That was in the present day.
Or, rather, in the future. He suppressed the urge to scratch his head over what was when. There were times he honestly had trouble keeping his location straight.
His location at present—in the past, of course—was Scotland during the glorious Year of Our Lord’s Grace 1387, and his persona was medieval bastard. He was extremely thankful that Malcolm MacLeod had been so indiscreet about his liaisons, for it provided him with a perfect cover story. That he needed a cover story was something that left him wanting to find something very strong to drink if he thought about it too long.
Then again, the situation on a fundamental level was absolutely barking. It was certainly nothing he’d ever expected to have happen to him, partly because he had never considered the possibility of the same. Time travel? Medieval clansmen with his death on their minds?
Ridiculous.
Yet there he’d been one pleasant afternoon, enjoying a round of golf with his father and his sire’s younger brother ata small, private tournament, wagering substantial sums of money in an effort to distract his relatives and himself from his own mother’s untimely death, when a spot of inclement weather had sent him and his uncle scampering for cover in a handy bit of forest.
That was when things had gone awry.
He didn’t like to think about the handful of days that had followed. Apparently one did not present himself at the keep of the laird of the clan MacLeod in 1382 without a damned good reason as to why he found himself there. He’d thought his subsequent capture and deposit into the dungeon had been a practical joke at first, but that had only lasted a few hours before he’d realized that he had fallen down some sort of rabbit hole to another world entirely. He’d seen his share of dungeons, true, having indulged his curiosity for medieval things fairly regularly over the course of his life, but he’d never seen one that had been as full of vermin and muck as the place he and his uncle had been tossed.
He’d honestly thought he would never see daylight again.
He and his uncle John had been hauled out of that hellhole eventually, though, and he had immediately trotted out a tale that would have made his most despised medieval literature tutor weep with joy. He had styled himself a lesser of the bastards sired by the laird himself, and identified his companion, Master John, as a very pious priest who had been so overcome by the opulence of the castle’s dungeon that he had been rendered mute. He supposed he had been extremely fortunate that Laird Malcolm’s roaming habits had unwittingly furnished him with details for a tale that had satisfied most everyone within earshot.
His escape from that alternate, medieval reality had been as abrupt as his entrance and just as inexplicable. He’d eventually staggered out of that Highland forest without his uncle because he hadn’t been able to talk the fool into coming with him. That was perhaps a tale better thought on at a different time.
He’d run all the way back to his rental cottage, found himself proper clothes, then checked his phone only to find that his father had been taken to hospital in Inverness. He’d arrived there in time to watch his father clutch his chest a final time, then shuffle off this mortal coil.
He’d been devastated.
He’d gone through the motions of grieving, burying, and settling affairs. He’d thought his inadvertent trip to the past had been an aberration, something he could chalk up to bad luck and too much whisky.
He had quickly discovered how wrong he’d been.
That had been five years ago. He was currently older, wiser, and thoroughly and unwillingly fluent in medieval Gaelic. He had absolutely no idea how that improved his life in modern-day Scotland, but he supposed it might come in handy at some point. It certainly came in useful in the past, which was currently his present.
He had another long drink of ale. It seemed the very least he could do.
He looked around the hall at present for any stray, inebriated priests, but his uncle was nowhere to be found. John was a mystery. He had indeed flirted with the idea of being a vicar in the twenty-first century, but he had also been a compulsive gambler, an obsessive golfer, and a lover of all sorts of drink. His wife was gone and his children off and grown. Perhaps in the end it didn’t matter to the man where he found himself, though Nathaniel suspected his uncle missed the links. No amount of trying to convince him to come back to the future had swayed him, so Nathaniel had left him where he was and watched over him as often as time permitted.
As for himself, the traveling back and forth at the whims of a pocket watch–clutching worker of destiny—perhaps it was Father Time with his hand on the wheel, as it were—was starting to wear on his patience, but he was still trying to work that out. When he spent at least half of his life with a sword in his hands, trying to keep his head on his shoulders and his belly unpierced by medieval steel, he tended to look at the viscidities of modern life with a bit more who-gives-a-damn than he might have otherwise.
It was a bit like a chess game, he had decided. He wasn’t unaccustomed to games of strategy when it came to his business so he understood the principles well enough, but he didn’t necessarily care for them in his private life. His time in the past, he had come to believe, was governed by the accomplishment of something that only he could see to. Once that deed had been done for that particular foray into a time not his own,he was always free to go home until called for again. Why there wasn’t another bloody MacLeod clansman capable of doing what he did, he couldn’t have said.
It was just so damned gratifying to be needed.
“Weel, let’s be about it then,” Lachlan said, setting his cup on the floor and stretching his hands over his head. He grinned evilly at Nathaniel. “Best blend into the forest as usual, aye?”
“As you say,” Nathaniel agreed.
If there was anything he was a master at, it was blending in. He supposed he’d learned the art early on thanks to his parents, both of whom had perfected the skill of being whatever they’d needed to be at the time to appease family and friends, then carrying on with their own lives when alone. He had honestly never thought the skill would be so useful to him, but life was, as he tended to admit after a pint or two, extremely strange.
After all, it wasn’t every day that a man could find himself worrying about where his most volatile stocks would land before market close in the morning, then find himself using a medieval broadsword to defend an equally medieval keep later on that afternoon.
“Those bloody Fergussons,” Angus complained. “Why are there always so many of them?”
“’Tis a good thing,” Lachlan said, slapping his cousin on his back. “What would we do else?”
“Wench ourselves to death?” Angus suggested.
Nathaniel refrained from comment lest Angus think following in his sire’s thoroughly indiscreet footsteps was a good idea. He left the keep with the rest of the rabble, but had to admit Angus had a point. It was amazing how those damned Fergussons could lose so many men yet still have so many more to bring to any given skirmish. He had begun to suspect they abducted unwary travelers on a regular basis and gang-pressed them into service.
If the battle began with a prayer offered by Nathaniel’s uncle, well, he wasn’t going to argue. He didn’t consider himself particularly religious, but he wasn’t opposed to a few prayers offered on his behalf. The truth was, as much as he had grown fond of the men he now called cousins, he didn’t fancy himself dying on a medieval battlefield whilst defending them.
