Well, I can’t just tell him, can I?
Whatever he was, she felt compelled not to muddy history with modernity, as if the dream might spit her out if she didn’t abide by the rules.
“It’s… a sort of… tablet that I write messages on,” she replied haltingly, racking her mind for something credible.
“It doesnae look like any tablet I’ve seen,” he said, his eyes narrowing in suspicion. “It’s nae wax or clay.”
“It’s made of something different. A glass-like material from where I come from,” she hurried to explain, and prayed he wouldn’t try to scrape some letters into it with a blade.
Without warning, he snatched up her purse and took it over to a small recess in the wall. There, he began to rifle through it like a common thief, enacting a show-and-tell of her own damn things.
“What’s this?” He took out her notepad and pen.
“Give me that back!” she shouted, clenching her fists as the shock gave way to fury. “Those are my personal belongings. Do you have no manners here, huh? Do you just go through a woman’s things in this place?”
He leveled a cool look at her. “If she’s a lass I daenae ken who was found at me gates, and cannae tell me a useful thing about her, then aye.” He shook the notepad slightly. “Now, what’s this?”
“I write on it,” she replied, a bite in her voice.
In his position, she’d be suspicious too, but that didn’t mean she liked the direction this had taken. She’d preferred it when he was bent over her with his hand on the wall, breathing heavily as if he meant to put an end to her love life’s complete drought.
CHAPTER 5
“And this?”Hunter drew a large black cylinder out of the leather bag and eyed it curiously.
It likelywasill-mannered of him to search through her belongings, but he was hoping for a clue that she wouldn’t give up herself. And he couldn’t have her in his castleorhelp her to get back to wherever she’d come from if he didn’t know what danger she posed to his people, to his family.
Until he could be certain she wasn’t a spy sent by the enemy, or a thief, or a mercenary, or a cleverly disguised scout from another territory, he wouldn’t be letting her out of the dungeons.
Nancy glowered at him as if she wished she could chop his head off. “It’s a cup. Keeps your coffee hot.” She paused. “Do you know what coffee is?”
“Aye, I’ve heard of it,” he replied with a sniff of displeasure.
It was something they drank all the way down in London. A place he had no desire to ever visit, though merchants had tried to sell that sort of thing often enough in this part of the world. They rarely tried again.
There was some manner of book, unlike any he’d seen before, the pages thin and the cover flimsy. But as he flipped through it, the printing was so uniform, so immaculate that he couldn’t help but feel a little awe.
“A Thistle By Any Other Name?” He looked to Nancy for answers as he read the title, the cover astonishing. It seemed to be a painting, yet the surface was smooth, depicting dramatic mountains and a glittering loch where a lone thistle grew on the shore.
“My friend’s book,” Nancy replied.
He noted the name. “Emily Fox.” His eyebrows flew up. “A lass wrote this?”
“A very talented ‘lass,’ yes.” Nancy’s leg bounced up and down. “Can I have my bag back, please?”
He couldn’t say he’d ever heard of a woman being permitted to publish, but then this did not seem to be an ordinary book, and Nancy didn’t seem to be any ordinary woman, so perhaps her friends were equally strange.
Maybe the Americas were strange… and fairer to the fairer sex. He had no arguments there, for some of his best archers were women, and when all the men were gone from the castle, riding toward battle, it was the women who fought fiercely to protect their land and its residents from harm. In his experience, no one fought harder than a mother with children to keep them safe.
“Nae yet.”
He continued to rifle through the bag: a cluster of strange, precisely cut bits of metal that could only be keys; a mirror hidden inside a silver clamshell; long, thin items in a material he had no name for, which left a stripe of something like ink on his skin when he accidentally brushed it; a comb, more familiar, but made of that same unusual material; and a weird orange vial with tiny little pellets inside, alongside another odd tube that was orange at one end and blue at the other.
“Put those back!” she snapped. “I need those.”
“What are they?”
She hunched over and put her head in her hands. “Medicine. Could probably use a dose right now, to be honest. Get my adrenaline going enough to wake me the hell up.”
