Exiles in Time (The After Cilmeri Series) (10 page)

By noon, Cassie was ready to sleep,
but she didn’t know if she dared, in case someone came looking for
him. In that event, Callum wasn’t going to be of any help, but
Cassie couldn’t stay up for another day and night either.
Ultimately, Cassie barred the door and slipped into the bed,
wrapped in her own blanket. She rested a hand on Callum’s chest so
she would know the instant he awoke, giving her time to leap from
the bed before he saw that she was in it with him.

It was breaking all sorts of her
personal rules to have him there at all, but Cassie tried to ignore
the uneasy feeling it gave her to be so close to another person. To
sleep beside Callum was breaking medieval rules too, but Cassie
didn’t care much about them. She’d learned how to adapt and
survive, not fit in. She hadn’t ever wanted to fit in.

The difference between the modern
world and the medieval one was more than the absence of plastics or
that peasants had to bow to their overlords. It had to do not only
with what to eat but how to eat it; not only what to say but how to
say it. Living out here on her own, Cassie had managed to sidestep
most of the differences, even as she concocted rules for herself,
which included what she allowed herself to think about, how much
alcohol she allowed herself to drink (essentially, none), and the
fact that she’d never let a man into her house before, not even
once.

More important than all of these was
how close she allowed any person to come to her before she eased
away so as not to risk revealing her secrets.

Cassie slept through until dark and
woke just as Callum began to stir. She climbed out of bed, and he
opened his eyes long enough to accept a drink of water but then
closed them after four or five sips and lay back down. He was
asleep again in an instant. In those few moments of consciousness,
Cassie hadn’t seen recognition in his eyes. Perhaps his body had
acknowledged his need for liquid while his mind still
slept.

She used to do that when she was a
little girl. Cassie hadn’t actually sleepwalked, but according to
her grandfather, she could hold whole conversations with people and
have no memory of it in the morning.

It had been a long time since Cassie
had allowed herself to think of her childhood—a long time since
she’d allowed herself to think about anything but her own survival.
She’d been twenty-four years old when she’d found herself in
medieval Scotland. Her grandfather and she had been bow hunting
high up in the Wallowa Mountains of Oregon when she’d crossed
through that pit of blackness to come here.

Her grandfather hadn’t been intent on
killing a deer as much as finding time and space to talk to Cassie.
She’d been away from home most of the last six years, at college
and then graduate school, and her grandfather was trying to
convince her to come home, that her place was with her family and
that she should use her education and skills for the benefit of her
tribe.

For Cassie’s part, she’d spent her
life half-in and half-out of the tribal community and had never
been sure she fit into either. Maybe that had turned out to be for
the best, since she didn’t fit into the medieval world and had
learned not to expect it.

Not that she had tried. Cassie
couldn’t be a medieval woman—couldn’t even pretend very well. She’d
spent that first year traveling Scotland—even venturing as far
south as Hadrian’s Wall—looking for answers, looking for a passage
through time. She’d thought maybe if she found a cave or a ring of
standing stones like in some of those romance novels, she could
find her way back home.

But real life wasn’t like life in a
romance novel, and while Cassie never gave up trying, she had
eventually chosen to make the best of it, to live here as well as
she could. She’d survived by living as her ancestors once did,
using all the old skills her grandfather had taught her as a girl.
If only he could see her now. Cassie hoped that he would be
proud.

Chapter Five

Callum

W
hen Callum awoke, Cassie was sitting beside him, checking his
head wound again. Her long rope of braided black hair had fallen
over her left shoulder and it swung towards him. She still wore
men’s clothes—breeches, shirt, a thick knitted sweater, hiking
boots—which would have kept her warmer than Callum had been as
they’d trekked across the wilds of Scotland.

At the moment, however, he was warm
and comfortable. For the first time in months, he’d slept without
dreaming of Afghanistan. That thought brought him upright with a
jerk. He put a hand out to his sword, which leaned against the wall
by the head of the bed, and then he glanced upwards to the shelf.
“I need my gun.”

Cassie didn’t say a word, just reached
above her head and handed the gun to Callum.

“
How long have I been out?”
Callum said.

“
Two days,” she said. “You
woke only enough to drink and eat a little.”

“
I don’t remember.” Callum
put a hand to his head, which hurt less than it had, though he
still felt like he’d been run over by a lorry. “Thank you for
saving me.”

“
They left you for dead,”
Cassie said. “That was sloppy of them, but that close to Kilsyth,
they knew they had to get out of there quickly.”

The way she spoke was music to
Callum’s ears. Her words flowed. He understood her without having
to think about it.

“
James Stewart said
something about MacDougalls,” Callum said.

Cassie tsked through her teeth. “He
was right to assume the worst. It was the MacDougalls.”

Callum tried to conjure up a map of
Scotland in his head. “I thought their lands were far to the west.
What were they doing so close to Stirling and Glasgow?”

“
They were attacking your
company, obviously. They’re allies of the MacGregors and the
Grahams, who have lands around here. They hate the
Stewarts.”

“
So their target was James
Stewart and not to influence the succession?” Callum said. All
these names and alliances were muddling his already aching
head.

“
Everything is about the
succession,” Cassie said. “The MacDougalls support the Comyns, who
support Balliol. They hate the Stewarts so they hate the Bruces
too. In Scotland, you’re either on one side or the
other.”

“
King David warned me about
that,” Callum said. “He won’t be happy that it’s already come to
open war.”

“
This isn’t open war,”
Cassie said. “If you’d seen open war between clans, you’d know that
this isn’t it. This was a raid.”

Callum shook his head in disbelief,
but the motion made his head hurt and he moaned before he could
stop himself. He put a hand to the cut at his hairline, probing
with his fingers, but Cassie brushed them away.

“
Don’t touch it. It’s
healing.”

“
They killed Bishop Kirby,”
Callum said.

“
I saw a man in white robes
go down at the beginning of the fight,” Cassie said. “Is that who
he was?”

“
Why would they do this?”
Callum said. “What do the MacDougalls hope to gain by slaughtering
the king’s men?”

“
The rumor among the clans
had it that King David should have been in your company,” Cassie
said. “I don’t care about the guy one way or the other, but killing
the king of England is a great way to start a war.”

“
He didn’t come,” Callum
said. “His wife’s about to have a baby and he wanted to be there
when she did. He sent Bishop Kirby and me to talk to the Scots for
him.”

Cassie chewed on her lower lip. “Would
the MacDougalls have known about the king’s change of
plans?”

“
I don’t know,” Callum
said. “Perhaps they wouldn’t unless a spy sent word ahead of us,
either by coming himself or by pigeon.” Since becoming King of
England, David had taken over and improved upon King Edward’s
well-established communication network. That included a man in
Edinburgh and a second in Stirling, both with the ability to get
word to him by carrier pigeon. Callum had their names and was to
have found his contact as soon as he arrived in
Stirling.

“
Rumors have been racing
around the north country for weeks,” Cassie said. “They say that if
King David isn’t going to take the throne himself, he has already
decided to give it to the Bruces. The MacDougalls, obviously,
decided not to wait to find out if the rumor was true.”

Callum struggled to sit up and Cassie
didn’t force him back. Instead, she handed him a cup from which he
drank thirstily. It was Callum’s first real look at his
surroundings. “What is this place?”

“
My home.”

“
I guessed that,” Callum
said, “but it’s—it’s—” He couldn’t find the words. It could have
been the cabin in rural Virginia where his family had gone on
holiday when he was a boy.

“
It’s nice, isn’t it?”
Cassie looked around at her house. “I built it myself.”

Cassie’s home was an old-fashioned log
cabin, like the ones the pioneers had constructed in the American
West. The room had a fireplace built into a side wall, which drew
out the smoke remarkably well. Most medieval fireplaces hardly
worked at all, but a fire in the center of a room could be much
worse.

“
How did you do all this?”
Callum said.

Cassie’s brow furrowed. “The same way
houses like this have always been built—by hand, with time. It’s
not that hard.”

“
It would have been hard
for me.”

Cassie turned to a line that she’d
strung from the fireplace to a hook beside the door and felt at the
clothes hanging on it. She took down Callum’s pants and shirt and
tossed them to him. “Here. I dried the chain mail as best I could,
but I think you need a special brush to get rid of the rust. I
don’t have one.”

Callum grabbed the clothes out of the
air and dressed while Cassie bent to the fire and stirred a pot
that hung over it. By the time she handed him a bowl of porridge,
he was looking and feeling more like himself.

But now that Callum was conscious and
getting used to being upright, he started to focus on how strange
this all was. The ambush, certainly, was unexpected. That the
MacDougalls might have wanted to kill or capture David was going to
give the king a headache in the weeks ahead, once he found out
about it. But it was Cassie’s very existence that was the most
troubling.

“
How did you get here,
Cassie?” Callum said.

“
I walked with you. Don’t
you remember?”

“
I don’t mean that. I
mean
how did you get here?
To Scotland.”

Cassie lifted one shoulder. “I can’t
even tell you. I’ve thought over those last moments in Oregon again
and again and come up with precisely nothing. I can’t fix any of it
in my mind for long enough to trace the path I
followed.”

“
What do you
remember?”

“
I had been visiting my
grandfather on a quick vacation from my job in California, working
for the Bureau of Land Management. My grandfather and I had been
hunting, working with my new bow—” She drew Callum’s attention to
the bow hanging over her front door.

Callum’s jaw dropped. It was a modern
recurve bow. A quiver of arrows hung on a hook beside
it.

“—
when a storm blew up out
of nowhere. Storms are pretty rare in the summer in Eastern Oregon.
We had been just about to turn for home, since neither hunting nor
talk was much fun in a thunderstorm, when I heard the whine of an
airplane engine, growing closer until it was almost on top of us.
My grandfather was fifty yards away when the plane came in. He
shouted at me to run, and I did, but with the storm and the driving
rain, I couldn’t see which way to go. Suddenly, an enormous black
hole opened beneath me and sucked me into it. And then I was
here.”

“
Here, as in, right here?”
Callum said.

Cassie shrugged. “It was a few miles
further west, near the sea. Between one instant and the next, I
went from my forest to this one, though I didn’t know until later
that I was in Scotland. All I knew was that I was on my knees in
the dirt in an unfamiliar woods, surrounded by a fog, with the
sound of the airplane fading into the distance.”

Throughout Cassie’s narration, a
coldness had seeped through Callum and his stomach had fallen into
his boots. He knew with a certainty that Cassie’s story was Meg’s
story, but told from the ground. Callum rubbed at his forehead with
his fingers. He didn’t know what to say. How was he to tell Cassie
that her presence here was a mistake, just like his, and she’d been
caught up in the wake of a miracle? How was he going to tell her
that even if it was theoretically possible, there was no going
back?

Goronwy had made that clear on
Callum’s first night in the Middle Ages. Callum had been unable to
sleep, to face lying on his pallet in his cold room with Meg and
Llywelyn asleep in the room next to his. He’d understood that he
was privileged to have a room at all, that he could have been
sleeping on a bench in the great hall or with soldiers in the
barracks. But his head had been spinning with all that had happened
to him and he couldn’t sleep just yet. He’d climbed the battlements
at Windsor Castle and found Goronwy beside him.