Page 26 of Blood of the Thistle

And yet....

Whatever afflicted her, he could neither cure it nor unravel it, and he no longer had the luxury of trying. Wallace was dead. Scotland needed every loyal man it still possessed, and Bram had already spent more precious hours than he ought escorting a woman whose path and purpose could not be his own.

To his growing frustration, try as he might, he could not harden himself against the instinct.

“We should go,” he said.

He waited while Anastasia rose beside him. She brushed dried grass from her skirt with absent strokes, her thoughts plainly elsewhere, then settled the strap of her curious satchel over one shoulder.

Without another word, they resumed their journey.

For a time, they remained beneath the shelter of the trees, following little more than a deer path that wound between birch, ash, and scattered hawthorn. Supposing she was as gut-wrenched as he—whatever her reason might be—they walked for nearly half an hour without exchanging a single word.

“Help me make sense of it,” she begged finally.

Bram glanced over his shoulder.

Anastasia had fallen several paces behind him. She looked no less troubled than she had at the wall, though some of the vacancy had left her expression, replaced now by a restless determination he was beginning to recognize.

“You say it’s 1305... those men... even this place...” She lifted both hands helplessly. “But it can’t be. It was 2026 yesterday morning. I can’t have just misplaced seven hundred years.”

Bram had no notion what precisely she was asking of him and continued along the narrow path, but after another dozen paces he became aware that he could no longer hear Anastasia behind him. He turned and found her standing some distance back, holding a small black object above her head while she slowly turned in a circle.

He stared at her. Whatever uncertainty he’d entertained regarding the soundness of her mind increased tenfold.

“It turned on,” she said, apparently oblivious to his concern. “It says the battery’s at six percent, but I can’t get a signal anywhere.”

She took several steps in one direction, still holding the object aloft, then frowned at its glowing face and turned back again.

“What are ye doing?”

Anastasia lowered the thing and looked at him. “Trying to get a signal.”

Bram’s gaze returned to the curious object. Its face shone with its own pale light, covered with tiny symbols and numbers unlike anything he had ever seen.

Anastasia caught him staring and her expression immediately changed. “Oh, come on. Please don’t pretend you don’t know what a phone is.”

“I have never seen the like.”

“Are you doing this on purpose?” Her frustration sharpened. “Are you trying to make me think I’m crazy?”

Something in her expression changed. It was slight, but Bram saw it—the first faint erosion of the certainty with which she had contradicted him from the moment he’d told her the year. Her gaze moved from him to the woodland surrounding them and then down to the strange object in her hand, which she quickly tucked out of sight.

She pressed the heel of one hand against her forehead and walked on, while Bram found himself watching her with increasing concern.

“I have a family,” she said after a moment, her voice strained. “A sister, Mallory... parents, Nancy and Frank. They’re real. My mom calls my sister when I don’t answer my phone.” She gave a faint, distracted laugh that vanished. “My dad has been remodeling the half bath since February because he refuses to pay someone else to do it. My mom sends me recipes I’ll never make and at sixty-two, she’s addicted to TikTok... they’re waiting for me. They’re real.”

Bram listened, understanding some of the words individually more readily than he understood what had prompted the sudden flood of information.

“They’re real,” she said.

He frowned. “Aye.”

She shook her head impatiently. “I’m not losing my mind. Yesterday everything was normal. My parents were at home. Mallory was at home. I was supposed to call my mom when I got back from York because she worries when I travel alone, even though I’m twenty-eight years old and have been living on my own for years.”

She was speaking faster now, but Bram suspected she didn’t notice.

“I have an apartment. I have a car. I have twenty-three third graders waiting for me when school starts again, and I’m supposed to be on a ten-day vacation to England, Rome, and Paris.”