Chapter Eight
Throughout the long months of Bram’s captivity, the guards had rarely missed an opportunity to boast of English victories or recount the latest news from the war.
Whether out of cruelty or simple amusement, they delighted in telling their prisoners which Scottish castles had fallen, which lords had bent the knee to Edward, and how hopeless their cause had become.
Bram and the others had learned to receive every report with a degree of skepticism, believing much of what they heard to be exaggerated, if not outright fabricated, intended only to strip away whatever hope remained in them.
This, however, was different. The men resting beyond the stone wall had not been speaking for the benefit of an audience. There had been no reason to invent such news, nor to lie about the destination of the grisly burden they escorted north.
Wallace was dead.
Bram closed his eyes briefly, unable to conceive of this war—of this world!
—without William Wallace in it. For years, Wallace had endured defeat, betrayal, and relentless pursuit, surviving when lesser men would have surrendered or fled abroad.
Wallace had become something larger than any one man ought to be, a living symbol that Scotland could and should yet refuse Edward’s rule.
And now he was gone, ignobly hanged, drawn, and quartered, and one of his severed limbs at that very moment being carried toward Berwick to hang above its gates as a warning to every Scot who still dared dream of freedom.
What would become of the resistance now?
“Bram...?”
“Aye?” he answered without opening his eyes.
“Did you... do you still believe it’s thirteen hundred and five?”
What the—still believe?
Bram scrubbed a hand over his eyes and beard before looking at her. He had neither the patience nor the desire for such foolishness while the news of Wallace’s death yet echoed in his mind.
“It requires little to believe,” he said curtly, “when ?tis truth.”
She frowned. “But... it isn’t 1305.”
He regarded her for a long moment before saying, with the tired resignation of a man who had neither the strength nor the desire for such babble, “Then tell me the year.”
“Twenty-twenty-six.”
“What kingdom counts years so?” He forced himself to ask. The anxious look in her hazel eyes suggested she truly believed this foolishness. Something about her eyes struck him as strange—the lashes seemed too thick, too dark, but the thought vanished beneath the greater impossibility of her words.
“Everyone does.”
“Verra well.” He had no intention of arguing further with her.
Bram pushed himself to his feet, cursing as the forgotten length of chain slid from his wrist and clattered against the stones. The sound was unnaturally loud in the quiet. Grimacing, he gathered the links and wrapped them tightly in his palm to silence them.
He looked down at her, still seated against the ancient wall with her hands lying listlessly in her lap.
The spirited woman who’d argued with him for several of the last twenty-four hours seemed to have vanished.
In her place was someone as weary and uncertain as he felt, her face drained of color, her eyes fixed somewhere beyond him as if she, too, had just received some horrid news.
He found himself studying her carefully.
The morning sun caught in strands of her fair hair, turning them almost white.
She looked utterly out of place in this wild country, from her strange garments to the curious satchel she refused to abandon.
Stranger still was her belief that she lived in a year that had no meaning to him, speaking of it not as one inventing a tale, but with the quiet conviction of someone stating the simplest of truths.
He knew not what to make of her—she was either more profoundly touched in the mind than anyone he had ever encountered or she was something else entirely, something for which he possessed neither explanation nor name.
Mayhap she was merely lost. The thought stirred that same persistent instinct urging him not to leave her.
And yet....
Whatever afflicted her, he could neither cure it nor unravel it, and he no longer had the luxury of trying.
Wallace was dead. Scotland needed every loyal man it still possessed, and Bram had already spent more precious hours than he ought escorting a woman whose path and purpose could not be his own.
To his growing frustration, try as he might, he could not harden himself against the instinct.
“We should go,” he said.
He waited while Anastasia rose beside him. She brushed dried grass from her skirt with absent strokes, her thoughts plainly elsewhere, then settled the strap of her curious satchel over one shoulder.
Without another word, they resumed their journey.
For a time, they remained beneath the shelter of the trees, following little more than a deer path that wound between birch, ash, and scattered hawthorn. Supposing she was as gut-wrenched as he—whatever her reason might be—they walked for nearly half an hour without exchanging a single word.
“Help me make sense of it,” she begged finally.
Bram glanced over his shoulder.
Anastasia had fallen several paces behind him. She looked no less troubled than she had at the wall, though some of the vacancy had left her expression, replaced now by a restless determination he was beginning to recognize.
“You say it’s 1305... those men... even this place...” She lifted both hands helplessly. “But it can’t be. It was 2026 yesterday morning. I can’t have just misplaced seven hundred years.”
Bram had no notion what precisely she was asking of him and continued along the narrow path, but after another dozen paces he became aware that he could no longer hear Anastasia behind him.
He turned and found her standing some distance back, holding a small black object above her head while she slowly turned in a circle.
He stared at her. Whatever uncertainty he’d entertained regarding the soundness of her mind increased tenfold.
“It turned on,” she said, apparently oblivious to his concern. “It says the battery’s at six percent, but I can’t get a signal anywhere.”
She took several steps in one direction, still holding the object aloft, then frowned at its glowing face and turned back again.
“What are ye doing?”
Anastasia lowered the thing and looked at him. “Trying to get a signal.”
Bram’s gaze returned to the curious object. Its face shone with its own pale light, covered with tiny symbols and numbers unlike anything he had ever seen.
Anastasia caught him staring and her expression immediately changed. “Oh, come on. Please don’t pretend you don’t know what a phone is.”
“I have never seen the like.”
“Are you doing this on purpose?” Her frustration sharpened. “Are you trying to make me think I’m crazy?”
Something in her expression changed. It was slight, but Bram saw it—the first faint erosion of the certainty with which she had contradicted him from the moment he’d told her the year.
Her gaze moved from him to the woodland surrounding them and then down to the strange object in her hand, which she quickly tucked out of sight.
She pressed the heel of one hand against her forehead and walked on, while Bram found himself watching her with increasing concern.
“I have a family,” she said after a moment, her voice strained.
“A sister, Mallory... parents, Nancy and Frank. They’re real.
My mom calls my sister when I don’t answer my phone.
” She gave a faint, distracted laugh that vanished.
“My dad has been remodeling the half bath since February because he refuses to pay someone else to do it. My mom sends me recipes I’ll never make and at sixty-two, she’s addicted to TikTok... they’re waiting for me. They’re real.”
Bram listened, understanding some of the words individually more readily than he understood what had prompted the sudden flood of information.
“They’re real,” she said.
He frowned. “Aye.”
She shook her head impatiently. “I’m not losing my mind.
Yesterday everything was normal. My parents were at home.
Mallory was at home. I was supposed to call my mom when I got back from York because she worries when I travel alone, even though I’m twenty-eight years old and have been living on my own for years. ”
She was speaking faster now, but Bram suspected she didn’t notice.
“I have an apartment. I have a car. I have twenty-three third graders waiting for me when school starts again, and I’m supposed to be on a ten-day vacation to England, Rome, and Paris.”
Bram knew not what to make of any of it.
Her frantic words tumbled into a silence broken only by the wind.
She was not merely lost; she was unraveling.
He let the quiet stretch for a moment longer before turning away.
“We need to move,” he said, continuing along the path.
He heard her footsteps following, and when she offered no further bewildering declarations, he allowed himself to hope the worst of it had passed.
The woodland gradually thinned until the trees stood farther and farther apart, each one casting its own lonely patch of shade instead of joining the next. Before long there remained only a handful of wind-bent oaks scattered across the hillside, beyond which the country opened completely.
Bram stopped at the edge of the meadow.
The ground rolled northward, a broad expanse of waist-high grass offering no cover until a belt of woodland a mile distant. To the east, marshy ground would slow them to a crawl. To the west, an exposed ridge offered a longer, more dangerous path. There was no good way. Only the direct way.
“We’ll have to cross,” he said at last.
Anna followed his gaze over the thistle-covered meadow. “It’s so... big.”
“Aye,” he answered distractedly, “and verra poor ground for a man who wishes nae to be seen.”