“I think you should go see to Serafina,” he suggested. The Saracen beauty could be temperamental. “I’ll no’ have her moods ruining the high fettle of the others. Folk dinnae come here for intrigues and mayhem.”
“As you wish.” Saor couldn’t quite keep the smile out of his voice.
Bran knew his friend had a weakness for the dusky-skinned temptress, with her raven locks and exotic perfume. The speed with which Saor turned and flew back up the stairs, taking them two at a time, proved it.
Bran frowned.
There’d been a time when he, too, would have raced to Serafina’s side.
Indeed, he might have knocked Saor out of the way to get there.
Now . . .
His scowl deepened and he flicked his fingers. Not to conjure a beef rib—though he was still mightily famished—but to snatch a brimming cup of ale from the kitchen’s cold, smoke-tinged air.
He quaffed the frothy brew in one quick gulp.
He should help himself to an entire ewer of ale. Or perhaps a bracing swig of
uisge beatha
. The fiery Highland spirits would surely banish the gooseflesh that was beginning to prick his nape.
Uisge beatha
was, after all, Scotland’s cure-all for every ill known to man.
But he, Bran of Barra, prided himself on taking matters into his own hands.
He didn’t need to toss down a bolt of firewater to bolster his courage.
A Barra MacNeil feared nothing.
So he swiped a hand across his mouth, ensuring that no ale flecks clung to his fine red beard, and then prepared to do what he’d never done before.
Take a peek at modern-day Barra.
Even if the thought soured his stomach and was as appealing as tumbling, naked, in a patch of stinging nettles.
He was anything but a fool and he’d sifted himself in and out of other Highland locales often enough over the centuries to know that keeps like his didn’t fare well through time. Almost all once- mighty abodes lost their roofs. Many saw good, solid walls crumble and sag. And some were reduced to shameful piles of rubble.
Praise God, he knew through Mindy Menlove’s appearance that his tower yet stood.
An American tourist wouldn’t be interested in an out-of-the-way place like Barra otherwise.
Even so, if three MacNeil chiefly ghosts and Mindy sent-to-tempt-him Menlove had all pierced the carefully wrought shields he kept around his beloved fourteenth-century keep, it followed that great activity must be going on in Barra of modern times.
Bran put back his shoulders and took a deep breath.
It was his duty to discover what was amiss.
Eager to be about it, he closed his eyes and concentrated on sifting himself into his bailey. But not the bustling courtyard of his own day, a colorful, noisy place he knew and loved so dearly that it sometimes hurt his heart just to stride across its cobbles.
Nae, he sifted himself to whatever was left of his bailey in Mindy Menlove’s time.
He knew he’d made it when he could no longer feel the cobbles beneath his feet.
He was standing on grass.
Bran swallowed. His heart began galloping. He wasn’t quite ready to open his eyes, but the chill, briny air comforted him. Also familiar was the sound of the wind churning up the sea beyond his curtain walls. They were noises he knew and loved and that meant home.
It didn’t matter the century.
Or that his courtyard had lost its cobbles somewhere in the long passage of time.
A buffet of wind tossed his plaid, reminding him of why he’d come here. So he drew another deep breath and opened his eyes. Unfortunately he saw nothing but blowing mist and—if he wasn’t mistaken—a few straggly clumps of heather.
Whatever remained of his walls was hidden behind the drifting sheets of mist. Chills sped down his spine and for one maddening moment, he wondered if he’d sifted himself to the wrong place. But the cold, damp air was so thick with the smell of the sea, and the ground—with or without cobbles—was his.
That, he knew to the roots of his soul.
It was just a matter of getting his bearings and then peering through the damty fog.
He took a few steps forward, mindful of any tumbled stones or suchlike he might encounter. But when the mists did part long enough for him to see more than a few feet in front of him, he realized he needn’t have bothered. Nothing surrounded him but the heather-and-bracken-strewn ground and the tossing, whitecapped sea.
MacNeil’s Tower was gone.
Bran blinked and turned in a disbelieving circle. He didn’t want to accept the truth before his eyes. But it was there all the same. And the brittle horror of it was worse than anything he’d ever dared imagine.
His home had been wiped from the earth as if it’d never existed.
Not a single stone remained.
Only the cold night, the waves, and the eerie, wind-driven mist looked on as terrible pain pierced his heart and punched holes in his soul. Anguished, he threw back his head to roar denial, but a scalding thickness closed his throat, cutting off his cry.
He did fist his hands, barely aware of the soft drizzle beginning to fall. The chill droplets clung to his hair and rolled down his face, but did nothing to cool the burning agony inside him.
He’d expected at least one ruined wall.
Tears blurred his vision, but like all Highlanders, he was man enough not to hide his feelings. He did bend to scoop up handfuls of damp, loamy- smelling earth, clutching the peat to his chest as if doing so might make his home rise up out of the whirling mist.
But nothing stirred except the sudden blur of gray racing toward him across the springy turf.
Bran’s heart gave a leap.
It was Gibbie.
The dog hurtled into him, almost knocking him down. Bran dropped to his knees and reached out, pulling his old friend hard against him. He rumpled Gibbie’s shaggy coat and rubbed his ears, some of the pain in his heart lessening.
“Ach, laddie, did you follow me here, too?” Bran lowered his head, pressing his cheek against the great beast’s rain-dampened shoulder. “ ’Tis no’ a fine place for us just now, our Barra. But I’m glad to be seeing you!”
As if that was all that mattered—and Bran supposed that, to Gibbie, it was—the dog barked happily and pressed closer to him, slathering Bran with kisses.
“Come, you, let us be away.” Bran pushed to his feet and forced a grin, not wanting Gibbie to see his distress and think he was upset because the dog had joined him.
In truth, Gibbie was his salvation.
As was his ability—praise the saints—to sift them both back to fourteenth-century Barra, where they belonged. In their own merry keep with a roaring fire, jovial friends, and all the finger- flicked beef ribs their ghostly hearts desired.
And as Bran reached down to curl his fingers around Gibbie’s collar—just to be sure he didn’t lose him on the way home—he vowed to never again visit Barra of modern times.
Once had almost undone him.
He wouldn’t make the same mistake twice.
The first thing Mindy did upon walking into Newark Liberty International Airport a month later was to throw away the six outdated Scotland guidebooks and several faded and well-thumbed maps of the Highlands and the Isles that Margo had insisted on giving her as must-have reading material for the flight to Glasgow.
Margo Menlove had never been to Scotland. But as a die-hard Scotophile, she had a ton of tartany paraphernalia clogging her tiny apartment and considered herself an authority on all things Scottish.
She meant well.
And her eyes had flashed with such excitement when she’d dug her treasures out of her oversized handbag and presented them to Mindy.
Margo just didn’t understand that Mindy wasn’t going to Scotland as a tourist.
She wasn’t one of the gazillion genealogy-obsessed Americans whose ancestors emigrated from Scotland two hundred years ago and viewed their package-deal see-Scotland-in-seven-days coach-bus tour as a journey that was taking them home.
She wasn’t into cold, rain, and sheep.
Nor was she a Kilt-o-maniac.
Not anymore, anyway.
She was going to Barra for one reason only. And her greatest wish was to leave as quickly as possible. Though she would be sure she took time to pick up some nice newly printed guidebooks and maps for Margo’s collection. Perhaps, too, a nice length of heathery-colored tweed that Margo could no doubt whip into something stunning.
Mindy smiled. She wished she had her sister’s sense of style. But having spent her entire adult life wearing an airline uniform left her a bit spoiled. To her, a top was a top was a top. And as for some women’s passion for shoes, well, she just didn’t get the thrill.
She paused to let an air crew hurry past, the flight attendants smartly elegant in stewardess blue and with well-polished heels to match. Looking after them, Mindy felt a pang as they disappeared into the crowd, the rattle of their wheeled crew luggage and the
click-click
of their heels bringing back memories.
She looked down at her own shoes, bought especially for this trip, and almost laughed out loud.
Thick-soled black leather walking boots too bulky for her checked bag, they were like nothing she’d ever worn before. She hoped they’d protect her from turning an ankle in some godforsaken Hebridean bog.
Nothing else mattered.
Except perhaps getting checked in and to the gate before she changed her mind and made tracks straight for Global’s Newark crew lounge, friends she missed, and—one could dream—a fast ticket to her old job!
She
was
tempted.
Especially when—nearly an hour and much hassle later—she reached the boarding gate and had the bad luck to sit down next to a talker.
“We’re going on a history and heritage tour,” the middle-aged woman gushed, her eyes lighting with the zeal of a die- hard Scotophile. “We’re all Scottish”—she indicated the little group standing close by, all wearing badges proclaiming their names and that they were on a Celtic Twilight tour—“and we’ll be visiting the ancestral castles of each one of us.
“Treading in the footsteps of our forebears and”—she heaved a great sigh, getting misty-eyed—“breathing in the air of our native land.”
Mindy nodded. She wished she’d noticed the woman’s KISS ME, I’M SCOTTISH pin before she’d sat beside her. Years of suffering Margo’s endless pining for the Highlands had put her off such people. She started to say something, anything, to be polite, but before she could, the woman leaned close.
“You must have Scottish roots.” She pulled a card from her jacket pocket and pressed it into Mindy’s hand. “I have an online business that sells Scottish memorabilia. We do everything from T-shirts and coffee mugs emblazoned with your clan name and crest to teddy bears wearing your own family tartan.”
“I’m not Scottish.” Mindy resisted announcing that she, like the woman herself, was American. “But—”
“I must tell you”—the woman spoke right over her—“we’re ending our trip with a gala weekend at Ravenscraig Castle near Oban. They have a state-of-the-art genealogical research center called One Cairn Village where we can reference everything we learn on the tour. They even do—”
“Ravenscraig Castle?”
Mindy’s heart sank.
She’d booked her first night in Scotland at the castle hotel. It’d caught her eye because of its proximity to Oban, where she’d board the CalMac ferry to Barra. And because a castle hotel sounded luxurious and she deserved a night of pampering before stranding herself on a rocky Hebridean island that surely lacked most modern conveniences.
But she’d somehow overlooked that Ravenscraig had a genealogy center. The place would be overrun with history buffs and ancestral enthusiasts.
Mindy shuddered.
The
talker
was just warming up. “Yes, that’s it. Ravenscraig Castle. It’s owned by a real laird, Sir Alexander Douglas, and his American wife. I believe her name is Lady Mara. They’re known throughout the Highlands for their medieval-reenactment festivals and—”
“Medieval reenactment?”
“Oh, yes. Their ‘Medieval Dayes’ weekends are supposed to be fabulous. Very authentic, but”—she gripped Mindy’s arm, speaking with as much relish as if she were talking about attending a tournament at Buckingham Palace—“they’re just as famous for the genealogy research they sponsor. They even give out certificates verifying one’s roots. And in some cases where they have connections with the lairds, they present you with a land deed for a square foot of your own home glen!”
Mindy gulped.
It just kept getting worse.
Genealogy nuts were bad. The thought of arriving at the castle hotel in the middle of a medieval reenactment was off-putting enough for her to break out in hives.
She’d had her fill of medieval lately and didn’t want any more. Thousands of numbered and packed-in-straw castle stones were more than anyone’s share of the Middle Ages. Now that those stones were on their way to the Auld Hameland—and very likely there already—she should be able to consider her part in their history a done deal.
In fact, when a Global PA announcement rang through the concourse calling passengers to board a flight to St. Croix, Mindy decided those now-in-Barra stones were enough. She wasn’t doing anything else and neither was she flying to Glasgow, getting in a rental car, and driving left through heather and mist.
Her heart was
not
in the Highlands.
It was on a sunny beach where the sand burned her feet and the smell of cocoa butter tanning oil scented the air.
Almost tasting the tropics, she sprang to her feet. Unfortunately, her seat companion leapt up, as well. Once more the woman grabbed her arm, holding tight.
