by Tarah Scott
Julianna’s attacker seized her arm. Cailean kicked his horse’s belly. He glimpsed a flash of steel and realized she’d lunged at the man with a dagger. The man drew his hand back for a blow to her face. Cailean reached them and slammed his fist into the man’s cheekbone before he could swing at her. The man’s head snapped aside. Cailean’s steed swung round, shying from the ruckus, and the horses bumped each other.
Cailean wheeled about as the man turned his horse to face him, sword raised. Cailean met the blow, then pushed upward in an arc and whirled his horse left. The rider veered right, clearly intending to slice his sword across Cailean’s midsection.
Cailean jabbed, cutting the man’s arm above his wrist. He howled, but didn’t falter, and parried left, then right, forcing Cailean back. Cailean’s horse shied from the other animal. Cailean tightened his grip on the reins. He’d had much less practice at swordplay on a horse than on foot. Swordplay? His attacker’s blade ripped a hole in Cailean’s shirt above his left pec.
This was no swordplay.
The bastard feinted a jab. Cailean swung, caught the man’s sword at the hilt, and sent the blade flying. The man lunged toward him. Cailean tried to turn his horse aside, but his attacker seized Cailean’s arm and they crashed to the ground, the man on top of him.
“Cailean!” Julianna shouted.
He registered the dagger in the man’s hand, and slammed his sword hilt down on the man’s head. He slumped onto Cailean. For an instant, he couldn’t move. His heart thundered and his vision blurred.
Cailean drew a deep breath, shoved the man off him, then pushed to his feet, still gripping his sword. His knees started to buckle. He willed them into submission and stumbled two paces to his horse. Cailean grasped the pommel and steadied himself. What had just happened?
Lennox’s attacker abruptly whirled his horse and took off at a gallop. Lennox started after him, then turned back seconds later. Gregory swung his sword and sliced his attacker’s chest open. Blood spurted. His attacker gurgled, then fell to the ground. Cailean glimpsed another body lying near Gregory. His stomach turned. It was one of Julianna’s guards. The other guard sat on his horse, five feet from Julianna, eyes blazing.
Julianna swung her leg over her horse’s pommel, slid to the ground, and hurried to Cailean. She laid a hand on his arm. “Are ye hurt?”
“Hurt?” he repeated.
“Cailean!” Lennox shouted.
Cailean jerked his head up as Lennox dug his heels into his horse’s flank.
“Behind you,” Lennox shouted, thundering forward.
Cailean whirled.
Sword raised, his attacker stood five feet away. The man lunged. Cailean yanked his sword up as he shoved Julianna behind him. The man swung so hard that Cailean’s teeth jarred when the blades collided. The man drove him backwards. Cailean’s shoulders struck a horse. The animal turned, bumping Cailean toward his attacker. He saw the blow coming and couldn’t back away. The man’s gaze flicked to Julianna.
“No!” Cailean shouted as his attacker’s blade sliced down toward him.
Cailean faltered. The man leapt right and seized Julianna’s arm. Cailean glimpsed the opening and thrust with the intent of cutting the man’s sword hand where he gripped the sword. The man twisted, yanking Julianna to his side. Cailean registered his only chance and thrust Triumph into the man’s belly, then dove for Julianna. Cailean ripped her from the man’s hold and rolled away as his assailant crashed to his knees.
Lennox reached them and leapt from his horse. He pulled Julianna to her feet. “Are you hurt?”
“Nae,” she replied.
Cailean pushed onto his knees and looked at their attacker. He’d fallen onto his back, his legs unnaturally angled beneath him. A red stain spread across the white shirt at his belly. Could this truly be real? What was the last thing he remembered that was real? The play, chasing Val, the swordfight. Oh, yes, that had been real enough to draw blood, if only a little. But this—
Lennox seized Cailean’s arm to pull him to his feet, but Cailean shook him off and scrambled over to the fallen man. He pressed trembling fingers to the man’s neck. No pulse. He ripped open the man’s shirt, then recoiled at sight of the open wound oozing blood. He fell onto his backside and stared.
This wasn’t possible. It didn’t matter how real it felt, it couldn’t be real.
Lennox stepped into his line of view. “Ye have never killed a man?”
Cailean shook his head. “And I never intended to.”
“You had no choice,” Lennox said. “He meant to harm Julianna.”
“Go to hell,” Cailean rasped. He didn’t miss the glance that passed between Lennox and Julianna. “Good God.” Cailean closed his eyes and shook his head, then slowly pushed to his feet. “None of this is real.”
Lennox nodded toward his left arm. “Real enough to draw your blood.”
Cailean frowned and looked at his arm. A tear in his shirt revealed the scratch that ran from his elbow to just above his left wrist. The small cut bled as much as the one above his elbow had…just like the one Val had inflicted. If this was a dream, it was unlike any dream he’d ever experienced.
“His sword came damned close to slicing open your arm,” Lennox said.
A line of red beaded the length of the scratch. A wave of dizziness swept over Cailean.
“He is going over,” Gregory said.
For an instant, Cailean thought he was right. Then his head cleared and he realized that it wasn’t that the situation didn’t feel real—it felt too real—the problem was, he didn’t belong here. It was as if the universe had made a huge cosmic mistake. He had no idea what that mistake was or how it had happened, but it had.
“Who are these men?” he asked, as if knowing their identities would somehow illuminate the mix-up.
Lennox’s gaze swung onto Julianna. “They might be Crowe’s henchmen.”
“We cannae know that,” she said.
Cailean frowned. “You said Crowe wanted to marry her.”
Lennox nodded. “It is possible he would kidnap her in an effort to force the marriage. So far, she has spurned his attentions. Crowe is no’ a man to take rejection lightly. Ye dinnae by chance know who they are?”
“What—how would I know them?” Cailean snapped. “I don’t know anyone here.”
Lennox’s gaze sharpened. “I recall ye saying you were here visiting relatives.” Cailean stared, unable to reply, and Lennox said, “Can ye ride?”
He nodded.
“Good. When we get to Raghnall you will tell me how you know Crowe.”
“What the bloody hell?” Cailean blurted, but Lennox turned to Gregory.
“Help me get these men onto Julianna’s horse. Take them to Heatheredge. Pitch them into the cellar at the Red Lion. They will keep cool enough until someone can determine if they are known. I will return to Raghnall with Julianna and Cailean.”
Lennox nodded toward the man Cailean had killed. Cailean’s legs went rubbery. This was no dream. He’d killed a man.
Lennox and Gregory hauled the body over the saddle, then led the horse to the second man and they hefted him up alongside the other corpse. They rounded up two of their attackers’ horses and by the time they piled the fifth body onto Julianna’s saddle, Cailean had regained enough of his senses to realize that murder, even self-defense, and even in medieval days, came with consequences.
“There will be questions,” he said. Many of which would come from him. “I should go to Heatheredge with Gregory.”
“Gregory can deal with things until I speak with Crowe. You will return with us.”
“Crowe? Is he sheriff, as well as Clan Ceann-Cath?”
Lennox cast him a disgusted look, but said nothing.
“I need to return to Heatheredge,” Cailean said.
Lennox’s gaze snapped onto him. “Why?”
Cailean’s mind jumbled. He couldn’t tell them that he wanted to find the place he had landed in Heatheredge, that he needed to r
eturn home, six hundred years into the future.
When he didn’t reply, Lennox leaned toward him and said, “They tried to harm Julianna. They might have killed her. Our first duty is to get her safely home.”
Cailean stared. He was right, they meant harm, maybe even death, and he’d killed a man. This was not a dream, not a hallucination. This was something altogether different.
Moments later, Gregory headed toward Heatheredge with their dead attackers. Julianna mounted behind Lennox, and Cailean rode alongside them. The remaining guard brought up the rear, leading the horse that carried his comrade’s body. Cailean’s heart had slowed, but a surreal sense of his consciousness having left his body lingered. How was any of this happening? Was any of this truly possible? Had he really killed a man, or had he gotten caught in some bizarre dimension? Maybe he was in Hell? He wanted to laugh, but the idea of dimensions and Hell were no stranger than the unfathomable possibility that he’d somehow traveled back in time six hundred years.
Except that science claimed time travel was possible.
Another thought struck. If time travel was possible—if he had traveled back in time—then he’d just changed the future. Were the men who had chased Julianna the night he’d met her part of the plot to abduct her, maybe a first attempt not recorded in history? When she told him she was running from robbers, he’d remembered the story of her kidnapping and death. But when she told him that they’d attacked her in Heatheredge, he’d given the matter no more thought, as history recorded her abduction taking place on the road from Heatheredge.
Until today’s attack, he hadn’t worried about learning the exact date in this…fantasy.
Time travel movies and novels were replete with theories and warnings on the cascade effects of any past event being changed. He recalled Ray Bradbury’s short story A Sound of Thunder in which a man who traveled back to prehistoric times on a paid hunting trip left the designated path and unknowingly stepped on a butterfly. He returned to his time to find current events dramatically changed.
The butterfly effect. A chaos theory that said a minute localized change in a complex system in one place can have large affects elsewhere. Like pulling a thread from a tapestry. The whole damned thing eventually unravels.
What could that mean in this case? History recorded Lady Julianna’s death on April 12, 1395. Tomorrow hadn’t come yet. Would fate step in and undo what he had done? Cailean hazarded a glance at her, riding behind her brother. Hair disheveled, dress mussed, she was still beautiful. How could someone so lovely be snatched from this world at so young an age? His chest tightened. If he saw death come for her again, could he stand by and do nothing? What were the ramifications if she lived? She would marry and have children, who would then have children. This was no small change.
Lennox hadn’t been injured today as history recorded, and, ten years from now, he wouldn’t learn that Hugh Murray had kidnapped Julianna. As a result, Lennox wouldn’t attack Hugh, and all the men who died in that fight would now live, and have children. He had changed much more than a small localized event. It wasn’t a matter of had he changed history, but how much.
Adrenaline twisted his belly. He had to be dreaming. He had vivid dreams, but this? Most dreams, no matter how realistic, contained holes. Something would magically appear, or he would suddenly awake in a new place, or something would happen that he had no prior knowledge of but somehow understood.
None of those elements were present. This experience was as linear as every mundane day of his life. That didn’t change the grim reality that not one second of what he’d experienced was possible. Cailean looked down at his shirt where splotches of his victim’s blood stained the fabric. His stomach turned. He’d never dreamt of harming anything, much less killing another human being. When he woke tomorrow, would he be able to tell himself that he had dreamt this? Would the horror fade?
Cailean shifted his gaze to Triumph, sheathed to the hilt. Had he betrayed her…or had she betrayed him? He resisted the urge to slide the blade from the sheath. His gut tightened. He could wash the blade, but there would be no forgetting the memory of the blood that had marred the steel.
He closed his eyes and forced his concentration on the rhythm of the horse. The exhaustion that permeated every molecule of his body, the steady bounce of his body on the saddle, the scent of rain in the air, were all too vivid. This was no dream.
But how?
At Lennox’s shout, Cailean snapped open his eyes. Half a dozen men raced onto the road, swords out and gleaming. Cailean drew a sharp breath. A battleax spun through the air toward Lennox and Julianna. Lennox hunkered down in the saddle, Julianna hugging his back, as his horse shot forward along a low wood fence that enclosed a pasture where a herd of cows grazed. The ax whizzed past them, barely missing Julianna by what Cailean was sure was a hair’s breadth. Lennox wouldn’t get far carrying Julianna on the horse with him.
The cows scattered when two of the men raced after them along the fence while the other four surrounded Cailean and the guard. Cailean yanked his sword free as the guard swung his blade and caught one man against the back of the head and sliced his neck. The Raghnall guard stiffened as a vicious spear thrust pierced his spine.
“No-o-o!” Cailean stood in his stirrups.
The three assailants closed in on him, their swords raised, their helm visors down, hiding their faces. He clashed with the nearest man, fighting so fiercely, sweat ran into his eyes, almost blinding him. Unlike Cailean and Lennox, the men wore mail. Cailean knocked one of the attackers off his horse with a vicious blow to his head. The two others pressed him, their swings so brutal that each crash of blade against blade jarred him to the marrow.
One horseman bolted from the trees with a wicked spear longer than any jousting pole Cailean had ever carried in a tournament. The spearman’s pals wheeled their beasts aside, freeing the way. The spearman charged Cailean. Horsed men with swords, he could deal with. A maniac charging him with a sharpened spear? He was going to die while a bunch of nervously lowing cows looked on.
Maybe not.
Cailean jerked the reins. His horse lunged into a gallop and seconds later, sailed over the low fence and into the field. Cailean circled behind the cattle and whooped and wildly brandished Triumph as he raced back and forth. The bull bellowed and, as one, the herd surged toward the wooden fence. Posts broke with an ear-splitting crack and the cattle stampeded the mounted assailants who couldn’t outrun a hundred maddened cows.
Cailean whipped his horse around and galloped across the field in the direction Lennox and Julianna had disappeared. He hadn’t gone far before he spotted a horse standing on the side of the road. He drew closer and saw a man lying face down. Lennox. Fear tightened his gut. Julianna was nowhere in sight.
Cailean reached him a moment later, jumped from his horse, and dropped to one knee beside him. Carefully, Cailean rolled him onto his back, then pressed two fingers to the pulse point on his neck. A strong heartbeat thumped against his fingers. He found no blood, so gingerly inspected Lennox’s head and discovered a large lump on the back of his skull. Either one of the attackers had brained him, or he’d hit his head when he fell off his horse.
Lennox groaned. His eyes opened. He stared for several heartbeats, then pushed upward.
“Easy,” Cailean warned. “You hit your head pretty hard.”
He shoved Cailean’s hand aside and struggled to his feet. He started for his horse, listed, then righted himself. He reached his horse and grasped the pommel but didn’t mount. Instead, he leaned his forehead against the saddle.
“They took Julianna,” Lennox rasped.
“Aye.”
Lennox lifted his head and met his gaze. “But you are alive and well.”
“I fought our attackers while you were being chased. I left them to be trampled by cattle.” Death by hoof and horns. No worse than they deserved.
A hard look lit Lennox’s eyes. “What of Liam?”
“Your man?” Cailean shook
his head. “I’m sorry.”
“Bloody bastards,” Lennox cursed. He stepped into the stirrup and swung up into the saddle. “They have stolen my sister and killed my men. Did ye see which way they went?”
Cailean shook his head.
“Can ye track?”
“Nae.”
“Then ride back to Raghnall and tell my mother what happened. She will send a tracker.”
Cailean knew exactly what to do. Keep quiet. Let history play out as it already had. Fate had righted herself. Lady Julianna was destined to die and there was nothing anyone could do to change it. His chest tightened. There it was. That feeling he’d experienced when she’d been attacked. How could he stand by and let her die? Twice, he’d drawn his sword to protect her.
What if he was here to change the past?
Maybe he’d been sent back in time because he was supposed to make a difference. No matter what happened, it was impossible for history to be untouched by his presence. Who was to say that the history he knew was the real history? After all, the story of who attacked the Mackay bride and who redeemed Heatheredge had already been turned on its head. What if the theory of parallel universes was true and in this universe Lady Julianna lived? But how was he going to save her without giving himself away?
There was only one answer.
Cailean strode to his horse and mounted. “Nae, we don’t need a tracker. I know where she is.”
Lennox’s eyes swung onto him—hard.
“It’s not what you think, Lennox.”
“Nae?” Lennox snarled. “Then you mean to tell me ye are gifted with second sight?”
Cailean turned his horse to face him. “That’s one way of putting it. Now, if you want to save your sister, you won’t waste any more time.”
Ire flashed in Lennox’s eyes, but he said, “Where is she?”
“Hugh Murray has her.”
Lennox’s brows dove down in a fierce frown. “Hugh Murray? Are ye daft? What reason could he have for kidnapping Julianna?”
