Highlander Protected: A Scottish Time Travel Romance (Highlander In Time Book 3) Page 4

  “Punched the servant’s nose straight through his brain, Audrina says,” Cora murmured, her eyes on the doors through which Eamon had just left. “He would’ve been killed instantly. Awful thing. His poor wife and daughters...”

  “If he’s lying about not being there, why wouldn’t he just tell them where he was? Guilty people usually make up alibis, right?”

  “Alright, CSI Scotland.” Cora chuckled, elbowing her in the ribs. “Not your job to analyze everyone around you.” An insinuating tone crept into her voice. “You just think he’s handsome so you want him to be innocent.”

  “I don’t think he’s innocent, I think he’s guilty of something other than what he’s being accused of,” Marianne retorted. She grinned a little. “And it doesn’t hurt that he’s easy on the eye —”

  “Marianne! He looks like a huge unwashed bear! I’ll never understand your type.”

  “I have another question,” she added.

  Eamon’s business seemed to have been the last order for the day – the crowds were dispersing. Ian and Colin were still deep in conversation, both looking tired and frustrated. Ian in particular kept flicking glances back to the door from which Eamon had so abruptly departed, as though wishing his cousin would come back and speak reasonably. She felt a pang of sympathy for him.

  “What?”

  “Why the hell can I understand everyone?”

  “It’s Scotland. They’ve been speaking English since the bastards invaded. I think,” Cora added. “I can’t really get a clear history from anyone. A lot of the townsfolk speak Gaelic, I think? Audrina knows more than I do —”

  “Sure, but it’s the early fifteenth century, right?”

  Cora frowned for a minute. “That’s the fourteen hundreds, right? Yeah.”

  “Did you ever read the Canterbury Tales?”

  “I’m not a huge nerd, Marianne, sorry —”

  “They were written at the end of the fourteenth century. They’re basically a different language. English now —” God, it felt strange to speak about the distant past as being ‘now’ - “isn’t at all the same as the English we speak. It shouldn’t even sound the same – there was a big shift in pronunciation sometime around Shakespeare’s time, which isn’t for another hundred years or so, by the way. Not to mention the Scottish accents. So how the hell can I make out what anyone’s saying?”

  Cora blinked. “Maybe you just – get used to it?”

  “You studied Romeo and Juliet in high school, right?”

  “Yeah.”

  “And could you understand a single word anyone was saying without using that little translation thing at the bottom of the page?”

  Cora hesitated. “Well – sort of?”

  “Cora.”

  “Sometimes I couldn’t even figure it out with the translation,” Cora admitted, grudgingly. “We’re not all theatre nerds, Marianne.”

  “Compared to the English they were speaking around this time, Shakespeare was basically contemporary. We shouldn’t be able to make out what people are saying at all. So what’s happening?”

  “I guess the magic that brought us here also – taught us how to speak old English?”

  “Middle English, but maybe.”

  “Well, what do you think? You’re the magic expert. And the language expert, apparently,” Cora added. “None of this even occurred to me. I just assumed English was English. The accents were a bit hard at first,” she added, sounding a little embarrassed.

  “I think—” Marianne hesitated a little, aware that she was speaking about magic in a public place – but the majority of the crowd had dispersed by now. They wouldn’t be overheard. “My instinct is that the magic that brought us here is still with us. It’s inside us, translating everything we hear for us.”

  “Cool, I guess? Marianne —”

  “Which means we might still be able to use it to find a way home.”

  Cora sighed. “Come and meet Colin and Ian. We’ll talk about magic later. But as I said – this is my home. Not America, not the future. I live here now.”

  Well I don’t, Marianne thought irritably, but she bit back on the impulse to snap at her cousin. That was what had caused all the family unpleasantness in the first place and she had no interest in alienating her only ally in this strange place. There was something comforting about the idea that the magic that brought her here was still with her, though – it felt like having an ally, somehow, a friend on her side, helping her understand the world around her. That had always been the main focus of her magic, after all – clarity, perception, understanding. She smiled a little to think of the work it was doing for her now.

  Ian and Colin were very interested to meet her – and they both exchanged meaningful looks when Cora, voice lowered in case of listening ears, explained that Marianne, like she and Audrina, had been brought back through time from the future.

  “I’m sure my wife has already said it, but let me say it again – you’re welcome here as long as you need to stay. Any clan of Cora’s is clan of ours.”

  Marianne liked Ian immediately – there was something very likeable about the brash, youthful energy he exuded. Colin was more reserved, more stately, but she felt real warmth from him when he made his introductions, reaffirmed her welcome in his home.

  “Thank you both,” she said, sincerely. “It’s a bit of an adjustment, but I appreciate your hospitality. And I hope I can find some way to earn my keep around here.”

  “Well, we can always use a skilled healer,” Colin said thoughtfully. “Are you a nurse, like Cora or Audrina?”

  “Um, not exactly. But I know enough to help out,” she added. It didn’t feel like the right time to mention her actual profession, back in the real world.

  “We’ll talk later,” Colin said, “once Maeve’s home. Women orphaned in time tend to bring their fair share of trouble along with them. It would be best to get ahead of it in any way we can.”

  “They’re more than worth the trouble, though,” Ian said quickly, grinning as he slipped his arm around Cora’s shoulders and pressed a kiss to her forehead.

  Marianne hoped he was right.

  Chapter 6

  It was a busy afternoon. There was some debate about what to do with Marianne – the castle didn’t have a great deal of spare rooms, especially having just taken in the widow of the man who’d been killed in the tavern brawl Eamon started, or so everyone claimed – Marianne nursed her doubts, but she kept them to herself. She was a guest under this roof, after all, and it wasn’t exactly a bright idea to turn the only allies she had against her based on some gut instincts that may have been completely fanciful.

  A solution was found in Dolores, who spoke up immediately and offered to have Marianne stay in her quarters with her until a more permanent solution could be found. Marianne liked the odd woman a lot – she was a little unusual, but something about her just made her feel like she could trust her. It was the same instinct that guided her in her magic practice, and in the absence of anything else to go on, Marianne decide she was going to trust it.

  The room that Dolores invited her into was beautiful, too – extremely well organized, everything in its proper place, including a little cot that had clearly been installed for Marianne’s benefit. Though Dolores tended to avoid eye contact, Marianne was beginning to realize she showed kindness in other ways – the way she’d always adjust Marianne’s pillows and straighten the blankets, for example, or the way she always left the seat closest to the fire empty for Marianne to sit in even though the unequal amounts of wear on both chairs made it very clear that Dolores had surrendered her preferred seat to her guest.

  “Dolores,” Marianne said that evening, looking up from the fire she’d been staring meditatively into. They’d organized a change of clothes for her, and she was wearing her favorite of the small pile of clothes that Cora had brought to the room earlier that night. It was a simple but beautiful blue dress, and it fit reasonably well – though she suspected it had been made
for Cora, given how gappy it was in the bodice. Still, easy enough to take in. She’d have to remember her sewing lessons. Her mother had taught her, years and years ago – she felt a pang of grief at how far away all that seemed now. If only she’d paid closer attention.

  “Yes?”

  “You recognized me, this afternoon. Who did you think I was?”

  “Elena. I thought you were Elena. My daughter.”

  Marianne blinked. It was hard to imagine Dolores with a baby, or caring for a child – she was so fastidious in her habits, Marianne had just assumed she was a spinster. Still – this was a point of some interest. Cora had said that when she arrived, people had said she was the spitting image of a local woman. Perhaps Marianne also had a doppelganger – in which case she’d better get as much information as she could. But Dolores was staring at the fire, almost frozen in place, the only movement in her hands twisting at the hem of the dress she was wearing as though she were determined to tear it.

  “Tell me about her?”

  “Looked just like you,” Dolores murmured, not looking up from the fire. “Down to the age. She’d be your age. Beautiful, like you, dark hair. She was so bright, so clever. Always trying to figure things out, running around, learning the names of the plants and the animals and the insects. Kept a huge collection of pressed leaves under her bed. My brilliant girl. Everyone loved her, too. She was so good with people. Not like me, I never – never could quite get people to like me. She knew how. She just had instincts, like that. Could see the truth of people, knew who meant well and who didn’t. I didn’t know. I never knew until it was too late. Always listened to what people said, not how they said it. How they said it, that’s the important thing. I just hear the words.”

  Her knuckles were white as she twisted at the hem of her dress, and though her voice was flat and level, Marianne could tell by the rambling, twisting paths she was taking through talking about her daughter that something was wrong – that this topic caused her great pain, for some reason. “What happened?”

  “Gone, now,” Dolores whispered to herself. “Gone.” She looked up suddenly, pierced Marianne with her gaze. “But you’re here. Maybe you’re back. Like Lady Audrina. Like Lady Cora. Back to take her place, though you’re not the same as you were. They said that about me, when I was younger.” Her face twisted, a little strangely, and she looked back at the fire. “They said I was taken away by the faeries, that I came back strange – that once I was normal, and then I wasn’t. Maybe I was taken away, and I don’t remember. Maybe that’s why people don’t like me, why I don’t understand, why I don’t fit in here.”

  “I like you,” Marianne said, touched by the woman’s odd intensity. “You’re a little different, that’s all.”

  “I hit my head when I was a girl. I still remember all the blood. Maybe that’s it, maybe that’s what made me strange.”

  Marianne was getting the feeling that Dolores didn’t often speak about these things – she was speaking rapidly, as though trying to get everything out at once, but with a strange chaos to the words, as though she hadn’t gotten all her ideas in the right order. “Or maybe I was strange already. Broken, they told me. I was broken, in the head. My sister, my own sister said that.”

  “That’s unkind,” Marianne said sharply. “There’s nothing wrong with being a little different, Dolores. People who are different see the world differently. That’s a strength, not a weakness. Don’t let anyone tell you otherwise.”

  “You even sound like her,” Dolores murmured, and a smile crossed her usually reserved face.

  “I know a little bit about being different,” Marianne replied, thinking of her witchcraft, thinking of the looks she got – even in the twenty-first century – from people when she mentioned what she did for a living, or revealed any minor detail of her practice. The best she could hope for was a polite disinterest – the worst… well, her father was a pretty good example. God, he still haunted her, even hundreds of years in the past. “Witchcraft isn’t exactly mainstream, even where I come from...”

  “You mustn’t speak about it,” Dolores said sharply, that urgency rushing into her voice. “You must hide it. From everyone. Promise me, Elena – I mean Marianne. Promise me that you’ll keep it a secret. Please. You must understand the things that can happen – the horrible things that can happen if they find out … find out that you do magic… if they even suspect you of being a witch...”

  “I’ll be careful, Dolores. I promise. But I need to know more about Elena. Is there anyone else I can talk to who knew her?”

  “Everyone knew her,” Dolores said, sounding far away. “Everyone loved her. Such a bright young girl. I —”

  “What about her father?”

  The minute Marianne spoke she knew it was a mistake. Dolores’ whole body froze up and her hands clenched so hard onto the hem of her dress that Marianne heard the thread within the seam give way with a tearing sound. She was silent for a long time, the only noise in the quiet room the crackling of the logs, and Marianne was just about to ask if she was okay – and to take back the question – when she spoke. Her voice sounded so small – so lost.

  “I don’t remember. Sometimes I remember – sometimes I have dreams – awful, awful dreams – I don’t remember. Please, don’t ask me to remember.”

  “I won’t. I’m sorry, Dolores, I won’t.”

  “It’s fine.” She stood up, abruptly, and crossed to the mantelpiece, where there was a little bundle of fabric, and extracted from its interior a needle and thread. Without saying anything, she returned to her seat and started sewing up the hem that she’d torn, eyes focused on her work – it seemed to calm her, that little physical activity.

  Marianne, as full of sympathy as she was of confusion and curiosity, made a note to ask around the castle about Dolores’ past. Clearly, something traumatic had happened – the way she spoke about her daughter in the past tense made that fairly clear, and her refusal to even remember the girl’s father suggested something pretty terrible. If it hadn’t been so important, Marianne would have left it completely alone. But she needed to know why she was here – what had brought her back in time to this strange, foreign land, and why it was continuing to guide her and protect her, translating the language around her, making sure that she found safety and refuge at Clan MacLaren.

  It was no coincidence that the one person that had found her stumbling out of the woods had lost someone who looked just like her. Something was going on here – something of strong cosmic significance. Something that Marianne, a twenty-first century witch, was determined to get to the bottom of. She’d promised to keep her powers secret, that was for sure, but she hadn’t promised not to use them. It was a shame that they were so tech-centric, though. If only she’d had a physical deck of Tarot cards…she’d never gone so long without doing a reading, and her phone was miles and centuries away. Not that it would have done her much good even if she’d been able to bring it back – there weren’t exactly many places to charge a phone in this medieval castle… But all of that could be left as problems to face another day. She’d done enough research for now. Now, she needed her protector to feel safe. She reached across the space between them and squeezed Dolores’s arm comfortingly.

  “Why don’t we play a game? Do you have any cards or anything?” Had cards even been invented yet? God, she should have taken more history electives in college.

  But Dolores’s face had brightened. “Yes! I’ll teach you.”

  She shot to her feet again, first carefully replacing the needle in her sewing kit and disposing of the leftover thread before returning to Marianne with a deck of cards in her hand.

  “You’ll have to teach me, I think the games I know are a little different…”

  Dolores began chattering on about the elaborate rules of a game she knew, but as she turned the cards in her hands over, Marianne’s mouth dropped open. There they were – four suits, ten numbered cards in each suit. Swords, pentacles, wands and cups. The dra
wings weren’t the ones she was used to, but nevertheless, there they were – the suits and numbers of the Tarot. She almost wept for joy as Dolores handed her the Two of Pentacles – a card that spoke of adaptability, of nimble movement. She stared down at it, breathless. Just when she was beginning to feel lost, here the universe was with a reassurance that she’d find everything she needed here. But there was a game to be learned. Marianne leaned in and focused on what Dolores was telling her, feeling fully at home in this strange place for the first time.

  Chapter 7

  That night, she lay awake for a long time. She’d picked up the card game relatively quickly, given its complexities, and though she fully suspected that Dolores was letting her win, they’d had a good time, playing long into the night, talking and laughing as they did. It was surprising how few differences there were, really, between two women from hundreds of years apart. Dolores would tilt her head in confusion at some of Marianne’s more esoteric futuristic references, and if she spoke too quickly, Marianne would lose track of her accent (even her magical guide fell behind sometimes, it seemed) – but aside from that, it was like spending time with an old friend.

  After Dolores went to bed, Marianne flipped through the cards, touching on each one and familiarizing herself with its meaning. It felt good to have the tools of her trade in her hand again, albeit altered, but she didn’t feel the need to do any readings at the moment. There was plenty to ask the cosmos, of course, but first she wanted to get familiar with the castle and the country she was in. The more she found out through mundane means, the sharper the insight her magic would give her – a good witch didn’t use magic until she needed to, after all.

  Yawning, she packed the cards neatly away and slid into her cot, pleased by the way the bed was angled – it meant she could stare into the dying embers of the fire as her mind settled toward sleep. Still, it took a long time to fall asleep. There was something about the silence outside the window – no cars, no traffic, no airplanes overhead – that troubled her, kept her drowsing, but not quite asleep. As she gazed into the embers of the fire, they seemed to warp and shift, pulling her in, sending her out, like waves. They glowed with ghosts of the flames that had been there before, and even when her eyes slid shut, the flames still seemed to flicker against her eyelids…she could almost feel the warmth on her skin, enfolding her like the blanket did with warmth, more warmth, building and intensifying, the heat licking along her limbs – enveloping her – consuming her —