Relief flashed across her face, making her eyes light up in a way that made Magnus’s chest tighten. “You’ll take me home?”
“Aye, it’s the least I can do. Where do ye make yer home?”
She waved a hand into the darkness. “Alness.”
“Alness? Is that the name of a manor house?”
“A manor house?” she asked, scrunching up her nose. “It’s a town about ten miles that way. I have an apartment in that new development next to the shopping center.”
“Shopping center? What’s that? A keep of some kind?”
“Eh? It’s exactly what I said. You know: shops, restaurants, cinema. I work in the bank there, so my apartment is pretty convenient.”
Now she had really lost him. He was a man of the world, but these expressions were entirely outside his understanding. Unless...unless...No. He wouldnotgo there.
“Are you seriously telling me you don’t know what a shopping center is?” she asked, her tone full of disbelief.
He shook his head. “I do not.”
She rolled her eyes and muttered something about being stuck with a madman. Magnus chewed the inside of his cheek. Shopping center. Restaurant. Cinema. He knew none of these words. Could she really be... No, he couldn’t even think it.
“Magnus?”
He blinked, coming out of his thoughts. “Aye?”
“Why are you staring at me like that?”
“My apologies, lass,” he said. “I...It’s just that...”
He looked at her, really looked at her. The fabric of her clothes was unfamiliar, and so was the cut. Her hair was loose and wild, not elaborately styled as a noblewoman’s would be.Her speech was so odd he sometimes had difficulty understanding her—and it wasn’t just because she was English.
“Ye are not from here, are ye?” he asked slowly.
She huffed. “I told you, I’m from Alness.”
“No,” he said quietly. That dark suspicion reared its head again, and this time it would not be ignored. “Ye are not from Alness. Not from Scotland. Not from this time.”
“Eh? What does that mean?”
“I mean...” He hesitated, unsure of how to phrase it. This was all new territory for him, too. “I think ye might have...traveled through time, lass. I think ye may have come from the future.”
Isabelle stared at him for a second and then threw her head back and laughed. “Oh, is that what’s happened? Silly me. That explains everything!”
“I know it sounds incredible,” he said. “In fact, I can hardly believe it myself. But nothing else makes any sense. I dinna know what a shopping center is, or a cinema, or the police, or some of the other outlandish things ye’ve mentioned because they dinna exist here, in my time.”
Her laughter died away and she stared at him, her eyes wide and full of confusion. “Your time?” she echoed.
“Aye.Thistime. The Year of Our Lord 1478.”
The silence that followed was deafening.
“I...I don’t...” Isabelle stuttered, her face paling. “This must be a joke!”
Snaffles, sensing her distress, trotted over to his mistress and leaned reassuringly against her, almost knocking her over in the process.
Isabelle looked at Magnus, then at their surroundings—the rolling moors and jagged ridges, the quiet solitude of the landscape, the absence of civilization. She seemed to crumble in upon herself. “That’s impossible...This is the twenty-first century, not the fifteenth. I can’t have traveled back in time.”
“Impossible or not, it is the truth,” Magnus replied gently.
