Chapter 13
CHAPTER 13
E xhaustion settled over her like a lead blanket the moment she slid into bed. But for the first time in her life, Lissa found herself staring at an unfamiliar ceiling, more tired than she could remember being since her Army days — and yet utterly incapable of falling asleep. Every time she closed her eyes, it felt like her mind raced even faster, as if removing visual stimulus only freed up some extra mental resources to come up with more questions about what was going on. The walk through the Keep itself had been a blur — she had a faint memory of a handful of servants in old-fashioned clothing emerging from a pair of enormous wooden doors to rush them inside. Someone had taken her backpack, someone else had pushed a cup of something into her hands that turned out, when she sipped it, to be a warm, hearty broth. Niall was bundled off to his own quarters at some point, Amelia and Hamish disappeared, and then a smiling, ancient old woman with a pair of vivid green eyes had shooed her into her room and fussed around her until she’d obediently undressed and climbed into the waiting bed.
And now, here she was — wide awake in a room on the second floor of an honest-to-God medieval castle. Why wasn’t she more freaked out about that? She’d expected the question of time travel to stir more consternation from her rational mind… but if anything, the time travel was the least baffling part of the whole situation. It was Niall she kept getting stuck on — Niall and his lost wife, the absolute absurdity of the odds that the one night she’d gotten lost in his woods happened to be the night he was riding home from Glasgow for the first time since he was a child. Did magic explain that, the same way magic explained her bearing a supernaturally accurate resemblance to his lost wife? Magic? Really? She’d always held that ‘magic’ was just a kind of historical placeholder, a concept people relied on to fill the gaps in their scientific knowledge of the universe.
But what kind of science could possibly explain what was going on here? Science that was well beyond the paygrade of a lowly security officer like her, that much was for sure. And yet her mind continued to gnaw on the problem like a dog with a bone, pulling her protesting body away from sleep again and again. At one point, she even sat up in bed and dug her phone out of her backpack, which was feeling more and more incongruous and orphaned in contrast with the surroundings — it felt even more wrong to be holding a phone in her hands. The screen lit up in the darkness, and despite her absolute certainty that there would be no reception, the icon confirming that fact still sent a pang of disappointment through her. The last message she’d sent was still open — her smiling face in the forest. Had it reached her father? she wondered. Or had she already been in the grips of the magic that had brought her here when she stopped to take a photo? Feeling even more uneasy than she had when she got her phone out, she switched the device off and returned it to her bag, trying not to think about the fact that once the battery was gone, there would be no way of recharging it.
And so the night passed, in a constant cycle of overthinking, exhaustion, and more overthinking — all of it completely unproductive and deeply frustrating as a result. She must have slept a little bit — occasionally, she’d feel herself lurch out of a strange, shallow half-dreaming state during which the shape of her thoughts went strange — but she certainly wasn’t feeling rested when the darkness of the room began to lighten to a cold, dreary gray. Being in the Army had destroyed any tendency toward sleeping in she’d ever had — once the sun was up, as a general rule, Lissa was up. Still, the night had been so wretchedly unrestful that she tried closing her eyes anyway on the off-chance that she might just be able to snatch another few minutes of rest…
No. Lissa sat sharply up in bed, shaking her head to clear it of those thoughts. She’d never been the kind of person to give up in the face of a complicated situation. Sure, she’d never faced anything even remotely like this — but that didn’t mean she was just going to lay back down and feel sorry for herself. Action, that was the remedy to despair — not hope, not lying in bed wishing like hell things were different. Action. It wasn’t as though she was in that dire a situation. She had resources at her disposal — she had a place to stay, for a start. She had allies in the form of the people she’d met last night — Amelia, who’d been through something similar to what she was currently experiencing, Hamish, her husband, and Niall, who… well, Niall was a complicated subject, wasn’t he? He’d been nothing but kind and helpful, but it was important to keep in mind that when he looked at her, he saw the face of his dead wife. Her line of work had taught her plenty about what could go wrong when men — even seemingly good-natured, well-intentioned men — got confused about women. And that was without magical complications.
It felt good to be on her feet again. Her legs had found interesting new places to be sore in — something told her that horse-riding was to blame, and she made a mental note to get better at that as soon as possible. Her night of shallow, broken sleep had been far from restful, but she told herself it was better than no sleep at all. It had at least been enough to dispel the pounding headache that had set in last night. She’d just finished making her bed — another habit she hadn’t been able to leave behind when she left the Army — when a soft tap on the door announced the entrance of the same old woman from last night, who wished her a cheerful good morning before setting a steaming basin of warm water down on the table by the hearth and bustling straight back out again.
Ah, Lissa thought. She’d been wondering about what the bathing situation would be like — it seemed she had her answer.
She had a change of clothes in her backpack — she’d imagined she might want to change after her flight, but the hustle and bustle of the airport had been such that she’d forgotten about that option. Now, she was very grateful to have some clean clothes to change into — though she did wonder if two sets of twenty-first century clothes were really going to be enough. Deciding to leave that concern for later, she stripped off the clothes she’d slept in and gave herself an odd little standing bath with the warm water and the small lump of soap the old woman had brought her. Reflecting that she’d certainly had worse bathing experiences — the freezing cold and highly time-limited showers during basic training came to mind — she had redressed and was just debating whether to take her hair out of its braid to comb it when another knock at the door sounded.
She’d been expecting to see the old woman again, so she was a little taken aback when she opened the door to find Niall standing there, every bit as tall and handsome as he’d been when she met him on the roadside. Deeply inconvenient, how attractive he was. Lissa had never been in the business of denying the reality of her feelings, and she wasn’t going to start now. That didn’t mean, however, that she was going to let him know how she felt. Not until they’d dedicated a good amount of time to working out the complexities of the situation regarding her resemblance to his wife.
“I did promise,” Niall said, a slightly hesitant smile on his features. “First thing in the morning, as we agreed — and I thought I’d bring some breakfast, too.”
Well… complexities of the situation aside, how could she say no to an offer like that?