Beyond the Highland Myst

by Highlander 01-08

  She spun in a slow circle, heedless of her icy toes. Dimly, her mind registered the fact that the hail had fallen only within the circle of stones. The ground beyond it was warm and dry.

  He'd told her that in his century, the stones of Ban Drochaid had been enclosed within the perimeter walls of his estate, but the Ban Drochaid she'd entered an hour ago had resided in the midst of a wasteland of crumbled stone and grass.

  Yet now she was completely encircled by high walls, within a veritable fortress.

  She glanced at the night sky. It was dense black with no distant glow on the horizon in any direction, which was impossible, because Alborath lay in the valley beyond, and only last night, while sitting on the hood of the rental car, she'd rued that the lights of the village spoiled her view of the stars.

  Turning back to the castle that hadn't been there five minutes ago, she fingered the folds of his plaid. Suddenly, the words he'd shouted—words she'd ignored because they hadn't made any sense at the time—now made perfect sense.

  I went back too far. I thought I could come with you, but I cannot.

  Save my clan.

  Oh, God; Drustan, she thought, you didn't go back in time. You sent me back to save you!

  * * *

  "When I consider the small span of my life

  absorbed in the eternity of all time, or the

  small part of space which I can touch or see

  engulfed by the infinite immensity of spaces

  that I know not and that know me not, I am

  frightened and astonished to see myself here

  instead of there… now instead of then."

  —blaise pascal

  "For those of us who believe in physics, this

  separation between past, present, and

  future is only an illusion, however

  tenacious,"

  —albert einstein

  * * *

  july 18

  1518

  Chapter 11

  The nightmare was beyond anything Drustan

  MacKeltar's slumbering mind had ever managed to conjure, replete with a taste so vile, he knew it for what it was: the taste of death.

  Shadowy images taunted him at the periphery of his vision, and he felt a monstrous leech suckle onto him, and they grappled, then suddenly there were two discrete yet similar beings inside his body.

  I am possessed of a demon, the sleeping Drustan thought, struggling to spew the atrocity forth. I will not permit this. Enraged, he resisted the new presence violently, lashing out to destroy it without even trying to identify it. It was foreign and as strong as he was, and that was all he needed to know.

  He focused his mind, isolating the intruder, cocooning it with his will, and with immense effort thrust it from his body.

  Then suddenly there were two of him in his nightmare, but the other him looked older, and anguished. Mortally weary.

  Get thee hence, devil, Drustan shouted.

  Listen to me, you fool.

  Drustan clamped his hands over his ears. I will hear none of your lies, demon. Somewhere in the distance—in the nightmare place that defied his mind's ability to either comprehend or fabricate—Drustan scented a woman. She was indistinct, but he could feel her, even smell the fragrant heat of her skin. A rush of longing consumed him, nearly shattering his resolve to hold the other him at bay.

  Sensing the weakness, the replica leaped forward, but Drustan flexed his will and knocked him aside.

  They glared at each other, and Drustan wondered at the play of emotions on the replica's face. Fear. Sorrow so deep it might cleave a man asunder. And as he watched, a sudden understanding flickered in the false Drustan's eyes, even as the replica seemed to be losing solidity.

  You would fight me to the death, the counterfeit's lips moved soundlessly. I see. I see now why only one lives. 'Tis not Nature, which is innately indifferent, but our own fear that causes us to destroy each other. I beg you, accept me. Let us both be.

  I will never accept you, Drustan roared.

  The replica faded, then grew more solid, then faded around the edges again. You are in terrible danger—

  Speak no more! I will believe naught you say! Drustan lashed out at the shadow-him viciously.

  The shadow-him glanced over his shoulder and shouted to someone Drustan couldn't see: The moment you see him you must tell him the first rhyme I taught you, remember it? The verse in the car, and show him the backpack and all will be well.

  Be gone, demon! Drustan roared, shoving at him with his will.

  The other him speared Drustan with his gaze. Love her, the counterfeit whispered, and then he vanished.

  * * * * *

  Drustan shot bolt upright in bed, gasping for air.

  He clawed at his throat, pounded his fists on his chest, and finally managed to suck in a painful breath. He was sweating. Icy and feverish at the same time, he'd shredded his linens in his sleep. Previously soft animal skins were now mere tufts of sweat-slicked fur, and his head pounded.

  He fumbled for the mug of wine at his bedside. It took him several attempts before he succeeded in wrapping his fingers securely around it. Trembling, he drank deep, until the mug was empty. He dragged the back of his hand across his mouth.

  His heart thundered and he felt as if he'd just been more bitterly threatened than ever in his life. As if something had crept into his body and tried to claim territorial rights.

  He plunged shaking hands into his hair, lunged from the bed, and began to pace. He glanced back at the bed warily, expecting a succubus to be lurking in the pile of destroyed linens.

  By Amergin! What strange dream had been visited upon him? He could recall naught of it now but a bitter sense of violation, and a hollow sense of victory.

  His attention was snared by a brilliant flash of light beyond the window of his bedchamber. A low growl of thunder followed it, and he tugged aside the tapestry and gazed out through the glass into the night.

  Drustan stood by the window for a long time, taking slow, deep breaths and trying to regain a measure of calm. He rarely suffered nightmares and preferred to forget this one, for the dream reeked of madness. He firmly corralled it in a deep, dark place in his mind, burying it where it would never see the light of day.

  The storm died as suddenly as it had arisen, and the Highland night fell still and silent again.

  * * * * *

  Think think think, Gwen berated herself. You're supposed to be so brainy, use it. But her brain felt numb and clumsy. After the day she'd just had—the incredible passion, the bizarre storm, the fuzziness of her mind from nicotine withdrawal—she was in no condition to be brilliant. She was hardly in any condition to manage average.

  Pacing gingerly upon the melting hail, she tallied the tangible facts, because the intangible ones, at the moment, scared the bejeezus out of her. She was desperate to find some factual, logical conclusion to explain away the illogic of her whereabouts.

  She shivered, eyeing the castle. The prospect of confronting what it held both fascinated and terrified her.

  But there was something she had to do first. Not that she was the disbelieving type, no way, not her. But she did prefer to view hard evidence with her own two eyes.

  Drawing a bracing breath, she plunged into the darkness beyond the circle and sped away from the castle. When she reached the estate wall, she flung herself up on a pile of casks, pressed her cheek to a narrow slit in the wall, and peered out into the valley at the city of Alborath.

  It wasn't there. Suspicion confirmed.

  Her shoulders slumped. She hadn't expected it to be, but its absence was shocking nonetheless.

  I went back too far.

  In other words, she mused, sorting through what she knew about the theories of time travel, he'd probably tried to go back to shortly after he'd been abducted, but had gotten the symbols wrong. He'd returned to a time when the past him was there in the castle, and common theory held that if time travel were possible, the fabric of the uni
verse would not suffer two identical selves in a single moment. The future him had somehow been canceled out.

  Time travel! the scientist shouted in her head. Analyze!

  We have to save him. Analyze that. We'll contemplate the ramifications of multiverses later.

  If the future him had been canceled out, that meant the Drustan she'd fallen in love with no longer existed, but she would find him in the castle, pre-enchantment, and with no knowledge of her whatsoever.

  That thought made her heart hurt. She was in no rush to look into his silvery eyes, which had gazed at her so intimately but an hour ago, and see an utter lack of recognition.

  Promise me you will not fear me.

  Fear him? Why would she have feared him? Because he could manipulate time? Sheesh, that only increased her fascination with him!

  Save my clan.

  She would not fail him.

  Squaring her shoulders, she hurried back through the stones, toward the castle, and flew up the stairs. Fisting her hand, she knocked on an enormous door that made her feel like a shrunken Alice in a hostile Wonderland. Once, twice, and again. "Halloo, halloo!" she cried. She flung her small frame at it, pounding with her shoulder.

  There was no answer. No convenient doorbell either. Her mind duly noted more tangible evidence that what she was knocking on was not a twenty-first-century door. She would contemplate the medieval door later. From the inside. At the moment, she was feeling as if she might faint at any moment. The strangeness of it all left her feeling utterly overwhelmed. And so what if she was a physicist, supposedly capable of heightened comprehension—she was totally freaked out.

  "Oh, puh-lease!" she cried, turning around and using her bottom as a battering ram on the thick door. Thump-thump, thump-thump. It hurt her more than it hurt the door, and made about as much noise as a downy pillow. She'd be damned if she was getting sent back to save him, only to be denied entrance.

  She stepped back and eyed the windows. Perhaps she could toss something through the glass?

  Not exactly a wise way to petition shelter from strangers, she decided. Someone might shoot at her. Arrows, or something equally archaic. Perhaps toss boiling oil down the walls.

  She cast a glance about and spied a pile of chopped wood. She scurried over to it, freed a wedge, and slammed one end against the door. "Please, open up," she called.

  "I'm coming," a sleepy voice replied. "I heard ye the first time. Impatient, aren't ye?" There was the sound of metal sliding against wood, and the door was finally, blessedly opened. Gwen sank to her knees with relief.

  A buxom fortyish woman clad in a long gown and lacy cap stood in the doorway, blinking sleep from her eyes. Her eyes widened as she took in the sight huddling on the doorstep, nearly naked.

  She whisked Gwen through the door with a strong grip and slammed it behind them. "Och, lassie," she crooned, gathering her in her arms. "Nell's got ye now. For the love of Columba, what gives ye cause to be wandering so on such a night? An English wench, no less! How came ye here? Did a man have at ye? Did he harm ye, wee lass?"

  As the woman drew her to her ample bosom, Gwen thought, So this is Drustan's Nell, and sagged against her. She was exactly as he'd described. Assertive and gruffly kind, pretty—past the flush of youth, but with a timeless beauty that would never fade.

  Beyond coherent thought, she was dimly astonished to realize her brain was shutting off, as if someone had flipped the main breaker and, circuit by circuit, all systems were going down.

  She couldn't crash now! She needed to know what date it was. But her body, overwhelmed and madly off-kilter from her jaunt through the centuries, had other ideas.

  "Nell, what's all the commotion?" A man called from somewhere in the perimeter of her awareness.

  "Help me with the lass, Silvan," Nell murmured. "'Tis the oddest thing, but she's chilled and her feet are near frozen."

  Gwen tried desperately to ask, "What's the date" and "Is he okay?" But damn it all, she was passing out.

  Her fading consciousness chuckled richly when she thought she glimpsed Albert Einstein, the greatest theoretical physicist of all time, bending over her, wiry white hair and wrinkled impish face, a mischievous light in his eyes. If she was dying, she was going to be in fine company, indeed. He bent his face close to hers and she managed to whisper, "Drustan."

  "Fascinating," she thought she heard him remark. "Let's get her warmed up and put her in the Silver Chamber."

  "But that chamber adjoins Drustan's," Nell protested. " 'Tis not proper."

  "Propriety be damned. 'Tis the most suitable."

  Gwen didn't listen further.

  Drustan was alive and they were putting her near him. She would rest for a moment.

  * * *

  the next morning

  Chapter 12

  "Why must ye live all the way up here, Silvan?

  Yer like the bald eagle nestin' on the mount," Nell said, nudging open the door to his tower chamber—one hundred and three steps above the castle proper—with her hip. "Had to settle on the highest limb, dinna ye?"

  Silvan MacKeltar popped his head up out of a book with a bemused expression. A silvery-white mane was sleek about his face, and Nell found him terribly handsome in a sage way, but she'd never tell him that. "I am not bald. I have quite a lot of hair." He lowered his head again and resumed reading, running his finger across the page.

  The man was completely in his own world most of the time, Nell mused. Many were the times she'd wondered how he'd managed to get sons on his wife. Had the woman slammed his tomes shut on his fingers and dragged him off by the ear?

  Now, there was a fine idea, she thought, watching him through eyes that did not nor had ever, in the twelve years she'd been there, betrayed one ounce of her feelings for him.

  "Drink." She plunked the mug down on the table next to his book, careful not to spill a drop on his precious tome.

  "Not another of your vile concoctions, is it, Nell?"

  "Nay," she said, stony-faced, "'tis another of my splendid brews. And ye need it, so drink. I'm not leaving until the mug is empty."

  "Did you put any cocoa in it?"

  "Ye know we're nearly out."

  "Nell," he said with a put-upon sigh, flipping a page in his book, "go on with you. I'll drink it later."

  "And ye might as well know yer son is up and about," she added, hands on her hips, foot tapping, waiting for him to drink. When he didn't reply, she forged on. "What do ye wish me to do with the lass who appeared last eve?"

  Silvan closed his tome, refusing to look at her lest he betray how very much he enjoyed looking at her. He appeased himself with the promise of safely stealing several surreptitious glances when she walked out the door. "You're not going to leave, are you?"

  "Not until ye drink."

  "How is she?"

  "She's sleeping," Nell told his profile. The man rarely looked at her that she noticed; she'd been speaking to his profile for years. "But she doesn't seem to have suffered lasting injury." Thank the saints, Nell thought, feeling fiercely protective toward the lass who'd arrived with no clothing and the blood of her maidenhead on her thighs. Neither she nor Silvan had missed it when they tucked the wee unconscious lass into bed. They'd glanced uneasily at each other, and Silvan had fingered the fabric of his son's plaid with a perplexed expression.

  "Has she said anything about what happened to her last eve?" he asked, rubbing his thumb idly over the symbols embossed on the leather binding of the book.

  "Nay. Although she mumbled in her sleep, naught of it made sense."

  Silvan's eyebrows rose. "Think you she was… er, harmed in some way that has affected her mind?"

  "I think," Nell said carefully, "the fewer questions ye ask her for now, the better. 'Tis plain to see she needs a place to stay, what with having no possessions nor clothing. I ask ye grant her shelter as ye did me that eve, many years past. Let her story come out when she's ready."

  "Well, if she's aught like you, that means I'll ne
ver know," Silvan said with studied casualness.

  Nell caught her breath. In all these years he'd not once asked what had happened the night she was given sanctuary at Castle Keltar. For him even to make such an offhand reference to it was rarer than a purple pine marten. Privacy was ever honored at the MacKeltars'—sometimes a blessing, ofttimes a curse. The Keltar men were not wont to pry. And many were the times she'd wished one of them had.

  When, a dozen years ago, Silvan had found her lying in the road, beaten and left for dead, she hadn't felt like talking about it. By the time she'd healed and been ready to confide, Silvan—who'd held her hand and fought for her while she'd lain fevered—had retreated coolly from her bedside and never spoken of it again. What was a woman to do? Blurt out her woeful tale as if she were looking for sympathy?

  And so a polite and infinite distance had formed between housekeeper and laird. As should be, she reminded herself. She cocked her head warily, warning herself not to read too much into his mild statement.

  When she said nothing, Silvan sighed and instructed that she procure suitable clothing for the lass.

  "I already dug out some of yer wife's old gowns. Now, would ye please drink? Dinna be thinking I've not noticed that ye haven't been feeling yerself of late. My brew will help if ye quit dumping it in the garderobe."

  He flushed.

  "Silvan, ye hardly eat, ye scarce sleep, and a body needs certain things. Will ye just try it and see if it doesn't help?"

  He raised one white brow, giving her a satyrlike look. "Pushy wench."

  "Cantankerous old fox."

  A faint smile played about his lips. He raised the mug, held his nose, and tipped the contents back. She watched his throat work for several minutes before he grimaced and plunked it down. For a brief moment, their eyes met.

  She turned around and swept toward the door. "Dinna be forgetting about the lass," she reminded stiffly. "You need to see to her, assure her she has a place here for however long need be."