Page 81 of Blood of the Thistle

“A cow?”

Anna laughed. “Definitely no cow.”

“Then what did ye keep?”

“A coffeemaker and several houseplants I was slowly killing.”

Etta tilted her head, her expression arrested in confusion.

“Never mind.”

She told Etta that she lived alone in a small townhouse, which produced another round of questions about why an unmarried woman would have an entire house to herself, wanting to know who cooked for her, who washed her clothes, who made her bed.

“I do all that,” Anna answered, becoming a little bit uncomfortable, almost wishing she’d invented some medieval answer to suit them. “I like living alone.”

“ʼTis nae safe.” Bram’s voice cut cleanly into her conversation with Etta.

Anna’s gaze shifted to him. There was nothing provocative in his expression, but the remark felt more personal coming from him.

“It’s not unsafe. I lock my doors, have an... alarm,” she said, and saw his confusion. She turned back to Etta and moved the subject along. “My parents live pretty close, within five minutes,” she told Etta. “My neighbors are even closer than the village is to you. I’ve been there for four years, have never had any problems.”

It was so much easier to talk to sweet Etta. She wasn’t trying to punish Bram. And she certainly wasn’t going to behave as though every ordinary conversation between them required some dramatic reminder that he’d hurt her. She simply wasn’t going to hand herself over so freely anymore. She’d done that on the road without realizing it, offering him every thought that entered her head, asking what he thought about everything, searching his expression for amusement or approval until his companionship had quietly become the center of her days. And then she’d mistaken closeness for promise. She wouldn’t do it again.

“Actually, I know I’m safe. I have this one neighbor, Mrs. Donnelly. She texts me constantly while I’m at work about absolutely everything that goes on in the neighborhood—strange cars parked in front of my house, someone’s garbage can blowing into the street, a delivery left on my porch. Once she texted me three times because a dog she didn’t recognize was walking around without its owner.”

“At work?” was what Etta questioned her about.

Anna was relieved she hadn’t asked for a translation of texts.

“Um, yes. I go to work each day—well, Monday through Friday, but not in the summer.” TMI, she thought immediately. She was going to have to learn to tailor her answers to what they could reasonably understand without every explanation requiring three more explanations. She just wasn’t sure how to do that when virtually every ordinary detail of her life seemed capable of exposing another seven-hundred-year difference.

“What work do ye do?” Etta asked.

“I’m a teacher.” That, at least, seemed safe.

Anna waited, and when the silence continued, began to suspect she'd miscalculated again.

“Ye teach?”

There was enough astonishment in the question that Anna frowned. “Yes.”

“Ye can read?”

“Of course I can read.” She caught herself. “I mean—yes. I can read.”

Etta's eyes widened further. “And write?”

“Yes.”

“Latin?”

“No. English.” Anna paused. “And some Spanish, but that's probably not helpful.”

Etta was still staring at her with such open fascination that Anna almost laughed. Apparently airplanes, phones and indoor plumbing weren't required to make herself incomprehensible in the fourteenth century.

“I teach reading and writing, math—numbers—and science and history. Children mostly, eight-year-olds.”

Etta sat up a little straighter. “I imagined only priests taught such things. Or clerks. Learned men.”