Chapter Twenty
She woke somehow well before dawn, though she should have been exhausted.
Morggán's arm lay heavy across her waist, his breath warm against the back of her neck, and she smiled before she was even fully awake, astonishment stealing over her anew at what had passed between them only hours before. She had made love. The thought itself still seemed too wondrous to belong to her life. If she had ever imagined such things—she couldn’t just now recall that she ever had—she’d imagined such things only in the vaguest, most abstract way, never believing they would truly be hers.
So many firsts had come with Morggán, she realized.
He’d been the first person she’d met in five years, the first person she’d willingly leaned upon, the first to draw conversation and laughter from her after years of silence.
He’d given her her first kiss, the first time she’d ever fallen asleep wrapped safely in another's arms, and what they’d shared earlier, the most extraordinary thing, their lovemaking.
She wondered how one man had managed to alter the entire shape of her world in only two weeks.
The joy lingered only a little while before a familiar fear began to gather at the edges of her thoughts, quietly at first, then with increasing insistence until it crowded out everything else.
In truth, it wasn’t one fear but many. The first concerned how, exactly, she would ask him what year it was and, perhaps more nerve-wracking still, what his reaction would be to so strange a question.
If he answered as she suspected—that he truly lived somewhere in the Middle Ages—then she would have to tell him when and where she was from.
She couldn’t continue carrying the truth alone.
She had to know for certain, and she had to tell someone.
The prospect terrified her. She didn’t know how much longer she could contain the confusion and uncertainty before they consumed her entirely.
Yet admitting the truth opened the door to greater fears.
Would he think she was crazy? Would he think she was lying?
Would he confirm what she believed to be true, thereby making it impossible for her to deny its possibility any longer?
If it became undeniable, she would have to accept that somehow, against every law of reason she understood, that she had crossed seven centuries to be here now.
Soon enough, however, a calm stole over her, and she was filled with a quiet certainty that she absolutely had nothing to fear in Morggán’s reaction, that least of all.
She knew she could trust him, that he would help her make sense of it without judging her.
She couldn’t explain how she knew this, but she felt it deep in her bones.
Nothing had been promised and no declarations had been made, but something between them had changed late last night, when she’d placed her body and heart entirely in his keeping and he had touched and caressed her with a gentle hunger that left no room for doubt.
It seemed only natural now that she should place this impossible truth in his hands as well.
Morggán stirred then, tightening his arms around Avery’s waist, his touch gentle yet possessive. A faint gray light filtered through the window, casting a soft glow over the room. He pressed a kiss to her hair from behind, the warmth of his breath sending a delicious shiver down her spine.
“What troubles ye, lass?” he murmured, the words a rumble against her hair. “Stiff and restless ye are, and the sun nae yet risen.”
Avery stroked her fingers over his thick forearm wrapped around her waist, and said tentatively, “May I ask you something?”
“Ye may ask me anything,” he said groggily.
Avery opened her mouth, but then balked at the last second, steered from her intent by nervousness, and said instead, “I worry each day when you leave, to go... off to fight, but I’m not exactly sure what you’re doing, and so I’m not exactly sure how worried I should be.”
A short chuckle rumbled along his chest, felt at her back.
“Ye want that I explain it fully so that ye may worry more?”
Avery grinned. “Basically.”
Morggán explained, “The English are too many to meet in open battle.
So we strike where they're weakest, their rear lines. We take their food, their horses, their wagons, their arrows—whatever keeps an army moving and armed. We take what lives we can, disappear into the hills, and strike again somewhere else. An army may be large, lass, but it canna outrun hunger, and it canna fight with nae weapons. ?Tis nae glory, and rarely a fair fight. But every wagon burned is food they dinna have, and every horse taken slows them. Every delay buys Scotland another day. We aim to harry them until they weary of the land itself.”
His arm slid out from beneath her hand and moved under the furs, tracing over the curve of her hip, down to her thigh and back again to her waist.
“And I suppose as laird, you lead,” she guessed, momentarily distracted by his warm hand against her skin. “Like, you go first.”
“Aye. Scouts and guides find the foe, and tell us what awaits. But when the charge is called, the men expect to see their laird at the fore. I ask naught of them I wouldnae do myself.”
Of course, that hadn’t been the question she’d wanted to ask, but found herself troubled by even that vague picture Morggán had just painted.
Yet, lulled by the openness of his answer and the quiet warmth of his voice, she found the courage to ask what she truly wanted to know. “And um... what year is it?”
His hand slowed, nearly stopped, and then resumed its back-and-forth pattern.
“What did ye say?”
Unblinking, Avery gulped a swallow and repeated, “What year is it?”
And now his hand stopped completely.
“Ye canna recall the year?” he asked, not sounding as incredulous as she’d feared he might.
But then he seemed to apply his own reasoning to her question.
“Aye, ye've been alone these many years. I suppose such things cease to matter.” And then, without hesitation, he announced, “?Tis our Lord's year, thirteen hundred and five.”
And there it was.
Avery stared blindly into the little house that had sheltered her for more than ten years, but which, apparently, had been built seven centuries before she herself had ever existed.
Her first sensation, oddly enough, was relief.
For years she had questioned her own memory, her own judgment, wondering whether grief, loneliness, or childhood confusion had somehow distorted what she remembered of the world before the forest. Every strange thing she encountered, every unfamiliar word, every moment of such supreme isolation, and more recently, war and armies and so many unmodern things had demanded explanations she’d not been able to supply—until now.
It was the most impossible explanation imaginable, but it fit every unanswered question she had carried for ten years.
The thought struck with such force that she struggled to draw breath.
This was not another world but the same one, separated from her parents by seven hundred years.
The realization unfolded with terrible clarity.
There had been no great catastrophe that had emptied the world.
Her parents hadn’t lost her; she hadn’t merely been taken in by some hermit; and there was no possibility that twentieth century civilization existed just over the next hill.
Her parents weren’t gone—they simply hadn’t been born yet, and home as she knew it in California had yet to be discovered.
“Avery?” Morggán questioned, his grogginess seemingly gone in an instant, while his fingers curled a bit into the flesh of her hip.
She shook her head, unable to comprehend what she’d just had confirmed, despite having suspected it now for several days.
“Avery.” This time his voice was tainted with quiet insistence.
He sat up and turned her toward him with a hand at her shoulder.
His brow was furrowed, concern written plainly across his face as he searched hers.
“What has happened?”
Tears blurred her vision. Only moments before she’d been so certain he would understand, that together they would somehow unravel the impossible, and now the words lodged painfully in her throat.
“I...” She swallowed hard. “I was born in... nineteen eighty-six.”
“Nineteen eighty-six?” His brows slanted lower over his eyes. “This is a place?”
She shook her head, tears slipping free.
“It's a year—almost seven hundred years in the future.”
He continued looking at her, but something in his expression shifted. The concern remained, yet it was joined now by bewilderment so complete it seemed to rob him of speech. His eyes searched hers, then her face as a whole, as though answers were written there.
“I dinna understand.”
She sat up, keeping the plaid around her breasts, and used one hand to push the hair back from her face. “I'm not from here,” she said, her voice cracking. “Not from... this time. I was born in the future.”
His jaw tightened.
She watched the confusion begin to harden into frustration. It was the same look she had seen from him whenever some problem refused to yield to him, when the world ceased to obey him. His mouth compressed into a thin line, and he held her gaze sharply, as if he would will her into submission.
“What is it ye say?” he demanded, the edge now unmistakable in his voice. “Speak plain, Avery.”
More pitifully, she told him, “I just said it—I don’t belong here. I was born in the future.” She swiped at the tears that fell from her eyes. “That’s what happened to me. I didn’t—”
“Do ye jest?” he snapped.
The words cracked through the little house like a clap of thunder.
Avery flinched.
He swung his legs over the side of the cot and rose so abruptly the narrow mattress lurched beneath her.
“Nay,” he muttered, more to himself than to her. “Nay.”