“Because ye are in danger of growing hard hearted, me son. Ye have seen more loss and anguish than most, but life is no worth living if ye close yerself off from it.”
He didn’t answer her. Even if he wished to change, he didn’t know how.
“That’s all I’ll say to ye about it. Now, tell me more about this girl. Ye said that she spoke of being from the twenty-first century?”
Baodan shook his head and smiled thinking back on it. The lass had a grand imagination, mad or no. “Aye, but she hit her head on a rock moments before. Perhaps it did more damage than she believed or than I realized at the time?”
His mother looked over at him and grinned nervously. “I swear to ye that me head is fine. I dinna bump it and I doona wish for ye to start to think that I am mad as well, but why are ye so inclined no to believe her?”
Surely she played some sort of trick on him. “Heh? I’m sorry, but what do ye mean by that? O’course I wasna inclined to believe her.”
“Dinna ye say that she said many words for things that ye have never heard of?”
“Aye.” He pulled back on the reins, slowing his horse. They grew close to his aunt’s cottage, and he wanted to hear what his mother had to say before they arrived.
“And dinna ye say that she mentioned a woman named Morna? Yer uncle Alasdair’s sister’s name was Morna, and she was a powerful witch.”
Baodan heard stories of her as a child, but most of his life he’d dismissed them as simple tales. He’d never heard his mother speak as if she believed the rumor to be true. “She isna a real witch, surely?”
“Aye son, a real witch. I dinna believe the stories either, no until our last visit to Conall Castle. Mary, ye remember her, doona ye? She told me the truth of it all. Bri is no more Laird MacChristy’s daughter than old Heather here.” She reached down to pat her horse. “She fell prey to a spell put in place by Morna many years ago, and as a result, she fell through time. ’Tis a verra long story and, to be honest, I doona remember all of it, but I spent enough time around yer cousin’s strange wife to believe her story. She is kind and has made a place for herself amongst the family, but ’tis verra clear that neither her nor the lass’ mother grew up in the same world as ye and I.”
Impossible. No matter how odd the lass seemed, he’d never witnessed such magic himself. “Surely, ye canna mean it? How can something so impossible be so?”
“How can the love of two people create another? I doona see how that is any less impossible than this. I have seen magic in me life, son. It does exist, and there is a piece of it held captive in yer home. We are nearly there. I think it best if ye unload me horse and leave for home at once, for ye owe the lass a grand apology.”
*
McMillan Castle
The smug, beautiful bastard lied. It was the fourth night since he locked me inside this room, and he’d still not returned. Not only that, but his idea of me being “well taken care of” differed from my own. Breakfast consisted of some sort of roasted bird. Unless, it poured out of a green box and tasted like sugary apples topped with milk, it didn’t constitute breakfast.
Lunch and dinner could hardly be called that. Even if they’d been decent meals, they were still two meals less than what I usually ate a day. I liked to eat and made sure that I could keep doing so by running my fair share of miles everyday.
The exception being the last four days I’d spent locked up inside this hole. Perhaps hole was a bit extreme. I’d slept in few rooms as pretty and the bed, despite being springless and slightly lumpy, I found quite comfortable. All that aside, any room where I had to go to the bathroom inside a wooden bucket and use scraps of cloth as toilet paper, I could label as a hole.
I spent the first day in denial, clinging on to my hope that all of this was just some sort of nerdy role-playing game taken to the extreme, but by day two, I could no longer deny the unexplainable presence of the rock inside my dress and abandoned that notion. Only two other possibilities remained.
One: the impact of the water and the bump on my head had caused brain damage, and I truly was crazy. Two: Bri, Morna, and Jerry all told the truth.
The first possibility surprisingly seemed less plausible to me than the second. After the first day, my headache was gone and I seemed to be having no sort of other cognitive difficulties. No slurred speech, no dizziness or confusion. Nothing. Only a small scab remained to remind me of the injury.
The second possibility, while admittedly insane, was now what I accepted as reality.
Bri was smart, and not the sort of person to easily fall under the influence of others. I’d used the assumption that Bri was crazy to rationalize the truth of something I simply couldn’t wrap my head around.