He sat down and plucked a mug out of thin air. “Ah, but I look so distinguished at the age of my passing. A bit like that Scottish lad who wielded all those fancy gadgets in the spy movies.”
She had to admit he had a point there and she couldn’t help but agree. “He was a very handsome man no matter his age, asyou are in yours. What brings you to Moraig’s humble hearth tonight?”
“To give you company.”
She took a deep breath, then looked at him. “He’s off.”
“So I saw as I watched him go through the gate in the meadow.”
She looked at her nephew who had indeed turned out to be an incomparable leader of their clan during his time and attempted a smile. “He is a good man.”
“I think he loves you, Mairead.”
“I think I feel the same way about him.”
Ambrose smiled. “You know this sort of thing is my current business, don’t you?”
She pursed her lips. “Matchmaking? And with your brother-in-law Fulbert and that blasted Hugh McKinnon? I’m honestly amazed Hugh is still speaking to you.”
“We’ve made our peace,” Ambrose said with a shrug. “But since this is my goodly work at the moment, I’ll tell you plainly that I would like to see young Oliver succeed—for both your sakes.”
She wanted to toss off a light-hearted remark about maidens in distress and those brave enough to rescue them, but she couldn’t.
“What will he do without me for all those years?” she asked quietly. “And I him?”
Ambrose considered. “I’m no expert in this.”
“Save for your years of unbridled matchmaking.”
“I’m a romantic at heart,” Ambrose admitted with a smile. “As for your very reasonable concern, even though things will change, perhaps you’ll still carry in your souls an echo of those memories.”
“But how?” she asked, pained. “Our paths will have changed.”
He shrugged very carefully. “All I can do is speculate, but I’ll give you my thoughts if you’d like them.”
She wasn’t sure they would be any worse than the ones she was entertaining, so she waved him on to his musings.
“We think of time as a string that stretches from beginning to end,” he said, “but what if it’s more like the trail of, for example, young Allan, running hither and yon to elude his exhausted parents.”
“Giles and Grizel would have been less exhausted if they’d been able to stop mooning over each other,” Mairead said with a snort.
“Which left Allan with several younger siblings,” Ambrose agreed, “which increased the weariness and chasing for all involved. But my thinking is that time might be like his path, if you could see his path trailing behind him as he ran it, crossing and recrossing, sometimes repeating the same steps at a different moment. And surely as a mortal woman you walked over the same spots on different days, perhaps even different years. Did not the memory of your previous steps in those places ever come to you?”
“Of course,” she said with a frown, “but those are memories of things you’ve done in the past.”
“True, but what if the first time you walked to a particular spot, you recalled the memory of yourself doing the same thing, say perhaps a year later.”
“That,” she managed, “is daft.”
“Is it?”
“That would be remembering the future,” she said frankly, “and that is completely mad.”
“It might be,” he agreed, “but consider this: I went to Edinburgh as a youth with Uncle Lachlan and visited the exact tavern where Fiona snuck off to some ten years later. I was also there in that same tavern atthattime, watching her spill ale down Fulbert de Piaget’s front.” He shrugged again, looking slightly uneasy. “Those two memories are odd to me somehow,as if I might have remembered the later one during the first one if I’d attempted it properly. Or thought it possible at all,” he added.
“Ambrose, you were too busy chasing after Hugh McKinnon and wondering where to stick your dirk in him to think thoughts nearly so profound.”
Ambrose laughed a little. “You have that aright, but the point still stands. You might lose your memories of being a spirit, or you might have them simply disappear until you retrace those same steps as a mortal and they come back to you.” He shrugged. “Perhaps they lie somewhere between your past as a spirit and a future you will have as a mortal if Oliver succeeds, somewhere that has everything to do with both.” He smiled pleasantly. “I call theseTankard Thoughts. What do you think?”
