Chapter 3 #2
She turned to go, but paused at the edge of the firelight. Without looking back, she added, “Try not to die in the night. I went to a great deal of trouble pulling you out of the sea.”
It might have been his imagination, but he thought he heard something almost like warmth beneath the sharp words.
Then she was gone, and he was alone with the fire, the drying herbs, and the weight of everything he didn’t understand.
A while later, Elspeth returned with two boys in tow, who—to his embarrassment—had to help him from the stillroom and up the circular stairs of a tower to a room.
The chamber they gave him was small but clean, with a narrow bed, a chest, and a window that looked out over dark hills.
A fire burned in a small hearth, already laid and lit.
“The plaid?” he asked.
Elspeth arched a brow. “Burnt in the fireplace. For the best, aye?”
With that she left, pausing to tell him someone would fetch him in the morning.
He sat on the edge of the bed and stared at his hands.
They looked the same as they always had.
Strong. Capable. The hands of a man who’d built an empire, who’d gripped ice axes and ship’s wheels and the handlebars of motorcycles racing through Moroccan deserts.
Those hands were shaking now.
Think logically, he commanded himself. There has to be a rational explanation.
Option one. He was dreaming. Still unconscious on the beach, maybe, his oxygen-starved brain conjured these elaborate fantasies while his body slowly froze.
But the pain in his head was too sharp, the cold of the stone floor too real beneath his bare feet.
He’d had vivid dreams before—you didn’t survive the things he’d survived without some spectacular nightmares—and this didn’t feel like any of them.
Option two. He was hallucinating. The lightning strike had done something to his brain, scrambled his neurons, made him perceive things that weren’t there.
Possible. Probable, even. He should ask to see a doctor, get proper medical attention.
Except these people didn’t seem to have doctors in any sense he understood, and he wasn’t sure his American health insurance covered treatment in 1693.
Option three. This was an elaborate hoax.
Some kind of immersive experience gone wrong, or a prank orchestrated by.
.. who? He didn’t have the kind of friends who would stage something this complex, and Fletcher’s retreat certainly hadn’t included “pretend to be transported back in time” in the brochure.
Besides, the details were too perfect. Too consistent.
No one could fake an entire castle full of people who genuinely didn’t know what a phone was.
Option four—
He stopped. Because option four was impossible. Option four was the kind of thing that happened in movies, in books, in the fever dreams of madmen. Not in the real world. Not to billionaire adventurers who prided themselves on their grasp of reality.
Option four. Elspeth is telling the truth. You’re in 1693. You’ve traveled through time.
He rejected it immediately. Violently. The very idea was absurd, a fairy tale, the kind of nonsense he would have laughed at if someone had suggested it to him a week ago.
And yet.
The absence of electricity. The hand-dipped candles.
The way Elspeth spoke, formal and archaic, with constructions he’d only ever encountered in historical novels.
The genuine confusion when he mentioned his phone.
The look in her eyes when he asked if others had appeared on that beach—not dismissal, but recognition carefully hidden.
Connor will speak with you tomorrow. He’ll have answers I cannot give.
Dawson lay back on the narrow bed and stared at the ceiling. His watch—he suddenly remembered his watch. He sat up and checked his wrist, but it was bare. When had they removed it? Where had it gone?
He found it in the chest at the foot of the bed, nestled among rough wool clothing.
The Breitling Emergency—titanium case, sapphire crystal, built to withstand the worst conditions on earth.
He’d worn it on Everest, in the Empty Quarter, diving in the Galápagos.
The sapphire face was scratched now, the titanium band salt-crusted, but the display still glowed faintly in the dim room.
Numbers flickering. Searching for a GPS signal.
No signal found.
Of course, there was no signal. There were no satellites. There was no GPS. There was nothing in the sky but stars and clouds, because if this was really 1693, the technology that powered his watch wouldn’t be invented for another three hundred years and change.
If this really was 1693.
He shoved the watch back into the chest, his heart pounding. This was insane. He was insane. Tomorrow he would wake up and discover this had all been a fever dream, or he would find the hidden cameras, or something would prove that the world still worked the way it was supposed to work.
But sleep was a long time coming. And when it finally arrived, it brought dreams of lightning and a woman’s voice echoing across impossible distances.
The heart that’s done everything must learn to wish again.
He woke to gray light filtering through the window and the sound of movement somewhere below.
For one blessed moment, Dawson didn’t remember where he was. Then it all came flooding back—the storm, the beach, the woman with gray eyes telling him the year was 1693—and his stomach dropped like he’d just stepped off a cliff.
He sat up carefully, testing his body. The headache had faded to a dull throb. His limbs responded when he asked them to move. Whatever herbs Elspeth had given him, they seemed to have done their work.
The room looked different in the daylight.
Less mysterious, more... ordinary. Stone walls.
Rough wooden furniture. A fireplace where the coals had burned down to ash.
It could have been a room in any historical property, the kind he’d stayed in during Scottish hunting expeditions or Irish castle weekends.
See? he told himself. Nothing supernatural about it. Just an old building that hasn’t been renovated in a while.
He crossed to the window and looked out.
The view stole his breath.
Green hills rolled toward the sea, dotted with sheep that looked like cotton balls scattered across velvet.
In the distance, he could see the dark line of the shore where he’d washed up yesterday.
The sky was the color of pewter, heavy with clouds that promised more snow.
And everywhere—covering every surface, blanketing every roof—was pristine white.
No power lines. No roads. No cars or trucks or any sign of modern life as far as the eye could see.
Just land and sky and sea, as it might have looked for centuries. For millennia.
It doesn’t prove anything, he insisted. Plenty of remote places look like this. Northern Scotland is practically untouched in parts.
But his hands had started shaking again, and he couldn’t make them stop.
A knock at his door made him turn. Before he could respond, it swung open to reveal a young man—Jamie, from the night before, the one who had seen his watch and fled. Elspeth must have tucked it away in the chest.
Jamie’s expression was wary, but he entered the room carrying a basin of water, a cloth, and a bundle of fresh clothing. He set them down on the chest without meeting Dawson’s eyes.
“Mistress Elspeth said ye’d be wanting to wash,” he muttered. “And the laird will see ye when ye’re ready. The great hall is down the stairs and through the main corridor.”
“Jamie—” Dawson started, but the young man was already retreating.
“I’ll no’ be touching that devil’s glass again,” Jamie said from the doorway, his voice trembling. “Whatever ye are, whatever dark magic brought ye here—keep it away from me.”
The door slammed behind him.
Dawson stood in the cold room, water dripping from the cloth in his hand, and felt the last of his rational explanations crumble to dust.
Devil’s glass. That’s what Jamie had called his watch. Not a fancy timepiece or a strange gadget, but something associated with evil. With magic.
Because in Jamie’s world, a glowing screen with no visible power source was magic. There was no other explanation. No frame of reference that could account for it.
Just as there was no frame of reference in Dawson’s world, that could account for waking up more than three hundred years in the past.
He washed mechanically, barely feeling the cold water against his skin. He dressed in the rough wool clothing that had been provided—breeches, a linen shirt, a thick vest that smelled of peat smoke and sheep. The fabric was coarse against his skin, nothing like the technical fabrics he was used to.
When he finally made his way down the winding tower stairs and into the great hall, he found chaos.
Men and women moved purposefully through the vast stone room, carrying bundles of cloth and baskets of food.
Children darted underfoot, shrieking with laughter.
Dogs barked somewhere in the distance. The smell of roasting meat filled the air, mixing with smoke from the enormous working fireplace and something that might have been mulled wine.
At the far end of the hall, seated in a high-backed chair near the massive fireplace, was a man who could only be the laird.
Connor MacLeod looked like he’d been carved from the same stone as his keep—broad-shouldered, dark-haired, with the kind of weathered face that spoke of years spent outdoors in harsh conditions.
He was deep in conversation with a woman beside him, but his eyes tracked Dawson’s approach with sharp attention.
The woman turned as Dawson drew near, and he recognized her immediately. Auburn hair, gray eyes, the careful composure that he was beginning to recognize as her default state.
Elspeth, standing at her brother’s side, watched him with an expression he couldn’t read.
“Dawson Carrington,” Connor said, rising. His voice was deep, accented differently than Elspeth’s—authority rather than caution coloring his tone. “Welcome to Bronmuir. Though I suspect you don’t feel particularly welcome just now.”
He made his way to the dais, lowering his voice so only Connor would hear.
“I feel like I’ve lost my mind,” he said honestly.
“Your sister tells me it’s the year 1693.
The boy Jamie thinks I’m some kind of demon.
And I’m standing here in borrowed clothes, trying to figure out whether I’m dreaming, hallucinating, or genuinely insane. ”
Connor’s expression didn’t change, but something flickered in his eyes—understanding, maybe, or recognition. He glanced at Elspeth, some silent communication passing between them, and then gestured to a chair nearby.
“Come,” he said. “We have much to discuss.”