Exiles in Time (The After Cilmeri Series)

by Sarah Woodbury

  She eyed the sleeping man in her bed. Regardless of whether it had been he who’d bought it or King David, Callum appeared to have done very well for himself, despite being from the future. Better than Cassie had, anyway.

  The sword would need to be oiled sooner rather than later, but Cassie didn’t know exactly the kind of oil it needed so she just polished it again with a clean cloth, resheathed it, and propped it against the wall near the head of the bed. Callum might not be a medieval man, but he acted very much like the few knights she’d met, and that meant his first instinct when he awoke would be to make sure he still had his sword.

  And his gun.

  Cassie took the gun off the shelf and popped out the magazine. None of the bullets had been fired. That alone was interesting. How long had he been here that he hadn’t used the gun at all? Perhaps, for all his ability to hold his own in a medieval battle, this was the first dangerous situation he’d been in. Either that or he was saving the ammunition for absolute need—though she would have thought that the ambush would have qualified as ‘need’. Still, bullets couldn’t be replaced.

  That Callum carried a gun with him, however, meant that the balancing act of living in the Middle Ages was as real for him as it was for Cassie. The gun made him vulnerable to discovery far more than anything else he could have carried. What if the MacDougalls had gone through the bodies of the ‘dead’ more thoroughly? What if it hadn’t been Cassie who had found him? And that didn’t even address the real question of the hour: did King David know who Callum really was?

  Cassie checked for moisture before pushing the magazine, which held the standard fifteen rounds, back into place. The ammunition was military grade and thus sealed. Neither it nor the gun would have been affected by rain and mud that had soaked Callum, but the weapon itself could rust, just as surely as Callum’s sword would if he didn’t dry and oil it.

  Cassie put the gun in its holster—a handmade one that had to have been made here—and placed it back on the shelf where she kept her herbs. Then she poured warm water into a bowl, grabbed a cloth, and sat on the edge of the bed next to Callum. She soaked the cloth, squeezed it out, and patted at his wound, gently at first since she didn’t want to wake him and then more thoroughly when he didn’t stir. Head wounds were tricky. Earlier, his eyes had told Cassie that he had a concussion. He’d proved her right by throwing up twice on the trek to her house; he was certainly exhausted.

  Cassie rubbed the wound with a salve she had made herself, composed mostly of sanicle, but with a few other herbs that added to the healing properties, and left it exposed rather than bandaging it. The sooner the cut scabbed over, the better off Callum would be. Head wounds bled like nobody’s business, but since his had stopped bleeding around the time the rain had stopped, and it looked like he would rest for a while, Cassie had hope that he would heal quickly.

  Cassie needed to sleep herself, but she spent the next few hours putting her house in order, feeding the fire, and making sure that she had what she needed for whatever tomorrow might bring. All the while, she kept half her mind on the man sleeping in her bed. Callum might have survived the ambush, but if he really was the new English king’s emissary, he wasn’t safe here or anywhere. The MacDougalls hated the English and their meddling in Scotland. Cassie didn’t know what had sent them on the path of war last night, but to attack the king’s party meant there was no turning back for them. They had to know that they were committed to see this through. Whatever this was.

  In fact, Cassie was surprised they’d left Callum alive at all. Even with the dark and the rain, and the bodies of fifty dead men littering the road, it was still sloppy work and very unlike them. They’d taken only those who could walk, killed those who couldn’t, and departed. Callum had been lucky to have fallen face down and out of his senses under two other men.

  By noon, Cassie was ready to sleep, but she didn’t know if she dared, in case someone came looking for him. In that event, Callum wasn’t going to be of any help, but Cassie couldn’t stay up for another day and night either. Ultimately, Cassie barred the door and slipped into the bed, wrapped in her own blanket. She rested a hand on Callum’s chest so she would know the instant he awoke, giving her time to leap from the bed before he saw that she was in it with him.

  It was breaking all sorts of her personal rules to have him there at all, but Cassie tried to ignore the uneasy feeling it gave her to be so close to another person. To sleep beside Callum was breaking medieval rules too, but Cassie didn’t care much about them. She’d learned how to adapt and survive, not fit in. She hadn’t ever wanted to fit in.

  The difference between the modern world and the medieval one was more than the absence of plastics or that peasants had to bow to their overlords. It had to do not only with what to eat but how to eat it; not only what to say but how to say it. Living out here on her own, Cassie had managed to sidestep most of the differences, even as she concocted rules for herself, which included what she allowed herself to think about, how much alcohol she allowed herself to drink (essentially, none), and the fact that she’d never let a man into her house before, not even once.

  More important than all of these was how close she allowed any person to come to her before she eased away so as not to risk revealing her secrets.

  Cassie slept through until dark and woke just as Callum began to stir. She climbed out of bed, and he opened his eyes long enough to accept a drink of water but then closed them after four or five sips and lay back down. He was asleep again in an instant. In those few moments of consciousness, Cassie hadn’t seen recognition in his eyes. Perhaps his body had acknowledged his need for liquid while his mind still slept.

  She used to do that when she was a little girl. Cassie hadn’t actually sleepwalked, but according to her grandfather, she could hold whole conversations with people and have no memory of it in the morning.

  It had been a long time since Cassie had allowed herself to think of her childhood—a long time since she’d allowed herself to think about anything but her own survival. She’d been twenty-four years old when she’d found herself in medieval Scotland. Her grandfather and she had been bow hunting high up in the Wallowa Mountains of Oregon when she’d crossed through that pit of blackness to come here.

  Her grandfather hadn’t been intent on killing a deer as much as finding time and space to talk to Cassie. She’d been away from home most of the last six years, at college and then graduate school, and her grandfather was trying to convince her to come home, that her place was with her family and that she should use her education and skills for the benefit of her tribe.

  For Cassie’s part, she’d spent her life half-in and half-out of the tribal community and had never been sure she fit into either. Maybe that had turned out to be for the best, since she didn’t fit into the medieval world and had learned not to expect it.

  Not that she had tried. Cassie couldn’t be a medieval woman—couldn’t even pretend very well. She’d spent that first year traveling Scotland—even venturing as far south as Hadrian’s Wall—looking for answers, looking for a passage through time. She’d thought maybe if she found a cave or a ring of standing stones like in some of those romance novels, she could find her way back home.

  But real life wasn’t like life in a romance novel, and while Cassie never gave up trying, she had eventually chosen to make the best of it, to live here as well as she could. She’d survived by living as her ancestors once did, using all the old skills her grandfather had taught her as a girl. If only he could see her now. Cassie hoped that he would be proud.

  Chapter Five

  Callum

  When Callum awoke, Cassie was sitting beside him, checking his head wound again. Her long rope of braided black hair had fallen over her left shoulder and it swung towards him. She still wore men’s clothes—breeches, shirt, a thick knitted sweater, hiking boots—which would have kept her warmer than Callum had been as they’d trekked across the wilds of Scotland.

  At the moment,
however, he was warm and comfortable. For the first time in months, he’d slept without dreaming of Afghanistan. That thought brought him upright with a jerk. He put a hand out to his sword, which leaned against the wall by the head of the bed, and then he glanced upwards to the shelf. “I need my gun.”

  Cassie didn’t say a word, just reached above her head and handed the gun to Callum.

  “How long have I been out?” Callum said.

  “Two days,” she said. “You woke only enough to drink and eat a little.”

  “I don’t remember.” Callum put a hand to his head, which hurt less than it had, though he still felt like he’d been run over by a lorry. “Thank you for saving me.”

  “They left you for dead,” Cassie said. “That was sloppy of them, but that close to Kilsyth, they knew they had to get out of there quickly.”

  The way she spoke was music to Callum’s ears. Her words flowed. He understood her without having to think about it.

  “James Stewart said something about MacDougalls,” Callum said.

  Cassie tsked through her teeth. “He was right to assume the worst. It was the MacDougalls.”

  Callum tried to conjure up a map of Scotland in his head. “I thought their lands were far to the west. What were they doing so close to Stirling and Glasgow?”

  “They were attacking your company, obviously. They’re allies of the MacGregors and the Grahams, who have lands around here. They hate the Stewarts.”

  “So their target was James Stewart and not to influence the succession?” Callum said. All these names and alliances were muddling his already aching head.

  “Everything is about the succession,” Cassie said. “The MacDougalls support the Comyns, who support Balliol. They hate the Stewarts so they hate the Bruces too. In Scotland, you’re either on one side or the other.”

  “King David warned me about that,” Callum said. “He won’t be happy that it’s already come to open war.”

  “This isn’t open war,” Cassie said. “If you’d seen open war between clans, you’d know that this isn’t it. This was a raid.”

  Callum shook his head in disbelief, but the motion made his head hurt and he moaned before he could stop himself. He put a hand to the cut at his hairline, probing with his fingers, but Cassie brushed them away.

  “Don’t touch it. It’s healing.”

  “They killed Bishop Kirby,” Callum said.

  “I saw a man in white robes go down at the beginning of the fight,” Cassie said. “Is that who he was?”

  “Why would they do this?” Callum said. “What do the MacDougalls hope to gain by slaughtering the king’s men?”

  “The rumor among the clans had it that King David should have been in your company,” Cassie said. “I don’t care about the guy one way or the other, but killing the king of England is a great way to start a war.”

  “He didn’t come,” Callum said. “His wife’s about to have a baby and he wanted to be there when she did. He sent Bishop Kirby and me to talk to the Scots for him.”

  Cassie chewed on her lower lip. “Would the MacDougalls have known about the king’s change of plans?”

  “I don’t know,” Callum said. “Perhaps they wouldn’t unless a spy sent word ahead of us, either by coming himself or by pigeon.” Since becoming King of England, David had taken over and improved upon King Edward’s well-established communication network. That included a man in Edinburgh and a second in Stirling, both with the ability to get word to him by carrier pigeon. Callum had their names and was to have found his contact as soon as he arrived in Stirling.

  “Rumors have been racing around the north country for weeks,” Cassie said. “They say that if King David isn’t going to take the throne himself, he has already decided to give it to the Bruces. The MacDougalls, obviously, decided not to wait to find out if the rumor was true.”

  Callum struggled to sit up and Cassie didn’t force him back. Instead, she handed him a cup from which he drank thirstily. It was Callum’s first real look at his surroundings. “What is this place?”

  “My home.”

  “I guessed that,” Callum said, “but it’s—it’s—” He couldn’t find the words. It could have been the cabin in rural Virginia where his family had gone on holiday when he was a boy.

  “It’s nice, isn’t it?” Cassie looked around at her house. “I built it myself.”

  Cassie’s home was an old-fashioned log cabin, like the ones the pioneers had constructed in the American West. The room had a fireplace built into a side wall, which drew out the smoke remarkably well. Most medieval fireplaces hardly worked at all, but a fire in the center of a room could be much worse.

  “How did you do all this?” Callum said.

  Cassie’s brow furrowed. “The same way houses like this have always been built—by hand, with time. It’s not that hard.”

  “It would have been hard for me.”

  Cassie turned to a line that she’d strung from the fireplace to a hook beside the door and felt at the clothes hanging on it. She took down Callum’s pants and shirt and tossed them to him. “Here. I dried the chain mail as best I could, but I think you need a special brush to get rid of the rust. I don’t have one.”

  Callum grabbed the clothes out of the air and dressed while Cassie bent to the fire and stirred a pot that hung over it. By the time she handed him a bowl of porridge, he was looking and feeling more like himself.

  But now that Callum was conscious and getting used to being upright, he started to focus on how strange this all was. The ambush, certainly, was unexpected. That the MacDougalls might have wanted to kill or capture David was going to give the king a headache in the weeks ahead, once he found out about it. But it was Cassie’s very existence that was the most troubling.

  “How did you get here, Cassie?” Callum said.

  “I walked with you. Don’t you remember?”

  “I don’t mean that. I mean how did you get here? To Scotland.”

  Cassie lifted one shoulder. “I can’t even tell you. I’ve thought over those last moments in Oregon again and again and come up with precisely nothing. I can’t fix any of it in my mind for long enough to trace the path I followed.”

  “What do you remember?”

  “I had been visiting my grandfather on a quick vacation from my job in California, working for the Bureau of Land Management. My grandfather and I had been hunting, working with my new bow—” She drew Callum’s attention to the bow hanging over her front door.

  Callum’s jaw dropped. It was a modern recurve bow. A quiver of arrows hung on a hook beside it.

  “—when a storm blew up out of nowhere. Storms are pretty rare in the summer in Eastern Oregon. We had been just about to turn for home, since neither hunting nor talk was much fun in a thunderstorm, when I heard the whine of an airplane engine, growing closer until it was almost on top of us. My grandfather was fifty yards away when the plane came in. He shouted at me to run, and I did, but with the storm and the driving rain, I couldn’t see which way to go. Suddenly, an enormous black hole opened beneath me and sucked me into it. And then I was here.”

  “Here, as in, right here?” Callum said.

  Cassie shrugged. “It was a few miles further west, near the sea. Between one instant and the next, I went from my forest to this one, though I didn’t know until later that I was in Scotland. All I knew was that I was on my knees in the dirt in an unfamiliar woods, surrounded by a fog, with the sound of the airplane fading into the distance.”

  Throughout Cassie’s narration, a coldness had seeped through Callum and his stomach had fallen into his boots. He knew with a certainty that Cassie’s story was Meg’s story, but told from the ground. Callum rubbed at his forehead with his fingers. He didn’t know what to say. How was he to tell Cassie that her presence here was a mistake, just like his, and she’d been caught up in the wake of a miracle? How was he going to tell her that even if it was theoretically possible, there was no going back?

  Goronwy had ma
de that clear on Callum’s first night in the Middle Ages. Callum had been unable to sleep, to face lying on his pallet in his cold room with Meg and Llywelyn asleep in the room next to his. He’d understood that he was privileged to have a room at all, that he could have been sleeping on a bench in the great hall or with soldiers in the barracks. But his head had been spinning with all that had happened to him and he couldn’t sleep just yet. He’d climbed the battlements at Windsor Castle and found Goronwy beside him.

  “What are your plans?” Goronwy had said.

  Callum tipped his head as he looked at him, unsure if he’d heard him correctly, given how monumentally weak his French had been at the time. Plans? “I don’t understand.”

  Goronwy’s brow had furrowed. “Is it your intent to serve King Llywelyn? You are not Welsh. You do not have ties to him or our country.”

  It had been a delicate moment. Callum had thought through what he was going to say before he said it, so Goronwy couldn’t misunderstand. “I have no plans. I have no allegiance to anyone else in this world but your king.”

  In truth, Callum’s big plan had been to stand in the gentle rain and stare out at the medieval world for a while longer and then to find more of the beer they’d served earlier in the hall. Beyond that, he hadn’t had a clue.

  Goronwy had leaned over the battlement and looked down on the soldiers who paced the lower wall-walk above the Thames River. “Meg could jump from here and return you to your world.”

  Callum hadn’t replied. That had been just a bit too close to what he had been thinking when he first looked over the wall himself.