Chapter Seventeen
Sleep would not come.
Avery lay awake beneath the familiar weight of furs she herself had stitched and mended over the years, listening to the distant sounds of an army settling for the night beyond the walls of the house.
Somewhere a horse stamped impatiently against the earth.
Men laughed around one of the closer campfires before the sound drifted away into the darkness.
A horse whinnied once, answered by another further away.
Eventually even those noises faded until only the steady crackle of the dying fire and the sighing wind through the pines remained.
Ordinarily the familiar sounds of the forest calmed her. Tonight they seemed only to leave more room for her own thoughts.
William Wallace.
She closed her eyes tightly, as though doing so might somehow silence the name, and the preposterous idea that came with it. It was ridiculous, she knew.
History was full of repeated names. She herself had known two girls named Emily in school, three boys named Michael, and more than one Mr. Anderson.
Surely there had been dozens, perhaps hundreds, of men named William Wallace.
It proved nothing beyond coincidence, and she felt almost embarrassed for the wild thoughts that distressed her so badly.
Yet she could imagine nothing to give her assurance that what she outrageously imagined was not the case.
Instead her mind wandered frantically back across the last ten years, gathering things she had never before thought to put together—the language, the clothing, the absence of every ordinary convenience she had once taken for granted.
For years she had explained everything to herself in the simplest way she knew.
Something terrible must have happened while she'd been lost. Society had changed, people had changed.
She had survived because she had been isolated, and with every passing season the life she'd once known had slipped a little farther away until remembering it required effort, and her present condition—in this life—seemed less and less strange.
The alternative was so completely impossible that she refused to shape it into direct words, even inside her own thoughts. Still, people did not simply move from one century into another. Such things belonged in novels and films and childish fantasies, not in the real world.
Her mother would have laughed and told her she’d been reading too many books, a once favorite pastime of hers.
The thought of her mother caught her unexpectedly and wrinkled her nose in sorrow.
She could picture her mother in her sapphire blue gown at the movie premiere outside the theater in Scotland, and then in her blue coat strolling the streets of that small town.
Blue was her mother’s color—she wore blue in some form almost daily and paired it normally with a light mauve lipstick.
Avery had been eleven years old when she last saw her mother. Only eleven.
If what she now fantastically supposed might be true—
No. Stop.
But she couldn’t stop the churning of thoughts.
If what she now considered as a possibility were true, what had become of her parents?
Had they been—what was the word? Moved? Thrown?
Shifted?—through time as well? Had they searched high and low for her?
Did they still, whether in this century or that other one?
She glanced around the gray interior of the house, considering items and objects through a fresh lens, connecting dots she’d impossibly spent ten years keeping separate.
The lack of both electricity and running water, the crude make-up of nearly everything—table, jars, fire pit, fabric, wooden bowls—the very person that was the man, so unlike anyone she’d known either in real life or in movies.
No. It wasn’t possible, she reminded herself, wondering why she questioned now things she’d taken at face value, with little or no resistance, for ten years.
***
Several days passed, each one resembling the last closely enough that Avery thought she should have found comfort in the routine, even as every day she was amazed again at the sheer number of men surrounding her house.
Before sunrise the mounted soldiers departed behind Morggán and Lucas Thain, returning only after dusk—muddied, weary, and sometimes bringing wounded back with them, though thankfully never any bodies of their own fallen.
She, too, settled into a routine of sorts, though one increasingly governed by distraction.
The thought that had taken root the morning she overheard William Wallace’s name refused to leave her in peace.
She dismissed it a dozen times each day only to find it waiting patiently for her again at night, as though it had merely stepped aside while she occupied herself with ordinary chores.
She fetched water, and collected the trapped game, mended clothing, worked in her garden plot, yet all the while another part of her mind wandered restlessly amongst questions she refused to ask.
She found that she focused more on the details of the armies, on singular men and their gear, rather than the group as a whole.
She watched a pair of men making arrows, using some glue that was melting in a pot over a cookfire to adhere feathers from some forest bird to the shaft.
She listened to conversations all day long, realizing that never had she heard any discussion that she might have called modern.
More than once, she caught herself studying some commonplace thing—a wax tablet in one man’s hands, a cart’s wheel being repaired, a blacksmith hammering metal over red-hot coals—as though expecting one of them to betray the absurdity of what she had begun imagining.
None ever did.
She watched Morggán most of all, seeing him with different eyes, probing and studious, as though something in the way he moved or spoke had escaped her but should answer questions now.
She had known him for nearly two weeks now.
She knew the measured confidence of his stride, the thoughtful stillness that settled while he listened intently, the slight tightening of his mouth whenever pain from his healing injuries returned.
She knew the sound of his laugh, infrequent though it was, and the gentleness with which he scratched Charlie's ears whenever the dog pressed himself insistently against his leg. And she knew his kiss.
She had expected that if the impossible held any measure of truth, she ought to perceive something different about him now.
Some unmistakable quality announcing that he belonged to another age altogether.
Instead, he was still only Morggán, a man whose company had become unexpectedly important to her.
Late one afternoon, shortly after the mounted companies returned from another day's skirmishing, a familiar knock sounded against her door.
She recognized it before he spoke.
“Avery.”
She crossed the room quickly to lift the latch.
Morggán stood outside looking every bit as weary as he had the evening before. A smear of dried mud marked one sleeve, and the leather at one shoulder had been newly scored by a blade, though it appeared the sword had cut only the leather and not the man beneath it.
She stepped aside to allow him inside.
As had become his habit, he left the door open behind him.
Avery watched him remove his gloves slowly, her gaze lingering upon his hands, connecting more unnerving dots.
Those hands—the same ones that had held her close while he’d kissed her—had killed people.
In that old world she knew, he would be called a murderer; here, it didn’t seem right to name him such.
What he did was tied to war, was about survival of not only him, but apparently Scotland as well.
When she wrenched her gaze from his rough, scarred hands, she found him watching her.
“What is it?” he asked.
She hesitated, embarrassed by her thoughts. “I... I was just thinking.”
“A dangerous pastime?” he wondered, wearing the hint of a tired grin.
Ordinarily she might have smiled. Instead, she found herself asking, “How old are you?”
He regarded her curiously before answering. “Nine-and-twenty.”
She nodded slowly and decided that while she hadn’t specifically thought about his age, she might have guessed him a few years older.
“When you fight,” she asked next, “is it always like this?”
He regarded her, faintly puzzled. “Like what?”
“Riding out every morning. Fighting. Coming back at night.” She gestured vaguely, searching for words that would not betray too much. “No larger battles? No... other kinds of weapons?”
His brow furrowed slightly. “Other weapons?”
She pressed on carefully, purposefully. “You said once you didn't know what planes or tanks or guns were.”
He gave a short, quiet huff of amusement. “Aye. Because I dinna. Ye have those where ye are from?”
Avery nodded. “We did—I mean, I suppose they still do. But you've never seen anything like them?” she asked, watching him closely.
“Nae.” He shook his head, his gray gaze intent upon her. “What would such things be?”
She swallowed, and hesitated again, afraid now to pursue this further. “I—” She forced a small, dismissive shrug. “Nothing. Just things I've heard of. Stories, maybe.”
“Strange stories,” he said, with more curiosity than suspicion.
She held his gaze for a moment longer, searching for any hint that he might be humoring her, that he understood more than he let on, but there was none.
She folded her arms loosely across her chest, her pulse quickening despite her effort to remain composed. “I, um, heard someone mention the name William Wallace the other day.”
This drew another frown from him, but again she thought she saw only curiosity.
“Like as nae, his name has been said many times since the armies have come,” he said. “Had ye heard of him before now?”
Avery didn’t know how to answer that. “I think so, but... not in years.”
“Aye, he’d been away for some time, seeking diplomatic alliances. ?Twas said he even sought the pope.”