Chapter Ten
Bram judged they had covered at least fifteen miles since stealing the horses, keeping to the tangled anonymity of the forests. He scanned the treeline, every shadow a potential threat, but the woods remained fortuitously silent. There was no sign of pursuit.
He forced the tension from his shoulders. They could be anywhere, or nowhere. Worrying changed naught. Long experience had taught him to face only the danger at hand, not the one that might be.
And as no danger presented itself for some time, his thoughts, despite every effort to the contrary, returned again and again to Anastasia—too difficult to avoid altogether when the length of her slender back leaned comfortably against his chest and while her thighs rather sat atop his on either side of the horse.
He still had no explanation for her. She, her manner, her garb, and most of the words she spoke remained incomprehensible to him.
He’d wondered, more than once throughout the day’s ride, whether some fever of the mind had overtaken her, and yet if so, it explained only part of her, but not her odd English or clothing.
She was also, he determined, almost too... reasonable. Madness, at least as he’d witnessed it before, did not usually carry itself with such quiet practicality.
He could still picture her standing before him, brow furrowed in concentration as she puzzled over the tiny remedies she’d drawn from that curious red pouch.
She’d frowned at them first, as if she’d been disappointed by their inadequacy, before setting herself determinedly to make the best use of what she possessed.
And she’d cried when she had finished and for the life of him, he hadn’t any idea why, but still he judged her too soft, too weak.
She’d spoken softly while she worked and he’d thought then—as he still did—that her voice would be very pleasing if not for all the garbled English that regularly spewed forth.
In truth, her voice was pleasing. The denial was a fool’s attempt to guard himself, but he suspected that battle had already been lost.
He couldn’t recall the last time someone had fussed over him, over his well-being—aside from his own mother, it had been years, mayhap a decade since another had asked after him.
Aye, beguiling that, but no more so than his own reaction to her, his awareness of her—that which he could not escape as they rode but which he’d first noticed in full force earlier.
She’d stood close enough that he had easily counted the pale freckles scattered across the bridge of her nose and high upon her cheeks, so faint they disappeared unless the light struck them just so.
Her eyes—which he had thought merely green when first they’d met—proved far more intricate than that.
Closer, he could see that the green was shot through with brown and gold, the colors of a woodland floor in autumn, shifting as the light changed whenever she lifted her face toward him.
And then there had been her removable lashes.
Bram still could not properly account for what he had witnessed by the stream.
One moment she had been ordinary—well, as ordinary as Anastasia ever was—and the next, something dark had been coming away from her eye, as if her very face were shedding pieces of itself.
He had thought, for one horrified instant, that she was injured, that some wound he had not seen was now revealing itself.
But no. She had simply reached up and removed it, as casually as another might remove a glove, and then the other, until her eyes looked...
smaller? Younger? He was not certain of the difference, only that it unsettled him deeply, that a woman could wear pieces of her face as she might wear a cloak, and remove them at will.
She had laughed at his confusion. He had not found it amusing. The world she came from, if her words could be believed, was a place of such strangeness that even a man’s understanding of a woman’s face could not be trusted.
Yet despite that strangeness—or perhaps because of it—he could not stop himself from noticing other things about her that had nothing to do with artifice. The way she smelled, for instance.
He searched unsuccessfully for the proper comparison, inhaling now to refresh his memory.
She smelled not only clean, not merely recently washed, but fresh.
No smoke clung to her clothing or her hair, and she did not carry the scent of horse, or wool, or any of the offensive scents that had assaulted his nose for the past three months.
Whatever fragrance lingered upon her was entirely her own—something he could not name, could not place against any memory he possessed, as though it had no origin in the world he knew.
There was no sense denying that he found that pleasant as well—dangerously so, he feared.
Enough, he told himself, hardening himself against her—every bluidy captivating thing. ?Twas enough foolishness for one day. Anastasia Ellis was a distraction he could ill afford.
“Bram,” she said just then, calling his attention for the first time in the last hour.
He thought she might have dozed earlier, being so long in the saddle, but she was clearly awake now.
“How were you captured?”
She turned her head slightly as she spoke, resting it against his chest so that, by merely lowering his gaze, Bram found himself looking down upon her profile.
When he didn’t answer immediately, she added quietly, “You don’t have to tell me if you’d rather not. I was... just curious.”
“?Twas an ambush,” he said after a moment, guiding the gelding around the broad limbs of an ancient pine.
“The MacCailins were led to what we believed a small English encampment. Instead, we found ourselves greatly outnumbered, betrayed by a man who shows one face to the Scots and another to the English.”
“Oh,” she said. She was quiet for a wee bit before asking, “Were you the only one captured?”
He shook his head. “Nae, but I was the only one who survived the last three months.” A frown settled over his features, but she could not see that. “I ken the ones in captivity who died, but I have nae knowledge how many perished in total at the time of the skirmish.”
“That’s awful. Do you... does that happen often? I mean, that Scottish people are betrayed by their own countrymen?”
“Enough to be disheartening,” he answered.
“I would think...” she began, and then shook her head, dismissing her own thought.
“What would ye ken?”
“Well, actually, I don’t know what to think—this is all so... surreal. And I’m not saying I know you well, obviously, but I guess I would think you would get angry, more so than disheartened. Like, I would think you would want vengeance.”
“Aye, and it shall be mine.”
“So, you’re going home, to some place called Craig na Coille, but you don’t plan on staying there, do you? You’re going to assemble an army, or whatever men like you do in this century, and go get the guy who betrayed you?”
“I will.”
“But... aren’t you ever afraid? When those men caught up to us, you didn’t look scared. Just... resigned. Like you knew you had to fight.” She paused. “Aren’t you afraid you’ll die?”
“Every man fears death.”
“But how can you be so calm? Is everyone in this time... like that?”
“Courage has little to do with whether a man fears.”
“So it’s acting in spite of the fear?”
“Aye.” He bit the inside of his cheek, recalling something from his youth. “My da was fond of saying, ‘the brave man is nae he who fears least, but he who obeys fear least’.”
“That sounds very... medieval,” she said.
Whatever men like you do in this century, she’d said. She’d actually used the term in this century more than once.
“And now I will ask ye, when ye speak of this other time, what is it ye truly believe?”
A small scoff of laughter erupted from her.
“I guess that answers whether or not you believe what I’ve said.
But that’s fair—it does seem impossible.
And yet, if what you say is true, that it’s really thirteen-o-five, then I believe—actually, I know—that I was born seven hundred years in the future.
Or rather,” she corrected, her voice even, “I was living seven hundred and twenty-one years from now when I was... whatever, sent back here.”
“Born centuries beyond now and yet here ye sit,” he remarked, his chin nearly resting above her head as the gelding moved beneath them.
“Yep. Here I sit.”
“How did it happen?”
“I don’t know,” she said, her shoulders lifting in a small shrug he felt more than saw.
“Who brought ye here?”
“I don’t know.” She paused. “I realize how ridiculous it sounds.”
“Aye.”
She nodded to herself, her hair shifting against his chest. “I don’t blame you for not believing. I’m living it and I still can’t understand it.”
“And yet, I dinna imagine ye are a liar.”
“What makes you so sure?” she asked.
“Liars labor to persuade.”
“I don’t know how to prove any of it,” she said after a moment.
“I’ve nae expectation that ye can, lass.”
She was quiet for a moment, and when she spoke again her voice had gone small. “I’m scared, though. And I don’t know what to do about it, or how to get back to... well, my time.”
He said nothing, having no words to give as reassurance. At Richmond House he had learned to read fear the way a smith reads metal, by its weight and its heat, and what he felt and heard from her now was neither performed nor mistaken by his reckoning. She believed it.
And that was the problem, that she believed it completely, and he could not.
***
They made camp that night beneath a stand of ancient pines where the thick carpet of fallen needles kept the ground drier than the surrounding forest and the lowest branches shielded them from much of the wind.