She laughed a little. “You’re a jerk.”
“Aye, I daresay.” He paused. “You are going to have to marry me, you know.”
She pulled back and looked at his filthy, too-thin face. “Am I?”
“I think you’ll go mad without me, actually.”
“That is the single most unromantic proposal I have everheard,” she said, fighting her smile, “following hard on the heels of your other proposal, which wasn’t all that great, either. Actually, I think you’ve brought it up more times than that, but obviously your speeches need some work.”
He wheezed out a laugh, but that seemingly cost him. “Lass,” he managed, “if I offer anything more romantic after what we’ve just been through, I’ll weep.” He took a deep, unsteady breath. “I think I need to go home.”
“I’ll drive you.”
He shook his head. “You truly do not want me in your car, and I’m not being fastidious. I can make it home. You’ll have to stay and tend me round the clock for the saints only know how long, but you’re too altruistic to leave me on my own.”
“Especially after I ventured across centuries to rescue you?”
His smile faded. “Exactly that.” He pushed away from the tree, swayed, then nodded. “Let’s hurry.”
She put her arm around him again, drew his arm across her shoulders while ignoring his grunt of pain, and walked with him past her house and down the road toward his. She looked up at him.
“Shall I distract you with mindless chatter?”
“Please,” he said seriously. “Anything to keep me awake.”
“Then I’ll tell you about the visit on the morning I went back to get you.” She looked at him to make sure he was still conscious and not just sleepwalking, then pressed on. “I had made the connection with your mother and 1372—”
“Is that her birth year?”
“Apparently so,” Emma said, “which is why I think it got to you at Cawdor. Anyway, there I was getting ready to come rescue you and who should show up at my door but Thomas Campbell, collector of all things sharp, with your dagger in his hand. He’s off to Florida, you see, and wanted you to babysit it for him. Imagine my surprise to find a substantially younger version of our good curator acting as an apprentice to the Fergusson clan’s blacksmith.”
He paused, breathed raggedly for a moment or two, then shook his head and walked on. “Storyboard material, that.”
She smiled. “I think I might have a few things to add, definitely. So, I dressed in black, grabbed my go bag, and left thehouse, only to run straight into Patrick MacLeod. He was good enough to walk me to the forest, then watch me shove your dagger into the, well, I guessdooris the only thing to call it. The door opened, I hopped through, then turned around to find both Patrick and the dagger gone. Maybe there’s only one of those blades now, which will make Jamie and his plaid of time happy.”
“Sorry?”
“Jamie has a theory about pulling threads out of the fabric of time,” she said. “He says it’s bad. Messes up the pattern.”
He nodded, but his breathing was very ragged. She understood, actually. They walked in silence almost all the way to his house before he stopped, breathed for a moment or two, then looked at her.
“I wonder if the gate is closed.”
She started to answer, then realized that she should have been paying attention to their surroundings, not trying to distract Nathaniel with conversation. She looked at him, then ducked under his arm and drew the dagger from her boot at the same time.
Gerald MacLeod stood there in a worn, medieval plaid, a sword bare in his hand. He looked at her, then laughed shortly.
“You can’t be serious,” he said contemptuously. “You?You think you’re going to fightme? With that pitiful little dagger?”
“Emma.”
Emma looked to her right to find Patrick MacLeod standing there. He flipped a long dirk toward her. She caught it, flung off the sheath, then realized what she was holding.
Nathaniel’s medieval dagger. Well, the incarnation of it that resided most of the time in Thomas Campbell’s glass case. She didn’t feel ill, which she thought might be a good sign.
She glanced at Nathaniel to see if he had a different opinion, only to find him leaning back against the railing of his porch.Leaningwas probably the wrong word for it. He was swaying so badly, she thought he might be on the verge of passing out, but he was looking at Patrick MacLeod sternly.
“I need a sword,” he wheezed.
