From his spot farther down the table, Alex spoke up. “Why do you ask my brother about this woman? Is she someone you’ve come here to find?”
“In a way,” Annie answered, knowing how ridiculous any explanation she attempted would sound.
But could it be any more ridiculous than finding herself stuck seven hundred years in the past? Not likely.
“Go on,” Alex encouraged, his full attention turned in her direction. “In what way?”
“Ellen is—” Annie paused, a sense of loss still tugging at her heart as she acknowledged what she could not change. “Ellen was my grandmother.”
“Was? And yet you claim to seek her here?” Alex asked. “Explain yerself.”
“My grandmother died a few months ago. I’m not looking for her, exactly. I’m looking for answers to a puzzle I stumbled into when I came to claim the cottage she left to me. I’m looking for a man named Aiden who, apparently, was very important to her.”
So important that for every day of her life she’d worn the necklace he’d given her. So important that she’d told only her most trusted friend about him. So important that, for more than four decades, she’d made an annual pilgrimage to the spot they’d shared.
“You see, Alex?” Lissa asked, a broad smile lifting the corners of her mouth. “I told you as much, did I no’? It’s exactly as Grandda always told us.”
“This is not a discussion for us to have here and now, sister,” Alex said, his eyes flickering to the people in the great hall before returning to his sister. “There is naught to be gained in dragging out the eccentricities of our grandfather’s later years to sully his memory in front of all who join us here. I’ll no’ have any of it.”
As if to emphasize his words, he rose from his chair and strode from the hall.
Annie watched the exchange between the siblings, utterly confused as to how the conversation had hopped from her civilly answering questions about her grandmother to Alex’s sudden departure. When she turned to ask Lissa what had just happened, she found the other woman staring at her, still grinning.
“I feel like I missed something just then. Something big. Why did your brother leave like that? Why is he angry?”
Lissa shrugged, obviously not concerned about Alex’s response to her. “He left because he knew I was right, likely enough. He’s no’ angry so much as unsettled. He dinna want me to raise the subject of the Fae in front of many here in the hall who might view the subject with fear and mistrust.”
“The Fae?” If nothing else, her new friend definitely had a fixation on these mythical creatures. She really must have missed something that someone said. “I didn’t hear anything in our conversation about—”
“It’s what the whole of the conversation was about, lass. Yer story of hunting for yer grandmother’s lover and mistaking our brother for the one you sought, simply because of his name. Do you not see the connection?”
“I never said anything about the Aiden that I was looking for being my grandmother’s lover.”
Not that she hadn’t allowed herself to consider it, especially after she realized the importance of the necklace and how secretive Syrie had been about the man. The hearts carved in stone had done their part to reinforce the suspicion, too. But somehow, saying it out loud, naming them as lovers, felt almost like an insult to Nana Ellen’s memory.
“Not in so many words, perhaps.” Lissa chuckled and leaned her head closer to Annie, lowering her voice. “Our brother Aiden was named for our grandfather. Throughout Grandda’s life, he told the story of a beautiful woman the Fae had sent to him for a very short time when he’d first come to claim this land. A woman named Ellen, the love of his life, who the Fae then took from him as mysteriously as they had brought her to him in the first place. It was she for whom he named the castle in which we sit at this very moment. Castle Dunellen. The castle at Ellen’s hill. While my brothers saw Grandda’s stories as the mere fancy of an old man’s mind, I heard the truth in his stories. I believed every word he ever told us was true because he believed every word he told us was true. And now, obviously, I was the one who was right all along. Yer being here proves it, does it no’?”
As if an elephant had suddenly settled on her chest, Annie found it hard to breathe. Not only was she lost seven hundred years in the past, but her grandmother had been here at some point, too. Ellen had been here as a young woman and had returned to live out her life in her own time. That could mean only one thing.
“I can go home,” she whispered.
There had to be a way for her to return to the place and time where she belonged. She knew it now for a fact. If her grandmother had made this trip before her and returned, there had to be a way back. All she had to do was to find it.
Chapter 8
“Thank you for believing me, Lissa. Thank you for being my friend.” Annie smiled at the woman sitting next to her on the hearth. “You can’t imagine how much it means to me. There are moments when it’s only your friendship and the thought of finding my way home again that keep me going.”
Lissa looked up from her needlework to return Annie’s smile. “You’ve no need to thank me. The truth is easy enough to believe if you want to.” She dropped her task to her lap and, with her elbows braced against her knees, she rested her chin in her hands as she leaned forward. “But answer for me this, my friend. You told me that yer family has arranged for you to marry a man you’ve no great love for, and running from that marriage was why you ended up here. So, why then are you so anxious to return to yer own time? Do we make you so unhappy here as to drive you back into the arms of the man yer supposed to wed?”
“No!” Annie exclaimed, realizing what an ungrateful whiner she must sound like to her new friend.
Over the past weeks the people in this castle had done nothing but make her feel welcome. Well, most of the people. Their laird, Alex, had avoided her as if she carried some horrible disease. The few times they’d ended up in the same room, he’d almost immediately excused himself.
Not that she minded his leaving whenever she entered a room. His presence always unsettled her in ways she couldn’t begin to explain and didn’t want to explore. He made her feel…well, that was the problem, exactly. He made her feel. His voice, his glance, everything about him made her feel things. Things like heat simmering along her skin, emotions she could barely understand, and a trembling deep inside. Things. Physically unsettling things.
Even thinking about him like this was enough to send a shiver down her spine.
“Then why are you so determined to find yer way back if no’ for the man you doona love?”
Annie breathed in carefully, deeply, struggling to rid herself of Alex’s image hovering in her mind, his dark eyes fixed on her, as they always were when she was around him. “I don’t know what you’re talking about. I never said I didn’t love Peter.”
“No’ with yer words, perhaps,” Lissa answered. “But you told me in so many other ways. You never speak of the man unless yer asked a specific question about him. And when you do answer, there’s no longing in yer voice, no’ even as much as I hear when you speak of the bathing rooms in yer own time with their special rolls of lovely, soft paper. Most of all, I’ve yet to see a single tear shed for yer missing of this Peter of yers. None of that strikes me as the actions of a woman in love.”
Everything Lissa said was true, and every word of it cut like a dull knife. If someone told Annie right now that the wedding had been called off, her only regret would be all the time her mother had put into planning an event that would never take place. Lissa was right. She didn’t love Peter. She never had. She considered him a friend, but that was all. And the thought of spending the rest of her life as his wife made her want to weep with frustration.
And yet, in spite of all that, she didn’t belong here either.
“This isn’t about Peter or my relationship with him. I need to go back because this isn’t my time. With only a little effort, I can imagine a thousand diffe
rent ways my being here could mess up the whole space-time fabric thingy. I need to go back because I’m not supposed to be here. I don’t belong here.”
“Pfft,” Lissa hissed, dismissing Annie’s reasoning with a wave of her hand. “Have you ever considered that perhaps the time you came from was where you doona belong. The truth of the matter is that the Fae sent you here for a reason and, that being the case, this is exactly where you belong, just as yer grandmother belonged here when she came before you.”
“You’re wrong about that. Nana Ellen didn’t belong here any more than I do. I’m sure that’s why she didn’t stay,” Annie said. “I don’t know why she was here any more than I know why I’m here. But I do know that she returned to her own time. And then she got married and she had a son and grandchildren and she lived out a whole, long life there in the time she was born to. She did all those things in the time and the place where she belonged. I have to do that, too.”
“That may be,” Lissa said, her voice tinged with sorrow. “She may have fully lived out her life in your time. But I’ll never believe my grandda’s Ellen was happy to leave him. I know for a fact that his heart was broken by her going away. And I’d say that bauble you wear around yer neck is proof that yer grandmother dinna want to leave her Aiden, either. What’s more, I’d even be willing to say, that it was her, yer own grandmother Ellen, working with the Fae, that sent you here. The Fae do nothing without good reason, my friend, so that alone is even more proof that yer supposed to be here. You’ve a purpose in this time, Annie. Yer supposed to be here or you wouldn’t be.”
Annie’s hand went to the silver heart pendant hanging around her neck, the metal warm from its contact with her skin. Maybe her grandmother had sent her here. She’d certainly left enough mysterious little clues. And she had to have known that Annie wouldn’t be able to resist trying to track them down. Between that and Syrie’s tantalizing bits and pieces of Ellen’s history, the two of them had all but delivered Annie into that arbor.
But could those two little old ladies actually have had a reason for doing something so unbelievable?
“I just can’t accept that. Yes, I believe that she was here. Yes, I believe that Aiden was very special to her. But, in the end, she still went home.”
Lissa fidgeted with a ribbon that encircled her neck, much as Annie often did with the necklace she wore. “Did you ken that my Grandda made that bauble yer wearing? No? He made it for his Ellen with his own two hands. And if you dinna ken that, then you probably dinna ken that he made one for himself, as well. One that he wore every day of his life, too. It’s true. I ken this to be the truth because he gave the one he wore to me before he died.” Lissa tugged at the ribbon around her neck, lifting from her bodice an almost identical pendant, missing only the crystal heart that hung from the center of Annie’s. “Can you no’ believe now, looking at the two of these, how much they meant to one another?”
“Okay, I accept that they loved each other. But Nana Ellen still went home, so the only thing any of this proves is that you can’t stay where you don’t belong, no matter how much you might want to. The path to here and back home again somehow lies in that arbor. That’s why I have to go back there. I need to thoroughly search the place to find where that path is.”
Lissa began shaking her head before Annie finished speaking. “But yer ignoring the importance of why yer here. Yer grandmother and the Fae went to a great deal of trouble to get you here. You need to think upon what the reason was that you were sent to this place and this time. Otherwise, all their efforts are for naught. And anyway, even if you did have the right of it, Alex willna allow you to go back there. He believes that whoever locked you into the arbor could still be lurking about.”
Frustration welled up inside Annie’s chest at the claim she’d been fighting from the moment of her arrival.
“But there is no one to be lurking around out there. No one locked me into that arbor. I’ve told you all how I got there. Or at least as much as I know about how I got there. Parts of it are, admittedly, more than a little fuzzy, but I do know that no one else was involved.”
Lissa shrugged, picking up her needlework to resume her task. “I’ve told you that I believe what you say. But what I believe has no bearing on what our laird chooses to do. And what our laird chooses to do is law around here. When he says you canna go, you canna go.”
Her friend’s acceptance of her brother’s rule was as frustrating as Alex himself! Surely, after all this time, he should be able to understand that just because her story was totally unreasonable didn’t make it untrue.
A moment of rational thought and even she was forced to accept the absurdity of that idea. If the tables were turned, would she believe him?
Probably not. But that didn’t change what she needed to do.
“I still have to try, Lissa. I have to at least try to convince him. If you’ll keep an eye on your father for me for a little while, I’m going to stop off to speak to your brother when I pick up Alexander’s meal.”
“As you will,” Lissa said, not lifting her gaze from her handwork. “I’m happy to help here. All I ask is that you put as much time into considering why you were sent here in the first place as yer putting into considering how to return to where you came from.”
“Agreed,” Annie said, rising to her feet and making her way out into the hall.
It was easier to agree than to argue with her friend. It was as likely that she had stumbled into whatever thing had sent her through time as it was that she’d been intentionally sent. Regardless of what Lissa believed, sometimes things just happened, for no good reason at all.
Like her having agreed to marry Peter.
She’d known him her whole life and, for her whole life, she’d listened as her mother and father had spoken about how perfect it would be if the two of them grew up and got married and joined the fortunes of their two families. When Peter had asked, she’d said yes, for no better reason than that she knew it was what both their families expected.
It had been a reason, yes. But not a good reason.
Over the course of the past weeks, trapped in a place so far from all that she’d ever known, she’d had time to think about her life. In the process, she’d come to realize that there was nothing worse than marrying someone you didn’t love. When she got back home—if she got back home—she really needed to try to do something about that.
But first, she’d have to find the way to get back home. And in order to do that, she needed to confront the high-and-mighty laird of the MacKillican.
Chapter 9
“You’re not even listening to the words I’m saying. You don’t have to send anyone along with me. Seriously. I’m not the least bit concerned for my safety outside the castle walls. You might not believe me when I tell you that there was no mystery man who locked me inside that arbor, but I know it’s the truth, so I know I have no one to fear. All I need you to do is to tell your men that it’s okay to let me travel beyond the gates. That’s all I’m asking of you.”
The expression on Annie’s face as she spoke convinced Alex that she actually expected him to agree to her ridiculous request. That she didn’t realize how ridiculous her story sounded amazed him. That she didn’t realize that if he were to believe her story, he’d also have to believe that she was there of her own free will. And that supposition would naturally lead to the conclusion that she could very well be a spy. A spy that now wanted to return to whoever had sent her to deliver the information she had gathered.
Her story was such fantasy it might well be something his grandfather would have spun for an evening’s entertainment. Which left him right back where he started.
Either way, he wasn’t allowing her outside the castle gates.
Annie might have no concerns for her own safety, but he had enough for the both of them. If she hadn’t the good sense to willingly follow the precautions he’d established, then he’d need to give her some gentle encouragement.
“I’
m no’ sure if it’s Lissa who’s the bad influence upon you, or you upon her. Whichever it is, it’s really of no matter to me. The time for Faerie stories has done and passed. You’ve been given shelter in our home with but one responsibility asked of you in repayment for our hospitality. Instead of wasting my time and yers with this silly blether about finding a passage through time, should you no’ be tending to my father’s recovery?”
Though they were the only two people in the great hall, Alex kept his voice low to avoid embarrassing Annie should anyone overhear his rebuke of her. To his surprise, she didn’t seem to have the least bit of appreciation for his consideration of her feelings. Nor did she appear to have the least bit of concern for who might hear them.
Her cheeks colored a lovely shade of pink and her eyes fairly sparkled with her anger. “You are the most arrogant, inconsiderate, unfeeling P-O-S I’ve ever met,” she stormed, one delicate finger poking forcefully into his chest. “I’ve told you that searching that freakin’ arbor is my only way home. The least you could do—”
“I’ve already done the least I could do,” he interrupted as Jamesy entered from the back of the hall and slipped into a chair nearby, a grin covering his face. “And quite a bit more, if I do say so myself. Now, if you have nothing else to discuss, our audience is at an end, my lady. You have yer work to do as I have mine.”
The noise she made before turning her back and stomping out of the hall reminded him of a bear protecting her young. Or perhaps a child preparing for an all-out tantrum.
“What is this P-O-S of which she speaks?” Jamesy asked, doing a poor job of hiding his amusement as he sounded out the letters Annie had used.
“I have no idea,” Alex answered. “But I’m willing to bet, from the way she said it, it’s something I wouldna like.”
“A safe bet, I’d agree.”
Alex sighed and slumped into the chair next to his friend. Barely halfway through his day and already he felt as if he’d been dragged through a field of boulders. The day had worn upon him, from his meeting at first light with the herder who’d complained of missing stock, to the new blacksmith who swore his tools were disappearing, right through this visit with Annie. Perhaps most especially this visit with Annie.
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