Page 98 of Blood of the Thistle

She winced and grinned at the same time. “You sort of did.”

Bram rubbed his thumb absently across the side of her hand, thinking. “I’ve spent my life believing a man is born, lives whatever years God gives him, and dies. Yesterday follows the day before it, tomorrow follows today, and nae man can step from one into another merely because the air changes around him. Then I watched ye appear in a wood where ye hadnae been moments before, wearing clothes I’ve never seen and carrying things I cannae explain.”

“And yet you still don’t believe,” she concluded. “Do you think I’m crazy?” She ventured carefully.

“Nae.”

The answer came easily enough that some of the tension left her face.

Bram tightened his fingers around hers. “I have never thought ye mad.”

“All right, don’t be mad,” she said, and grinned audaciously. “But I thought you might be crazy when we first met.” She glanced around and saw that no one was paying any attention to them. “That was when I still thought it was 2026, and you were the one confused. That’s why I stayed with you in the beginning. I didn’t want to leave you alone. I thought you were suffering with PTSD.”

Bram frowned. “What is that?”

“Post-traumatic stress disorder. It can happen after someone goes through something really traumatic,” she explained. “And you’d been imprisoned for months, you’d been beaten and starved, you were being hunted, and you hardly slept because you were always listening for someone coming after us. You were... wound pretty tight, Bram.” Her mouth twisted. “So when you insisted it was 1305, it honestly made more sense to me that your mind was trying to cope with everything that had happened to you, rather than me guessing that I’d somehow traveled seven hundred years into the past.”

“And ye stayed with a man ye believed confused in the head.”

“I didn’t think you were dangerous.”

Bram lifted a brow at that.

“Well, all right, I absolutely thought you could be dangerous,” she amended. “I just didn’t think you were dangerous to me.”

She’d known him scarcely a day then. He had been filthy, desperate, half-starved, and still carrying the iron his captors had fastened around his wrist, and somehow Anastasia had looked upon him and concluded not that she ought to flee, but that he ought not be left alone. Bram could not decide whether that spoke more to her poor judgment or her kindness, though by now he suspected the latter. He’d seen too much evidence of it since.

“You were hurt,” she said more quietly. “And whatever was wrong, I thought you needed somebody. I figured once we reached a town, I could get you somewhere safe and find someone who could actually help you.”

“While I was attempting to do precisely the same for ye.”

Her smile returned slowly. “I guess we were concerned about each other.”

Bram smiled as well. “Aye. It would seem we were.”

“Neither one of us had the slightest idea what was going on.”

“I kent considerably more than ye did,” he said, expecting to rile her.

She laughed at this. “Well, I wouldn’t say that. You just happened to have supposed the correct circumstance.” She sighed and her smile lingered. “You know what’s strange?” she asked after a moment.

“Hm?”

“When was that? Three weeks ago? Gosh, but doesn’t it seem a lifetime ago?”

It did, though Bram had not considered it until she said so. Three weeks was no great measure of a life, and yet he could scarcely reconcile the frightened woman he’d found in that English wood with Anastasia sitting beside him now, comfortable enough to laugh over how thoroughly they had misunderstood one another. He supposed he had changed no less. Three weeks ago, he had wanted only to be rid of her before she complicated an escape already fraught with danger; then he had wanted only to get her safely north, and later to put enough distance between them that neither mistook necessity and circumstance for something more. Now she stood with her hand still resting in his, and Bram could no longer remember when having her near had ceased to feel like a problem he ought to solve.

“Aye,” he said at last. “It does.”

As if the thought had somehow passed from his mind into hers, Anastasia glanced down and seemed to notice their joined hands anew. Her smile faltered. Slowly, almost apologetically, she slipped her fingers from his and returned her hands to the post behind her.

Bram disliked the loss of her touch immediately, but more than that, he disliked the small reserve that returned with it. Only moments ago she had been laughing with him, speaking as freely as she had during the best days of their journey, and he had no wish to surrender that simply because she’d remembered she wanted to keep distance between them.

“Ye have changed considerably,” he said.

Anastasia glanced at him, tilting her head. “Have I?”

“Nae proper fear of me anymore.” He pretended an affront.