Page 25 of Blood of the Thistle

“Wallace? What do you mean, executed?” Anna asked, before wondering why she even bothered to play along with any of this.

“Three days past,” Bram said woodenly. His mouth twisted, and he drew a slow breath through his nose, as though struggling to master something that threatened to overcome him. “They hanged him... and tore him to pieces. “Those men were charged with carrying one of his quarters north to Berwick, where they will display it to discourage rebellion.”

Anna stared at him, his words settling like stones in her stomach. Wallace. Hanged, drawn, and quartered. The phrase echoed from a half-forgotten history class, a brutal detail lodged in her memory. It was all part of the delusion, her mind supplying facts to make the fantasy more real.

William Wallace?

A cold dread seeped through her panic. Yesterday, Bram had insisted the year was 1305.

She squeezed her eyes shut, searching frantically through her memory. 1305. William Wallace. Executed. The pieces clicked into place with a horrifying certainty that had nothing and then everything to do with her own madness.

Chapter Eight

Throughout the long months of Bram’s captivity, the guards had rarely missed an opportunity to boast of English victories or recount the latest news from the war. Whether out of cruelty or simple amusement, they delighted in telling their prisoners which Scottish castles had fallen, which lords had bent the knee to Edward, and how hopeless their cause had become. Bram and the others had learned to receive every report with a degree of skepticism, believing much of what they heard to be exaggerated, if not outright fabricated, intended only to strip away whatever hope remained in them.

This, however, was different. The men resting beyond the stone wall had not been speaking for the benefit of an audience. There had been no reason to invent such news, nor to lie about the destination of the grisly burden they escorted north.

Wallace was dead.

Bram closed his eyes briefly, unable to conceive of this war—of this world!—without William Wallace in it. For years, Wallace had endured defeat, betrayal, and relentless pursuit, surviving when lesser men would have surrendered or fled abroad. Wallace had become something larger than any one man ought to be, a living symbol that Scotland could and should yet refuse Edward’s rule.

And now he was gone, ignobly hanged, drawn, and quartered, and one of his severed limbs at that very moment being carried toward Berwick to hang above its gates as a warning to every Scot who still dared dream of freedom.

What would become of the resistance now?

“Bram...?”

“Aye?” he answered without opening his eyes.

“Did you... do you still believe it’s thirteen hundred and five?”

What the—still believe?

Bram scrubbed a hand over his eyes and beard before looking at her. He had neither the patience nor the desire for such foolishness while the news of Wallace’s death yet echoed in his mind.

“It requires little to believe,” he said curtly, “when ʼtis truth.”

She frowned. “But... it isn’t 1305.”

He regarded her for a long moment before saying, with the tired resignation of a man who had neither the strength nor the desire for such babble, “Then tell me the year.”

“Twenty-twenty-six.”

“What kingdom counts years so?” He forced himself to ask. The anxious look in her hazel eyes suggested she truly believed this foolishness. Something about her eyes struck him as strange—the lashes seemed too thick, too dark, but the thought vanished beneath the greater impossibility of her words.

“Everyone does.”

“Verra well.” He had no intention of arguing further with her.

Bram pushed himself to his feet, cursing as the forgotten length of chain slid from his wrist and clattered against the stones. The sound was unnaturally loud in the quiet. Grimacing, he gathered the links and wrapped them tightly in his palm to silence them.

He looked down at her, still seated against the ancient wall with her hands lying listlessly in her lap. The spirited woman who’d argued with him for several of the last twenty-four hours seemed to have vanished. In her place was someone as weary and uncertain as he felt, her face drained of color, her eyes fixed somewhere beyond him as if she, too, had just received some horrid news.

He found himself studying her carefully. The morning sun caught in strands of her fair hair, turning them almost white. She looked utterly out of place in this wild country, from her strange garments to the curious satchel she refused to abandon. Stranger still was her belief that she lived in a year that had no meaning to him, speaking of it not as one inventing a tale, but with the quiet conviction of someone stating the simplest of truths.

He knew not what to make of her—she was either more profoundly touched in the mind than anyone he had ever encountered or she was something else entirely, something for which he possessed neither explanation nor name.

Mayhap she was merely lost. The thought stirred that same persistent instinct urging him not to leave her.