Chapter 25
Patrick
adjusted the sword strapped to his back, made certain his stash of medicine was securely stashed under his shirt, then stood in the forest and willed himself to the exact place Madelyn had gone before him.
The wind in the trees didn’t vary. The chill in the air didn’t abate. The flora and fauna around him didn’t change.
Things were not going very well so far.
Maybe he was still enjoying the events of the day before too much.
He imagined Bentley was still in bed, nursing bruises that would never come to the surface and slaps that stung but wouldn’t show.
He himself had never enjoyed an encounter more.
He probably would have enjoyed it even more if he’d been able to really do some damage, but it was the twenty-first century, after all, and one did not torture one’s rival before doing him in the most painful way possible.
Patrick almost wished he could take Bentley back with him to the Middle Ages, where he could have repaid the bastard properly for all the things he’d done to make Madelyn miserable—and for his own misery, thanks to having Gilbert McGhee stirred up.
He stood quite still.
Time passed.
Nothing changed.
He was torn between becoming agitated and becoming tired. Despite all the time he spent waiting on his charges, he wasn’t one to wait willingly, especially when the saints only knew what had happened to Madelyn by now.
He looked at his watch. An hour had passed.
And then he looked at his watch. He slapped his hand to his forehead. That was probably what was causing the delay. He took off his watch, shoved it in the pouch under his shirt so it wouldn’t show, and took up his waiting again.
By nightfall he was tired, anxious, and famished. He didn’t dare leave his post, but he knew staying would do him absolutely no good whatsoever. He walked out of the forest and back down the meadow to his brother’s keep. If anyone would know what he was doing wrong, it would be Jamie.
Given Jamie’s propensity for time traveling, that is.
After all, it was Jamie who’d discovered almost all the X’s on the MacLeod map.
Ancient Greece, the First Crusade, the Inquisition, and, Jamie’s personal favorite, seventeenth century Barbados.
Ian’s map had red dots on it and no labels, but it was the same thing.
Patrick didn’t have a map. He supposed it was just dumb luck he hadn’t been thrust back in time to some unwholesome and very unpleasant destination.
Either that, or he’d been saved by his complete unwillingness to believe the gates on Jamie’s land worked.
The forest’s power, he believed. He’d used it himself. But the other places?
Too fanciful.
Too ridiculous.
Too much a part of the past he’d done his damndest to kill and bury when he’d met Lisa. It wasn’t as if she would have believed that his birthdate was closer to 750 years earlier than the one he’d given her. At times, it wasn’t as if he believed it himself.
He left the forest and saw the lights on at Jamie’s hall. It always reassured him, somehow, to see Jamie’s keep in its modern reincarnation. He stood for a moment and just stared at the sight before him.
He sighed. Saying that he’d forgotten his roots was a lie.
He believed it every time he got in the shower and saw the battle scars he bore.
He believed it every time his first tendency when faced with danger was to reach for his sword.
He believed it every time he looked at his brother and remembered the moment he’d pledged his life to his new laird after their father’s death.
Maybe it should have been the first thing he’d said to Madelyn. “Hello. I’m Patrick MacLeod, medieval clansman. My sword is at my lady’s service.”
He wouldn’t make that mistake again. He would tell her the truth.
If he could find her.
And then he would tell her quite a few other things, starting and finishing with how he just didn’t think he could stand the thought of life without her.
He couldn’t seem to stop himself from agonizing over her fate as he walked into his brother’s courtyard. Rape, murder, beatings. The saints only knew which she’d already endured. Murder would have been the kindest of all, probably.
Elizabeth’s brother Alex was waiting for him outside on the front steps. Patrick came to a rather ungainly halt in front of his brother-in-law.
“No luck,” Alex said, and it wasn’t a question.
“None.”
“Are you doing it wrong?”
“Is there a right way?”
“Well,” Alex said slowly, “that is the question, isn’t it?”
Alex had had his own experiences with traveling through time courtesy of Jamie’s rather magical landscape.
It had won him a wife, though that hadn’t come without a few trials of his own.
Patrick thought, all things considered, that Alex had come out better in the time-traveling game than he had.
Then again, the last nine years hadn’t been a complete waste.
He’d found himself in a completely foreign world and mastered it.
He’d also found a woman he thought he just might love.
He looked at Alex. “You almost lost Margaret.”
“Are you reminding me of that to make yourself feel better?” Alex asked with a grave smile.
Patrick shook his head. “’Tis out of desperation.”
“Now that, brother, I understand.” He nodded toward the hall. “Jamie’s been holding a council of war all day, waiting for you to come back.”
“He thought I’d fail?” Patrick asked in astonishment.
“He thinks,” Alex said with a twinkle in his eye, “that you have some emotional issues preventing you from fully harnessing the power of the time gates.”
“What a mountainous pile of rubbish.”
Alex laughed. “Don’t say I didn’t warn you. Come on. I want to watch the fireworks.”
“Go to hell,” Patrick muttered at him. He received only another laugh in return. He appreciated the attempt at levity, though. It wouldn’t do to panic in front of his family. Alex would understand that. Jamie would try to provoke it, so he could study it.
There were times his brother threatened to drive him to madness.
But he followed Alex inside anyway.
There were several time travelers sitting around the table in the great hall. Actually, there wasn’t a soul there who hadn’t used the gates on Jamie’s land at one time or another, save Jane. The others, however, all had quite thorough experiences with the practice.
Take Elizabeth, Jamie’s wife, who was sitting in a comfortable, finely upholstered chair. She had once found herself thrust back into medieval Scotland—onto Jamie’s land no less and into the castle’s pit.
Jamie was still paying for that one.
She had also subsequently gone with Jamie on several journeys through time. She didn’t anymore, not with her bairns, but she knew what to expect based on her past experience.
Next to her was Margaret, Alex’s wife, who had, in a former lifetime, been a medieval lady of wealth and rank who had given up the past to come forward to a time not her own.
Across from Margaret sat Joshua of Sedgwick, Jamie’s medieval minstrel.
Next to Joshua was Patrick’s own cousin, Ian, who had wished himself forward into his lady wife’s bridal salon.
And missing from the table were several more souls who had found Jamie’s land responsive to their entreaties.
In fact, it was only Jane who had never used the gates on Jamie’s land.
That was probably the reason her map had red dots scattered all over it and she was religious about not stepping on any of them.
Oh, and then there was Zachary, Elizabeth’s brother, who had traveled back in time with them to rescue Jamie, who had gone back in time .
. . well, it was complicated. In fact, it was so complicated, all the traveling and the unreality of it all, that Patrick had made a point of trying to forget the whole business existed.
Of course, that was a little difficult with the way his brother continued to investigate the nooks and crannies of his land, popping here, tiptoeing there. When people asked him what he did for a living, he always told them he was an armchair historian.
Ha. If anyone only knew the history he viewed from a much closer perspective than an armchair!
Oddest of all, though, was the thought that he was the pioneering time traveler of this group. If only he’d just stayed home . . .
He paused.
Nay, it had been worth it.
For them, if not for him. For him, too, if he could find Madelyn.
He took a deep breath and presented himself at the table. The table itself was littered with books, plates, cups, and notes. Indeed, it did look quite like a council of some kind.
“Failed?” Jamie asked unnecessarily. “Aye, well, we’ve been doing some research. Sit down and listen.”
Patrick sat, and he listened. The others were discussing Madelyn’s last known location and trying to divine a possible trajectory and destination. He exchanged a look with Alex. There was pity coming from Alex’s quarter, and Patrick took it for what it was worth.
He also accepted a plate of something hot from Jane, who squeezed his shoulder briefly before she sat down and cuddled young Sarah on her lap.
Patrick ate and let the talk wash over him.
He couldn’t join in. He had nothing to offer.
His head was too full of horrific visions: war, bloodshed, rapine.
Anything could have happened to her. She didn’t speak the language.
She had no idea what she was getting herself into.
She was wearing modern clothes, for pity’s sake.
If that didn’t result in her immediate dismemberment, he didn’t know what would.
And that was assuming she found herself in the clutches of a reasonable MacLeod ancestor.
But an enemy?
He shuddered to think.
So he ate and forced himself not to think. He answered the questions that were put to him, questions he didn’t know the answers to, such as how Madelyn would react under extreme duress, how she would fare under torture, if the journey to madness for her would be short or long.