Page 113 of Blood of the Thistle

He didn’t answer, there were no orders to give. They knew what he was after. No words were needed until Raghnall was dead at his feet, when the man who had sold Scottish warriors to English torture had paid for every life lost to that bargain.

The gray horse stumbled on the uneven ground, and Bram saw his opening. A quarter mile, perhaps less. The wind pressed harder against his face, and his destrier tossed his head and snorted. He hauled on the reins, cursing, and felt it then-not just wind, not just weather, but something that made the hair rise on his arms and the back of his neck.

The same wrongness he had felt in York, when Anastasia had appeared before him for the first time.

The same pressure in the air, the sense of something gathering that did not belong to the world he knew, just as when he told he’d to go, that she didn’t belong here.

Bram felt a pressure behind his eyes, subtle as the ache before a storm, but wrong somehow-wrong in a way that made his horse shy again, nearly unseating him. He tightened his grip on the reins and pressed his knees harder against the animal's ribs, urging it faster along the rutted track that passed for a road.

Bram pulled the horse up so sharply that it half-reared, dancing sideways on the track. Behind him, he heard Domnall and the others drawing up, heard the confusion in their voices, but he could not look at them. He was staring east, toward Craig na Coille, toward the sea.

Anastasia.

She was leaving.

Not by choice, perhaps, mayhap not willingly. But the thing that had brought her to him had come to take her away, and if he was not there—

If he was not there, she would simply be gone. As suddenly as she had appeared, as completely, and he would spend the rest of his life wondering if she reached for him in those final moments, if she called his name, wanting to remain after all.

Raghnall was two hundred yards ahead, close enough that Bram could see the hunch of his shoulders, the desperate way he rode his horse.

“Laird?” Domnall again, closer now. “What is it? Why do we stop?”

Bram looked from the fleeing traitor to the eastern sky, where the clouds gathered in a pattern that made no sense, where the wind blew from too many directions at once. He thought of Anastasia standing in his hall, her chin lifted in defiance, her eyes bright with tears she would not shed. He thought of her in his bed, warm and real and his. He thought of her vanishing like morning mist, and the world narrowing to the space she had occupied, empty and absolute.

“Bram—”

“Pursue him if ye will—Hay and nae other,” he said, letting the choice be theirs.

He wheeled the horse. The animal fought him for a moment, still unsettled by the wrongness in the air, but Bram remained determined, pointing it back toward Craig na Coille. Toward the keep. Toward her.

“Laird!” Domnall's voice, shocked and angry. “He's getting away!”

Let him.

He didn’t say it aloud. He had no breath for words, only for driving his heels into the horse’s ribs, for bending low over its neck as the wind—no longer fighting him but shoving—pressed hard at his back.

He would leave the reckoning on the road. Not forever—no. He was still Bram MacCailin, and if there was breath in his body when the world stopped coming apart, he would hunt the traitor down. But not now. Not when the sky was boiling with colors that did not belong to this world, not when he might lose Anastasia. He had to get to her. Every part of him knew it, from the marrow out.

She would go back to her own time, he thought, if he did not make it. She would be lost to him forever, and he would never again hear her quick, sharp laugh or feel the press of her body against his, or watch her mouth form his name with that mixture of exasperation and longing that still seemed impossible, even now. The loss was so sharp it felt like a blade in his gut.

Anastasia first. He needed to get to Anastasia.

“Anastasia!” He roared into the wind.

***

For weeks Anna had wondered if the impossible thing that brought her here might happen again. She had wanted it to happen, had imagined being returned to York and everything she understood, to her parents and Mallory and the life that had vanished in an instant.

Now the possibility terrified her.

Bram was gone. She couldn’t leave. Not now, not with the memory of their argument a raw wound between them. She had to see him one more time.

A sound reached her beneath the strengthening wind.

Hooves.

Anna turned toward the landward side of the keep. For a moment she could hear little more than the wind and the pounding of her own heart, but then it came again, the unmistakable rapid beat of a horse being ridden hard.