Chapter Twenty #2
He snatched up his breeches and hose from the floor and thrust one leg and then the other into them with quick, impatient movements. The wool of his breeches caught on one foot, earning a sharp curse before he yanked it straight.
Avery watched him through blurred eyes, her heart sinking with each angry movement.
“I’ve kent ye these weeks,” he said without looking at her. “I deemed ye sensible, honest. Ye've never spoken foolishness.”
He turned then, his expression drawn tight with bewilderment and mounting anger.
“So why?” he demanded. “Why would ye tell me such a thing?”
He didn’t seem to wait for an answer but collected his tunic and pulled that over his head. His belt followed, buckled with unnecessary force.
“Because it’s true,” Avery answered anyway.
“True?” The word came back to her almost as a bark. “Ye expect me to believe ye’ve come from seven hundred years yet to be?”
“I don’t expect you to understand—I don’t even understand it. I only... I thought...” She couldn’t finish.
Five minutes ago, she had been so certain.
She had believed, with the simple certainty that had settled over her before dawn, that whatever impossible truth she placed in Morggán's hands, he would lean toward understanding because it was hers.
Instead, she watched that certainty crumble before her eyes.
His face was no longer the face that had looked upon her with such tenderness only hours before. He stared at her while his fists opened and closed once and then again at his sides.
“God’s bluid,” he said through clenched teeth. “What game is this?”
Defeated, and filled with sorrow, she said with resignation. “It’s not a game. It’s my life and I...” she let that trail off and shook her head, staring at his chest, unwilling to see any more of that fury in his dark gaze. “I shouldn’t have said anything. I thought... never mind.”
“Avery,” he said, with only a bit less of that hard wrath, “I’m nae sure what yer intent is, with this wild—”
“Forget it,” she said, and flopped onto her back, looking up at the ceiling. “Forget I said anything. Just go.”
He stood a moment more, unmoving. She was certain she could feel the hostility oozing from his person, but maybe that was simply her heart choking on the hope she’d placed in him.
After a moment, he turned and left, closing the door quietly behind him.
He hadn’t even bothered to put his boots on but had carried them from her house.
***
Having finally pulled on his boots beside the cool cookfire outside Avery's hut, Morggán strode into the forest toward the loch, scarcely aware of the path beneath his feet. The scattered tents of his men lay quiet in the pale hour before dawn, but his thoughts afforded him little peace.
He could not escape her words.
I was born in the future.
The notion was so wholly at odds with every truth by which he'd ordered his life that his mind refused to consider it even as possibly true—it was impossible.
And yet, Avery had spoken it with neither coy triumph nor mischief, but rather with quiet misery, as though she, herself, had expected the confession to bring ruin rather than relief.
Jesu! He thought he knew her. Not entirely, perhaps—there were still corners of Avery that remained hidden from him—but he thought he understood the shape of her heart.
She was steadfast where others complained, courageous where most would have yielded, possessed of an uncommon gentleness that revealed itself only in quiet moments.
She spoke little, wasted no words, and had never once given him reason to doubt her honesty.
After last night, he’d been willing to believe that the last distance between them had vanished.
Now, before the sun had even risen, he felt she was a stranger all over again.
He could not reconcile the woman who had offered herself to him with such innocent trust only hours before with the one who had looked into his eyes and calmly claimed to have crossed seven centuries.
Honest to God, in that moment, with her revelation, he’d felt absurdly as though the ground itself had shifted beneath him.
Was it grief that had finally claimed her reason?
Years of solitude slowly twisting memory into fantasy?
Or had she fashioned this impossible tale for reasons he could not fathom?
To what end? Nothing in her tears had suggested deceit.
Nothing in her trembling voice resembled performance.
If it had been false, then she’d suffered as deeply from the telling of it as he did from hearing it.
The contradiction gnawed at him.
He strode past her snares without seeing them, searching in vain for some explanation that would restore the world to its proper order. Instead, he found only mounting frustration, and beneath that, an ache he wanted no part of.
He had been drawn to everything that made Avery unlike any woman he had ever known: her quiet strength, her curious manner of speaking, and even the fierce independence born of living too many years alone.
He’d admired those differences, even cherished them, but now he found himself wishing, with a bitterness that surprised him, that she were ordinary—ordinary he understood.
Later, the day’s harrying of the English should have demanded every ounce of his attention and yet the skirmish offered him no refuge.
The raid itself passed in a haze of dust, shouting men, and fleeting impressions of his sword striking the enemy.
Morggán rode harder than prudence dictated, pressed farther than caution advised until Tormod shouted at him to get his head out of his arse.
By the time the companies finally withdrew, he’d accomplished no more than on any other day, yet he was left with a fresh slice in his arm, a temper worn raw, and Avery's impossible words echoing as loudly as they had before dawn.
***
The sound of horses leaving the camp finally propelled Avery from her bed.
She splashed water on her face and dressed quickly and then, as she made her bed, she noticed a faint rust-colored stain upon the linen mattress.
For a long moment she simply looked at it before deciding bitterly that it seemed a fitting end to last night and this morning.
Rather than wear Morggán’s plaid as she’d taken to doing, she folded it neatly and set it on the table.