Sympathy flooded Molly’s eyes. “’Tis a terrible torment, no’ knowing. If she did survive—where would she be?”
“I know not. But how could she survive so terrible a battle, and she a woman?”
“Did ye no’ survive? And ye a harper!” Molly gave him a wobbly smile. “Ye never know.”
That was the trouble, was it not? Among all the other questions that beset him, Finlay might never know what had become of the woman who’d walked beside him.
The one who held his heart.
*
The winter camedown swift and hard, and Finlay stayed in the little stone cottage with Molly. At first he told himself he would linger only till the weather eased and he might be away. Then he reckoned he stayed to help the old woman with all the difficult chores she performed so arduously. Hauling water up the snowy slope from the burn. Tending the beasts and guarding the roof against the wind.
His body mended and his strength came back. The gouge to his cheek was an ugly thing, but his wild red beard covered most of it. He worked hard through the days and slept well at night, though when the dreams came, they consumed him.
A bright confusion of scenes they were, all jumbled and twisted so he could scarce make sense of them. If they were meant to make sense. And no ordinary dreams, for he inhabited them, walked, breathed, and sang in them. It was as if the wheel of his life spun,giving him random glimpses, and him not knowing where the pieces fit into place.
It came to him slowly over the long months of that winter, came with an otherworldly kind of knowing—that the women he was seeing were all aspects of one. The woman that he loved.
She who stood in the bright sunlight outside the roundhouse. She with the great deerhound at her side and she with the defiant, silver eyes. She who sailed a dragon boat, and she who had walked, bravely, into battle at his side, singing.
The one thing he did not doubt was that he loved her, with a deep and unwavering devotion as fundamental to him as his breath. Where she was, he could not say. Nor did he know if he would ever be with her again in this life. Whether she be alive or dead.
But och, each time he woke from a dream or even when he recalled one—cherishing the thought of her—his heart ached to be at home. At home in her.
Old Mol watched him throughout that winter, glad that he stayed and at the same time worried for him. She proved patient with his silences and willing when he sought to talk the pieces through, weaving the threads of them into something resembling a pattern. She sang with him and laughed with him, and he knew it would be hard to leave her, just as he knew that time would come.
So it must.
It came on a day late in winter when a watery sunshine bloomed, arguing that against all odds spring would arrive. They sat by the fire together, sharing a scant breakfast of oatcakes and weak herb tea, and he recounting a dream he’d had wherein he sailed in a tiny boat far out on the ocean in company with the woman he loved, and a great gray deerhound.
“D’ye think she was yer wife then?” Molly asked.
“Aye, so she must ha’ been.”
“And she is the same woman, ye say, as strode into yon Englishbattle at yer side?”
He smiled at Molly. “I ken it makes nay sense, but aye, ’tis so.”
Molly hesitated. “Ye ken, lad, ye are welcome to stay wi’ me. For good if ye choose.”
“Aye, I do ken that, Mol.” When her name came from his lips, it near sounded likeMa.
“But I ha’ watched ye all this while and I feel there is a place ye need to be. This dream ye keep having”—for he’d had it more than once—“o’ yer lass marching to battle at yer side.”
“Aye?”
“Wha’ is she wearing? Besides the sword, I mean.”
“Why, as I ha’ told, she is dressed like a man entirely. Leggings and a leather jerkin for armor and a cloak over all—”
“A kilt?”
“Aye, so.”
“All the troops among whom ye be walking in this dream—they are kilted also?”
Finlay narrowed his eyes.
