Chapter Thirteen
“Are you distrustful by nature?” she asked later that morning, her voice just loud enough to be heard by Bram, seated behind her once more on the gelding.
They rode yet again through dense woodland. The land dipped and rose, mirroring the gentle, treeless green knolls that lay beyond and behind them.
He shifted his weight and the horse snorted. “Aye, I am.”
She shifted, trying to sense his expression since she couldn’t see it. “Is that... because of the man who betrayed you to the English?”
“Nae. I simply dinna take anything at face value—I’ve kent too many people whose agendas dinna align with their words or deeds.”
She paused and considered that before wondering, “Do you think I’m—”
“Nae, lass.” His chest moved sparingly against her and she pictured him shaking his head. “I ken you’re lost, afraid, mayhap confounded by whatever’s happened to ye, but I dinna sense deception.”
A breeze rustled the leaves above. Anna parted her lips for a follow-up question, but Bram spoke before she could. “But nae, that dinna mean I believe any more now than I did yesterday about the year ye claim to come from. And ye, lass, ye are too trusting, I imagine.”
She drew in a breath. “I probably am. I... well, I like to give people the benefit of the doubt—never assume ill of them till they give me reason.”
“I have nae such luxury in this life,” he said quietly, nudging the horse forward as they climbed a gentle rise.
“No, I guess not,” she admitted, tucking a stray lock of hair behind her ear. “Honestly, it felt awful at the time when I learned I’d trusted people I shouldn’t have. But compared to what goes on in this century, none of it seems so important anymore.”
As they crested the rise, the trees thinned enough to reveal the country beyond, green hills rolling away beneath a pale morning sky, their distant slopes softened by lingering mist. Anna twisted slightly in the saddle, trying to see more of it, and remembered suddenly the little instant camera tucked inside her bag.
“Can you give me my purse?”
“Yer what?”
“My bag. It’s behind you.”
Bram made some quiet sound that might have been impatience, but reached behind himself to where he’d secured the strap beneath the ties of the saddle. A moment later he passed the crossbody bag around her, and Anna settled it awkwardly across her lap.
“What do ye need?”
“My camera.”
“Yer wee picture box?”
She smiled. “Yes, my wee picture box.”
She dug it out, checked the little window that told her how many exposures remained, and lifted it toward the landscape ahead.
She knew before she pressed the button that the instant camera wouldn't begin to do the view justice. The hills were too distant, the morning light too subdued, and the little camera had never been intended for sweeping landscapes. Still, she wanted it. The horse’s ears rose prominently into the bottom of the frame, and Anna smiled and left them there, pressing the button.
The camera whirred, and the photograph emerged into her hand.
“I don’t know how long I’m going to be here,” she said thoughtfully, watching the image slowly come to life. “I want to remember some of it.”
Anna tucked the developing photograph carefully into the little box she kept for them, but instead of returning the camera to her bag, she looked down.
Bram’s right arm circled her waist, holding her securely against him while the horse picked its way down the uneven track.
His other hand rested upon the reins before her, broad and brown against the leather, the newly freed wrist marked by those angry bands of damaged flesh, same as the other one.
Compared to her own hand, his looked enormous.
Before she could think too hard about why she wanted the picture, Anna tipped the camera downward. She angled the camera from somewhere beneath her chin, catching the fall of her skirt, the pommel, and the horse’s dark mane beyond it, and Bram’s hand upon the reins and the other spanning her waist.
She pressed the button.
“Another?” he asked as the second photograph slid free.
“Yes. Of your hands.”
“My hands?”
“Yes.”
“Why?”
Anna looked down at the blank square slowly beginning to cloud with color.
“I don’t know.”
That was a lie, of course.
If she ever managed to get back home, how could she explain this?
These strange, impossible little pictures would be her only proof.
Proof of this impossible journey, and of the man who’d become its center.
It wasn’t just about proof, though. It was about memory.
She wanted to capture the things time might steal—the shocking competence of his hands, both with a sword and a simple thorn, the brutal story etched into his wrists, the sheer solidness of him that made this wild century feel real.
She regretted now having discarded the photograph she’d taken of the two of them at the collier’s hut. At the time she’d been hurt and angry and had wanted nothing to do with him or the stupid picture. Now she wished she’d kept it. It was the only likeness she’d taken of Bram's face.
Well, she would remedy that. Anna intended to get at least one proper picture of Bram MacCailin. If she returned to 2026 with nothing else from this impossible detour through history, she knew she’d want to remember him..
She slipped the photograph into the box with the other and returned the camera to her bag. Bram reached around her for it without being asked, and she handed it back to him, feeling him shift behind her as he secured it once more to the saddle.
Then Bram said, “What did ye mean earlier?”
“About what?”
“That the betrayals of yer own time seem unimportant now.”
“Oh.” She leaned back against him again, her voice softening with a rueful laugh. “I’ve been burned by men—in relationships, I mean. But it’s not life or death. My problems seem so petty compared to a betrayal that led to actual death, to what the English did to you.”
“How is burning nae life or death?”
She smiled lazily. “Oh, no, not literal burning. I mean, like burned, as in, I don’t know, like my emotions were scorched by their betrayal.”
“I dinna follow.”
She let out a long sigh, rocking slightly with the horse’s gait. “Like this guy Aaron—I thought I was in love, you know? I suspected he was cheating—er, unfaithful—but he lied so convincingly I believed him for months. Then I found out he’d been sleeping with my best friend the whole time.”
“Yer heart was burned?”
Anna shrugged, eyes fixed on the gloomy trail ahead.
“Well, yeah—figuratively, not literally. But then, it was fine. It’s a lot easier to get over someone when they’ve been hurtful and disrespectful, when you realize everything they ever said was all lies.
” She was thoughtful for a moment. “Sometimes I think you don’t understand half of what I say for all the modern idioms and expressions. ”
“I imagine I grasp the gist of it, by context.”
“Does your wrist feel naked now, without the cuff?” she thought to ask a few minutes later.
“Lighter,” he answered after a moment. “I keep expecting to feel it there.”
Anna glanced down at his now-bare wrist where it rested upon the reins, comparing one set of scars to the others on his right hand.
“But it wasn’t the handcuff that did that, was it?”
Bram was silent long enough that she wondered if he hadn’t heard her.
“Nae.” A long pause settled before he said, “The English had plenty of methods to persuade a man to answer questions.”
Anna’s stomach tightened.
“They bound my wrists with rope and hoisted me from a beam above the prison floor,” he explained.
“They’d leave me there till my shoulders felt fit to tear from their sockets, then lower me long enough to ask their questions.
” His voice was flat, almost detached. “When I refused to answer, they’d haul me up again.
They were convinced I knew where Wallace meant to gather his supporters, where messages were carried, which lairds had secretly pledged themselves to him.
They believed pain would loosen my tongue. ”
Anna’s fingers curled tighter around the pommel. She’d imagined beatings, of course, almost from the first moment they’d met, having noticed his bruises immediately.
But to hear him describe being hung by his wrists until his own weight threatened to tear him apart—and in such an indifferent voice—sent a fresh wave of horror through her.
Her stomach clenched, saliva flooding her mouth.
She swallowed it back, and forced herself to see the barely noticeable path winding through the trees, and the moss-covered stones and still-dripping branches.
If she allowed herself to picture what he described, she’d see him, suspended helplessly, perhaps beyond hope but somehow managing to survive anyway.
She didn’t want him to know what the image did to her.
Pity was the last thing Bram MacCailin would ever welcome, she somehow understood that instinctively.
So she kept her silence, though she found it suddenly difficult to draw a full breath, and after a long moment merely laid one hand lightly over the arm that circled her waist.
After a time, Bram’s voice, low and rough, finally broke the silence. He did not speak of the English, but of her.
“This man, Aaron. Ye said ye suspected he was false to ye, yet ye believed his lies.”
She nodded, surprised he’d returned to it. “I did. He was convincing, and I wanted to believe him. That helped.”
“Aye,” Bram said, a new hardness in his tone. “A lie finds easier purchase when it offers what a person already wishes to be true.”
Anna turned that over, disliking how precisely it fit. “Very true,” she allowed.
His arm shifted around her as he guided the horse between two trees, bringing her more firmly against his chest for a moment before the path widened again. “Ye are wed to this Aaron?”
“Oh, God, no,” she was quick to clarify. “We dated, that’s all—though for longer than we should have, considering what I suspected early on.”
“What is that? Dating?”
“Um, it’s like, I guess you would call it courting.”