Exiles in Time (The After Cilmeri Series) (9 page)

“
And you’re—”

“
From the future. Yes,”
Callum said.

The woman gave a cry that was half
laughter, half startled surprise. “When I heard you cursing in
English—real English—during the battle, I couldn’t believe it. I’ve
searched for so long …” Her throat closed on the last word, but she
didn’t look away. Her eyes were very wide and clear as she gazed at
Callum.

Callum’s hand was still around hers,
both of them holding the torch. “If I tell you when I’m from, will
you tell me your name, and what you’re doing here?”

“
Yes.” She eased back onto
her heels, seeming to want more distance between them.

Callum loosened his hold on her hand
without letting her go entirely. The woman was far closer to
mastering her emotions than Callum was to his. He needed to get
this out of the way right now before his head exploded. “2016,” he
said.

“
Oh God.” The woman jerked
away.

Callum reached for her, fearing that
she wasn’t going to keep up her end of the bargain. If she ran
away, he couldn’t chase her. He didn’t even know if he could walk.
But then she stopped, breathing hard, having scrambled only four or
five feet from Callum. She looked at him, her hands clenched into
fists and what he thought might be tear tracks on her dirty cheeks,
mixing with the raindrops.

Then as before, her chin firmed. She
crawled back to him, her eyes on his. “My name is Cassie. I was
born in Oregon.”

Chapter Four

Cassie

S
omehow Cassie got Callum upright and walking—or rather
stumbling—heading off the road and into the hills to the northwest
of the ambush site.

“
Where are we going?”
Callum said, though it came out more of a mumble, something
like
where we?
and
Cassie had to infer the rest.

“
Some place safe,” Cassie
said.

It was a wonder he could walk at all,
given how long she’d had to leave him lying in the mud until the
MacDougalls had marched off. If they’d discovered he wasn’t dead
and threatened to finish the job, she might have had to pull a
Pocahontas and cover his body with her own. Thankfully, it hadn’t
come to that.

“
Is it far?”

“
Farther than you want to
walk just now, but we can make it,” Cassie said.

After that, Callum didn’t ask any more
questions, just kept walking with his head down, his arm around
Cassie’s shoulder and hers around his waist, holding him up. Cassie
was tall for a woman, almost 5’ 9”, but he was bigger, easily over
six feet. He wore a cloak that weighed twice as much as it should,
due to the rain that had waterlogged it. He wore armor, too. She
didn’t know how he’d come to be a knight in the king’s company, but
she’d seen him fight and he’d handled himself better than all but a
few others, Scot or English.

Cassie had known that
Callum was from the twenty-first century from the first time he’d
said you
bloody cocked up bastard knob
head!
while cutting through two MacDougalls
to help one of his fellow soldiers. As they’d walked, and before he
became too breathless to talk, Callum had told her about his
mission for King David. It had been the first positive news Cassie
had heard all day. It meant that King David hadn’t been among those
killed or captured. The king hadn’t come at all.

In the nearly five years that she’d
lived in Scotland, Cassie had learned to ignore the rain. As the
miles passed, it tapered off, even as the wind picked up. She kept
Callum walking higher into the hills, going up and down, heading
northwest all the while through scrub and stands of
trees.

Finally, as the sky began to lighten
towards morning and Callum was stumbling badly, worse with every
step he took, they reached Cassie’s house. It was set in the middle
of a small clearing with a garden next to it. Callum pulled up at
the sight of it and spoke his first sentence in hours. “Who lives
here?”

“
I do.”

Though Callum balked like a
three-year-old, as if Cassie was dragging him to the dentist
instead of entering her home, she eventually got his feet moving
again. He was so tired that after his initial protest, he couldn’t
fight her anymore. Cassie tugged him to the door, lifted the latch,
and let them in.

She had built the house herself, for
herself, so Cassie hadn’t bothered with more than one room. She did
have a bed, which she’d also built, and a down mattress, a luxury
for which she’d traded labor, rabbit skins, and herbs for three
months before she could afford it. Though Callum made straight for
the bed, Cassie steered him towards a low stool by the banked fire
instead and began stripping him of his clothes.

“
You’re soaked. I’m not
letting you ruin my mattress,” Cassie said.

Callum gazed at her blankly. Cassie
wanted to fall face first onto her bed too, so she could sympathize
with the dullness of his expression. She got his cloak, boots, and
mail shirt off him without Callum making much more than a token
protest, but as she reached around him to untuck his undershirt,
her hand came into contact with something hard and metal at the
small of his back.

“
No.” Callum caught her
hand in a strong grip, fully awake for the first time in
hours.

Cassie and Callum gazed at each other
for five seconds, suspended in a silent tug of war, and then Cassie
sat back to allow Callum to pull out the gun himself. He held it
loosely in his hand. Cassie was pretty sure his eyes weren’t really
focusing, even though he’d reacted quickly when she reached for
it.

“
I’ll keep it safe,” she
said, holding out her hand, palm up, and waiting for him to give it
to her.

He studied her for another ten seconds
and then nodded. “Okay.”

Cassie put the gun on a high shelf
behind a box of herbs.

After that, he didn’t argue
with her anymore. She took his shirt and pants, leaving him only
braes—medieval underwear—and refrained from exclaiming
holy crap, the man is cut!
out loud.

“
We’ll talk when you wake
up,” she said instead.

Cassie got him off the stool and over
to the bed. He lay down and she covered him with a blanket. Within
five seconds, he’d closed his eyes and was breathing
evenly.

Cassie gazed down at him, glad that he
was covered because it seemed unfair to gape at him while he was
asleep. He was tall and, to go along with his body, disconcertingly
handsome. He had dark brown, close-cropped hair and the most
regular features of any man she’d seen outside of television. His
hazel eyes were currently hidden, which was a good thing since
earlier they’d looked at her with startling frankness. In the old
world, women must have been lining up to be with him. Cassie
wondered what girl he might have left behind.

She took a last look at him, making
sure he was really asleep, though that didn’t seem much in doubt.
She’d walked through the woods for half the night with him, and if
he had been able to argue coherently or had any real ability to
move about on his own volition, he wouldn’t have accepted her
ministrations in the first place. His looks aside, the head wound
was the first thing she was worried about. She’d tended it briefly
in the ditch beside the road, but even with the flashlight held
between her teeth, with the rain and the dark, she hadn’t been able
to do much for him.

Cassie stirred the fire, which in her
absence had died down to a few embers, got it going again, and set
a pot of water over it. She didn’t have any antibiotic ointment,
but at least she could clean and pack his wound. The herbs in the
Middle Ages weren’t bad for healing and certainly were better than
nothing. It was just that they weren’t as powerful and didn’t work
as consistently as many manmade drugs. She’d gotten a good look at
Callum’s body when she’d undressed him and he was otherwise whole,
except for bruises and an old scar that looked like he’d once taken
a bullet on his right side, high in his chest.

While she waited for the water to
heat, Cassie went through Callum’s belongings. As far as she was
concerned, they were past worrying about manners or privacy. She
wasn’t going to wait until he was awake to find out more about him.
She had a strange man in her bed. That was rare enough—okay, so
rare it had never happened before—that she wasn’t going to trust
him just because he was from the modern world. She needed to know
as much about him as she could, preferably before he woke up and
found her going through his clothes.

Cassie dumped the rest of the water
out of his boots and set them close to the fire. Then she hung his
shirt and pants on her clothesline and laid his armor across the
table. It took up half of the space. Callum had been cognizant
enough at the ambush site not to sheath his sword while it was
still bloody, but Cassie unsheathed it again to make sure he’d
dried it completely. The leather wrap for the hilt was butter soft,
and gold filigree adorned the crossguard and pommel. Someone had
paid a pretty penny for that sword.

She eyed the sleeping man in her bed.
Regardless of whether it had been he who’d bought it or King David,
Callum appeared to have done very well for himself, despite being
from the future. Better than Cassie had, anyway.

The sword would need to be oiled
sooner rather than later, but Cassie didn’t know exactly the kind
of oil it needed so she just polished it again with a clean cloth,
resheathed it, and propped it against the wall near the head of the
bed. Callum might not be a medieval man, but he acted very much
like the few knights she’d met, and that meant his first instinct
when he awoke would be to make sure he still had his
sword.

And his gun.

Cassie took the gun off the shelf and
popped out the magazine. None of the bullets had been fired. That
alone was interesting. How long had he been here that he hadn’t
used the gun at all? Perhaps, for all his ability to hold his own
in a medieval battle, this was the first dangerous situation he’d
been in. Either that or he was saving the ammunition for absolute
need—though she would have thought that the ambush would have
qualified as ‘need’. Still, bullets couldn’t be
replaced.

That Callum carried a gun
with him, however, meant that the balancing act of living in the
Middle Ages was as real for him as it was for Cassie. The gun made
him vulnerable to discovery far more than anything else he could
have carried. What if the MacDougalls had gone through the bodies
of the ‘dead’ more thoroughly? What if it hadn’t been Cassie who
had found him? And that didn’t even address the real question of
the hour:
did King David know who Callum
really was?

Cassie checked for moisture before
pushing the magazine, which held the standard fifteen rounds, back
into place. The ammunition was military grade and thus sealed.
Neither it nor the gun would have been affected by rain and mud
that had soaked Callum, but the weapon itself could rust, just as
surely as Callum’s sword would if he didn’t dry and oil
it.

Cassie put the gun in its holster—a
handmade one that had to have been made here—and placed it back on
the shelf where she kept her herbs. Then she poured warm water into
a bowl, grabbed a cloth, and sat on the edge of the bed next to
Callum. She soaked the cloth, squeezed it out, and patted at his
wound, gently at first since she didn’t want to wake him and then
more thoroughly when he didn’t stir. Head wounds were tricky.
Earlier, his eyes had told Cassie that he had a concussion. He’d
proved her right by throwing up twice on the trek to her house; he
was certainly exhausted.

Cassie rubbed the wound with a salve
she had made herself, composed mostly of sanicle, but with a few
other herbs that added to the healing properties, and left it
exposed rather than bandaging it. The sooner the cut scabbed over,
the better off Callum would be. Head wounds bled like nobody’s
business, but since his had stopped bleeding around the time the
rain had stopped, and it looked like he would rest for a while,
Cassie had hope that he would heal quickly.

Cassie needed to sleep
herself, but she spent the next few hours putting her house in
order, feeding the fire, and making sure that she had what she
needed for whatever tomorrow might bring. All the while, she kept
half her mind on the man sleeping in her bed. Callum might have
survived the ambush, but if he really was the new English king’s
emissary, he wasn’t safe here or anywhere. The MacDougalls hated
the English and their meddling in Scotland. Cassie didn’t know what
had sent them on the path of war last night, but to attack the
king’s party meant there was no turning back for them. They had to
know that they were committed to see this through. Whatever
this
was.

In fact, Cassie was surprised they’d
left Callum alive at all. Even with the dark and the rain, and the
bodies of fifty dead men littering the road, it was still sloppy
work and very unlike them. They’d taken only those who could walk,
killed those who couldn’t, and departed. Callum had been lucky to
have fallen face down and out of his senses under two other
men.