by LL Muir
Funny. She never remembered her ears working quite so well before.
By the time she finished changing and hiding the trews, shirt, and vest in an old satchel beneath her bed, she’d become accustomed to the sounds and sensations of her new body, and she was able to listen outside herself again.
The front door opened below, and someone stomped their feet. “Assa? Where are ye, lass?”
“Here, da!” She answered without thinking. “I’ll be right doon.” Nervously, she grabbed onto the top of the ladder and swung around to the outside of it, careful to hold doubly tight to make up for the unfamiliar feeling of gravity.
Assa. She’d nearly forgotten her old name. Until Gerard Ross had asked her, she’d disremembered the change she’d made as soon as she’d risen from the ground on which she’d bled out her life.
In Irish mythology, Assa had been the daughter of a king but raised by twelve step-fathers. When she returned home one day to find all of them murdered, she’d changed into a vengeful hunter and converted her name to Nessa. Where Assa meant gentle, Nessa meant the opposite. For she’d become the opposite the moment her brother had been cut down on the battlefield.
She would never again be Assa, but for the day or two she’d been allotted, she could at least answer to the name.
She jumped before she got to the last rung and ran at her father, wrapping her arms around his large form. He smelled the same. She’d forgotten that as well.
He pushed her away, suspicious. “What have ye done, burned dinner?”
“Nay, da. I just thought I might tell ye how much I appreciate ye.”
“It doesna smell burned,” he said, sniffing the air.
Nessa sighed and stared at her father just a moment more, then hurried to the kitchen to see what the other her had been cooking. If the man was expecting dinner, it was midday. And it stood to reason there would be something in the small stone oven, or in the pot over the fire.
To her delight, there were both.
Her mother had been dead for six years after giving birth to her brother Fingal, but Nessa’s aunt Cate, who lived just down the way, had taught her to cook as well as her mother had—or nearly so. And after hundreds of years without a smell or a taste of anything on her tongue, her own cooking was a treat she could have never predicted, even when Soni had begun sending spirits from the moor.
Perfectly toasted buns she pulled from the oven. She swung the hook away from the fire and lifted a heavy pot of beef stew. If her nose was true to form, the other her had added a bit of bacon to help the salt along.
Her father sat down at the table and grunted in anticipation. It was the closest thing to appreciation she would get from him, and she knew it. So she forgot about all the sentimental foolishness she’d seen on the telly about families sharing their honest feelings.
Mercy, but there was no place for such mawkishness in her current century.
With her attention focused on the careful handling of hot pans, she hadn’t prepared herself for the shock of seeing her brothers, both of them hale and hearty again. She nearly dropped the buns while she stood agape, staring at Jacky, the lad whom she remembered being much younger than he now looked.
At the age of seventeen, and two years her junior, his age had been the most bitter point of their contention, but their cousins insisted it was only her motherly imagination that made her see him as a lad and not the man he was.
Now, staring at him across an impossible expanse of time, she wondered if she might have been wrong on that point.
“If it tastes half so good as it smells, sister,” Jacky said, “I’ll eat Fingal’s share and feel no guilt o’er it.”
“No one will eat my share but me!” Six-year-old Fingal slapped the table in a show of manliness, but only managed to hurt his hand. Nessa couldn’t resist hugging him from behind and ruffling his copper curls that matched her own.
“Pipe down,” her da grumbled. “If ye eat yer share first, I give ye permission to dig into Jacky’s portion.”
The laddie’s eyes bulged and he hopped onto the chair Jacky had pulled out for himself, then lifted his bowl and waited anxiously to be served. His brother chuckled and moved down to the small stool upon which Fingal usually perched. Instead of the wee lad’s usual complaints, he tucked into his meal with gusto.
Nessa leaned over and kissed her father on his balding head. “Thank ye for that.”
The man blushed and frowned, then attacked his own meal with exaggeration, as if he were afraid his smallest son would try to help him eat it.
The four of them laughed together. The tableau warmed her heart and she took a mental photograph and tucked it away in her mind, to savor again at a later time. And while she did, she found a generous number of other such occasions she’d hidden away.
Special days. Perfect moments—like small photographs from her life she’d hidden away in a cabinet and forgotten. And now that she’d re-opened that door, they came spilling out again.
Memories of her mother braiding her hair. Her father’s antics had the woman laughing so hard she had to start again. And again.
She remembered the first time she’d made buns. Even with Cate’s help, they resembled clods of horse dung—only without the usual green.
The night her mother had died and the entire family stood around her uncle’s grand fireplace and sang dirges. No one told her not to cry. No one shamed her for doing so. Many wept openly with her and her father, man and woman alike.
Family was such a strange phenomenon—something mysterious, something unfathomable.
Nessa looked around the table once again and willed her memory to store the image, and hopefully, the impression of belonging in it.
The rest of the afternoon respite went as it always had. Her father smoked a pipe and told Fingal wild stories that would keep a lesser lad awake at night. But since it was the stuff upon which Fingal had been weaned, he only laughed and giggled at the most frightening portions of the tale. If there were gory parts, he’d ask for the details to be repeated.
Nessa wondered if her father told such stories to steel the laddie for truly frightening moments that came in every life. Perhaps one day, when he stood on a battlefield, he wouldn’t be frozen in fear when he found himself soaking his heels in someone else’s blood—or worse.
Once her da and Fingal headed back to the fields, Jacky slipped out the door before Nessa had a chance for a private word. She wasn’t sure just how close they were to the day of the battle, so she couldn’t guess if the lad’s blood was already boiling. Regardless of the date, however, she had no more than a day or two to accomplish what she’d come for. No matter how Jacky felt about the fighting at the moment, she knew he’d soon come to a decision to join Charles Stuart’s army.
There was no time to spare. She had to broach the subject with him. After all, she was required to do some noble deed, and saving her brother’s life seemed to be her destiny.
Please, God. Let it be my destiny.
CHAPTER THREE
Nessa was left alone in her home, and with no family about, it once again felt as though the place belonged to that other her. And in two days hence, she assumed that other her to return, don her apron, and start fixing supper…
She banked the kitchen fire and cleaned up the table. Anxious to speak with Jacky, she sat in her mother’s rocker and waited for him to return from his chores that might take him from one Kennedy farm to the other. But Jacky didn’t return for a long while, damn him. And after an hour of practicing her argument, she fell into a deep, dreamless sleep.
Some noise awakened her and she prayed it was her brother. That prayer was quickly answered when the door burst open and Jacky hurried into the house with a wide grin on his face. Unfortunately, she remembered him doing that before—with his cousins close on his heels.
Ian, Hughie and Jamie filled the doorway and spilled into the cottage.
“Woman of the house!” Ian bellowed. “We have an ache in our bellies for
want of yer fine cooking!”
“Nay,” she bellowed back. “Let yer mother feed ye, ye ravenous swine!” Then she flung herself into the open arms of her nearest cousin, Jamie, with a combination of old habit and new joy at seeing the lads alive again. After Hughie and then Ian gave her a good squeeze, she remembered having done that all before as well. But she determined to hide her unease.
The way she interacted with her cousins came so naturally to her then, none of them would suspect she was some imposter from the future. And the knowledge gave her pause. Of course she was relieved she would not have to explain herself. But she had a niggling worry she barely dared allow into her mind—that perhaps nothing about the past was within her power to change…
But that was nonsense. Of course she could make the lads see reason. She had a great many facts she hadn’t had before, so her arguments should better sway them than they had in the distant past.
Ian stuck his fingers into the depths of the dark pot over the cold fire and she laughed, knowing he found nothing there.
“Go on with ye,” she said. “Yer mother will be glad to fill yer bellies and hear yer grand tales.” But recognizing the chance to change their minds, she bid them sit for a moment or two, to rest their sorry boots. “I suppose ye’ve come from Doune, where ye’ve loitered all spring, leaving yer mother heartbroken.”
Ian looked at her sideways. “Father must have told ye?”
“Nay. I’ve my own sources, ye might say. As Cromartie’s men, ye’ve no doubt been stuck at Doune Castle, as reinforcements for the MacGregors, aye?”
Hughie frowned at Jacky. “Been discussin’ politics with yer sister, have ye? There’s no need to worry a woman over something she canna understand.” He clouted Jacky on the head.
“I’ve only told her I meant to join Cromartie when the snow is gone. She believes I would be a fool to fight for a man who doesna ken which side to take. But I told her what you said, Ian, that the Earl only waited to put off the enemy—”
“Ye dinna speak politics with a woman, ye wee skunner.” Hughie clouted him that time and her brother was at least smart enough to move to the other side of the room, beyond the reach of all three cousins.
Nessa leaned close to a figurine on the mantle and blew the dust from it. “Many a wise man will be sitting out this coming battle,” she said, then walked to the cabinet and pretended to search for something.
Jamie snorted. “Many a wise man? And who told ye such rubbish, a pack of gossips?”
She shook her head and smiled cryptically before turning her back again. “They say Cumberland has found a way to thwart the Highland Charge…”
“Pigs and balderdash!” Ian came to stand behind her. “I’ll tell ye what Cumberland’s done, Assa. He’s gotten a bunch of women to spread his lies and undermine the Jacobite army! But we willna listen. No real man will. Every true Scot will fight.”
In one stroke, her cousin had stripped her of all chance to influence her brother! If Jacky hadn’t listened to her before, when she’d pleaded with him to wait until summer to join the army, he certainly wouldn’t listen to her now. Ian made it clear—anyone who wouldn’t fight, no matter what reason, wasn’t a true man. And worse, wasn’t a true Scot. She could read the new determination on her brother’s face as if someone had written it there—
I am no coward.
However, she reasoned, if nothing she said would matter, if she truly could not save her brother as she had only dreamed, she might as well vent her spleen, aye? If no one would heed her warnings, she could at least hold them captive for a moment and make them hear her, for once.
She was Nessa once again, standing on the moor the day after the battle, watching Cumberland’s brutes rolling and sliding her cousin’s bodies close to the cart, then tossing them onto the pile of other true Scots. She’d walked along behind, like a one-woman funeral procession, escorting them to the gaping trench that would be their grave. The stone that would eventually lie above them would read MacDonalds.
None of the Red Coats took note of their faces, their plaid. There was no one to identify them except the ghost of a cousin who couldn’t be heard.
Well, now she would be.
“Shall I tell ye how the battle will go, lads?” She wandered around to the back of the rocker and leaned on the corners. “I wonder… When ye realize I was right, will ye be wise and flee?”
“It’s not in us to desert, Assa.” Jamie’s tone held a warning.
She ignored it. “The night before the battle, with troops starved and shivering, ye’ll be ordered to march all night to take the enemy by surprise. Only the enemy won’t be lying abed as ye were led to believe, and ye’ll have to march back. By sunrise, ye’ll be hard pressed to lift yer swords. But no matter. Ye’ll never get the chance, laddies. For the bog will slow yer feet and their artillery will cut ye down.”
A loud crack sounded in her ears and the room spun away into darkness and sharp pain. Ian had struck her. She spun to find him raising his hand to do it again, but Jacky hung on his arm to stop him.
“Ye’ve sold yerself to the devil, have ye, Assa? Now ye’re a witch able to see the future?”
She sighed, then nodded and laughed while she held her sore face against her arm.
Hughie laughed too. “She only tries to frighten ye, brother. Are ye frightened? Have ye wet yerself yet? If ye do, she’ll make ye clean the floor, remember?”
The rest of them laughed at a shared memory from years before, when Ian’s puppy piddled on the floor and Nessa forced him to clean it up—all while holding onto his ear. Perhaps Ian well remembered that sore ear because he wasn’t laughing.
“No more of that talk, cousin,” he warned. “It will upset yer da if we have to burn ye at the stake, aye?” His smirk brought on more laughter, but there was some reservation in his eyes that suggested he had been rattled more than he would ever let on.
After all the times he’d tormented her throughout their childhood, she couldn’t resist. “And if a night raid fails, Ian? What will ye do?”
He lifted his arm just enough to promise he would smack her again if she persisted. So she nodded, telling him she understood. But it was gratifying, truly, to see that reservation in his eyes turn to worry. And she didn’t believe it was worry for her soul, but worry her predictions would come true.
With a stiff farewell, the cousins left for home. They would stay the night before moving on to meet the rest of Cromartie’s troops expected to come south. She was tempted to tell them that Cromartie wouldn’t make it to the next battle. If she remembered rightly, they would be ambushed the following night, with many killed and nearly all of them taken prisoner. The Jacobite army would be short another 200 men come the sixteenth.
Jacky left the cottage as well, to get back to work preparing the barn for the animals due to be born in a week or more.
Remembering her own duties, she went to feed the chickens. And while she tossed grains on the ground, she wondered if her witchly warning had been enough. When Ian was faced with the prospect of a night raid, would he be wise enough to lead his brothers and Jacky away from the battle to come?
But Jamie’s words came back to her. It’s not in us to desert.
And it wasn’t in Ian to admit that a woman might have been right after all…
The sound of cracking wood was followed by a curse from Jacky. So Nessa hurried to the barn to see if her brother needed help. He was still cursing when she opened the door.
It took time for her eyes to adjust to the darkness within, and even longer to reconcile what she thought she saw. But eventually, she realized her brother was hanging upside down, bouncing his shoulder against a thick wood pillar while he tried to reach his foot, which was caught in a rope hanging from the loft.
She giggled. “What was yer plan, brother?”
He pushed with his shoulder so his body swung around to face her. “It’s…complicated.”
“I can see that.”
He stifled his
frown. “Dear, sweet Assa—”
“Spare me.” She strode over to the pillar and found the tangle that kept her brother aloft.
Kept him. Keep him! She could keep him home with just a little rope—and a gag! She would definitely need a gag.
CHAPTER FOUR
With Jacky complaining all the while, Nessa first secured his hands to the pillar just below his hanging head. Next, she ripped a length of fabric from the hem of her shift and pushed it between his teeth. The poor lad had assumed she was toying with him until that moment. By the time he realized he could spit the cloth out, she was sliding her hair ribbon over his mouth to keep the cloth inside. He was at her mercy.
Confident he could not escape, she pulled the stool close, climbed upon it, and untied the tangle around his feet. His boots swung away and down to the ground while his hands remained in place. They were then too high for him to reach the ribbon around his head.
If it hadn’t been for that gag, she was sure he would have thought her clever.
He tried to speak calmly.
She shrugged. “I dinna ken what ye’re saying, brother. But here.” She patted the stool. “Rest yerself. I have a feeling ye’ll be here for a while. At least until our cousins have gone on their way tomorrow. Perhaps longer. Until ye see reason.”
He shouted at her and she recognized the word father.
“Oh, dinna fash yersel’. I’ll have an excuse or two at the ready, to tell him why he hasna seen ye about. And I’ll volunteer for yer chores, so he’ll have no need to come in here. He’s preparing the fields, aye? No time to play about with the animals. Which reminds me—I’ll be back with yer supper when I come to milk the cows.” She ignored his struggling, patted him on the cheek, then turned serious. “I believe, in a few days, ye’ll be verra grateful I kept ye from the battlefield. Trust me.”
She had to turn her head away and pretend she hadn’t seen the hate in his eyes. She only wished she would still be around when that hate turned into something sweeter.
