Chapter 4
Chapter
Four
Connor’s solar was the warmest room in Bronmuir Keep, but it offered no comfort to Dawson as he sat in a hard wooden chair worn smooth by generations of use.
The laird himself, Connor MacLeod, and yes, the movie lines started running through his head, occupied the carved oak chair that had clearly belonged to someone important—a father, perhaps, or a long line of fathers before him.
His weathered hands were folded in his lap, his expression unreadable.
The fire crackled in the hearth, sending shadows dancing across the stone walls.
And near the narrow window, Elspeth stood with her arms crossed, positioned slightly behind her brother like a guard or a witness.
Dawson had seen that stance before. In boardrooms, in negotiations, in the countless moments when someone was assessing whether he was a threat or an asset. The difference was that here, he didn’t have a shred of leverage. No reputation. No power of any kind.
He was simply a stranger who had washed up on their shore, and they were deciding what to do with him.
“I’m going to ask ye some questions,” Connor said, his voice carrying the particular steadiness of someone delivering difficult news. “And I want you to answer them honestly, no matter how strange they might seem. Can ye do that?”
Dawson’s jaw tightened, but he nodded. “I’ll try.”
“Good.” Connor leaned forward, his elbows resting on his knees. “On the beach, before Elspeth found you—what’s the last thing you remember?”
Dawson closed his eyes, trying to sort through the fragmented memories that refused to assemble themselves into anything coherent. The images came in flashes. The wind tearing at his kilt, Bridie’s terrified whinny, the weight of ancient metal in his hands.
“I was riding along the coast,” he said slowly. “My horse—Bridie—she got spooked by something and ran off. I saw a sword half-buried in the sand at the water’s edge. And then the storm came.”
“A storm,” Connor repeated, his voice betraying nothing. “What did you see?”
“Lightning. Everywhere. The sky went dark, and then—” He hesitated, acutely aware of how insane this was going to sound.
Both of them were watching him with expressions that revealed nothing, and yet he felt the weight of their attention like a physical pressure.
“There was a woman. Standing not in, but on top of the water. She spoke to me.”
Elspeth made a small sound, quickly suppressed. Connor’s expression remained neutral, but his eyes had sharpened.
“What did she say?”
“Something about learning to wish again. Finding joy and love.” Dawson shook his head. “It didn’t make sense. And then the lightning hit the sword, it was excruciating, like being cut in two. Everything went white, and the next thing I knew, I was waking up in your stillroom.”
The silence that followed stretched like a held breath. The fire popped, sending a shower of sparks up the chimney. Dawson watched Connor’s face, searching for some indication of what the man was thinking, but the laird had clearly perfected the art of inscrutability.
Then Connor said very calmly, “The woman you saw was the Cailleach. She’s the goddess of winter and storms. And she’s the one who brought you here.”
Dawson stared at him as if he had suddenly started speaking in tongues.
“Did you just say goddess?”
“I did.”
“As in, an actual supernatural being who can manipulate the laws of physics and transport people through time?”
“That’s one way of putting it.”
Dawson looked from Connor to Elspeth and back again, searching for any sign that this was a joke, a test, an elaborate piece of theater designed to... he didn’t even know what. The problem was he had spent his whole life reading people. Assessing threats. Knowing when someone was lying.
Neither of them was lying.
“You’re serious,” he said flatly.
“Deadly serious.” Connor’s gaze was steady, almost compassionate. “I know this is difficult to accept. It took me quite a while to believe it myself.”
“You.” Dawson’s laugh came out harsh and bitter. “What, did you also get struck by lightning and wake up somewhere you didn’t belong?”
“Something like that, aye.”
The words took a moment to register. When they did, Dawson felt as though the floor had dropped out from under him, leaving him suspended over an abyss of impossible implications.
“What?”
Connor’s expression softened slightly—something almost like sympathy flickering across his weathered features.
“There are things about this place—about the magic that moves through these lands—that I cannot explain in a way that will satisfy a logical mind. But I can tell you that you’re not the first person to arrive here from. .. elsewhere.”
“Elsewhere.” Dawson’s hands had started shaking. He pressed them flat against his thighs, willing them to be still. “You mean from another time.”
“Aye.”
“And you expect me to just—what, accept that? Accept that everything I know about physics, about reality, about how the damned universe works is just... wrong?”
“I expect you to struggle with it.” Connor’s voice remained calm, almost gentle. “I expect you to spend days, maybe weeks, looking for another explanation. I expect you to wake up every morning hoping this was all a dream, and feel the crushing disappointment when you realize it’s not.”
The accuracy of his words stole the breath from Dawson’s lungs.
“I also expect,” Connor continued, “that eventually, you’ll accept what your senses are telling you. Because the alternative—spending the rest of your life in denial—will drive ye to madness.”
Dawson was quiet for a long moment, his mind churning through implications he could barely grasp. The fire crackled. Someone shouted something in the corridor beyond, and there was a burst of laughter that seemed to come from another world entirely.
“My mother,” he said finally, and his voice came out raw, scraped clean of any pretense.
“She’s planning a birthday party for my father.
He’s been dead for ten years, but she’s having a party anyway, in his honor, for the people he cared about.
It’s in three weeks. She’s been planning it for months. ”
Connor said nothing, but something in his eyes shifted—a recognition of grief that transcended centuries.
“I was supposed to give a speech,” Dawson continued. “About what he meant to me. About how he taught me that no mountain was too high, no ocean too deep. How he believed that anything was possible if you wanted it badly enough.”
His throat closed. He had to stop, had to breathe through the sudden pressure in his chest.
“She’ll never know what happened to me. She’ll spend the rest of her life wondering. And I—” He pressed the heels of his hands against his eyes, refusing to let the tears fall. “I can’t even tell her goodbye.”
Movement caught his attention. Elspeth had crossed the space between them with quiet purpose and now stood close enough that he could feel her presence—warm and steady against the chaos that was threatening to swallow him whole.
She did not touch him. Seemed to understand instinctively that touch would break him. But she stood there, a silent witness to his pain, and somehow that was enough.
“The grief doesn’t go away,” she said quietly. “But it does become... bearable. In time.”
He looked up at her, and for a moment, something in her gray eyes made his heart stutter. He saw recognition there. The same hollow ache of loss, the same long practice of survival.
“You’ve lost someone,” he said.
It was not a question, and she did not answer it as one. She simply held his gaze for a moment longer, allowing him to see what she rarely showed anyone. Then she stepped back, her composure sliding back into place like armor.
“Connor will explain what he can,” she said. “And there is someone else you should speak with. Someone who understands even better than we do.”
She crossed to the door and opened it, revealing a woman standing just outside with blonde hair pulled back in a practical braid, and sharp features, watching the scene before her with an expression of frank assessment.
“I thought I might be needed,” the woman said quietly, stepping into the solar. She moved over to Connor, leaned down and kissed him.
There was something about her voice, the accent. He went pale. It couldn’t be.
Kate settled into the chair across from Dawson with the ease of someone who had sat through this conversation before—from the other side.
“Hello,” she said, and her voice carried an accent that sounded strangely familiar to Dawson’s ears. Not Scottish. Not quite English either. American. “I’m Kate. Connor’s wife. And I know exactly what you’re going through, because I’ve been there myself.”
Dawson stared at her, his mind slowly catching up. “You’re from—”
“2019, originally.” Kate’s smile was sympathetic but pragmatic. “Been here about four years now. Maddie—Brodie’s wife—is from 2020. We’ve compared notes.” Her expression gentled. “And yes, it’s exactly as insane as you’re thinking.”
Relief washed through him, so intense it was almost painful. Here, finally, was someone who could understand. Someone who had stood where he was standing and had survived to talk about it.
“How?” The word came out raw, desperate. “How is any of this possible?”
“Honestly? We don’t know. The Cailleach has her own reasons, and she doesn’t explain them to us mere mortals.
” Kate leaned forward, her elbows resting on her knees in a posture that was startlingly informal for a laird’s wife.
“What I can tell you is that it’s real. You’re really here, in 1693.
And the sooner you accept that, the easier everything else becomes. ”
“Accept it.” Dawson laughed bitterly. “Just like that. Accept that I’ve somehow traveled more than three hundred years into the past, that magic is real, that everything I thought I knew about the world is wrong.”