Page 60 of Edge of Yesterday

“I need to return to Heatheredge,” Cailean said.

Lennox’s gaze snapped onto him. “Why?”

Cailean’s mind jumbled. He couldn’t tell them that he wanted to find the place he had landed in Heatheredge, that he needed to return home, six hundred years into the future.

When he didn’t reply, Lennox leaned toward him and said, “They tried to harm Julianna. They might have killed her. Our first duty is to get her safely home.”

Cailean stared. He was right, they meant harm, maybe even death, and he’d killed a man. This was not a dream, not a hallucination. This was something altogether different.

Moments later, Gregory headed toward Heatheredge with their dead attackers. Julianna mounted behind Lennox, and Cailean rode alongside them. The remaining guard brought up the rear, leading the horse that carried his comrade’s body. Cailean’s heart had slowed, but a surreal sense of his consciousness having left his body lingered. How was any of this happening? Was any of this truly possible? Had he really killed a man, or had he gotten caught in some bizarre dimension? Maybe he was in Hell? He wanted to laugh, but the idea of dimensions and Hell were no stranger than the unfathomable possibility that he’d somehow traveled back in time six hundred years.

Except that science claimed time travel was possible.

Another thought struck. If time travel was possible—if he had traveled back in time—then he’d just changed the future. Were the men who had chased Julianna the night he’d met her part of the plot to abduct her, maybe a first attempt not recorded in history? When she told him she was running from robbers, he’d remembered the story of her kidnapping and death. But when she told him that they’d attacked her in Heatheredge, he’d given the matter no more thought, as history recorded her abduction taking place on the road from Heatheredge.

Until today’s attack, he hadn’t worried about learning the exact date in this…fantasy.

Time travel movies and novels were replete with theories and warnings on the cascade effects of any past event being changed. He recalled Ray Bradbury’s short story A Sound of Thunder in which a man who traveled back to prehistoric times on a paid hunting trip left the designated path and unknowingly stepped on a butterfly. He returned to his time to find current events dramatically changed.

The butterfly effect. A chaos theory that said a minute localized change in a complex system in one place can have large affects elsewhere. Like pulling a thread from a tapestry. The whole damned thing eventually unravels.

What could that mean in this case? History recorded Lady Julianna’s death on April 12, 1395. Tomorrow hadn’t come yet. Would fate step in and undo what he had done? Cailean hazarded a glance at her, riding behind her brother. Hair disheveled, dress mussed, she was still beautiful. How could someone so lovely be snatched from this world at so young an age? His chest tightened. If he saw death come for her again, could he stand by and do nothing? What were the ramifications if she lived? She would marry and have children, who would then have children. This was no small change.

Lennox hadn’t been injured today as history recorded, and, ten years from now, he wouldn’t learn that Hugh Murray had kidnapped Julianna. As a result, Lennox wouldn’t attack Hugh, and all the men who died in that fight would now live, and have children. He had changed much more than a small localized event. It wasn’t a matter of had he changed history, but how much.

Adrenaline twisted his belly. He had to be dreaming. He had vivid dreams, but this? Most dreams, no matter how realistic, contained holes. Something would magically appear, or he would suddenly awake in a new place, or something would happen that he had no prior knowledge of but somehow understood.

None of those elements were present. This experience was as linear as every mundane day of his life. That didn’t change the grim reality that not one second of what he’d experienced was possible. Cailean looked down at his shirt where splotches of his victim’s blood stained the fabric. His stomach turned. He’d never dreamt of harming anything, much less killing another human being. When he woke tomorrow, would he be able to tell himself that he had dreamt this? Would the horror fade?

Cailean shifted his gaze to Triumph, sheathed to the hilt. Had he betrayed her…or had she betrayed him? He resisted the urge to slide the blade from the sheath. His gut tightened. He could wash the blade, but there would be no forgetting the memory of the blood that had marred the steel.

He closed his eyes and forced his concentration on the rhythm of the horse. The exhaustion that permeated every molecule of his body, the steady bounce of his body on the saddle, the scent of rain in the air, were all too vivid. This was no dream.

But how?

At Lennox’s shout, Cailean snapped open his eyes. Half a dozen men raced onto the road, swords out and gleaming. Cailean drew a sharp breath. A battleax spun through the air toward Lennox and Julianna. Lennox hunkered down in the saddle, Julianna hugging his back, as his horse shot forward along a low wood fence that enclosed a pasture where a herd of cows grazed. The ax whizzed past them, barely missing Julianna by what Cailean was sure was a hair’s breadth. Lennox wouldn’t get far carrying Julianna on the horse with him.

The cows scattered when two of the men raced after them along the fence while the other four surrounded Cailean and the guard. Cailean yanked his sword free as the guard swung his blade and caught one man against the back of the head and sliced his neck. The Raghnall guard stiffened as a vicious spear thrust pierced his spine.

“No-o-o!” Cailean stood in his stirrups.

The three assailants closed in on him, their swords raised, their helm visors down, hiding their faces. He clashed with the nearest man, fighting so fiercely, sweat ran into his eyes, almost blinding him. Unlike Cailean and Lennox, the men wore mail. Cailean knocked one of the attackers off his horse with a vicious blow to his head. The two others pressed him, their swings so brutal that each crash of blade against blade jarred him to the marrow.

One horseman bolted from the trees with a wicked spear longer than any jousting pole Cailean had ever carried in a tournament. The spearman’s pals wheeled their beasts aside, freeing the way. The spearman charged Cailean. Horsed men with swords, he could deal with. A maniac charging him with a sharpened spear? He was going to die while a bunch of nervously lowing cows looked on.

Maybe not.

Cailean jerked the reins. His horse lunged into a gallop and seconds later, sailed over the low fence and into the field. Cailean circled behind the cattle and whooped and wildly brandished Triumph as he raced back and forth. The bull bellowed and, as one, the herd surged toward the wooden fence. Posts broke with an ear-splitting crack and the cattle stampeded the mounted assailants who couldn’t outrun a hundred maddened cows.

Cailean whipped his horse around and galloped across the field in the direction Lennox and Julianna had disappeared. He hadn’t gone far before he spotted a horse standing on the side of the road. He drew closer and saw a man lying face down. Lennox. Fear tightened his gut. Julianna was nowhere in sight.

Cailean reached him a moment later, jumped from his horse, and dropped to one knee beside him. Carefully, Cailean rolled him onto his back, then pressed two fingers to the pulse point on his neck. A strong heartbeat thumped against his fingers. He found no blood, so gingerly inspected Lennox’s head and discovered a large lump on the back of his skull. Either one of the attackers had brained him, or he’d hit his head when he fell off his horse.

Lennox groaned. His eyes opened. He stared for several heartbeats, then pushed upward.

“Easy,” Cailean warned. “You hit your head pretty hard.”

He shoved Cailean’s hand aside and struggled to his feet. He started for his horse, listed, then righted himself. He reached his horse and grasped the pommel but didn’t mount. Instead, he leaned his forehead against the saddle.