by Kyra Whitton
“I had business in Edinburgh a few months into my time there. And that’s when I saw her. I looked out of the carriage and there she strode, bold as brass, between her father and her brother. Her hair was pulled back from her face, but was otherwise loose, tumbling down her back in a dark cascade, and her eyes bigger and brighter than any star. I had the driver stop and I jumped out after her, making up some excuse that I thought she was my sister’s dear friend, but she knew I lied. She pitied me, though, and the next thing I knew, I was calling at her father’s townhouse. But the moment I looked into her eyes, it was like a thread inside of me grew taut and pulled us together.”
Evie swallowed, averting her gaze to her hands where she idly rubbed at her fingers with those of the opposite hand. Had she not thought the same thing when she had seen him in the bookstore?
“I don’t know how to describe her other than… I never wanted to be away from her. I wanted to know everything about her and then know it all over again. My infatuation with Lady Mary melted away, and had you asked me her name, I wouldn’t have been able to tell you. When Elizabeth and I were together, it was as if… it was as if there was no one else in the world.”
He cleared his throat, as if it had gone dry, but Evie suspected there was some emotion there.
“We were married less than a month later. No one objected, not really. Her brother seemed off-put, but he always had a sour disposition when it came to me. This amused her father. Her mother was long dead and she was raised beside her brother. She was… brash, headstrong, full of ideas about the world and equality.
“You have to understand, I grew up in a different time. It was a man’s world. A white, wealthy man’s world. It has taken me a lot of time to see that, but I was born of vast privilege. I just never felt I was because I was the youngest son; I wasn’t a duke or an earl or even a baron. I had no land of my own and my well-being was entirely dependent upon my brother’s goodwill. I know differently, now, but then… After our first argument, I believe I told her ‘no wife of mine would…’ I don’t even remember what it was she suggested. She told me she was my partner. She would always be my partner, in every way, but the moment I tried to ‘lord myself’ over her, she would take herself right back to her father’s home.
“I was so smitten, I was terrified she would make good on her promise. I fell all over myself apologizing, wanting nothing more than to please her, to show her she had made the right choice. And when I was most honest with myself, I knew I would have her no other way than exactly as she was.
“And then the winds of war grew stronger. She was an ardent Jacobite. If I hadn’t known any better, I would have said she orchestrated the entire uprising from her own desk. She knew all of the movements, all of the logistics. She sent notes and letters all over Scotland, her fingers always stained and smudged with ink. It was she who convinced me to join the cause. We were standing in one of six grand salons and she was waving her hands around saying ‘this could all be ours, Alistair. You could be more than your brother’s steward.”
He huffed out a bit of a laugh. “She insisted on calling me Alistair. Said it made me sound like a warrior instead of a fop. She knew my weakness and exactly how to use it. She knew I was resentful of my position. That I hadn’t brought my new wife to my home, but to my brother’s.
“And so I took up the sword, again. I knew how to be an officer, and there were plenty of my brother’s tenants who wanted a free Scotland. We joined with her brother and father’s men, and she was right there, by my side. She would have stormed the battlefields with me. Wanted to.”
He got a far-off look.
“She, uh, she was there. Well, not there, but not far away. In Inverness. I’ll never know how I convinced her to stay behind. She was hell-bent on joining the men on the battlefield, had even gone as far as securing breeches and a musket. I was appalled. Not because a part of me didn’t think she could do it, I knew she could. But… it was my job to protect her. I told her as much. Told her that she made me feel less a man, that I was ashamed of her, that she didn’t have a female bone in her body.”
“What is wrong with you, Elizabeth, that you cannot act as a woman is to act?”
The mouth stiffened and her eyes narrowed. He knew that look far too well. It was the look he was digging for.
“Don’t call me that!”
“Your name? Elizabeth. Elizabeth. Elizabeth. Why must you challenge my manhood at every opportunity? Why must you force me to look upon you with shame?”
Her head jerked back and tears brimmed in her eyes. “You fill me with such contempt, I cannot even look upon you.”
He took a steadying breath, remembering the last words he said to his wife, the woman he loved beyond all else, before he left her for battle. “I wanted to break her spirit, just… just enough to keep her from doing whatever fool thing she was setting her mind to. It worked. For a time, anyway.”
He cleared his throat and stared off into the hazy distance. “We were overrun incredibly fast. I took a musket ball to the leg and my femoral artery was nicked. I knew the moment I went down it was over. I would bleed out on that gods damned field. I lay there, my life’s blood pouring out onto a stinking bog, my only thoughts of Elizabeth, my Ailsa, and my last words to her. I knew I deserved to die for the things I said to her, even if it was to protect her. I told her those things when I should have been telling her she was my everything, that I loved her. I could feel the darkness start to pull me under… And she appeared to me amongst the carnage. I’ll never forget the way she stepped over the carrion, as if she walked across a fresh carpet laid only for her, her black shroud flowing around her. Like a beautiful mirage. She placed her hand on mine and my pain lifted away. She offered me a drink and told me that if I accepted, I would see my Ailsa again. I accepted.” He closed his eyes. Drew in a long breath.
“I could barely remember my own name, and my memories of my wife? Gone. I was consumed with her. Mora. I was her lover for… seasons. A member of her guard by day, her personal pet by night. I stupidly thought I was the only one, the truth was, we were scattered around the Otherworld. When I realized, I began to notice the inconsistencies with the story of my life. That I couldn’t remember anything but my time with her. I began refusing the little vials she fed me, and bits of my memory started to seep back in.
“One evening, on patrol, I came in contact with an Ellyll caravan. We usually harassed them and then sent them on their way, but I knew they held some knowledge of magic, and I asked one for help with my memory.”
“Everything you need to know is already inside of you. You simply need to dig until you unbury it.”
“But how?” he asked anxiously, gaze darting around to be sure his partner for the evening didn’t hear. But the other man was on the other side of the ring of wagons, barking orders at the travelers.
“Stop looking for others to tell you who you are, and be yourself.” She stepped away, dismissing him in a way that few women ever had besides Mora and…
The name was on the tip of his tongue. He could almost see her, smell her. A scent of the earth. He closed his eyes and savored it, dug for the memory of her, whoever she was, but still came up with nothing more than the knowledge that she was there, somewhere.
And, for the first time, he murmured his heartfelt thanks to a woman.
“The memories came back, but slowly. The more I concentrated on the person I wanted to be and not what I was expected to be—by anyone, not just Mora—the more the memories came to me. The more I saw about that world, not just what Mora wanted me to see. She was angry, though I never really learned about what. One of her other pets, Iain, was constantly coming and going. At first I was jealous he had so many privileges, but I slowly began to see she was running him into the ground.”
Evie sat up straighter. “Iain. He was the one you mentioned in the journal. You were jealous of him…” She thought about that night in the back of her father’s car, of Iain’s hands on her body, of hers on h
is. And she swallowed as a new sense of shame wash over her.
But Alec continued as if he hadn’t even heard her. She wasn’t sure he remembered he was speaking to her at all, so lost in his memories.
“I overheard her yelling at him one night…”
“If you don’t have Ailsa here by the full moon, I will gut you from neck to cock, Iain. Do not doubt me.”
Air left his lungs with such force he could have been punched in the gut. Ailsa. His beautiful, vibrant wife. Her blue-green eyes bright and her dark tresses pulled over her shoulder. The challenging tilt of her chin, the promise in her sly smiles. How could he have ever forgotten her?
The pain, the shame, that ripped through his heart was unlike anything he had ever felt. The emptiness left by her absence was now a gaping hole he could never fill. How was he surviving without her?
He pressed back against the cold of the stone and sank down onto the floor, muffling the sob that rent his soul in two.
“I followed Iain the next morning when he left the castle. That’s when I learned how to make the jump from the Otherworld to mortal Earth. When he never returned with her, I planned for weeks how to get back to her on my own. I convinced myself Mora was making good on her promise that I would see my wife, again. That she had done me a favor by obscuring my memory until she could bring her to me. I told myself Ailsa refused to go with Iain and, instead I needed to be the one to go to her. I only imagined she waited for me or thought me dead. I dreaded the pain the latter must have inflicted upon her. I found myself back on that bloody moor.”
He jolted awake and almost lost the whole of his last meal, which hadn’t been much. The bodies littered the ground around him, and as he took them in, the bile rose. He struggled to his feet when the cold steel of a knife pressed to his throat.
“Keep quiet.”
He knew the man’s voice from the eavesdropping at which he had become so adept. “Your enemy is still swarming these parts.”
The flat open field where they crouched appeared rather abandoned.
“Take your bloody knife away,” Alec demanded. “I’m not here for you.”
Iain obliged, sliding the small knife into his belt. “You think I don’t know that? I just need to be sure you don’t get yourself killed.”
Alec glared at him. “What do you mean?”
Iain raised an eyebrow and clucked. “You think you were stealthy, don’t you?” His eyes shone with mirth. “You charged through those woods like a bear.” But then they became darker, clouded and he looked away. “I wish you hadn’t come. There is no saving her.”
Time, the wind, movements, all stopped around him, his whole world pinpointing on that simple statement. “What?”
Iain scanned the field once more. It was growing dark and fires dotted the horizon.
“She thinks you dead. She will attack a party of British soldiers, and when she does, she will be taken captive and hanged.”
“Why? Why would she do that? It’s madness. It’s… it’s suicide!”
Iain ran the tip of his tongue over his front tooth. “Yes,” he agreed.
“Then what are we doing, here? We must go to her, stop her at once, we should—”
The other man shook his head. A floppy lock of hair broke free and brushed his forehead. He didn’t bother to brush it away.
“It’s too late,” he said with something akin to regret. “I’ve been trying, but it’s too late. Her soul has already passed through the kingdom of Annwn. To see her now… you will be met with an empty shell going through the motions. She will not see you, will not know you are there.”
“I didn’t believe him. I thought that if I got to her in time, I could turn the tides. But he was right. When we reached her, she… she wasn’t there, anymore. She went through her tasks as if neither of us were there. Seeing her that way broke me. I begged with her empty body to come back, to show any flicker of knowledge of my identity. I threw things—a chair through the window—just to see how she would react. She didn’t even blink. I traveled back and back and back, and I could never change her. Just as Iain said.
“That was my first real lesson in how time works as one passes through the Otherworld, breaking all worldly laws. I once told you it exists on a separate plane, which is true. But our timelines, our life threads… They cannot be altered. We can pass through the veil as our mortal selves, but once death claims us, there is no altering the path. It’s as if a knot is tied and everything before is sealed into the tapestry in which it was woven.
“My only option was to find her deep in Arawn’s kingdom. I would have stayed in hell with her forever. But she had already gone. She had believed, it seemed, that she thought it was her only option of ever finding me, again. In the next life.”
Evie expected to see hurt and sadness and brokenness in his eyes. But none of that there. Instead… love. And pleading.
She frowned, not understanding how he could tell her of his dead wife, of her sacrifice, his pain, and then turn to her as if it was all for her.
“Evie…” He reached for her hand.
She moved it out of reach, not wanting him to touch her. Her pulse roared in her ears, because she knew, somehow, she knew what he would say next.
His head dropped back against the headrest, his shoulders slumped, and he sighed through his nose. “I searched through the centuries to find you. I honed myself into both a warrior and a healer, someone worthy of keeping you safe. I spent lifetimes living without my heart, without air, drowning, until I could find you.”
“I’m not Elizabeth.” But a whisper in the back of her mind reminded her of the portrait hanging inside. “I’m not,” she murmured again, trying to convince herself. “I can’t be. All of this is… it’s impossible.”
“All this time, I thought it was me Mora was after. After my encounter with Iain, I believed he would be coming for me, to bring me back to her. None of her warriors left her. None. I thought Iain was there to collect my Ailsa as a reward for serving Mora well, and when I couldn’t have the other half of my soul, I knew I could not be there.
“I disappeared. I was the first and I have been the last. I covered my tracks well, and I kept under her radar. But she knew where I was the moment Iain saw us in that coffee shop together, and never has she come for me. It was you she set the trap for, Evie, it was never about me. You’re the one she wants.”
Chapter Twenty-Two
Queasiness gripped her, stomach threatening to overturn water she drank in place of breakfast. She could have grabbed some toast or poured herself a bowl of cereal before leaving the flat, but after half a year of rising after noon, food first thing in the morning was easy to forget. By the time she realized food would serve her well, nerves kept her from doing any more than sipping from the bottle as she traveled north.
Mouth suddenly dry, she reached for the half-full bottle and gulped the remains down. Still in hand, she twisted the top on and then back off. Her hands needed something to do, the churning of her stomach impossible to ignore. She’d planned to stop for some lunch on her way back to St Andrews. Either it was good she was half-starved—she wasn’t vomiting a toasty onto the gravel parking lot—or a terrible mistake.
She fidgeted under his gaze. He waited for her to say something. Anything. But she had nothing to give him. Her entire identity was crumbling around her, chipped and hacked away until she didn’t even recognize herself. What was she supposed to do with all of this?
Curling up in his lap didn’t seem like the right answer, though it held a certain appeal. Being with him was easy, and it would be nothing to forget fighting with him on the street only a few days prior. All he would have to do was wrap her in his arms and soothe the fear away. Perhaps they could travel back to the cottage in the forest and never leave. Lost away from time, hidden from Mora and Iain, from history and the future.
But how could she ignore Elizabeth or Ailsa or whatever her name was? Accepting that she was linked to the woman took a considerable leap
of faith. And if she did, what did that mean for her and Alec?
Who did he really want? Evie? Or Elizabeth?
Maybe she wasn’t ready to find out.
“I think I need to be alone, Alec.”
“Evie.”
“I just… I can’t do this right now.” She turned watery eyes to him. “I can’t be who you need me to be right now. Ever. I can’t be Elizabeth.”
“Evie, I don’t want you to be Elizabeth. I want—”
The desperation in his voice tore at her, but she held a hand up to stop him. “I just need time, Alec. I need time to figure all of this out. Alone. You being here… I can’t wrap my head around it with you breathing down my neck.”
Her words came out far harsher than intended. She heard it the minute they passed through her lips but couldn’t take them back. Wasn’t sure she wanted to.
Alec deflated before her eyes, the color draining from his face and the brightness in his eyes dimming. Slowly, he nodded and then leaned down for his bag. He pulled out a skein of red wool wrapped tightly in a sandwich bag and placed it on the dashboard. “I hope that someday you follow this back to me.”
He opened the door and walked into the coming storm.
As Alec disappeared from view, Evie wondered if she would ever see him again.
****
Evie stared at the yarn for a long moment before plucking it off the dashboard. Rolling it from one palm to the other, she tested its weight as it passed over the plastic. What hurt more? She cupped it in her left hand. Losing Calum? It fell into her right. Or intentionally pushing Alec away?
The yarn didn’t have any answers. She huffed, dropped the bag into the passenger seat, and reversed the car. Sarah’s preferred music—electronic dance music—played over the speakers, the bass vibrating up through the seat upholstery. The tracks on the playlist all sounded the same, but Evie turned the volume up, anyway. Losing herself to the rhythm and her thoughts might distract from the dull ache somewhere in the vicinity of her heart.
