Chapter Twenty-One
For the next two days, the army remained in place.
Morggán and Lucas agreed that the English had grown accustomed to the daily raids. Let them believe, for a little while, that the Scots had withdrawn farther north or lost their appetite for harassment. Complacency, they reasoned, could prove a sharper weapon than any blade.
Ordinarily, Morggán would have welcomed the respite.
His men repaired tack, fletched arrows, allowed wounds to heal, and rested horses that had carried them hard for days.
Plans were still made, scouts dispatched, and reports traded between captains, yet he found himself hearing much of it without truly listening.
Always, every hour, and sometimes every minute, he thought of Avery, and noticed without surprise how she shut herself off from him and, in fact, from everyone and everything.
He became aware of her in the peculiar way one becomes aware of the absence of something once expected or anticipated.
She rarely ventured beyond her house except in the early mornings, when she fetched water from the burn or disappeared into the forest to tend her snares.
By the time the camp had properly stirred to life, she was almost always gone again, returning unseen to the shelter of the little house.
He thought often—regularly—of the night they'd shared.
The intensity of his recollection refused to fade.
He remembered the weight of her in his arms and the feel of her silky skin, the way she had welcomed him without fear, the astonishing rightness of being joined with her.
He had known desire before, but never anything that had left him so utterly spent, so profoundly content.
Even now, days later, he could still feel the echo of it—something he had no name for, only the knowledge that he had not felt it before and could not say when, or whether, he would feel it again.
He wondered if it had been different simply because it was Avery. He had no words for the thought and no wish to examine it too closely, yet no other reason surfaced. The memory was more than passion; it was tangled with everything else he felt for her, and that was the part he could not name.
How bitter, then, that dawn hadn’t brought greater closeness but the widest gulf he had ever known.
Twice he sought her company, and twice she met him with the same quiet reserve as she had at her door the evening after they’d made love and she’d told him, with no particular drama, that she had come from another century.
She answered his questions politely, never with more words than necessity demanded, and never once lifted her eyes long enough for him to know what she was thinking.
It was not anger that met him but something far worse, a purposeful indifference that left him cold.
He might have pressed her—ordinarily he would have.
Yet every imagined conversation carried him back to the same impossible place.
What more could she tell him that she had not already said?
She claimed to have crossed seven centuries.
He could neither believe her nor explain her, and he found himself with no notion of how to bridge the chasm that had opened between them.
On the second afternoon, when he hadn’t seen her, hadn’t noticed her return to the sanctuary of her hut, he asked Donnchadh if he knew where she was.
Donnchadh pointed toward the grasslands, and Morggán’s heart skipped a beat before Donnchadh said, “Sitting there, near the edge of the trees—been there for a spell, hours mayhap.”
“Sitting? Doing what?” Morggán asked.
Donnchadh shrugged. “Just sitting. Staring out into the grass. The hound gamboled about a bit in the field, but she dinna follow.”
He frowned. Stillness on Avery had never looked like this. Hers was a quietness of purpose, her hands always occupied—mending, gathering, carving. To sit staring at nothing felt wrong.
To sit for hours doing nothing...
Try again, he decided.
He found her where Donnchadh had said she was, upon the fallen trunk of an old ash near the edge of the forest. Beyond her, the grasslands rolled away beneath a pale afternoon sky, the sun rolling downward to the west.
She heard him approach. Her slim shoulders stiffened almost imperceptibly, yet she didn’t turn to see who came—mayhap only resented any intrusion.
He drew a slow breath. Hold your temper, he reminded himself, knowing anger was not an effective tool with Avery.
“Avery,” he said as he came around the log to stand before her.
“Morggán,” she said, but did not look at him.
“May I sit?”
She lifted one shoulder in a shrug, all the invitation he would receive, he guessed, and then his jaw tightened when she pushed herself to her feet just as he moved to sit beside her.
“I was just leaving,” she said.
He felt his patience snap, and he seized her hand as she made to walk past him.
“Avery,” he said, as gently as he could manage. “Talk to me.”
And now, finally, she met his gaze. A strangled and bitter laugh burst from her. “About what?”
“I’ve tried to make sense of what ye told me—”
“I don’t want to talk about it,” she said, tugging to have her hand freed.
“I do,” he growled. “We must.”
She shook her head. “No, there’s nothing to talk about. I told you what I know—or what I now believe—and you...” she stopped, her voice catching on whatever she would not say. “Let me go, Morggán.”
“I canna,” he confessed, meaning more than only her hand.
She glared up at him, her blue eyes hard and unblinking. “I needed you to—” Again, she forced herself to stop and applied her free hand to his, the one holding her wrist, trying to loosen his firm hold. “Stop it. Let go.”
“Avery, just listen to—”
“I needed you to believe me!” She yelled at him, still yanking at her hand. When she realized she could not free herself that way, she smacked at his chest. “You were supposed to help me! I wanted you to help me—you said you could fix anything.”
The blow scarcely registered, and the next one landed no more forcefully. And then another.
She looked up at him through tear-filled eyes, her face crumpling. “I thought you would help me figure it out.”
He released her hand finally and tried to pull her close. “Avery—”
“No!” she sobbed, pushing hard against his chest now with both hands, tears spilling from her bright eyes.
“You didn’t even try.” She pushed at him once more, though there was almost no strength left in it.
It was less an attempt to move him than an expression of utter helplessness, and he thought she simply didn’t know what to do with the hurt that consumed her.
Without a word, he gathered her finally into his arms. She resisted weakly, collapsing against his chest after only a moment.
Her shoulders, rigid through the whole of it, dropped as he folded her in, the last of her resistance visible only in the brief, convulsive tremor that moved through her before she went still.
“I trusted you.”
The whispered words struck him harder than any blow.
He understood now: she hadn’t needed his belief so much as she needed him.
This was a new kind of failure, not of pride or temper, but something that hollowed him out from the inside.
He had abandoned her when she needed him most. His arms tightened, an involuntary reflex to pull her closer, to somehow fill the space his absence had created.
He kissed the top of her head, his strong hand against her hair, holding her close. “Shh. Easy, lass.”
He’d told himself they’d been at odds because of her improbable admission, but he understood now that was not all—Avery was mourning something he’d broken, and it gutted him.
She wept against him a little longer, but then abruptly stiffened, pushing again at his chest. “Just... leave me alone.”
“I canna do that, lass.”
But he did, allowing her to slip free of his arms.
Her red-rimmed eyes searched his face with more skepticism than hope. “Do you believe me then? Do you believe what I said—where I come from?”
Something moved across his face before he could stop it, a flinch, the beginning of a denial, and though he shuttered it quickly, she had seen it.
“Then leave me alone.” This, furiously, and she turned and stomped away from him.
***
Morggán kept near the forward portion of the column alongside Lucas while the riders threaded carefully through narrow deer paths and broken ridges known well to local men, and now familiar to his own after days of hard travel.
Hooves struck the soft forest floor in a muffled rhythm beneath them while damp mist gathered low through the forest hollows.
Tonight’s ride was intended as another fast strike against the outer supply lines, conducted purposely after midnight—their first nighttime foray—hoping to catch the enemy off-guard again.
They would hit hard and vanish before the English had time to organize a defense.
Ahead of them, two mounted scouts ghosted in and out of visibility between the trees before disappearing farther north again.
The riders behind maintained discipline as they moved, and for a time nothing disturbed the march beyond the ordinary sounds of men and horses moving stealthily through darkness.
Then somewhere ahead, a horse gave a sharp, aborted scream. Morggán scowled, displeased by any noise that might give them away.
But then a scrambling was heard, and louder sounds, riders coming hard. Morggán and every man within earshot immediately straightened. His hand dropped toward his sword as the noise grew closer. Lucas turned sharply in the saddle, just as movement burst suddenly through the trees ahead.
One of the forward scouts emerged at a hard gallop between the pines, old dead leaves flying beneath the pounding hooves. Another rider followed close behind him, blood streaking black from one side of his face in the moonlight.
“They’re moving!” the lead scout shouted before he had fully reached them. “Forward riders behind us—”