Exiles in Time (The After Cilmeri Series) (19 page)

“
I think you’re right. If
the prisoners aren’t there, we can always ride on to Dunstaffnage,”
Cassie said. “You can have another go at Daddy Bruce.”

Callum chewed on his lower lip. Cassie
had said it as a joke, but he took it seriously. “It might be
better if we stayed off his radar for now.”

“
You got him to talk to
Lord Patrick. It was better than what he was doing.” Cassie paused.
“Thank you for that. Lord Patrick is a friend.”

“
We should have waited to
leave,” Callum said. “I would have liked to know the outcome of
their conversation.”

“
I feel bad about leaving
Lord Patrick too. I owe him a lot,” Cassie said, “but Robbie told
us we needed to go and he knows his own father. Daddy Bruce is
either going to Dunstaffnage or he’s not; the prisoners are there,
or they’re not.”

“
I know,” Callum
said.

“
I don’t think we could
have helped Lord Patrick more than you did by getting Daddy Bruce
to talk to him,” Cassie said.

“
Robbie was very convincing
in his urgency,” Callum said, “though it would have been nice to
understand Kirby’s end game. What’s he up to?”

“
No good,” Cassie said,
“but that, too, is out of our hands for the time being.”

“
You’re right, of course,”
Callum said.

Cassie was glad Callum saw that. She
liked being right. She was also finding that she liked having
something important to do. It had been too long since she’d made a
difference in anyone’s life but her own.

A mile out of Killearn, Cassie and
Callum forded the river that flowed east out of Loch Lomond and
rode northeast for several more miles, before turning north again.
If they kept going as they were, they would reach the river that
flowed from Loch Ard and could follow it west to the loch. Cassie
yawned. With the rising of the sun, a glorious May day was creeping
across the hills and valleys. Now that the excitement had abated,
she was feeling her lack of sleep.

Callum looked over at her. “Stay
alert, Cassie. We have a ways to go.”

“
I know.” Cassie shook
herself and looked at her companion. He swept his hood off his head
and allowed the sun to bathe his face. He looked tired too, but in
better shape than he could have been, given what he’d been through
in the last few days. “So, how did you learn Gaelic?” Cassie
said.

“
My mother is Scottish,” he
said. “I missed her every day before I came to the Middle
Ages.”

“
She’s gone,
then?”

Callum nodded. “My father too. They
both died of cancer two years ago, within six weeks of each
other.”

“
I’m sorry,” Cassie said.
And then she asked him—despite herself and even though it was so
unlike her—“did you have a girlfriend or a wife, back in the old
world?”

“
I was dating a girl, Emma.
We hadn’t been together long.” He paused. “She would have no idea
why I stopped calling.”

“
I’m sorry,” Cassie said
again, and meant it.

Callum shrugged. “I had a job to do
and I did it. I can’t be sorry, since it’s who I am. It’s because
of the army and then MI-5 that I was at all prepared for this
life.” He shot Cassie a wicked grin. “Being a spy is all fun and
games until a man ends up in the Middle Ages.”

Cassie snorted a laugh, which she
tried to swallow back. “You seem to have done all right for
yourself. You’re an emissary from the King of England.”

“
That’s only because he’s a
twenty-year-old kid from Oregon,” Callum said, “though the more
time I spend with him, the less I remember that.”

“
I don’t like that there
are kings at all,” Cassie said. “Why hasn’t he instituted a
democracy already? What about letting women vote?”

“
What about letting men
vote?” Callum said. “England has its own Parliament, as does Wales,
but democracy depends on education. David’s building printing
presses all over Britain, and since he became the Prince of Wales,
he has been encouraging children to go to school—both girls and
boys. It’s coming, but he’s only been King of England for six
months. These things take time.”

“
Too much time, if you ask
me,” Cassie said and then managed to curb her irritation. “But I
get it. Change is going to take place over generations, not
overnight.”

“
With your attitude, why
haven’t you ever been accused of being a witch?” Callum
said.

Cassie almost laughed again. “Who says
I haven’t?”

“
Have you?”

“
You’re not one to let
anything go, are you?”

“
No,” he said.

Cassie sighed. “My neighbors have been
suspicious of me, but nobody has ever accused me of being a witch.
You do realize that being an Englishman is far worse,
right?”

Callum was back to laughing. “You have
me there.”

“
At the same time, I’m not
quite English—I’m not quite anything—and for a long time that was
my biggest problem.” Cassie looked at Callum sideways. The sun had
come out from behind a cloud again and it shone full on her face.
It felt good. She could use some warmth. “When I first got here, I
didn’t even know if I was on planet Earth, much less
Scotland.”

“
You had it much worse than
Meg,” Callum said. “She arrived as you did and at much the same
age, alone and friendless. But Llywelyn took her under his wing
right away.”

“
I had Lord Patrick’s help,
after a fashion.” Cassie patted her bow. “And I had
this.”

“
Did you ever tell Lord
Patrick where you were from?”

“
God, no!” Cassie shivered
at the thought. “Did Meg?”

“
Her closest companions
know,” Callum said, “and of course, Llywelyn.”

“
Sometimes I’ve been
tempted,” Cassie said, “but it would be stupid to do so. It would
ruin everything.”

“
That’s why you need to
come to England with me when I return there,” Callum said, very
sure of himself. “You need to talk to David.”

Cassie didn’t say anything. She could
admit to herself that she was tempted by that too, but she’d made a
home here. From what Callum had described, the English court didn’t
sound very inviting. Here, she was in charge of her own life and
knew the world well enough to lead Callum through it. She would be
lost in England.

One of the things Cassie liked about
Scotland was how wild it was. It had few towns and most people
lived scattered among the hills, herding sheep and cattle. It was
unusual to find a woman living alone like she did, but not unheard
of. What could she do in England but find a husband and pop out one
baby after another like every other medieval woman? Even if King
David believed in equal rights for women, this world had
generations to go before that could become a reality. Cassie didn’t
have that kind of time. This was the only life she was going to
have and whiling it away at the English court was the last thing
she wanted to do with it.

In addition, the Scots
understood something that Cassie hadn’t known any non-Indians to
ever really
get
before: family lands were sacred and if you lost them, you
lost a part of yourself. Cassie didn’t know how long some of these
people had lived here, but for many it was countless generations,
the same as for her family back in Oregon. Even if some of their
ancestors came from the south, or from France originally,
Highlanders couldn’t breathe if too many people were around. Open
space and the natural world were in their blood, as they were in
Cassie’s. No wonder they fought so hard and for so long against the
English who wanted to take their land from them.

Cassie and Callum lapsed into silence
until the sun was well up and they reached the river that sprang
from the northwestern lochs. They turned to follow it as it wound
sinuously west. The terrain was rougher until they found a trail
that led to a ford across a tributary. Loch Ard was three miles
long, if one included the narrows, and roughly half a mile
wide.

“
We’re getting close,”
Cassie said. “We should walk from here.”

Both travelers dismounted stiffly.
Callum put a hand to the small of his back and bent forward and
back. “I’m getting old, Cassie.”

Oh, he was so
annoying!
He’d made her laugh again.
“You’re what? Thirty-four or five?”

“
That’s old for here,”
Callum said.

“
I’ve probably led us on a
wild goose chase anyway,” Cassie said.

“
Even if the prisoners
aren’t here, I don’t regret this journey,” Callum said.

“
We’re out of Daddy Bruce’s
hands—or Kirby’s for that matter—Liam is on his way to warn William
Fraser of what has happened, and we can ask at a village if the
MacDougalls have come through recently.”

“
They wouldn’t tell us,”
Cassie said. “Or rather, they wouldn’t tell you. I might get an
answer if they liked the look of me.”

It was no trouble to keep to the trees
that lined the loch’s shore, walking silently along a narrow path,
leading the horses. The day was actually getting hot. Cassie
stripped off several layers of clothes, including her cloak, dress,
and sweater, and stuffed them into her pack. Birds sang in the
trees, most of which were pine, but the deciduous trees were
finally fully leafed after a long cold spring.

“
So few people live here.
Why?” Callum said.

“
It’s not like someone’s
going to build a vacation home on the lochshore,” Cassie said.
“There’s nothing up here. The grazing isn’t even good—”

“
Ssh!” Callum put out his
hand and they both stilled.

Cassie didn’t hear anything at first,
but as they waited, listening, the sound of an axe against a tree
echoed through the woods, followed by the smell of smoke.
“Someone’s close,” Cassie said. “What should we do
next?”

“
Let’s tie the horses here
and continue without them,” he said.

Cassie didn’t like to leave them, but
Callum was right. They were hunting men today rather than game. In
such thick trees, the horses would get in the way, or worse, give
Cassie and Callum away with an untimely whicker. Leaving the
leading reins long, they picketed the horses near a brook that
gurgled as it ran into the loch. Immediately, the beasts began to
crop the patches of grass growing in the cleared spaces between the
trees. Both would need a real rest and more and better food soon,
but they would be all right for now.

Cassie let Callum lead, not because he
was a man but because he seemed to know what he was doing. Cassie
had brought them to the loch, but he was the soldier. Although
she’d spent many days alone in the woods, she’d never fought in a
battle or scouted an enemy camp. He had experience with both from
Afghanistan, even if the ambush had been his first battle
here.

Callum took Cassie up a hill to the
south, still tree-covered but more sparsely so. It rose fifty feet
above the path on which they’d been walking. Cassie kept looking
back, hoping to see something that would clarify what they faced,
but she couldn’t see anything until Callum found an open space that
allowed them to directly overlook the loch.

Callum let out a
whuf
of air. “I don’t like
the look of that.”

“
What is it exactly?”
Cassie stood on her tiptoes and tried to see what he
saw.

He glanced at her. “Come on. That rock
should give us a better view.”

A flat piece of granite jutted out
from the hill further down the slope. They crawled up onto it and
peered over the edge. A palisaded hunting lodge, built on the edge
of the loch, lay below them a quarter of a mile to the north of
their position.

“
Can you see how many men
defend it?” Callum squinted ahead. “Maybe it belongs to the local
lord and has nothing to do with the MacDougalls.”

“
I bet it belongs to the
Earl of Lennox,” Cassie said. “I remember hearing that he’d built a
hunting lodge up here.”

“
It’s a fine day for a
hunt,” Callum said.

“
Yup.” Cassie reached for
the pack on her back, pulled out her scope, and peered through it.
“I see—” She paused as she counted, “—a dozen soldiers, some on the
wall-walk on the palisade, some in the courtyard of the
fort.”

Callum had been looking down at the
fort, his hands shading his eyes from the bright sunlight. Now he
glanced over at Cassie. “My God! How many more gadgets do you have?
First the torch and now this?”

Cassie smiled at his appreciation and
handed him the scope. “Do you want to see?”

“
Yes, I want to see.” He
took the scope, checking the location of the lodge and then the
sun, which by now was almost directly overhead. Callum studied the
lodge for a full minute while Cassie studied him. She looked away
just as he put down the scope so he wouldn’t catch her looking.
“The sun’s pretty bright. I’m worried they’ll see the flash from
the sun’s reflection and come to investigate.”

Cassie’s hands were itching to take
back the scope, but she let him keep it for a bit longer. “Can you
see any sign of the prisoners?”