Page 76 of Blood of the Thistle

It would have been dangerously easy to forget.

But she couldn’t. She remembered rain striking the leaves overhead, thunder rolling somewhere beyond the trees, and Bram’s voice telling her with devastating ease, I’ve kissed many a lass.

The warmth inside her cooled.

Anastasia reached for the bread.

Bram watched her for another moment, perhaps noticing the change, but said nothing and reached for his cup.

***

Long after the noise of the great hall had faded beneath the floors below and Craig na Coille settled into the quieter sounds of night, Anna lay awake beneath the thick wool blankets of a bed more comfortable than anything she had known for nearly two weeks and discovered, somewhat bitterly, that comfort was not necessarily conducive to peace.

The chamber remained pleasantly warm from the fire that had burned throughout the evening, though the flames had fallen now to a dull orange glow behind the iron grate. A narrow shaft of moonlight slipped through the unshuttered portion of the window and stretched across the stone floor, illuminating the heavy wooden chest at the foot of the bed and the chair upon which someone had carefully folded the clothing she’d worn into Craig na Coille. Her ruined skirt, T-shirt, and short denim jacket looked impossibly foreign sitting there, surrounded by rough stone walls and furniture made by hands that had lived seven hundred years before her own birth. Even her espadrilles, discarded beside the chair, seemed absurd.

She thought she’d have fallen asleep the instant her head touched the pillow; instead, for the first time since she’d arrived in 1305, there was nothing to fear, nothing to worry over. No one was chasing her, she wasn’t cold, and she didn’t have to devote every thought to simply making it through the next several hours.

Anastasia rolled onto her back and stared at the darkened ceiling, not-so-idly wondering how many spiders lived up there at the same time she considered that she’d now spent two weeks in this century. The very idea no longer carried the same impossible disbelief it once had. She didn’t need another medieval house, another armed soldier or another inexplicable conversation about Wallace to convince her. She’d crossed whatever argument she’d once maintained with herself and come out on the other side knowing, however absurdly, that Bram had been telling the truth about the year from the beginning.

And so, with mere survival no longer a concern, the next immediate consideration was: how did she get back?

Until tonight, she hadn’t truly allowed herself to imagine forever—as in, stuck forever in this century. Even after breaking down on the road and finally admitting that she might never see her parents or sister again, some stubborn part of her had still assumed there must be an answer she simply hadn’t found yet. They’d been moving continuously, and movement had created its own illusion of progress. As long as she and Bram were traveling toward something, she’d been able to pretend she was eventually going to find whatever she needed.

But now they’d arrived, and yet Craig na Coille had been Bram’s destination. It offered no answers for her.

She wondered if enough time passed in her own century for her parents to understand that something terrible had happened. Or had only minutes passed there while weeks unfolded here? She had no idea how time worked in a situation like this. She pictured her mother, father, and sister worried sick, calling hospitals all over England, and surely having filed a report with the police in York. Good Lord, they must be beside themselves if time was the same here as there, as she was one week overdue.

The first tears came as she turned onto her side, curling into herself. She wiped them away with the heel of her hand, angry at the tears and at the memory of the evening. How could she feel so lost and still be so distracted by the sight of him, clean-shaven and solid in the firelight?

God! And she’d stared so openly—so childishly!—at him, hadn’t been able to help herself.

Idiot.

How many times did she have to be humiliated by the same man before she developed a survival instinct?

A sadness settled over her with a different weight now that she was alone, since she wasn’t sure how she was supposed to stop wanting him merely because she’d learned he didn’t want her in the same way.

What if she really was stranded here all the rest of her life? What if she spent the rest of her life at Craig na Coille—or somewhere else in this century—having to watch Bram go on with his?

Her stomach clenched at the thought. She groaned aloud, throwing herself onto her other side as if she could escape the image.

She sighed, pressing her face into the unfamiliar pillow. One day at Craig na Coille had been overwhelming. The thought of a lifetime of them was a weight she couldn’t yet bear.

She sighed then, recalling that dinner had at least offered one encouraging discovery, that Etta was lovely.

At perhaps twenty years old, she possessed much of her mother’s dark coloring and almost none of her reserve. Once Bram had seated Anastasia at the high table, Etta had spent much of supper attempting to learn everything about her without quite making the questions feel like an interrogation as her mother had. Her English was good, though colored heavily by the same thick accent that shaped Bram’s speech, and whenever Anna had failed to understand a word, Etta simply tried another or repeated herself rather than laughing at her.

Etta had been fascinated by Anna’s blonde hair, though not offensively so.

“ʼTis truly that color?” she’d asked at one point.

Anna had laughed. “Yep. Always has been.” Or something close to it, anyway. If she were stuck here too long, the summer highlights she’d had done before her vacation would fade or grow out, but she was still a blonde in essence.

Etta had grinned. “I’ve a cousin whose hair was near white as a bairn, but it darkened before she reached ten years.”

Etta had also quietly identified food whenever Anastasia hesitated over something unfamiliar, never making a spectacle of the fact that their guest apparently couldn’t recognize half the things placed before her. She’d even demonstrated, without comment, how to eat without the benefit of utensils, since there were none set at the table. A knife had been provided—an ‘eating knife’, Etta had called it when she’d requested one from a serving girl.

Her questions had been plentiful, certainly, but innocent enough.