"I don’t know where it was. It was dark. He took the staff from me and then he spoke to me."
"What did he say?"
"He told me I’m the key to the Highlands."
"The key to the Highlands? What does that mean?"
"I don’t know. He didn’t say. He just said I had to go with you and it would all become clear soon enough."
Lennox shook his head.
"You don’t believe me?"
"I ken you believe you saw Oswin."
"But you don’t think I really did?"
He heard a twig snap in the distance. "Let's get out of here," he said. "While we still can."
He walked out of the clearing and Rose followed. Behind them the altar thrummed with power.
11
The walk out of the wood took far longer than the walk into it. Without their horse and with no staff to guide them, it was dark before Rose once again saw fields and pasture.
Rose spent most of the time it took in silence, lost in thought. Was she stuck in the past forever? She wasn't sure why she'd ever expected the plan to work. Why had she been given the key.
She wanted, like Lennox, to believe it had been a hallucination. That would have been a neat explanation if not for the silver key she’d been given. Was it like the one she’d used at the castle, the one that had brought her back in time? Was it the one she’d lost?
She tried to remember the stories her mother had told her, the ones she had used to create her stories. They had become blurred in her mind, like trying to see people through thick fog. All she could remember was that the silver keys were important but she had no memory of why.
The rain slowed and then stopped as they walked, the storm dying away as quickly as it had come.
Lennox's didn’t look back at her. Was he angry that it hadn't worked? He'd sounded angry when she fell on him.
Something had happened when the staff touched the altar, just not the something she was expecting. She had been on a fairground ride once. The only time.
Hooked into a harness when the lever was pulled, she had shot upward into the sky at the end of a set of bungee ropes, stomach lurching into her mouth, world spinning far below her as she screamed at the shock of the sudden movement, the lack of control.
It had been like that at the altar. The thunder boomed, and she had been wrenched upward without any warning. Then just as she was about to start screaming, she was in the darkness with Oswin beckoning her over. He radiated calm and her fears vanished in an instant.
"They key," he said, pressing it into her hand. "You are the key."
All too soon she was flying downward again, bumping into Lennox and sending him crashing to the ground.
"What's that?" she asked, pointing at something moving in front of them.
"The road we need to take," Lennox replied. "And something on it. Wait here."
He left her alone, his sword drawn as he silently crept forward to see what was making that strange scraping sound. "It’s all right," he shouted. "Come here."
She saw more than she wanted to when she reached him. There was a broken carriage, the wheel snapped in half. Dead bodies lay strewn around. Too many to take in.
"It's the men from the clearing," Lennox said, stroking a horse which was trying to detach itself from the rope holding it to the stricken carriage. The sound was the horse scraping its hooves on the road, gouging deep ruts into the dirt beneath it.
"Dead?" Rose replied, glancing around her. "All of them?" She had never seen dead bodies before and the sight was overwhelming. There was a taste of iron in the air.
"Looks like it."
