They grinned at each other. “Of course!” Thomas said enthusiastically. “Where would ye like to go?”
“I’d like to see the river.”
“This way then!” Clyde said brightly. “It’s a grand day for exploring, if I do say so myself.”
Abi followed them through the castle. They seemed mightily relieved that she was up and about and she found their chatter about inane things—such as what cook was planning for the evening meal, who had been caught sneaking ale from the cellar, and whether the unseasonably warm weather would last, oddly soothing.
People would gossip no matter what the era. It gave her a fleeting sense of normality.
They crossed the courtyard and exited through the gates with no problem and halted, gazing out over the valley. Many people with carts traversed the muddy stretch of river bank that acted as a road. The locals were dressed in plain brown smocks with a tartan plaid over the top. Most were unwashed and sported long hair and beards. Only those dressed as warriors bore any kind of ornamentation and this was usually just a weapons belt strapped around their waists with a brass buckle.
Abi tried not to stare, tried to appear as if this was all perfectly normal for her, tried to act as if she wasn’t terrified by it all.
Oh god, she thought.I really, really need to get home.
And that started by figuring out exactly where she was. If she’d traveled through time rather than through space, then she ought to be roughly in the same area as she had back in the twenty-first century. Everything would look different, of course, with no shops, roads, cars and the things she usually took for granted. But the landscape should be the same. Even several hundred years wasn’t long enough to erode hillsides, drain lochs or shift the course of rivers. If she could figure out where she was, she could figure out a way to get back to where she needed to be.
They began walking, and she paced along between Thomas and Clyde as the youths called greetings to people they knew and filled her in on the local gossip.
“That’s Davey Smith,” Clyde said. “Everyone reckons he’s going to ask Rosie Mulligan to marry him. He’s daft if he does though, because everyone knows she’s been fooling around with Stuart Ramsey.”
“Clyde!” Thomas said. “That’s unfair! She only went to the summer dance with Stuart. It doesnae mean aught!”
Abi listened with half an ear. She was studying the river valley, trying to figure out if she’d been here in the twenty-first century. She didn’t recognize any of it and she hadn’t driven along any valleys with a river running through it.
“Where is Kalmack Castle from here?” she asked the youths.
They stopped their bickering and looked at her. “Kalmack Castle? Why would ye wish to know that?” Thomas shivered. “Horrible, dank place. I had to run some messages there for Laird Campbell once, but that was when it was in our hands. Heaven alone knows what kind of state it’s in now the Muirs have taken it back.”
“Just trying to get my bearings.”
Thomas jutted his chin. “It’s over yonder. About twenty miles to the north.”
Okay. So she’d have to find some way to travel twenty miles north. Progress.
“And have you ever heard of a place called Tarness? Up by the coast.”
Both youths shook their head. Right. So Tarness maybe didn’t yet exist.
“How about a series of broken hills that look like a sleeping dragon?” she asked, remembering the ridge she driven along.
Thomas nodded. “Ye mean Greenstone Ridge? Aye, of course we know it! Everyone around here knows that place. Ye dinna want to go there though.”
“Oh? Why not?”
“It’s a Fae place. Wicked Fae who will whisk ye away to their world before ye can blink. Then ye’ll forget all about those ye’ve left behind and dwell with the Fae forever.”
Clyde snorted. “Ye’ve spent too long listening to yer old nan! They’re tales to frighten bairns, naught more!”
“Oh, is that right? Only the other day some of the scouts came in saying they saw strange lights on the ridge and Drossy McCormack swears he saw an old woman walking through the woods who turned into a deer!”
“Drossy McCormack is as daft as ye are!”
The two fell into arguing and Abi tried to drown out their quarrelling. An old woman who turned into a deer? Fae who whisked people away to other worlds? It was superstitious nonsense of the kind she’d expect from medieval people who knew no better. So why did it unsettle her so? Why did it send a creeping sense of dread right through her?
She shook herself and forced herself to concentrate on what mattered. The broken ridge was nearby which meant shewasstill in the same area, if not in the same time. Therefore, if she could revisit Kalmack Castle, figure out where the portal lay and walk back through it, it should bring her out exactly where she left.
Easy peasy.
