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She should try to make Aulay like her. She should say things to placate him. Instead, she sputtered through her clenched teeth, “You have no idea what you’re talking about.”

Aulay’s eyes darkened, and he leaned back in his chair, all humor gone. “All right. Let us assume there is a St. Patrick Mountain and it’s a St. Patrick’s pilgrimage site. What happened to yer boat?”

“It was wrecked, and we were stranded—”

Before she could finish, a swarm of loud, giggling kids ran into the great hall like a rainbow cloud and, with no regard to anyone else, hurried straight to Aulay. There must have been six or seven of them. As they jumped onto him, it was hard to say how many pairs of legs and arms stuck out of the wriggling heap. He laughed somewhere under them, and Jenny’s heart melted like Nutella in the sun.

They wrestled and laughed and tickled. They yelled children’s rhymes she didn’t know, and Aulay’s voice boomed from under them, happy and peaceful, like a dad with his big family. She must have spontaneously ovulated seeing this huge, powerful Highlander being soft like that…

And then all the goo and warmth within her washed away when her eyes fell on the open doors of the great hall. There were no guards there. Aulay was distracted by the kids. The warriors were busy eating.

This could be her only chance to escape. On weak legs, she stood up, expecting at any moment for him to notice her and grab her. As she walked down the stairs of his king-like platform, her mind raced. If he caught her, what explanation would she give him?

Bathroom. She needed a bathroom. A latrine… What was it called in the Middle Ages, anyway?

She might also say she needed to change her tampon. Men always faltered if there was any mention of a woman’s period. And even medieval women must have some sort of menstrual hygiene practices.

As she walked down the aisle between the long tables, she wanted to run, but forced her legs to remain steady. The giggling and yelling kept going behind her, and none of the warriors she passed looked up from their meals.

Miraculously, she reached the doors to the great hall. As she entered the landing, she glanced back, but Aulay was still buried under the swarm of children. If her plan was successful, this would be the last time she’d see him.

She hurried down the stairs, one hand tracing the curved, rough stone wall for balance, her feet still dirty and slippery from the mud. Her footsteps against the stairs exploded in her ears as she ran. She was hyperaware of every sound coming from the great hall behind her.

As she opened the door of the tower and ran outside into the daylight, chickens and geese flew out from under her steps, squawking and hissing angrily. People watched her with frowns as she ran. Her lungs burned as she sped through the thatched-roof houses, heaps of firewood, shacks, carts, and warriors. She accelerated, despite the ache in her legs, despite slipping over and over again. She lost one flip-flop but kept going.

By the time she reached the outer gate of the castle, her rib cage hurt, feeling like it was too small for all the air she wanted to suck in. She ran down the rocky slope, zigzagging between the carts and the people who were on their way up carrying baskets of fish, ropes, bundles of sheep fleece…

When she reached the wooden jetty, her head was spinning and her throat hurt, and her lungs were about to burst. Just a little more. There was a man with a fishing boat who looked like he was about to depart.

She couldn’t believe it. She’d made it this far. Just a bit farther.

But feet pounded behind her. With the last of her strength, she lengthened her short stride, lunging towards the fisherman.

She stopped abruptly before the man, gasping. His eyes rounded when he looked her over. Distantly, she remembered she had something like a coin…

“Please…take me…Achleith,” she managed. “I have this—”

But before she could retrieve the coin, an iron fist clasped her arm then spun her around and pressed her against a chest as hard as stone.

“Where ye think ye’re going, lass?” said Aulay.

His scent enveloped her. The sea, the whiff of metal and wood, and the subtle male musk of his warm skin. It made her knees weak. She kept gasping, unable to get enough air.

“I need to go back to Achleith!” she yelled into his face.

Big mistake. She should have said something about a bathroom or a tampon like she had planned…it might not have made sense, but it would have confused him and given her time to think.

She had just undone all the work of trying to get on his good side. Fury distorted his face like a storm and a chill ran through her body.

“And I need to be careful,” he said as he clasped her elbow and dragged her back into the village. “I should have never believed ye. And they were right. Ye need to be locked up in the dungeon.”

“Let me go, you jackass!” she yelled as the unstoppable force kept hauling her towards the castle. “You king of jackasses!”

“I dinna ken what that means!” he yelled back. “And I dinna want to ken.”

She kept struggling to snatch her arm from his grip. She yelled at him to stop, but he ignored her. He dragged her through the mud, up the rocky slope, and through the inner bailey. In the tower, he took her down the stairs into a space illuminated by a brazier.

A dungeon.