Chapter Seventeen #2
Neither attempted to repair the conversation that had dwindled to silence between them. The possibly weary horse carried them steadily north through the gathering darkness, his hoofbeats muffled upon the narrow woodland track as the last traces of twilight surrendered to night.
The silence stretched on for what Anna guessed was another twenty minutes before Bram finally drew back upon the reins.
“We’ll stop here.”
Anna barely glanced around, expecting it would be as it had been on any previous night, a small space inside the trees, hidden and safe. Tonight, she didn’t care if the ground was soft or the wind blew hard, being instead completely drained until nothing remained but exhaustion.
Bram swung easily from the saddle before turning to offer his customary assistance. Anna accepted it without thinking, placing her hands on his shoulders and allowing him to steady her as she slipped from the horse.
The instant her shoes touched the ground, she froze.
A strange pressure settled over her, so faint she might have dismissed it had she not felt it once before.
The air itself seemed to change—thickening, acquiring a metallic taste at the back of her throat, like a bitten coin.
The fine hairs along her arms rose. Beneath her feet came the faintest suggestion of a vibration, not quite a sound and not quite a movement, but something she sensed nonetheless, as though the very earth had begun humming beneath the soles of her espadrilles.
Her breath caught painfully in her chest as recognition swept over her.
She knew this feeling.
She’d felt something almost exactly like it standing outside the little bookshop in York only moments before the world she’d always known had simply... ceased to exist.
A gust of wind swept suddenly through the clearing, strong enough to lift the loose ends of her hair and send the grasses bending in one direction.
Anna turned toward it, startled. Another gust followed almost immediately, colder than the first, stirring the branches overhead with a growing rush of leaves.
The quiet chirring of crickets ceased so abruptly that she became aware of their absence.
Above the trees, the last of the evening light began to fade with unnatural speed.
Anna looked upward. Clouds she could have sworn had not been there moments ago were gathering across the darkening sky, not advancing from any one direction but seeming almost to form overhead, spreading outward until the first stars disappeared behind them.
“Bram.”
She barely heard herself above another sudden rush of wind.
The mare shifted behind them, tossing her head, and Bram reached automatically for the reins.
Anna could only stare as the clearing changed around her.
The air wavered faintly between the trees, distorting the trunks beyond as heat might have done on a summer road, though the wind sweeping against her face had turned distinctly cold.
The branches overhead began to toss more violently, leaves showing their pale undersides, while dead leaves and bits of grass skittered across the ground at her feet.
Before she fully understood why panic seized her, her stomach dropped out from under her and she reached for Bram. Blindly, she closed her fingers around his forearm and held on.
“No,” she groaned, the word nearly stolen by the wind.
Bram’s expression sharpened at once upon seeing her face. “Anastasia?”
Another gust struck them, whipping her hair across her eyes and mouth. The pressure continued to build, filling her ears now, making the ground beneath her feet seem somehow less certain than it had been only seconds before.
It was happening again.
***
“Anastasia?” he said, his concern deepening when she neither answered nor seemed fully aware of him.
Her frightened gaze remained fixed somewhere beyond him, searching the darkness with an intensity that made him follow it.
A hard gust swept suddenly through the clearing, tossing the branches overhead and pulling Anastasia’s hair across her face, while the gelding lifted his head sharply from the grass.
Another gust followed, colder and stronger, and Bram glanced upward to see clouds gathering with unnatural speed across a sky that had been clear moments before.
He had weathered enough Highland storms to know how quickly they might descend, but this was different.
There had been no warning, no distant thunder or advancing clouds, and now the air itself seemed to waver between the trees, faintly distorted as though by heat despite the sudden cold.
Bram might have dismissed the peculiarity of it, if not for Anastasia’s terror—and the unsettling fact that she had sensed its coming before there had been anything for him to see.
For the first time since finding her impossibly dry in the rain, he was forced to wonder if the tale she’d told him was the impossible truth.
“It feels...” She struggled to draw a steady breath, her fingers tightening about his arm. “This is how it felt in York.” She swallowed hard. “Before I came here.”
He looked at her, deciding that whatever she felt, whatever memory had overtaken her, she believed it with every fiber of her being—that something was about to happen.
Considering the sinister gathering storm, Bram was forced to consider that whatever had brought her there might not exist only in her frightened imagination.
His thoughts returned to the trouble they’d just escaped, to the old man’s stomach-dropping command that Bram would leave her behind, and to the realization that, for all his vigilance, he had led her directly into danger.
Every day had only strengthened the same unwelcome conclusion: she did not belong here.
He saw it in the horror on her face when he’d killed that first scout—a horror he doubted she would ever forget.
She couldn’t mount a horse, had lost their supplies through sheer inexperience, and suspected no malice until it was nearly too late.
In his world, her softness was a fatal flaw; her face revealed every fear, every hope.
She was, in every way, the worst possible companion for a fugitive.
And it didn’t matter that she endured it bravely, that she didn’t complain, or didn’t curse her fate.
Anastasis simply didn’t belong here. She belonged in the comfortable world of which she’d spoke, of warm homes and parents who worried when their daughter failed to come home at day’s end, where men did not settle grievances with steel and young women were not hunted through lonely forests by English soldiers or nearly claimed as prizes by desperate outlaws.
He might wish, selfishly, that she could carve a place for herself beside him.
But he could not ignore her insistence that seven centuries separated their lives.
If she remained with him, there might be another farmhouse, another close call, another moment when he judged wrongly, or arrived too late, or simply failed.
He could not bear the thought that the next time, there might be no saving her.
If this now, this sinister change in the air, truly was what she believed it to be—if by some miracle beyond his understanding she had been granted the chance to return to the world from which she came—then he had no right to stand between her and it.
He would not condemn her to remain in a century that had already shown her too much cruelty simply because he lacked the strength to let her go.
“Go,” he rasped as an unearthly gust whipped through the trees, the thick air clinging to their skins like damp cloth. Dust and dead leaves swirled about them, bringing their own noise.
“What?” she whispered, strands of hair lashing her face.
“Go,” he repeated sharply, voice cracking in the turbulent wind, tearing something loose inside him. “Ye should go if ye can. Go home.”
Confusion swept across her face, quickly followed by something infinitely more fragile.
“But...” She searched his expression with as much naked hope as pain. “But you... kissed me.”
He knew she’d understood his coolness. He’d seen it in every hesitant conversation she’d attempted these past three days, in the hurt she might have believed she’d hidden, in the way she’d gradually withdrawn from him just as surely as he had withdrawn from her. She thought he regretted the kiss.
God forgive him, he was about to make certain she never doubted it.
“I’ve kissed many a lass,” he said. And the words sat wrong in his chest, like a stone he couldn’t swallow back down.
The blood left her face so completely she looked, for a moment, as though she might faint.
The wind drove her hair across her eyes, and she did not move to clear it, didn’t seem to feel it, only stood utterly still and stared at him, her eyes wide and unguarded in a way that made him feel like the worst kind of man.
Three months of English interrogation had not broken him, but her expression very nearly did.
“That’s... that’s probably the cruelest thing anyone has ever said to me.
” She drew breath to speak, then seemed to think better of it, her brow creasing as she looked at him the way a person looks at something they no longer recognized.
“Apparently my streak continues,” she finally managed.
“I seem to have seriously misjudged you.”
His lip curled and he forced himself to continue. “I made ye nae promise—”
“Oh, my God.” Her hands rose as if to ward off a blow. Thunder rumbled in the gathering gloom. “Please don’t try to justify it.” A bitter laugh cracked her resolve. “What? I was simply convenient after three months in captivity?”
Every instinct within him demanded that he deny it, that he tell her the truth—that no woman before her had ever left him so thoroughly undone by a single kiss.
Instead he remained silent.