Chapter 9
Lily was determined to keep up. If not for the boots that Hamish had provided for her, her feet would have been soaked through and freezing by now. As it was, the hem of her dress and cloak were already wet with snow and the wind sent it eddying so that it stung her face and gathered in her hair.
But she wasn’t about to let the weather dampen her mood. Since waking up this morning, she’d felt better than she had since she’d ended up in this crazy time. She wasn’t sure why. Perhaps it was the beautiful sight of the snow-covered landscape, perhaps it was the thought that they might make it to Edinburgh today and bring her one step closer to getting home.
Or perhaps it was the red-haired man striding in front of her.
She halted and Oskar carried on walking a few paces before realizing she’d stopped. He turned and looked back. “What is it?”
“Do we have to go so fast?” she asked, putting her hands on her hips. “This is like doing cross-country at school!”
“I thought ye wanted to get to Edinburgh.”
“I do, but if we keep up this pace, you’ll end up carrying me!”
His eyebrows rose and a flicker of something passed across his face. Amusement? “Well, if ye insist, lass. I’m already a little burdened but I’ll do my best.”
“Not funny,” she said, jabbing a finger at him. “The snow is making this hard going that’s all.”
That wasn’t the whole truth. Her back was already aching and she had a stabbing pain going down the back of one leg. She’d neglected to do her morning exercises, an oversight she would remedy as soon as they stopped for a rest.
Oskar sighed and put down their bags. Crossing to a nearby tree, he reached up and grabbed one of the branches and shook the snow off it. Appraising it critically, he drew his sword and chopped it down then stripped the side branches and shortened it a little before bringing the pole over to Lily and holding it out.
“Here. That should help.”
Lily took the staff, a little surprised. “Oh. Thanks.”
“Anything to stop yer complaining.”
He walked off. Taking hold of her walking staff and frowning at Oskar’s retreating back, she set out after him. The staff did make walking much easier and she considered asking him to cut her another so she could use two of them like a cross-country skier but didn’t want to make them stop again.
So instead, she studied the landscape as they walked. It was breathtakingly beautiful. From the road along the escarpment the land fell away in a series of ridges and folds, all carpeted in a blanket of white. Here and there, stands of tall fir trees poked up from the snow, their boughs heavily laden. In the distance, something sparkled and Lily made out the surface of a frozen loch, looking like a sheet of polished glass.
She had spent the winters of her youth in landscapes like this—her parents had been skiing instructors and taken her to most of the ski resorts of Europe at one time or another. A pang of longing swept through her so strongly that she gasped. Those days seemed so distant it was almost like they’d happened to another person. Once, landscapes like this had brought her a sense of freedom, a sense that anything was possible, that nothing was beyond her grasp if she could only see what lay beyond the next horizon.
But the next horizon hadn’t brought what she thought it would.
The screech of tires. The blare of a siren. The beep beep beep of a ventilator.
“Lily?”
She looked up. She hadn’t realized she’d stopped walking or that she was staring, unseeing, at the ground by her feet. Oskar was looking back at her with a concerned look on his face.
“Sorry,” she said, waving a hand. “I was daydreaming.”
