Chapter 3
“There’s one more thing I want you to keep in mind, Robbie.” Cate MacKiernan lifted her hand to his stirrup, casting a quick look to the woman at her side, Mairi MacKiernan Navarro. Cate spoke quietly, her words clearly intended only for the three of them.
Moments from now, these two women, Faerie descendants both, would be the ones to send him and Leah hurtling through time.
They’d come to this relatively secluded clearing not far from the ruins of where his family keep had stood in the thirteenth century.
He and Leah, dressed in authentic garb for where they were bound, sat on horseback, waiting for the moment they would travel into the multicolored lights of the Faerie Magic.
Robert cocked an eyebrow and leaned down toward the two women, waiting for whatever they wanted to tell him. He knew there was no rushing them. Cate would finish in her own good time. From the looks she and Mairi exchanged, this clearly concerned something the two of them had already discussed.
“You do understand that there are no guarantees for how the Faerie Magic works, right?” Cate glanced to Mairi once more.
“And you realize we’ve little control over the process if the Magic itself takes over,” Mairi added as her fingers worried at her long blond braid. “It’s no at all a scientific process.”
Robert nodded, watching both of them closely. He knew them too well. There was more. He could feel it in his bones. “I never thought it was. And?”
Cate needlessly cleared her throat. “You’re going back to a time when you’re not supposed to exist. If the Magic seeks to equalize what should be with what is, you could be in real trouble.
There’s a chance that because of your unique situation you could be in even more danger than anyone else who might go back. ”
“Mairi survived the same herself, did she no?” This woman standing in front of him had returned to a time where she wasn’t supposed to exist, either, and she’d come back from it unharmed.
Cate glanced to Mairi, who avoided his gaze, instead looking down at the braid she held in her hand. Nerves? That wasn’t a sign he liked to see from women as powerful as these two.
“It’s not quite the same, Robbie.” Cate shook her head and took a deep breath before continuing.
“When we pulled Mairi from the past, we did so under the assumption that she would be killed. Nothing had actually happened to her yet. You had already received a mortal wound. There was no doubt as to what your fate would have been if we’d left you behind.
It was only by bringing you to our time, by getting you immediate medical attention that didn’t even exist in your time, that your life was saved. ”
Mairi stopped twisting the end of her braid long enough to add, “We just can’t be sure what will happen.
You know how Pol always says we can’t change history, only alter the circumstances?
Well, yer being alive in that time is no what history had in store for you.
If you want, Robbie, there’s still time to change your mind about going. One of the others can take Leah back.”
Robert snorted his derision, smiling down at the women in an attempt to reassure them.
“If that’s the problem, then we’re simply looking at it all wrong.
Instead let’s choose to think of my being there as a small alteration of history’s course, no an attempt to change it.
How’s that work for you? There’ll be no changes in our plans at this late date.
My decision’s firm. I’m the one who’s going, so let’s get on with it. ”
Robert gritted his teeth against his irritation.
Wasn’t that just a lovely bit of news they’d saved up for him?
Not only was he staring down the possibility of never being able to return to the time he’d come to love and think of as his own, but now he’d also need to keep an eye out for the Magic trying to eliminate him entirely from the spot where he was headed.
So bloody typical of the damned Fae. Their magic was as fickle as a redheaded woman.
No matter. He didn’t need a lot of time. Just enough to settle Leah and to keep his promise to Thomas. Surely he could manage to stay alive long enough to accomplish two simple tasks.
“Okay, then,” Cate said loudly as she and Mairi backed away from the horses and toward the trees where Cate’s young daughter, Rosie, waited. “You have Leah’s envelope with directions to Dun Ard, right?”
“I don’t need it,” Leah interrupted. “I told you not to bother. I don’t want anything to do with any Faeries. Not ever again.”
Cate’s eyebrow rose in a perfect imitation of her husband. “Right. But you do have it, don’t you, Robbie? Just in case?”
He nodded his reassurance to the woman. Leah might not ever have any need of contacting the MacKiernans, but just in case she did, he planned to leave the envelope, wrapped in its linen disguise, in his mother’s care for the lass.
“I guess that covers about everything.” Cate ran a hand over the back of her neck, as if stretching out her muscles before exercising.
“Both of you need to keep in mind that the most powerful moments for the Magic are when you first feel it beginning to work. Concentrate on when and where you want to go. Clear your minds of everything else but what you want most.”
“Because it’s what you want most that the Magic will act on,” Mairi added.
Or, more likely, what the Faerie Magic itself wanted most.
Robert pushed away the negative thoughts, concentrating on his family estate as it had been in 1272, not the ruin of tumbled stones it was now.
A gentle breeze wafted through the glen, carrying it with it the sounds of birds in the trees above them. No other sound disturbed the silence as they waited.
And waited.
“Shouldn’t something be happening?” Leah hissed his direction, her eyes round with apprehension.
Robert shrugged, wondering the same himself. Unable to answer her excellent question, he turned to the experts.
“Ladies?”
“I know, I know. It’s just that nothing’s coming.” Cate grabbed up Mairi’s hand and they both closed their eyes. “I don’t understand,” she said after a moment. “I’m not feeling anything.”
“Let me help, Mommy!” Rosie jumped to her feet and ran to join her mother and Mairi.
With one last wave in Robert’s direction, the little girl lifted her arms to join hands with her mother and aunt, becoming a part of their circle.
“Be safe, Uncle Robbie. See you soon!” she called, a wide grin breaking over her face.
Returning Rosie’s infectious smile, he only hoped the child was right. For an instant, their gazes locked.
As sometimes happened when his eyes met those of the child, his thoughts skipped away to another young lass.
Isabella MacGahan. She would be only a year or two younger than Rosie.
He’d never seen Thomas’s daughter, but he had always pictured her in his imagination to be very much like Rosie: a small, blonde bundle of smiles and giggles with gangly arms and a wild imagination.
He had long ago lost any hope that he would have children of his own.
No matter how much he might want it, finding his Soulmate was surely not his destiny in this lifetime.
And even though his deepest desire would not be fulfilled, his life was still good.
He had been given a second chance, one that included true friends who had accepted him as one of their family.
A family he would do anything for. A family he wouldn’t hesitate to give his life for.
At this very moment, sitting here in this peaceful clearing, all he truly wanted in life was to deliver Leah to the safety of his family and to see to it that Isabella MacGahan got the life she deserved.
Was that so much to ask?
A strange tingle webbed its way around the lines of the mark on Robert’s arm and he realized with a start the Magic had already begun to work while he was lost in his thoughts.
Both he and Leah were already encased in a large sphere of wavering emerald with a growing multitude of brilliantly colored sparkles shooting around them like crazed comets in an eerily green night sky.
Leah reached out to him. Without thought, he grasped her hand, just as the myriad colors gyrating around them hit the peak of their frenzy and merged, turning their world to black and hitting them with a force that felt like it sucked them into a dark, invisible vortex.