by Jane Stain
Wait.
Tavish and Kelsey weren’t supposed to be a couple anymore, either. Every time he saw them together, something inside him shuddered in fear. He and Tavish had a good reason for staying away from Kelsey and Amber.
He didn’t want Amber in his life anymore. For her own good. He… He’d had a good reason for leaving her. He couldn’t put his finger on it right now, but it was a really good reason. He knew that. Why couldn’t he remember?
Anyway, he had walked away from her. He had left her seven years ago without even saying goodbye. It had hurt him, but he had known it was the right thing to do. It had been the right thing, hadn’t it? Yes. Yes, he felt assured it had. And now she was aware that he had a new girlfriend.
Why was she always coming into his thoughts like this? She didn’t have to walk in front of him while he was dancing with Sulis and come up for wine at the same time as he did. She really shouldn’t look into his eyes as if she were searching for a lost part of herself.
Well, she wasn’t doing that last thing right now anywhere but in his imagination.
But she shouldn’t be here.
Even though nothing else she was doing was wrong.
Her being here distracted him, and he had important things to do here at the castle for Laird Malcomb. He was the captain of the underground guard now, and he shouldn’t be distracted. Not even by a dark-haired beauty who sometimes brought back memories of a love so strong, he had been willing to give her up for her own good.
Tomas had just finished changing into fresh clothes when Sulis came in, smelling of the woods.
He was so glad to see her, he ran over and hugged her tight.
“Why did you have to go out to the woods alone? Something might have happened to you. You should let me go along to protect you. You—”
But Sulis kissed him then, a breathy wet kiss that started at his ear and worked its way around to his mouth. Fireworks went off in his mind, and the world narrowed down to just her lips on his, she was that good a kisser. As soon as she was done kissing him, he would ask her…
What had he been wondering about?
Oh, who cared? Being with Sulis was bliss. He should enjoy her.
Ochd (8)
Amber woke up in the throne room of the underground palace and gasped when she felt the huge golden throne beneath her and looked down to see that she was wearing a crimson gown made entirely out of handmade linen lace. There was weight on top of her head. She reached up and grabbed something, then lowered it down so she could see. It was an ornate golden crown made from many strands of gold woven into Celtic knot shapes.
A woman giggled from the other side of the hall.
“Don’t look so shocked. Just pinch yourself, hint hint.”
Pinch herself?
Oh yeah.
She looked up to see Kelsey and Sasha dressed equally as beautifully in handmade lace gowns, only theirs were blue and green.
“So this is a dream.” Amber smiled appreciatively and nodded. “It’s a good one. Do you plan on wearing a gown like that at your wedding?”
Sasha moved gracefully in her green dress as if she were dancing with Seumas the way she had the night before.
“Nah, they just get married in their regular clothes in this time period, so unfortunately I won’t have a special wedding dress. We come here often in our dreams. It’s a much easier way for her to show us around. You could have danced last night too, Amber. That one guard Cormac was really anxious to dance with you. All you would have had to do was smile at him, and he would have asked you.”
Amber gave Kelsey a look that said ‘Tell her what’s going on, because I haven’t the patience to and will end up being rude about it. You know me.’
Kelsey nodded then turned to her new friend.
“Amber's Tomas's ex-girlfriend, and we think if anyone can get Tomas away from Sulis, it'll be her—”
Impatient now with Kelsey’s explanation, Amber threw her head back to look at the carvings in the ceiling—and get the other two women’s attention.
“It's maddening, this assignment you've given me, Kelsey. It's really hard not being with him and yet hoping that I can be, you know? Especially since making him jealous is out of the question. I don’t have a clue how else to get a guy back.”
Sasha gave her a puzzled look.
“Why not make him jealous?”
Amber closed her eyes to try and escape from some of the pain of thinking about Tomas with that blank look on his face — or even worse, looking at Sulis as if she were a goddess — but that just made it all the more vivid in her memory.
“Because he’s too broken already, by Sulis’s machinations. I’m going to have to draw him out little by little until he remembers me again, and I don’t even know if I get to keep him once I do that, she has him so messed up. This is the hardest thing I’ve ever done.”
Kelsey gave her a determined face.
“He's worth it though , isn't he.”
Sighing, Amber shook her head yes slowly.
“Of course he is.”
This was getting too heavy. Time to think about superficial things for a while. Amber stood from the huge throne and found that she was wearing strange sandals made of rope. They were not the most comfortable things, but they were interesting.
She looked quizzically at Sasha.
“If there aren’t any special clothes to prepare, then why is it taking so long to plan this wedding?”
Sasha and Kelsey shared a conspiratorial look, but kept their mouths shut.
Amber threw her hands up.
“Out with it.”
Sasha put her palms forward.
“Okay. Remember how I fell when I first touched you, out there on the cliffs?”
“How could I ever forget?”
“Well, I had a vision of you at my wedding, and you were fine, not a scratch on you. Tomas, too. My visions always come true, so we know that as long as we keep putting the wedding off, this Lachlan character won’t be able to catch you, or at least he won’t hurt you.”
Amber looked at Kelsey for confirmation, and her friend gave her a playfully guilty look.
Sasha ran her hand down her long flowing red hair while she continued explaining the plan she and Kelsey had apparently made without Amber.
“Everyone who knows about time travel except Tomas—me, Seumas, Kelsey, and Tavish—knows you’re safe. And Kelsey thinks we can use that to help snap Tomas out of the funk Sulis has him in. His urge to protect you is really strong. I was skeptical, but now I think it’ll work.”
Amber didn’t want to think about that right now. It was too much on top of all this time travel stuff, so she gestured around at the throne room.
“Sulis lured me through here on her wild goose chase. But it didn’t seem this new — well, I guess it did happen eight hundred years from now, but—”
Kelsey nodded quickly and waved off Amber’s puzzlement in a promise to explain.
“Yeah, no, you’re right. This lower part of the underground palace is thousands of years old. The dream memories I have of it are from when it was new. Tavish and I came down here into this throne room after finding it through the dreams of an evil old druid named Brian. He must have time traveled back here during the Iron Age, when the Celts reigned here and raided the blue-painted Picts, whose kingdom was the eastern half of what is now Scotland.”
The Celts! They were all anyone had talked of at faire. Celtic knots. Celtic warfare. Celtic culture. How exciting to actually go back to their age and see how they lived. She would be the envy of all her old friends. They would hang on her every word.
“I’ve heard all about the Celts, of course, but you said something about blue painted Picts? I meant to ask you about that when I saw those guards straight out of Braveheart earlier. They had everything except the blue face paint Mel Gibson wore in the movie.”
Kelsey laughed. So did Sasha.
“Just because it’s in a movie doesn’t mean it’s authentic
. It was the Picts who painted themselves blue with woad, not the Celts.”
And then Amber jumped, because Kelsey gestured, and for a moment they were out in a field of battle watching Roman soldiers get jumped by naked people painted blue with odd blue designs all over their bodies. And then they were back inside the underground palace.
Amber gave Kelsey a huge grin.
“Does this Brian still know how to get there? Can he take us?”
Kelsey shivered.
“Ew, no. The man was evil, Amber. He’s dead now.”
Amber’s face fell.
Kelsey snickered at her.
“But I still have all of his dreams in my memory, so I can show you some more sometime.”
Amber nodded vigorously, still with that huge grin on her face.
Kelsey laughed at her.
“Tonight I’m going to show you the entire Celtic underground palace, so that you won’t get lost again. That B-witch may be able to humiliate us at grand feasts held in her honor, but never again is she going to make any of us get lost inside our own dig site.”
Amber jumped up off the stone counter she was leaning on and followed Kelsey and Sasha down the corridor. But as they walked, she just couldn’t help hashing over last night’s feast.
“Maybe it’s sour grapes on my part because Sulis is with Tomas now, but I thought she was the biggest B-witch ever last night.”
Sasha made a cutting gesture with her hand.
“She was unconscionable, no sour grapes about it. I could see everything from up on the stage. It’s the custom to form new sets for each new dance, but whenever others tried to form up with Malcomb’s sons, Sulis stepped on their toes or stared daggers at them so they would back off. She even shoved this one couple out of her way so she could continue monopolizing the spotlight.”
Kelsey put her arm over Sasha’s shoulders.
“I saw how rude she was to Seumas.”
Sasha looked at something down at the end of the large hollowed-out stone hallway while she sighed deeply.
“It broke my heart, seeing his brother shun him like that. It was all her doing, of course. I think I’ll refrain from playing at any more feasts while she’s here. I could have warned him if I hadn’t been playing. But Kelsey, if she’s here during our wedding…”
Kelsey gave Sasha a quick sideways hug.
“No way. We are not going to let Sulis ruin your wedding. She puts on those white linen robes and goes out in the woods every chance she gets, have you noticed?”
Sasha nodded.
“We’ll just stall until she feels her powers fading and needs to go out there, is all. You’ll play the flute, and you can get the other musicians to play. Maybe even have dancing. Let her dance awhile. She seems to like that. It’ll be worth it in order to get her out of the picture for the actual wedding ceremony.”
Sasha laughed a little, but she also brushed a tear away.
“I think that may actually work. Thanks. I feel better.”
With that, all three women linked arms — and then Kelsey slowly floated them around the entire underground palace until Amber knew every inch of it. She still didn’t know how to open the secret doors, though. Kelsey just made them float right through those.
“We would teach you how to open these doors if it were simple, Amber. But it isn’t. It took us years of study not really aimed at this — or so we thought — in order to open them, so you’ll just have to take one of us along whenever you explore down here.”
Amber scoffed.
“Wish I could have had you down here when B-witch brought me through the cave off the cliff down the rope ladder.”
Kelsey dropped their linked arms and side hugged Amber.
“She brought you in that way? I’m so sorry — but I’m impressed you were able to make it.”
Amber hugged her friend back.
“That’s how pissed off I was. It made me stronger. Thinking about it now makes me feel strong enough to chew rocks.”
Kelsey patted Amber’s shoulder.
“Here in the dream, you could chew rocks, but let’s not and say we did.”
At that, Amber laughed the tiniest bit.
“Deal.” But then her anger took over again. “Sulis has some nerve, showing up here at our dig site and taking over — and using Tomas against us.”
Kelsey growled a little.
“I know. She’s gotten him installed here so that she can recruit more of her zombie slaves out of his guards and then have them loot everything out of here before we even get a chance. But you know that’s not the worst of it. What she’s doing to Tomas is. It isn’t really him doting over her like that. She has him charmed but good. His real personality comes out every once in a while. I know you’ve seen it. Tavish has too, but for some reason the sight of his brother makes Tomas so furious that Tavish can’t get through to him.”
Amber took a deep breath and let it out as the three of them floated down the corridor past rooms that nearly sparkled in their cleanliness under the light of many torches.
“Aren’t there ever any people in here in this Brian the Druid’s dreams? It’s really eerie without people.”
Kelsey gave Amber a ‘let’s be frank’ look.
“At first, I used to have the people in the dream with me. They are interesting, and maybe some time when one of us isn’t in urgent need of knowing where everything is, I’ll let you see the people too. But they’re so distracting. We’d spend our whole time watching all of their fascinating rituals.”
Sasha gave Kelsey a hopeful look at that.
Kelsey nodded at her, and the two of them might as well have been rubbing their hands together, they looked so eager to study the Celts.
Amber took Kelsey’s hand and squeezed it.
“This was a good idea. I’m glad to know my way around. You’re right, we shouldn’t let her have any advantage on our own turf. And I hereby declare this underground Celtic palace ours.”
The place was magnificent, and quite a bit larger than Amber had first guessed, going down four levels before it reached the sea. She lost count of how many secret doors they passed through in order to get that far down, and then they went up by a different route, passing through even more and taking several flights of stairs. But she thought that as long as it didn’t involve opening any secret doors, she could now find her way out no matter where she was in the underground castle.
And the night’s adventure had to end sometime.
Sasha was especially pale in the light of all the torches, and her face looked especially mournful.
“Well, we’d better get home and go to bed.”
Amber jumped in before Kelsey could say anything.
“Aw, can’t we stay a little longer? This is fun, and you have to admit, life in the waking world is trying right now, dealing with Sulis.”
Gently shaking her head no, Kelsey took Amber and Sasha’s hands, and then all three of them became ghostlike and floated straight up through four layers of rock corridors until they were on the surface, standing on the wet grass in their bare feet under a sky that held so many stars, it was almost solid light.
Kelsey gave it a moment before she spoke and broke the peacefulness.
“No, we don’t really get rest while I’m manipulating our dreams. Sasha’s right, we have to go back to our bodies and allow them to rest.”
Amber squeezed Kelsey’s hand.
“Well at least tomorrow you can show me the upper castle in the real daylight.”
But Sasha put a hand on Amber’s arm.
“We were going to do that, but Seumas thinks it’s too dangerous for us to let Lachlan run around without watching where he’s going… Amber, we want Tomas to think Lachlan is after you in particular, so that his protectiveness is aroused. He’ll see otherwise if you come with us, so you’re going to stay and help Eileen in the weaver shop tomorrow while we’re out.”
Amber opened her mouth to speak, but what could she say really?
Kelsey put a hand on Amber’s back.
“I’m sorry. I know that’s not too exciting. You can have a tour of the castle and the town the next day, okay?”
Sasha gave a little laugh.
“It won’t be all bad. Wait until you meet Eileen’s daughter Deirdre. Heh! She’s six years old going on sixty. She’ll keep you entertained.”
~*~
Amber woke up with a tiny pair of blue eyes a foot from her face, staring at her unblinking.
“A good morning tae ye. My name is Amber, and some aught tells me ye are Deirdre.”
The blue eyes widened.
“What is it that tells ye?”
Amber smiled at the little cherub of a girl.
“I would say a little birdie telt me, but ye ken that would be a lie, dae ye na?”
Deirdre’s nose scrunched up, and she backed away and put her hands on her hips.
“Dinna be silly. Little birds dinna talk. I thought… wull, never mind what I thought. If ye are gaun'ae come help us in the weaver shop today, then ye had better get up and eat yer parritch. Maw has already left with the bairns. She left me tae look after ye.” Deirdre gave Amber a quick once-over. “I daresay ye dinna ken any better than Sasha how we live here, dae ye?”
Wow, Sasha wasn’t kidding.
“I reckon I ken how tae eat parritch.”
~*~
Eileen smiled when her daughter dragged Amber into the weaver shop.
“Thank ye for watching ower my new apprentice, Deirdre. Sìle needs ye tae look after her now, please.”
Amber expected Deirdre to put up a fuss, but to her amazement, the little girl went right over to where her baby sister was playing with some fist-sized wooden spools and took over supervising her, modulating her voice to sound somewhat like their mother’s.
“There’s a good lass. Are ye playing nice, now?”
Eileen beckoned Amber over into the far corner of the shop, where piles of burlap bags were stacked up against the wall.
“Ye are in luck. Kelsey has been helping me pound flax intae thread, and ’tis a tedious task.” She gestured over at the man who was weaving on a huge loom between them and Deirdre. “Howsoever, Fergus just traded for all o this raw wool, sae we get tae spin it intae yarn instead. Much easier.”
