocket and set off in the vague direction she had chosen to go.
The forest, once she entered it, was a bit more dense than she’d expected it to be, but she supposed that had more to do with the cloudiness of the day than it did the number of trees. She zipped her slicker up and continued on, undaunted. No self-respecting Seattleite would have paid any attention to what was falling through the trees and she was nothing if not seasoned when it came to rain.
Unfortunately, having nothing to do but walk gave her far more time to think than she wanted. She’d put on a good face as she’d been bolting from her life, but now she had no choice but to have a good look at it.
The truth was, she was uneasy. She had walked away from everything because she had to. She was almost thirty years old, recently friend-zoned by her boyfriend of two years, and staring at the ruins of a business she’d built from scratch. What of her savings she hadn’t been forced to give to her unscrupulous business partner—better not to think about that, she decided firmly—she had used to buy a ticket to Scotland and pay in advance for the first week of her stay. She had two months’ worth of expenses in an account she had managed to keep separate from any business entanglements, but once that was gone, she was out of money and out of options. She had to come up with a solution and fast.
The solutions she didn’t consider were insolvency, piracy, and moving back in with her high-brow parents, who would look her up and down and sigh lightly every time they saw her.
She had to pause and take several deep, strengthening breaths. She would manage it. All she had to do was put one foot in front of the other. She had come to Scotland for inspiration for not only her life, but for a new business direction as well. She just needed some peace and quiet to get her head together and start a new chapter in her life.
Because the truth was, she didn’t have a choice. She had stepped away from a bad situation, she had paid a steep price for her exit, and now she had no choice but to go forward.
She took a deep breath and pushed aside her unhelpful thoughts. She could have been living eight hundred years earlier and on her way to the Tower of London. She could have been missing her shoes. She could have had a lifetime of the same sort of truly awful tea and stale cookies she’d made a breakfast of back in her room. When she looked at it that way, her life was looking pretty good.
In the end, where she found herself was her choice. She had chosen to take a step out into the darkness without knowing whether her foot would find solid ground or thin air.
She really wanted it to be the former.
That seemed to be the case at the moment. The ground was solid if not a little damp, the air was clean and crisp, and she had on warm clothes. Things were very good.
She continued to wander through woods that felt more like a church than just trees and sky and rain. She walked until she found herself standing on the edge of a lake. She watched the water for quite some time, hoping she wasn’t trespassing. The tracks she had begun to follow were definitely not on the map she’d left back in the car and her phone was still useless.
There was a house sitting on the shore, actually not far from where she stood. It didn’t look particularly inhabited, but maybe it was a holiday rental. She supposed she might ask around in the village and see if it was for rent. She could think of much more uncomfortable places to pass the winter.
She turned back and walked through the forest. It was only as she paused to catch her breath that she heard the ringing. It wasn’t her phone; it was more a metal on metal sort of sound. Blacksmith? Fellow jewelry designer looking for the same sort of inspiration she was? She pulled her phone out of her pocket and looked at it just to be sure, but that wasn’t what she was hearing.
She looked around herself and considered. She couldn’t see anyone nearby, but what did she know? She supposed she could at least do a bit of careful investigation. For all she knew, she might make a friend. If she found something odd, she would just turn and run like hell. That useful plan made, she continued on silently, then stopped at the edge of a clearing with far less grace than she might have hoped for on another day.
No, it hadn’t been her phone making that ringing noise.
It had been the guys with swords in front of her.
She had to reach out and put her hand on a tree, not necessarily because she wanted to lean on something but because she was having a difficult time trying to decide what she was seeing and she needed something real to hold on to. Was that a movie set? A re-enactment group taking things way too far?
A waking nightmare?
There was a mist surrounding the men fighting there, as if they were truly part of some sort of group that existed only in her dreams.
Scotland in my dreams. She’d actually thought that, hadn’t she? Maybe she needed to be more careful with what went on inside her head.
The battle, if battle it was, was nothing like she’d ever seen in a movie, only because what she was seeing looked thoroughly unscripted and she could see men dying. Actually, the filthy clansmen shouting, the men dying, and the metal screeching against metal were everything she’d ever seen in a movie only this was a hundred times more intense.
That might have been because it looked real.
She couldn’t move. She could only stand there, her fingers digging into the damp bark of the tree, and wish she could move so she could flee.
And then a dark-haired man stumbled out of the fog. He caught sight
of her, then skidded to a halt. He was covered in what looked like blood, but she assumed it wasn’t his own. Surely it was just some sort of stage stuff, or something he’d bought down at the local costume shop. It looked real, though, and so did he.
But it couldn’t be real. She was obviously having a hallucination, but she found she didn’t want to disturb it. She stood, frozen in place, and tried not to breathe. She might have been imagining things, but she was nothing if not pragmatic. Maybe if she kept very still, she might get a decent look at that guy before he disappeared.
He was beautiful; there was no other way to describe him. His face was planes and angles but in such perfect symmetry that she almost took her phone out and grabbed a picture so she could have reproduced his face perfectly when she’d had a pencil to hand. He was much taller than she was, likely a trio of inches over six feet. He looked as though he spent a fair amount of time working out—though she supposed that was less time spent at the gym and more time spent with, well, a sword.
Good heavens, she was losing her mind.
And his eyes were green. She could see that from where she stood.
He looked as if he’d just run into a wall, but perhaps that expression of surprise was what most hallucinations wore when they escaped from a dream and found themselves facing a human. It was the only explanation she could come up with on short notice and it seemed reasonable enough to her.
“Damn it to hell,” he blurted out, adding several other things she didn’t quite catch, though she had to admit he had a very lovely accent.
He stepped backward, then ducked. She knew why because she’d heard the whistle of sword coming his way as well.
She put her hands over her eyes, rubbed them, then looked again.
There was nothing else in the glade there, nothing but a bit of mist and the sound of rain falling lightly against the last of fall’s leaves. She hovered there for a moment or two, her fingers digging into the bark of that tree, hearing that man’s accent ringing in her ears.
Then she turned and ran.
It was certainly the most sensible thing she’d done all year. She ran until she stumbled out of the forest, then she kept running until she had flung herself inside her car. She turned that car around, then drove like a bat out of hell back to the village.
It had been nothing. Just a waking dream brought on by truly the worst cup of tea she’d ever had in her life. And those things that she’d found to accompany that tea? Awful. She wasn’t sure what to call them, but she suspected that not even smothering them in chocolate would have redeemed them from their resemblance to sawdust. She suspected they had been sitting on that tray for months.
She reached the village without getting lost, no mean feat considering her state of mind but perhaps less impressive than it might have been if there had been more than one road leading in and out of the village. She parked, locked her car, then walked straight up to the turret room in her hotel. She locked the door, stumbled over to stand in the middle of that room, and shook.
She shook until she thought maybe her trembles came less from terror and more from a serious dip in her blood sugar. She reached for her phone to see what time it was only to realize she didn’t have her phone. She looked around her frantically, then looked out her window to see if she’d dropped it in the front garden.
She thought back. She’d had it on her way into the forest, but she’d had it in her hand, not in her coat pocket. She remembered reaching for that tree, but couldn’t remember the last time she’d had her phone in her hand.
She walked downstairs and looked carefully at the ground on the way to her car. She searched inside her car, even the backseat. She finally straightened, stood next to her car and let out a deep, shuddering breath. There was absolutely no way in hell she was going to go back and look for it now. Not when it was starting to get dark. Not in that haunted forest.
Highland magic.
Well, if that was what they wanted to call it, more power to them. She leaned back against her car and considered her next move. She was starving, cold, and more than a little freaked out. Well, the first thing she could solve was food, so she locked her car, then headed for the pub she’d walked past the day before. At least there she might find the company of real, live people.
Fifteen minutes later she was sitting in a corner near a fireplace with a comforting cup of tea. She sipped, then leaned her head back against the wall and tried to forget what she’d seen.
“I won’t speak ill of them, but you do what you like.”
“‘Tisn’t ill-speaking to speculate,” said another voice. “And you must admit, odd things go on up in those woods.”
“Aye, and goodly amounts of money come flowing down into the village to benefit the likes of you, so don’t blather on about what you think you know.”
Fortunately for her, Emma supposed, that old-timer didn’t seem to take his companion’s injunctions very seriously. He seemed perfectly happy to dish with the rest of his buddies. That worked for her, because she was perfectly happy to eavesdrop.
Though after a few minutes, she wondered why.
Highland magic was, apparently, just the beginning of the odd things that went on in the area. Ghosts, bogles, an influx of gold-diggers from down south: those were all examined at length with judgments passed on them accordingly.
But then their voices lowered and the juicy stuff was brought out and presented for speculation.
Emma listened through a lovely dinner of chicken, a jacket potato, and peas, though she had to admit after a few bites, she was only chewing out of sheer habit. The things she was hearing really couldn’t be taken seriously, but she couldn’t stop listening.
Time-traveling lairds? Money dug up from gardens? Murder and mayhem that stretched through the centuries and found itself solved in times and places not her own and with pointy medieval implements of death?
She had to have another gulp of tea. All that was starting to sound uncomfortably more possible than she would have wanted to believe, especially that last part about swords.
Good grief, what had she gotten herself into?
She was actually rather glad she’d already finished her dinner because she had certainly lost her appetite. She grabbed her coat and made her way as inconspicuously as possible to the door. She paused outside on the sidewalk and wondered if she might be losing her mind. It sounded reasonable. Actually, it sounded like the most reasonable thing she’d thought all day.
She pulled her slicker more closely around herself, gave herself a good mental shake, then walked off back toward her hotel. Jetlag. It had to be jetlag. She thought she had that crazy time change handled, but it was obvious she had been more affected by it than she’d feared.
It couldn’t be that she’d signed herself up for a couple of months in a place where magic really meant what it sounded like it meant.
She would go back to her temporary home and get some sleep. Before she did, she would consign her day’s events to the receptacle entitled Jetlag Hallucinations, then she would get back to her very sensible way of doing business, which included finding her phone in the bright light of day.
Unfortunately, she thought it might be quite a while before she managed to forget the sight of that green-eyed man in the ratty kilt.
Highland magic, indeed.
Photo by Lynn Rowley
Lynn Kurland is the New York Times bestselling author of Stars In Your Eyes, Dreams of Lilacs, All for You, One Magic Moment, and the Novels of the Nine Kingdoms, as well as numerous other novels and short stories. Visit her online at lynnkurland.com.
Looking for more?
Visit Penguin.com for more about this author and a complete list of their books.
Discover your next great read!