Did Iain let go of me?
My head—no, actually my entire backside rested on the unforgiving floor. I opened my eyes. I expected to see Iain standing there. Instead, only the roughhewn edge of a wooden table appeared in my line of vision. Beyond that was an angled thatched ceiling.
Perfect. I’d suffered a concussion complete with hallucinations.
I cautiously moved my hands to my sides to push myself up, disturbing what felt like dried grass. With uncertainty, I sat up and looked down at an earthen floor. Although confusion filled my head, pain didn’t. A thorough probing of my scalp with my fingertips confirmed no injury. I plucked a dried purple bloom from a lock of my hair. I glanced under the table and spotted Iain, his limbs spread haphazardly across the floor on the opposite side of the table. He moaned and sat up too. I gripped the solid table edge, pulling my body up from the floor as Iain rose to his knees and stood.
He stared at me with a blank expression, blinked, and slid his gaze toward the box. My gaze followed suit. The only constants in my hallucination were him and the box. Everything else had changed. But even though Iain still remained . . . he’d changed. I swallowed hard as I took in the image of the man before me dressed in a plaid similar to the one he wore to the games, only this one was dusty and darker. I marveled at his new appearance, which didn’t stop at his clothing. His dark brown hair flowed down beyond his shoulders, and a braid dangled from each temple bound by a thin strip of leather. A beard covered his face, but in no way hid the strong angle of the jaw beneath.
Besides those differences, one more struck me as I scanned his body. I’d seen plenty of the man’s skin both in real life and on the silver screen, and the only scars he’d ever worn had been carefully placed by makeup artists. Now, I stared in fascination at his broad chest and arms covered in battle scars. I found myself reaching out and tracing a finger along a jagged line marking an old injury on his sun-bronzed forearm while he silently watched my actions.
The seemingly real dream surprised me. Did people imagine smells? The room had a wretched, pungent aroma from the animal fat of rushlights burning on an iron stand in the corner. Only an errant breeze through a door left ajar alleviated the nauseous feeling rising from the bottom of my stomach. The fragrance of fresh baked bread and cooked meat wafted in as well, causing a good-versus-bad aromatic clash.
The small room had stone walls, one sealed wooden door on the far side, and an open door leading outside on the other. I ran my hand along the table edge feeling along the bottom, catching a fingertip at the point of a rough splinter before it pierced my skin. The vividness of every last historical detail—sight, smell, and touch—astounded my shock-addled brain.
Iain spoke to me as he stepped closer, his expression bordering on astonishment. Yeah, well, that made two of us. “Isa?” He reached his hand out to touch me with such trepidation, I wondered if he thought I’d been conjured out of his imagination. Great. My apparition-Iain held the same wariness as I did about the whole situation—yet another reason I decided none of it could be real. I’d projected my feelings onto those around me.
Without warning, the outer door flew open. Both of us snapped our heads at the intrusion. A burly man with long, black hair broke into our bewildering scene, speaking in what I swore was Gaelic. If not for my study of ancient languages and occasional talks with my seanair, I’d have been at a complete loss in understanding his rapid-fire speech. My limited experience with the dialect allowed me to piece together a few of the words he uttered: something about a woman needing Iain’s advice and a dispute requiring his authority to settle. The man pronounced Iain’s name more like Yo-an, rather than Ee-an like I did.
“Aye, Robert,” Iain replied to the intruder. “Tell Agnes I’ll speak to her on the morrow after noon meal. Have Fingall and Colum meet me in the near field. I’ll hear their grievance.”
Yep. I’d certainly lost it. Robert spoke in Gaelic, Iain replied in a Scottish brogue so thick I barely deciphered the words, and my delusional mind roughly translated it all into modern English-speak. Perfect.
Robert turned on his heel without so much as a glance at me.
I’d had enough of my silence. “What are you, their laird or something?”
Iain laughed nervously as he turned, focusing his attention on me once more. He stepped closer, searching my eyes, opening his arms, reaching out to me like my modern-day Iain had. Despite bearing all the same mannerisms of the Iain I’d always known, something about the man standing before me was subtly different, the specifics of how escaping me in my current confusion. He spoke slowly, as if I’d become a skittish deer he didn’t want to startle.
“Lass, I’m afraid I’m about to bear bad news,” he said, his voice soft.
My delusional man was going to tell me I’d died, wasn’t he? Well, damn, I’d died a virgin. How mortifying. Although, if my reality had been lost to some other realm, what was the harm in fooling around in my current one? I shook my head at my lustful thoughts. You are one step away from insanity, Isobel.
“I’ve died, haven’t I?” I asked.
Iain’s uninhibited laughter rang out, echoing off the stone walls. “Nay, Isa, you haven’t died. My kiss isn’t that powerful or, in any way, deadly.” His mirth subsided. He furrowed his brow as if discovering a problem. “But give me a few minutes, and you may wish you had.”
My struggle to understand his heavier brogue grated on every raw nerve I’d rapidly developed. I sighed. “Fine. Tell me this wondrous news, Iain.”
“Weel, I doona know really how to explain it, for I doona fully understand it myself, but you’ve . . . that is, I mean to say . . . we’ve . . . traveled back in time—back to my time.”
I burst out laughing. I couldn’t help it, really. “So, if we’ve been magically transported to the past, why am I still wearing my clothes and boots”—I ran my hands down my body like Vanna White, finishing with a hand flourish at my pointed toe as I posed—“while you are straight off the pages of Medieval Highland GQ complete with kilt, brogue, and realistic scars? Where’s your crisp, white shirt and jeans?”
“Weel, see, I recognized the box the moment you showed it to me.” He inched closer, but I stepped back as a rising fear took hold. “I’d touched it during a matin’ ceremony long before ’twas my time, not knowin’ the power it held. It threw me forward in time. I dinna know it then, but I know it now.”
Something in me started believing the tale he told, and I began to shake. Maybe it was the sincerity in his voice, his body language, or the honesty in his eyes. Even more than that, what he said made sense in another way, connecting to a feeling I’d been having since the first moment I’d been exposed to the box: it seemed to have a mysterious, otherworldly quality.
My voice croaked as I stuttered, “How . . . how do you know it now?”
He shook his head, stepping closer until I felt trapped both by him and the unknown picture he painted for me. “All of me dinna travel to your world; a piece of me did, like I’d split in two. I’ve remained here in the Highlands with no awareness of the Iain you know. The Iain of your time, also me, had early childhood memories of this life, but lived as you lived. I doona know if ’twas our kiss and the box, or simply touchin’ the box that brought us back, but here we are.”
“Here we are? Here we are?” I began to shout as fear turned to panicked rage. “When are we Iain? What’s the date?”
“We’re in the thirteenth century, lass.”