Page 51 of Edge of Yesterday

“Nae, my lady. It is just small cuts that ache a bit.”

“Cuts?”

“Dagger cuts,” he replied.

Her brows rose. “You allowed your opponent to get close enough to use a dagger?”

He laughed. “He did. But to be fair, the dagger was at least twelve inches long.”

“The dagger or just the blade?”

“Just the blade.”

She nodded. “A formidable weapon. You are lucky they are mere flesh wounds.”

“He didn’t truly intend to harm me,” Cailean said. “We were…sparring.”

Her eyes shifted to the bandage on his left arm. “A sparring scratch that requires a bandage?”

He started to say the bandaged arm wasn’t a dagger cut, then thought better of it. Julianna and Lennox hadn’t told Lady Ravenstone he was their guest at Haven Cottage, which had to mean they hadn’t told her about the altercation in Heatheredge last night. Wait, he was acting as if this situation was real. It wasn’t.

“I have never seen you at Raghnall before,” she said.

“This is my first time here. Raghnall is all I heard it is.”

Her gaze sharpened, but he noted a hint of amusement in her eyes.

“What did you hear?”

“It is well-known that you keep the castle spotless, and you are a gracious hostess.”

The amusement deepened, but this time he noted satisfaction, as well.

“I must do my husband credit.”

Cailean repressed a laugh. He liked this Lady Ravenstone; proud, competent. If her husband looked good, then she looked good.

“Indeed, you do, my lady.”

She sipped her wine, then set it back onto the table beside her. “Are you skilled with a sword, Cailean?”

“I am.”

“Perhaps you will accompany Lennox to Heatheredge tomorrow to fetch the sword I had made for my nephew.”

Well, well, Lady Ravenstone clearly didn’t know that Lennox had given orders that he wasn’t to leave the great hall. He wouldn’t be pleased that his mother was sending him to Heatheredge…or would he? Cailean laughed mentally. A play, this was all a play, and everyone here were actors. Except whoever else Val had dropped here…

~*~

Returning to Heatheredge to pick up the sword Lady Ravenstone had commissioned for Micheil excited Cailean. Despite his anticipation, he still felt off balance. Since leaving Raghnall’s gates, he’d been unable to spot anything modern and he found nothing familiar in the landscape. The run-rigs near the castle could’ve been staged for effect, but here, farther away? He glanced round, aware of the faint pounding in his head that threatened a headache. Where were paved roads? And what about signs? Northern Scotland wasn’t all that populated and roads were few and far between, but still...there should be something more than this narrow, muddied track they followed. He couldn’t call it a road—but obviously it was, and that was frightening.

Equally unsettling was the emptiness of the sky. Only birds flew overhead. Yet, in the Scotland he knew, passing airplanes were a common sight, even in remote places.

His heart leapt when he spotted a few cows in a field. If a farmhouse also came into view, he’d have his answer. But such a place was nowhere to be seen, though its womenfolk were just ahead, scattered along the edge of the road. Servants, he imagined by the looks of them, and because the three women knelt on the low bank of the Alltbuie River and—how could it be? They were washing clothes and linens in the fast-flowing water. Some, God help them, were actually in the icy shallows, beating the laundry on flat-topped river rocks.

Cailean stared at them, feeling sick at heart. He blinked, hoping they’d be gone when he looked again, one looked up and smiled, waving as they passed. He glanced at Lady Julianna, somehow not surprised to see that she apparently saw nothing odd about the women using the river for a washing machine. Far from it, she raised her arm to return the washerwoman’s greeting.

“I noticed you drinking cider last night, Cailean,” she called to him above the jingle of harnesses and clop of horses’ hooves.