“It didn’t hurt,” Ivy whispered in a small voice.
“You’re fine. You’re probably not in labor,” Claire decided. But the next few minutes would tell.
Ivy’s eyes went wide. “How can you say that? You said you don’t even have kids!”
“I don’t,” Claire admitted, “but I’m a nurse. A trauma nurse.”
The way Ivy sagged with relief, nearly crying, was almost comical. “Those are Braxton-Hicks contractions,” she said, almost certain of it. “Practice rounds. Annoying, but harmless. You’re not going into labor. Not yet.”
The look on Ivy’s face—shaky laughter and desperate gratitude—was almost enough to thaw the hard knot in Claire’s chest. Almost.
“Maybe,” Claire said, now the breathless one, “if what you say is true, maybe I was—brought here? Sent here?—for a reason.”
Ivy stared at her, her mouth falling open.
And damn her for looking as if she hoped it were true.
***
The next few days slipped by uneventfully—as much as possible given her circumstance as a whole. Monotonous, yes, but each one managed to test and wear on Claire’s stubborn disbelief. At first she clung to the idea that Ivy was lying—and it drove her nuts that she couldn’t imagine a reason why—or that she was simply deranged. As the days passed, it became harder to deny what her eyes and ears kept showing her. The clothes, the speech, soldiers in medieval helmets carrying medieval weapons, walking the battlements, the lack of even the smallest modern convenience... what else was she supposed to think but what Ivy had put into her mind?
Of course, it unsettled her—more than that, obviously. At times, she was beside herself, and became someone she didn’t know, not even in the unhappiest moments living in her husband’s shadow. Claire wasn’t the type to cling, not to Jason even, but she found herself shadowing Ivy whenever she could, afraid to be alone.
Thankfully, Ivy didn’t seem to mind. If anything, she seemed pleased with the company, glad to have someone who understood her words without translation, even if Claire’s attitude toward Ivy swung almost hourly, shifting from animosity to wary curiosity to an anxious dependence she really hated.
Ivy explained what she had learned in her short time here at Caeravorn. A woman named Mòrag oversaw the kitchens and the midwife was Ruth; the steward—the administer of the keep, Ivy explained—was Seoras; she advised which MacKinlay men-at-arms were good, and which were best avoided. Ivy admitted she hadn’t been at Caeravorn long enough to know too much about the Kerr men-at-arms. Claire listened, half comforted by the order in Ivy’s explanations, by knowledge itself, and half discouraged by the realization that she was listening as though she might need to know these things herself.
At night, when the shadows pressed too close, Claire told herself it was only temporary. Somehow she’d wake up again, back in her own bed, in her own time. But during the day, with Ivy at her side, she started to wonder if it was wiser to stop fighting the impossible and start learning how to live with it.
Chapter Five
Memory, Brought to Life
––––––––
Day after day the Kerrs and MacKinlays struck at the English column, with arrows sent down from ridges, quick raids at night, and ambushes that left bloody and broken bodies littering the heather. For every man they cut down, a hundred more trudged on. In the end, despite all their constant harrying, the invaders reached Urquhart.
Nonetheless, no one would have called it defeat. The English moved slower now in deference to those who’d been but wounded and not slain outright, their numbers fewer if only by a marginal degree, and their wagons considerably lighter. But it was no victory either, naught but small gains, never enough to satisfy.
At last, with the English pressing no farther north, and after waiting three days to see if the relieved garrison would move out—they did not, and likely would not until they were sure the Scots had abandoned the vicinity of Urquhart—Alaric and Ciaran turned their men back toward Caeravorn. Two dozen days they had been gone, through rain-slick crags and mire that swallowed hooves to the fetlocks, tempers worn raw by sodden cloaks and plaids, run-down horses, and broken axles. Men stumbled, muttered, and rose each dawn more miserable than the last. They had their own injuries to mind, not inconsequential given the almost-daily attacks on their foe. More than once Ciaran had feared half the wounded would never see the keep again.
When Caeravorn came into view, relief rippled through the ranks, and those who could, ran or urged their steeds to greaterspeed. Voices called down a welcome from the battlements as Ciaran approached, and the portcullis clanked upward with a groan. Only a few dozen rode into the bailey behind Ciaran’s destrier, others already home in the village, and a large part setting up an encampment in the east meadow, where soft earth and grass were more plentiful than rock.
Though bone-weary and knowing aches and pains he’d never have imagined a decade ago, still Ciaran did not falter when he swung from the saddle and handed off the reins to a stablehand. In his periphery, he caught sight of Alaric moving directly to an anxiously waiting Ivy. Alaric engulfed her in a bear-like embrace.
So that’s that, Ciaran thought, inexplicably disgruntled.
He cleared his throat and spat to the side as he strode across the bailey, the dust of the road still clinging to him.
And then he lifted his gaze to the door of the hall.
A woman stood there, pressed against the stone to the side of the door, unmoving, unblinking even, as if she might make herself invisible.
It was nigh impossible that he’d not have noticedher.
Ciaran didn’t stop dead, but his stride faltered. For a fleeting moment, the noise of the yard faded to nothing.
Of course, he hadn’t forgotten about her. He simply didn’t expect that she would still be here at Caeravorn upon his return. He couldn’t honestly say if, over the past three and a half weeks, he’d wished that she might be.
