Nessa felt a strange excitement run through her. Sheknewhim! Well, she didn’tknowhim, justofhim. And he looked very little like the rough sketches in the books and scrolls.Thiswas the man who single-handedly reunited the Pictish front against the Anglo-Saxons and freed his people from oppression and tyranny. And this was the man (her family legend claimed) had given her ancestors the scrolls to keep. For a moment she was awe-struck. And dumb-struck too. This King had made up a good part of the stories and fantasies of her childhood. And, ahhm…some of her more adult fantasies as a woman. What could she say? She was drawn to hot-blooded alphas, and the stories about Bridei had always intrigued her. She could still see the book in her mind’s eye, the one she’d gone back to again and again…
She opened the old wooden trunk and lifted out the book on the top. The original scrolls had long since crumbled to dust, but generations before her had faithfully copied and re-copied the words they held. The book on top was her favorite, the story of King Bridei III and his bold campaign to reunite the lands of his grandfather under one rule and free his people once and for all.
It irritated her to no end that King Bridei had single-handedly saved his people from domination by the Anglo-Saxons, and yet barely anyone even remembered his name. Except for her, of course. He had led his Pictish army against the Saxons in the battle of Nechtansmere, and it had been a literal massacre, ending with the death of King Ecgfrith, and the death or enslavement of all the remaining Northumbrian Anglo-Saxons in Pictland. If Bridei hadn’t won, the Scotland of present day would almost certainly not exist, and instead all of Britain would be English. Yet people were all over William Wallace and Robert the Bruce asthebe-all-end-all legendary heroes of Scotland. What about the man who had made Scotland possible? She had always felt that he should have gotten more recognition.
“Sometimes, when the night is just right, people have seen ghostly warriors on Dunnichen Hill, dressed in Pictish clothing, carrying torches, searching in the darkness for their dead.” Her grandmother had told her the story a hundred times or more, and she’d gone there, to Dunnichen Hill, more than once, trying to see the vision for herself. Sadly, she never had.
Beside her, Angus let out a sudden wail, bringing her wandering mind hurtling back to the present.
“No! No nono! We’re too early by more thanthree hundredyears! We have to go back Nessa, and try again. How could I have been this far off? The directions were exact mathematical equations!Exactlywhat the voices said, I wrote it downverycarefully.” He took her arm and tried to pull her towards the entrance to the well. Oh,nowhe wanted to go home!
Bridei stopped them short by grabbing Angus’s shirt and yanking him back, bringing Nessa tumbling with him.
“You arenotfree to leave.”
Angus gasped and looked around uneasily, apparently actually worried for the first time since they’d so unceremoniously arrived in what she now knew was seventh century Pictland. She glared at him. Great,nowhe gets it!
Bridei abruptly let go of Angus, who slumped to his knees, looking up at the King with his mouth gaping open. Nessa’s first instinct was to comfort and protect her uncle, but Bridei had turned his full attention to her, stepping closer and holding her still with a menacing look. He was close enough that she had to look up at him, since he was so much taller. Her heart beat faster with his nearness, and she felt slightly dizzy. She wanted to run away, but she also inexplicably wanted to lean closer, as if he held a dark power that drew her. She could smell the sun-warm musk of his skin.
“I ask you again, how did you come to be in the well, within the walls of this fortress?” He demanded, more than asked, his lips curling slightly. Not a smile, but a cold determination to get what he wanted.Her answer. The truth.
But she still didn’t have an answer, at least not one she could tell him. What could she possibly say?Gee, I don’t know.Magic?Quantum physics? A wrinkle in time? Are wormholes real?
“I honestly don’t know”, she told him, because she honestly didn’t. “The last thing I remember I was on top of a hill.” A breeze had picked up, coming in from the sea, and she began to shiver in her wet clothes, and with the undeniably potent combination of delayed shock, ignored terror and damp cold, her teeth began to chatter. “I think…I think we fell through, somehow.”
“You fell through a hill?” He crossed his arms over his chest again. Those muscles bulged once more. She wanted to touch them to see if they were as solid as they looked. Great, now she must be delirious too. She wished he wasn’t standing so close. She couldn’t think.
Howhadthey gotten here? She knew now that she should have paid more attention to her uncle’s ramblings, but she had been so busy with the farm, and taking care of Gram, then—more recently—visiting her in the nursing home every chance she got. As it was, she’d barely had any time to spend with Nathan. As long as Angus kept himself busy and out of trouble, she’d let him do whatever he liked.
But she hadn’t believed for a second that travel through time was possible, and she’d told him so. Nicely, of course…
“Of course it’s possible”, Angus had said patiently. “You just haven’t kept up with the latest in quantum physics. Time is more of a kind of fabric in another dimension. It’s not a straight line. Time passing in a forward motion is just an illusion created by the mind. Things that we think happened in the past are really still happening…sometime else. Which is how I’m going to stop it.”
“Stop what?” she had asked.
“The year 839. That’s when the Vikings wiped out the last of the Pict royal family. Then that blasted King of the Gaels of Dál Riata took over.”
“Kenneth MacAlpine?”
“Exactly! And our people were conquered. They all but disappeared!”
“So you want to go back in time and, what? Stop the Vikings? All by yourself? Wouldn’t that be a tad bit dangerous?” She had been humoring him, as if he were a child with an overactive imagination.
“I have a plan.”
And hehadhad a plan, just a badly flawed one. One could never blithely barge into another time and expect the shit tonothit the fan, even with the best laid plan ever. She had to believe that he really knew how to get them home again, just as soon as they could slip away. But for now, staying alive was her top priority. Good thing she was of the hearty country-lass persuasion and not some shrinking city violet. She figured she could survive here just as easily as she did in the Highlands of the 21stcentury. And having led an unusual life and come from an unusual family gave her a definite advantage. Aye, it shocked her that she had apparently travelled through time, but not nearly as much as it might have.
“Petra!” the King called out, his gaze staying locked on Nessa, although he thankfully stepped away a few paces. She felt as if she could breathe again. He was still studying her with those dark eyes, and for a moment she swore he could see right into her soul. A chill ran up her spine, just before a sturdy woman of perhaps fifty stepped forward from the crowd.Petra, she presumed.
The King placed a finger under the woman’s chin and tilted her face up to meet his as he spoke to her. His tone, though, was gentle, his gaze warm; respectful even.
“Ourguestsneed dry clothing. And perhaps a meal. Fife is a great distance, and I’m certain they must be hungry.”
His eyes locked on Nessa’s once again, hard and unyielding. Every bit of his body language told her that he was in control. That she was at his mercy. That he could do anything he wanted with her.
“Once they are comfortable, separate them. I want to question them individually.”
Individually? Oh no…not good. Angus would have them both on the chopping block in no time flat. Who knew what he might say? You couldn’t just march into another time and announce you were from the future. That was how people got burned at the stake, or locked up in a dungeon. Maybe once in a great while they might get lucky and be revered as a deity, but what were the odds? Had anyone even travelled back in time before?Were they the first?
