by A. B. Bloom
Then there was nothing. The herbs and leaves stared back at me as I peered at them, but none of them meant anything to me, no name, no recognition.
Herb lore was my strength.
So why was I staring at green leaves and dried petals unable to recall a single plant name?
“My Lady?” Mary called over to me and for a moment I stared at her. She was no one. A stranger. A face. Nothing more.
“Yes?”
“Are you okay?” She went to stand, wincing slightly, but I held my hand out to motion her to remain in place.
Turning slowly, I took in the scene around me. Familiar yet strange all at once. The only thing vaguely known to me was the blonde hair and dark flashing eyes, the lips turned down in the corner, the hands clenched into tight fists.
A loud screech of a chicken as it swung by its feet at the hands of a young boy snapped me out of my dream. I glanced down at the herbs while a rush of golden magical vibrancy ran through my veins, warming my limbs and lifting my heart.
I might not recognise a single thing around me but deep within the pit of my tummy, a deep and powerful sense of belonging rooted me into place.
Lifting my hand, I gripped the purple gem at my throat. It’s to connect you.
Of course… it’s to connect me to Tristan, to stop us wanting to kill one another, enabling us to lift the curse and love as we should…
“Mae? My Lady?” I blinked at Mary as she hobbled closer to where I stood.
“Mary?” I stared at her, knowing her name despite not recognising her face.
“Yes, My Lady. Is this not a good time? It’s not a problem?”
A snap of conviction cleared my vision. “No, not at all. You are the guardian. I have to heal you.”
Mary laughed nervously. “The only thing I’m guardian to is those two scamps.” She nodded her head towards Isobel and Deacon. Deacon screeched nearly as loud as the chicken he swung through the air.
I smiled. Within my mind a flickered memory of castle walls, a room thirteen, warm lips and firm hands.
Mae Adams.
It was a fleeting thought, but the tighter I held the purple gem the clearer the name became.
Mae Adams. Tristan Prince. I had to stop us from dying.
The thought chased away as quick as it came leaving me reeling.
“Come, Mary.” I beckoned her over to the stool and knelt at her feet. She blushed furiously as I threw random herbs into the pot of hot water. The herbs didn’t matter, I knew that. The earth at my feet did. The sounds of nature, the strength of the trees as their roots ran through the earth, reaching their powerful fingertips towards me.
Dipping my head so she couldn’t see my face, I placed one hand on the ground. The mud tingled under my palm as though it knew what I needed and was ready to meet that need with all of its power. I peeled up Mary’s dress exposing the putrid skin and scooped my hand in the water knowing it was going to do nothing more than wash away any surface dirt, but it would distract her nicely.
“Look at that son of yours,” I teased, pulling her attention away from what I was doing.
“Oh my. Deacon!” she hollered, and for the moment her attention focused on where her errant son caused all manner of wild mayhem.
Quickly I closed my eyes, allowing the magic I didn’t understand to flow from me. I rested my hand against the wound, uncaring of the pus and blood, letting my palm tingle against her skin as I rested my other on the earth, pulling the power of nature towards Mary.
The spell was complete when my palm no longer tingled.
I glanced at the wound, allowing my lips to curve into a small smile when I saw that all the pus had disappeared. Turning my own palm over, I saw the remnants of it under my skin. There was nothing to fear. I knew it. Not from pus and poison anyway.
“There you go, Mary.” I said, swiftly wrapping a clean piece of cotton around her leg tight. “Leave it wrapped for a couple of days and then I’ll check it again for you.” There would be nothing to check, I knew that, but it would be better if she kept it covered for a couple of days instead of everyone noticing how swiftly I’d healed her.
Father was suffocating enough as it was. I didn’t want the weight of his disapproval settling on my shoulders because I was helping our people.
Helping our people was what I was born to do. I was sure of it.
Avoiding staring too hard at where my father stood with Tristram and the other elders, I cleaned up the bowl I’d used and slipped back to the round house. Closing the door, I leaned against it. With every movement I made my head shook in my skull, echoing, making me believe every action had been done before.
There was a word for it… I just couldn’t remember it.
“You know if you keep healing everyone, there will be talk.”
I whirled in place and stared unseeing at the girl in front of me. Blonde and slender, she looked familiar yet strange all at once.
“Mae? You look like you’ve seen a ghost?” She stepped forward and took my hand. “Is this magic of yours causing you ill?”
My head shook from side to side. Her name tingling where the forgotten word I’d failed to remember only a moment ago had been. My eyesight dimmed, the edges flickering as though the house were disappearing, old twisted trunks of trees and brown leaves stepping forth into its place.
“I feel.” I grasped out toward her. “I feel like I shouldn’t be here,” I stuttered. This is all wrong.
“Of course you should be here. This is your home, with me and father; with our people.”
“Tristan?” I called the name my heart wanted to hear.
“No, Mae. Tristram. Do you need him? Shall I go and call?”
I shook my head, my hand sliding to my pendant. Clasping my fingers tightly shut around the gem, I paused and breathed deep. In and out, over and over again. All the while, the purple stone warmed my hand. The black-tinged shadows of my sight receded, and I was able to look into the room properly.
“Alana?” I sighed my sister’s name, as familiar as my own. “I almost forgot who I was then.”
I wanted to see a smile, but across her smooth ivory skin a frown line stole its place. “I’d forget you to do your chores, to learn your lore. But, Mae, you are the strongest of all of us. If you forget who you are, what hope is there for the rest of us?”
A shudder crawled up my skin. If I closed my eyes and allowed my power to root through the earth floor of the hut, I could sense the approach of the red army. They were still marching straight towards us, although thankfully, I breathed with relief, they were still some way off. I opened my eyes and stared into my sister’s pale-blue ones. “I hope father has convinced them to move the settlement.”
The door swung open, my father sweeping in, his white robe dragging in dust and leaves. “Father, what did Tristram say?”
Another shadow loomed in the door and my father shot me a dark look. “What would you have me say, My Baduri?” Tristram’s gold-haired head ducked in through the doorway and all at once the hut shrunk in size.
“I—” I faltered. I couldn’t speak to him, not openly in front of my father.
“Everyone leave,” he snapped, and I stared aghast as even my father left at the will of his chief, although the pointed glare he shot me told me well enough to keep my mouth shut.
“How do you feel, My Baduri? I was worried for you the other day, it’s unlike you to pale so.”
I swallowed hard, my pulse thudding like the hooves of a deer in a hunt.
“Better. I’m sorry.”
He stepped closer while again my brain told me this was all familiar. I’d been through this before. “I’m worried for you. Your father keeps secrets.”
I bit down on my lip. I’d sworn not to tell him… why then was the voice in my head telling me to tell him all I knew, every muddled, senseless strand of it?
When I didn’t answer, his face tightened, the beautiful planes of golden skin hardening. “And you keep secrets, my priestess?”
I shook my head, but my heart sank. I was keeping secrets, but half of them I couldn’t make head nor tail of.
“My Lord,” I reached for him, my fingers catching the skin of his bare arm.
“Once, Mae, we were so much more than friends. You trusted me with everything.”
“And now I’m trying to protect you.”
He leaned closer, close enough that his breath fanned over my skin. “You can’t protect me from you.”
“What if I need to protect myself from you? That’s what my father says.” The words almost slipped out.
His scent filled my senses. Forest and earth, fresh air and him. They all mingled together until my head swam. My body shifted closer. I wanted to feel his hands sliding along my skin. Why did it feel like I’d known it before? Why did it feel like his touch should belong to me?
“I would never hurt you.” His expression clouded and he leant back, stealing his intoxicating smell away from me.
“I know.” I reached for him, but he slipped out of reach. “Tristan.” Again, the wrong name slipped from my lips. Why was his name coming out wrong? “Tristram, please.”
“You have always been my heart, Mae. Why you would doubt me now I don’t know.” His body straightened as though his remorse and hurt were filling his veins, much like my magic and gold were filling mine, pulling me closer to him.
“I don’t want you to die.” A tear dropped along my cheek, springing like water out of a fresh waterfall.
“Where are you getting this from? Why do you think I’m going to die?”
I wrung my hands, folding them into the skirt of my dress, shaking my head from side to side. “I don’t know. I just know it to be true.”
Tristram watched me for one long moment, his face a mask of betrayal and hurt. Then without a word, he turned on his heel and marched for the door. I heaved, my chest labouring under a repressed sob. Swiftly, I turned my back as my father strode back in.
“What did you tell him?” he demanded.
“Nothing. I told him nothing.” My shoulders lifted, but I kept my sob buried deep inside where it mingled with the gold and power in my veins; swilling my magic around until I wanted to kneel in the earth and give rise to a new forest, a new land, a new isle.
I couldn’t do that though. Could I?
It was a jest. I didn’t know what I could do. Everything about me was unknown. Unchartered.
“I’m thinking of offering Alana as his wife.”
Father’s words rang in my head, but they didn’t surprise me. I’d heard them before. They echoed back at me from the depths of my memory.
I turned to my father. His mouth was open, ready to explain.
He was going to tell me it was for the greater good, he was uniting the power of our people tightly together.
I held my hand up. I knew. I knew it all.
Then I ran. I ran from what I knew, to what I didn’t understand, and the whole time the forest told me to run faster; the gold in my veins told me to be free. To fight, to save, to love.
I ran, with just the wind in my hair and the rain on my face.
Chapter Four
A cold chill slapped against my skin, stinging against the heat of my exertion. Solid stone walls called to me, an escape from the endless rain.
Someone called my name. “Mae! Mae!”
I kept running until my legs couldn’t take anymore.
I stopped, bent low, catching my breath. The pendant swung towards the earth on its chain, slipping from under my dress and I caught it neatly in my hand, clutching it tight.
It’s to connect you. Heather’s words echoed in my ears. I breathed and concentrated while shattered memories filled my mind. Alana singing and dancing in firelight. My father clapping and smiling, his gaze as he turned to me dark and pensive. Tristram’s jet black eyes landing on my mouth, his hands in my hair, his lips pressed to mine. His clothes different, soft cloth stretched across his hard chest. “More than love,” he whispered.
A mirror and my reflection staring back. A navy skirt and blazer; my hair, wild and red, bundled on the top of my head like a knot in a tree trunk.
“Mae.” I whispered. “Mae Adams.”
The pendant pulsed, warm and hot. Again and again it beat against my palm. Memories I shouldn’t have battered inside my mind. Tristram’s lips sweeping across my mouth, my breath gasping. His long legs stretched out under a table, his foot tapping mine, the curve of his mouth tilting at the edges into a secret smile.
But Tristram had never kissed me like that… his name… the other name… it was right there on the tip of my tongue.
Tristan.
Tristan Prince.
Room Thirteen. Bones on stones, blood and flowers.
It’s to connect you.
Mae Adams. I looked around at the forest, familiar yet strange all at once. The trees seemed to be almost tilting towards me.
I’m… Mae Adams.
The revelation was astounding. My breath caught in tight gasps of air that didn’t want to leave my chest.
I was Mae Adams.
But I was also Mae. My Baduri.
I was her and I was me.
The pendant cooled as soon as my realisation hit home. In my mind the past and present stretched in an endless pathway which went back and forth like a rainbow with me sat right in the middle.
“Thank God, I’m not losing my mind,” I uttered. I knew who I was and in the moment that was all that mattered. I’d stepped through the stones. My Tristan had watched me leave, his face marred with worry and concern and I’d stepped straight through and into the arms of my own Tristram. No. Her Tristram.
In my veins the gold rushed with renewed vitality. Crouching to the ground I pressed my hands hard into the dirt. I was here to learn. I was here to live, to save Tristram and I from dying. Let’s see what I could do.
I laughed as the earth tingled back. A little stab prodded my left hand and I searched to where I sensed it coming from. A beech tree, its leaves curled and withered, shimmied its branches at me. Wow. I was doing this. Me, Mae Adams. No, not even just the me of the twenty first century who had walked through standing stones. Just me. I was one of the same.
Through my fuzzy memories, both lifetimes muddled together like tangled weeds in a swamp of past and present. I remembered the forest around the old stone walls of Fire Stone Castle. Fire Stone the school—the place I had been lured to by Heather to fulfil my destiny. That forest had been dead, its life sapped out of it. Was that because of me, or was it the natural progression of time?
Shame Heather hadn’t been clear in either this life or the last what my destiny was, or who I even was.
Important. I must have been important for the Roman Empire to be sending an army to get me.
I needed to go with the army. I needed to see what they wanted from me.
My reasoning for darting through the stones lit like a fire within me. I’d stepped through time for a reason; to learn who I was and to stop Mae and her Tristram dying on those stones. Now I remembered who I was, it was time to get on with it.
I straightened as a startling thought formed. I needed to get away from the settlement. I needed to get away from Tristram so the past couldn’t pan out the way it had before.
I, Mae Adams needed to save him before he tried to save me.
Now I knew what to do.
I turned ready to run. I wouldn’t even go back. I’d just flee and give all my people a chance of survival.
“Don’t rush, Mae.” I chided myself. This was what I did. I saw something and I leapt for it. Like when the letter had arrived from my Aunt telling me to go to Fire Stone. I’d just jumped at the chance, accepted the ticket and off I’d gone. I’d been on that airplane before I’d even known what I was doing. I giggled out loud and the Beech tree waved its dried leaves at me like it was showing off its best jewels. This was all beyond insane. I was thinking of an airplane while standing in a forest in the middle of the Druid period in the first
century BC. Somewhere some Druids were possibly rolling rocks to create Stonehenge, the greatest ring of standing stones in history, and here I was thinking of airplanes, giant flying machines which could stay in the sky for hours.
My head whirled a little, the trees spinning around me.
I needed to calm down. I needed to think.
I closed my eyes and rushed the golden energy down to the soles of my feet. What was coming for me? Who was coming for me? For her? For us?
I breathed through my nose as from one tree root to another I searched out, using the network of nature’s connections to feel around me. Eventually I sensed their heavy footsteps on the soil. They marched in time, their feet hitting the ground. It beat like a drum through my veins. Flashes of gold and red filled my head, scarlet material and the golden glint of chariots. At the tip of gold though was a dark point. A keen set of eyes, seeking me as much as I was seeking them.
Her. The Mage. The woman who had killed my best friend on the cursed stones. She wanted me. Needed me.
So then. I needed her. If I headed in their direction right now, I could stop them from ever getting near the settlement. Her people would be safe, Mae’s people… mine.
Snapping my eyes open, my choice made, I prepared to run again. Straight into the chest of a disgusting hairy-armed man.
“Lookie what we have here.”
I stiffened, trying not to breathe as their obnoxious smell swam into my head with a migraine inducing pungent intensity.
“Let go of me.” I squirmed as rough hands pinned my arms tight to my sides. A second man, swarthy and revolting stepped into my space, his face peering closely at mine.
“Looks like we’ve found a bounty.”
Shit and fuck and all things. Bollocks. I dragged through Mae’s memories, but they slipped and slid away from me. This hadn’t happened to her yet—I was living her life as it happened. This wasn’t some DVD I could rewind when I didn’t understand what was happening, or a book I could flick back a page or two.
“Let go of me.”
“Now, sweetie, you’re on our territory and you know what that means. Finders keepers, my sweet thing.” He laughed revealing disgusting teeth, and I held my breath so I wouldn’t inhale his breath. “We will have so much fun. Haven’t seen anything as pretty as you in a long time.”