by Lynn Kurland
“Wench ourselves to death?” Angus suggested.
Nathaniel refrained from comment lest Angus think following in his sire’s thoroughly indiscreet footsteps was a good idea. He left the keep with the rest of the rabble, but had to admit Angus had a point. It was amazing how those damned Fergussons could lose so many men yet still have so many more to bring to any given skirmish. He had begun to suspect they abducted unwary travelers on a regular basis and gang-pressed them into service.
If the battle began with a prayer offered by Nathaniel’s uncle, well, he wasn’t going to argue. He didn’t consider himself particularly religious, but he wasn’t opposed to a few prayers offered on his behalf. The truth was, as much as he had grown fond of the men he now called cousins, he didn’t fancy himself dying on a medieval battlefield whilst defending them.
The morning wore on in a way that wasn’t particularly pleasant, but he hadn’t expected anything else. The Fergussons were determined and the MacLeods weary from not just the current skirmish. He’d already had a full report of what had gone on earlier in the week whilst he’d been off seeing to other business. If that business included more keeping his investments in the twenty-first century in good shape and less roaming through medieval forests, scouting for Malcolm, well, who was to know—
“Nat, duck!”
He did without thinking, thanked his cousin—however many generations removed he might or might not have been—for saving his life for the second time that day, then turned his mind back to the battle at hand. It looked like it might go on for quite some time.
At least the future, as he knew very well, would keep for a bit longer.
Chapter 3
There were, Emma had to admit as she examined her current location, several benefits to driving on the left. The first one that came to mind was that when she got distracted by scenery, she apparently naturally fell off the left side of the road into a bit of gravel instead of to the right into a bit of a long, winding river.
That was definitely a glass-half-full kind of moment.
She turned the engine off, then indulged in some restorative deep breathing. The morning had gone fairly well, all things considered. Hot shower, clean clothes, and an almost edible breakfast had gotten her off to a good start. She hadn’t hit anything in the village and she’d found her way out into the countryside without any trouble. Of course, her very recent brush with plunging her car into a river had been a thrill—and not a good one—but if that was the worst that happened to her, she wasn’t going to complain.
She took a final deep breath, then peered out her windshield at the forest that loomed up in front of her. The road leading into it 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, found herself mistaken for a grouse, and shot on sight.
She checked her phone but had no signal. Inconvenient, true, but nothing that couldn’t be solved by using a good, old-fashioned physical map. At least that way she could very reasonably claim ignorance if she wandered where she shouldn’t have. She pulled out the map she had bought earlier that morning at the local gas station and unfolded it until it took up most of the front seat. It was easier that way to ignore Mrs. McCreedy’s map that she hadn’t gotten around to taking back to the generous, if not slightly misguided in matters of magic and its ilk, shopkeeper.
The damned thing was almost burning a hole in the passenger seat, truth be told. She could smell the metaphorical smoke from where she was sitting.
She forced herself to focus on the map in front of her. She realized very quickly that it wasn’t going to be of much use except on more substantial journeys. The village was there, true, but that was about as detailed as it got.
She looked without much hope for some sort of exploded view of where she was, but found nothing. She sighed, folded the map back up into approximately its original configuration, then looked over at what she really didn’t want to become too familiar with. Unfortunately, she knew she had no choice but to concede the battle. She took the treasure map and carefully flattened it against the steering wheel, trying not to get too involved in wondering what in the hell the mapmaker had been thinking when he’d whipped out quill and ink. Maybe Mrs. McCreedy’s great-grandson had made it for her and those were things he’d buried for future use. She wasn’t opposed to running into a decent cache of either snacks or doubloons, so she threw caution to the wind and gave the thing a serious look.
She identified the village, then traced her route north and a bit east until she thought she might be looking at where she was. She didn’t see any Xs crowding around her, so she supposed she was safe from whatever those indicated. A little wander in the forest couldn’t go too wrong. She was comfortably far away from the MacLeod family castle and not anywhere close to Cameron Hall, so maybe she could avoid any encounters with angry lairds as well.
She folded the map up carefully and put it back on the passenger seat. The world didn’t end, so she took that as a good sign, then climbed out of her car and locked it behind her. She put her phone in her pocket, realized there was no hope of getting her bearings from the sun, then set off in what she hoped was the right direction.
The forest, once she entered it, was a bit spookier 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 shadows in the 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 branches, and she was nothing if not seasoned when it came to rain.
Stillness descended until all she could hear was her footsteps against the earth. Peaceful, true, but 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 she was quickly coming to the realization that she had to face where she was.
The truth was, she was at a crossroads. She was a year or so away from being thirty, recently broken up with her boyfriend, 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 an unscrupulous business partner, she had used to buy a ticket to Scotland and pay in advance for the first week of her stay. She had six months’ worth of income stashed 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 highbrow parents who would sigh lightly every time they saw her. Where that left her, she just didn’t know.
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, and she fully intended to find it. She just needed some peace and quiet to get her head together and start a new chapter in her life.
Things definitely could have been much worse. She could have been living eight hundred years earlier and been 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 pre-breakfast meal of back in her room. When she looked at it that way, her life was looking pretty good.
Besides, 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.
At least 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. She couldn’t complain.
She continued to wander through woods that seemed more like a church than just trees and sky and rain and felt the peace of her surroundings sink into her soul. She paused at one point
only because 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 something she remembered from Mrs. McCreedy’s treasure map, but that wasn’t much help because she couldn’t remember where they’d led to. Even more unsettling was realizing she should have made a better mental note about the location of those mysterious Xs.
She looked around herself casually, but didn’t see any pirates peeking out from behind the trees, primed to attack if she got too close to their hiding places. She did, however, see a house sitting on the shore, actually not far from where she stood. It didn’t look all that inhabited, so maybe it was a holiday rental. For some odd reason, the thought of that made her heart leap a bit. Maybe she would 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 let that thought settle around her for a bit, enjoyed it probably more than she should have dared to, then turned away with at least something of a plan in place. Peace, quiet, and water in front of her for a couple of months. Who knew where that might lead her?
She walked through the forest in the opposite direction from the lake. It was cold, but she had shoes and a decent jacket. With any luck, one of those pubs in the village would have a fireplace with an empty spot next to it. She would have her ramble, then go have lunch and get warm. The thought was appealing enough to leave her walking more quickly than she realized until she had to stop and catch her breath.
She frowned. Was that ringing?
It wasn’t her phone; it was more a metal on metal sort of sound. She pulled her phone out of her pocket and checked 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? Actually, for all she knew, it was that rumored recluse hiding in the trees in front of her, sharpening his knife and fork before he grabbed her and plopped her into a boiling pot of water to cook her up for supper.
She rolled her eyes at herself. Admittedly, there was something about the woods she was standing in that was, well, unusual, but it was the sort of unusual that no doubt accompanied anywhere that found itself in Scotland. She took hold of her inclination to have a peek at things she should probably have left alone and started to give it a stern talking-to, then she blew out her breath. She knew she was going to have a friendly little look at what was going on, so there was no reason to tell herself otherwise. If she found something odd, she would just turn and run like hell. That useful plan made, she continued on silently, then came to a halt 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 making that ringing noise.
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 looking at and she needed something real to hold on to. She couldn’t say for certain, but it was reasonable to suppose the guys in front of her could have been either actors on a movie set or a reenactment group taking things way too far.
Or they could have been hallucinations.
It was tempting to really give that idea the nod of approval it deserved. There was even 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 in the future with what went on inside her head.
The battle, if a battle it was, was like nothing she’d ever seen before. Actually, that wasn’t completely accurate. The filthy clansmen shouting, the men dying, and the metal swords clanging were everything she’d ever seen in movies, only this was a hundred times more intense—
A dark-haired man stumbled suddenly out of the fog. He caught sight of her, then stopped so suddenly, he almost lost his footing on the slick forest floor. He was covered in what looked like blood, but 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.
If she was hallucinating, she found she didn’t want to disturb it. She stood, frozen in place, and tried not to breathe too loudly. If she kept very still, she might get a decent look at her companion before he disappeared.
He was beautiful, and she could say that as someone who had spent her share of time dispassionately judging the models she’d drawn in numerous art classes. 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 do his features justice once she had a pencil to hand. He was much taller than she was, likely a trio of inches over six feet, and looked as though he spent a fair amount of time working out—though she supposed that came less from time spent at the gym and more from time spent with, well, a sword.
Good heavens, she was losing her mind.
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 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.
She listened to him add several other things she didn’t quite catch, though she had to admit he had a very lovely accent.
Yes, she was indeed losing her mind. It was the only thing that made sense.
He stepped backward, then ducked. She knew why, because she’d heard the whistle of sword coming his way as well. She clapped her hands over her eyes because, really, the last thing she wanted to see that morning was some guy meeting his end on the end of a sword. She waited for the sound of a sword whistling through the air, or a scream, or yet another crisply enunciated curse.
But she heard nothing.
She took her hands away from her eyes, then blinked a time or two.
The glade was empty. Well, it was empty except for a bit of mist and the sound of rain falling lightly against the last of fall’s leaves. What she should have said was that it was missing every last one of the men she had just been looking at not a handful of moments before.
She felt something slide down her spine that wasn’t quite terror but really couldn’t have been called anything else. She stood there, frozen in place, her fingers digging into the bark of that tree, hearing that man’s voice 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 burst out of the forest, then she kept running until she had flung herself inside her car. She locked the doors, turned the car around, and drove like a madwoman back to the village.
Her teeth were chattering and her hands on the wheel were extremely shaky, but that was just because she was cold. She hadn’t just seen anything odd. Perhaps she’d had a waking dream brought on by truly the worst cup of breakfast 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. The hot breakfast downstairs hadn’t done anything for her except convince her that she wouldn’t be signing up for it again.
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 into and out of the most substantial nod to modern civilization in the area. She parked, locked her car, then wasted absolutely no time in going straight up to the turret room in her hotel. She locked the door, crossed over to stand in the mid
dle 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 level. 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. Her case was royal blue and white so it surely should have stood out against the grass—
She forced herself to think about where she’d been so far that day. 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 if she’d been holding on to her phone as well or not. It was possible she’d dropped it on the floor of her rental. Heaven knew she’d been concentrating on other things besides setting it carefully down somewhere safe.
She forced herself to leave her room and retrace her steps back to her car. She searched the whole thing thoroughly, but found nothing but those damned maps that had caused her so much trouble already. She 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 to that haunted forest and look for it at the moment. Not when it was cloudy and gloomy and probably going to get dark at the most inopportune moment possible.
Highland magic.
Well, if that was what they wanted to call it, more power to them. She thought hallucination was a better term for whatever was going on up the way, but she didn’t imagine she was going to want to argue the point with anyone any time soon.
She thought, though, that she might need to make some adjustments to Mrs. McCreedy’s map.
She pulled her coat more closely around herself, but that didn’t help matters much. She was starving, cold, and more than a little freaked out.
The first could be solved easily enough. She locked her car, then headed for the pub farthest away from her hotel, hoping the walk would do her some good. At least there she might find the company of real, live people.