Chapter 24
Madelyn
woke, every muscle in her body protesting, her mind a complete fog of misery. Good grief, what had she eaten? Not even her mother’s hot-fudge sauce eaten in vast quantities straight from the pan could give her a hangover of these proportions. She stretched.
And found she couldn’t.
She opened her eyes. And the horror became real.
She was in a cage.
A cage on a rough stone floor, a stone floor that looked like—and felt like—it belonged in the Middle Ages.
She stared through the bars in astonishment.
She was looking at a great hall. It looked like James MacLeod’s great hall, only this one was not nearly so tidy, nor well built.
There was a fire in the middle of the room—and she was the farthest point from it, of course.
Ratty tables and equally ratty stools were huddled around the fire like hopeful hobos trying to stay warm around a metal garbage can hearth.
Even more terrifying were the occupants of those tables and chairs: unkempt, unwashed . . .
Unintelligible.
She gaped at the men who sat at those tables—and the ones that milled about the hall—and realized she couldn’t understand a damn thing they were saying.
Good grief, where was she?
This was taking reenactment to a whole new level. A whole new unnecessary level.
And what was the deal with her in the cage? She looked at the bars over her head, the bars all around, the metal wickets they were fixed to the floor by. It looked like serious business. She tried to stretch out her legs.
The cage was too small.
It was then she realized her feet were bare.
Her coat was gone as well.
She took quick stock of the rest of her. Everything else seemed to be intact. Maybe that was her silver lining.
It didn’t make up for the fact that she was trapped in a space that was far too small. She put her hands on the front of the cage and tried to rattle it. It was solid, despite the noise it made.
Too much noise, she realized belatedly. One of the men looked at her, shoved the man next to him, and barked out some kind of order. The man rose and walked over to her.
He didn’t look like a happy person.
He tossed the contents of his bowl at her through the bars. Hot soupy slop burned her face, and she quickly dragged her sweater across her eyes. She gaped up at the man in surprise.
“What’s the deal—”
Then she shut her mouth. He was lifting up his kilt.
Then he peed on her.
She screeched and backed away, but there was nowhere to go.
“Stop it, you idiot!” she shouted.
He had a dagger in his hand faster than she could blink. She didn’t doubt he would have used it if the man who’d sent him hadn’t barked something else at him. The man glared at her, spit on her, then resumed his place at the rickety table.
Madelyn sat on the very cold floor, smelling now of some kind of rather foul soup and something else entirely, and found herself too shocked to even cry.
Where in the hell was she?
Maybe that was the operative word.
Hell.
She could only stare, speechless, at her surroundings, at her prison, and wait as her mind tried to absorb what was happening to her. As she did so, snatches of conversation came back to her.
When was he born?
Beware of the Highland magic . . .
Do I look like I was born in the Middle Ages?
Watch out for the red dots . . .
She wished she’d paid more attention. It didn’t seem at all possible that anything she’d heard could have meant anything. Too fanciful, too magical.
Too ridiculous to take seriously.
Unreal.
Unfortunately, what she was experiencing was all too real.
She wondered, all too briefly, if she was just having a really intense nightmare.
Or maybe she was in a coma and this was what happened to those poor people who couldn’t seem to wake themselves up.
Yes, that was it. She was in a coma and the drugs they were pumping into her to keep her alive were causing ghastly dreams. That could be the only reason for the complete impossibility of her current predicament.
She closed her eyes and willed herself to wake up. She willed herself to feel a bed beneath her and needles in her arms, to hear monitors beeping and machines whirring above her.
But all she could smell was some sort of rotting meat. Oh, and that lovely biffy smell that she’d been just sure she’d never have to smell again after Girl Scout camp.
But now the latrine smell was coming from her.
She opened her eyes. She rubbed her eyes. No, still there. Something out of a hallucination, there right in front of her. Beside her. All around her. It was enough to make her want to scream. She was immediately past crying, or wishing she’d done something different.
Like listen to Moraig.
Like follow Jane’s map.
Like take her dad’s advice to stay home and find a job instead of gallivanting around Scotland.
But instead of listening, she’d leaped precipitously, sure of her own mind, as usual, and landed herself, again as usual, in a morass of her own making.
And speaking of those sorts of things, she realized quite suddenly that she needed to pee. She wondered if she could be excused for a minute to run to the bathroom.
A man walked by her, spit on her, then continued on his way.
Maybe not.
So she sat on the cold, stone floor, hunched over in a cage that was neither big enough to stretch her legs nor big enough to sit up completely straight, and let the tears run unimpeded down her cheeks. She pulled her feet up under her skirts to keep them warm.
They had, after all, stolen her boots.
She looked at her surroundings and wondered if she would have been better off if they had whacked her a little harder with whatever had plunged her into unconsciousness.
Time passed.
An eternal, miserable period of time that had passed with the excruciating slowness of a slug crossing a particularly dense bit of rain forest.
She realized that time had marched on only because dinner seemed to be winding down. Scraps of food were thrown to the dogs. A few women wandered here and there, either serving drinks, clearing wooden platters, or getting groped.
It was then that she started to panic.
She was trapped in a box not tall enough for her to kneel upright in or lie down in. And there appeared to be no way to undo the quite serviceable bars or the sturdy-looking bands that held the bars together. She started to shake the bars anyway.
No one looked.
She started to hyperventilate. “Hey!” she gasped. “Somebody . . . let . . . me . . . out. . . .”
Still no one looked at her.
“Hey!” she shouted, then gasped in precious air. “Hey!”
The leader motioned to the man who’d come to visit her before. That man rose, drew his sword—his very sharp, very medieval-looking sword—and started toward her.
She wished belatedly that she’d kept her mouth shut. She had no doubt the man either intended to kill her or take her out of the cage and rape her. The hatred in his face was something she’d never seen before. It made Bentley’s worst expression look like a mild toddler frustration.
She stopped shouting immediately.
The leader called to him. He cursed, but he stopped and listened. Unfortunately, he apparently hadn’t received instructions to sit back down. He continued on his way toward her.
She closed her eyes and prayed.
The slap of his sword on the metal of the cage startled her so badly that she screamed.
That seemed to be enough to satisfy him.
He spewed several things—words and spit—at her, banged several times on the cage in an orangutan-like fashion, then returned to the table to the accompaniment of noises of approval from his buddies.
So she sat, her knees drawn up to her chest, her bare feet against the cold floor, and tried to concentrate on something besides what was assaulting her nose.
Her options were nonexistent. It was a sure bet she wasn’t going to get out without some help—and it didn’t look as if she was going to get any help any time soon.
For all she knew, she would die right where she was, lost in some unknown location, in some situation so far from any reality she could have imagined that she almost couldn’t fathom it.
She closed her eyes so at least she wouldn’t have to look at her surroundings. The chill floor was harder to ignore, but she tried to ignore that as well.
Heaven help her, she was in hell.
The sun was rising. Madelyn knew this not because she could see the sun but because hell was beginning to stir.
Actually the people inside hell were beginning to stir.
She wished they would stir right out of her nightmare and back into the witch’s pot they had erupted out of.
But on Day Three, hell and its inhabitants were still right there in the thick of things with her.
She stared at a pair of women who began to set the table.
Such a perfectly normal thing to do. Never mind that she’d gotten to watch one of those women be sent sprawling the night before by the leader of the clan’s hand.
The woman looked perfectly content to be where she was and didn’t seem to think anything of her treatment.
Madelyn had begun to not think anything of it either.
During each of the three suppers she’d been forced to watch over the past three days, she’d seen the same kind of thing happen to various souls in the laird’s care.
Hell was a violent place, apparently.
She’d come to the conclusion that the leader had to be the laird for several reasons.
One, she was in the midst of a Scottish clan.
The swords and plaids gave that away. And since that middle-aged man with the scar down his face seemed to be giving the orders and no one seemed willing to cross him, she determined he must be the laird.
She took that back. There was one man who seemed inclined to cross him on occasion. She wondered if he might be the laird’s brother. They looked a great deal alike, and the laird seemed to tolerate the other’s interference well enough.
Madelyn didn’t like the brother. He seemed particularly interested in tormenting her. He liked to poke at her with sticks, toss her indescribables from the table, and, last but not least, use her as a sort of moving toilet target.
A real prince.
One of the serving women came and poured something in the bowl at Madelyn’s feet. Madelyn didn’t drink it right away. Who knew if she would get more? That, of course, had to be weighed against the possibility that one of the men might toss table scraps on her.
Difficult decision.
Not one Harvard Law had prepared her for.
She lifted the bowl and sipped cautiously. It was water, not some other kind of foreign substance.
It was heavenly.
She sat back in the cleaner corner of her cage and contemplated her situation. Actually, there wasn’t much to contemplate. She was in a three-foot by four-foot cage without a bathroom, bed, or kitchen. Things were not pretty.
She wondered absently how long it would be before her muscles froze up in the position they were in.
She’d had cramps the first two days. Now, she was just in such agony, she’d almost gotten to the point that she could ignore it.
Never again, if she were allowed freedom, would she complain about the cramped quarters in coach.
She would instead revel in the freedom to get up and go stand in line for a shot at a minuscule airplane bathroom.
Not that she would be flying any time soon.
Unless she died and joined the heavenly hosts.
She had the feeling she could be kept alive quite a long time just where she was, which didn’t bode well for her getting wings and a harp any time soon.
The men were waking up. This was the part she didn’t enjoy.
She steeled herself for the same kind of treatment she’d received before.
They would each come along near the cage, say something to her, throw something on her, then retreat to their day’s duties.
They all said the same thing, which she had finally managed to repeat.
The first time she’d said it back to one of them, he’d laughed, then said the words back at her with a suggestive leer.
She hadn’t repeated the words again.
Out loud, of course. One of the words was MacLeod. She speculated on the meaning of the word attached. She suspected it wasn’t complimentary, and might have something to do with either a choice of occupations or a feminine hound. Whatever it was, it wasn’t good.
Which led her to believe that she wasn’t in a MacLeod stronghold.
And given the frequency with which she’d heard the word Fergusson tossed about, she began to suspect she was in the Fergusson stronghold.
She began to have unkind feelings toward Hamish Fergusson than usual. It was no wonder all the MacLeods disliked the Fergussons. Then again, perhaps it was because of that animosity that she found herself where she was.
The day wore on. She sat, watched the goings-on, and tried to make sense of her situation. It was the same thing she’d been trying to do for the past three days. It wasn’t getting any easier, nor was it making any more sense. But one thing had changed.
She could readily believe that Patrick MacLeod could possibly have been born in 1285.
But what to do now? Begging to be released was useless. Bargaining was impossible given that she had nothing of value but herself, and she didn’t think, even if she’d been willing to give it up to fifty men repeatedly, that they would be interested in what she had to offer.
Which left her where she was, lost in time, lost without friends, very much alone in the midst of a crowd.
In hell.