Beyond the Highland Myst(380)

"Oh, puh-lease!" she cried, turning around and using her bottom as a battering ram on the thick door. Thump-thump, thump-thump. It hurt her more than it hurt the door, and made about as much noise as a downy pillow. She'd be damned if she was getting sent back to save him, only to be denied entrance.

She stepped back and eyed the windows. Perhaps she could toss something through the glass?

Not exactly a wise way to petition shelter from strangers, she decided. Someone might shoot at her. Arrows, or something equally archaic. Perhaps toss boiling oil down the walls.

She cast a glance about and spied a pile of chopped wood. She scurried over to it, freed a wedge, and slammed one end against the door. "Please, open up," she called.

"I'm coming," a sleepy voice replied. "I heard ye the first time. Impatient, aren't ye?" There was the sound of metal sliding against wood, and the door was finally, blessedly opened. Gwen sank to her knees with relief.

A buxom fortyish woman clad in a long gown and lacy cap stood in the doorway, blinking sleep from her eyes. Her eyes widened as she took in the sight huddling on the doorstep, nearly naked.

She whisked Gwen through the door with a strong grip and slammed it behind them. "Och, lassie," she crooned, gathering her in her arms. "Nell's got ye now. For the love of Columba, what gives ye cause to be wandering so on such a night? An English wench, no less! How came ye here? Did a man have at ye? Did he harm ye, wee lass?"

As the woman drew her to her ample bosom, Gwen thought, So this is Drustan's Nell, and sagged against her. She was exactly as he'd described. Assertive and gruffly kind, pretty—past the flush of youth, but with a timeless beauty that would never fade.

Beyond coherent thought, she was dimly astonished to realize her brain was shutting off, as if someone had flipped the main breaker and, circuit by circuit, all systems were going down.

She couldn't crash now! She needed to know what date it was. But her body, overwhelmed and madly off-kilter from her jaunt through the centuries, had other ideas.

"Nell, what's all the commotion?" A man called from somewhere in the perimeter of her awareness.

"Help me with the lass, Silvan," Nell murmured. "'Tis the oddest thing, but she's chilled and her feet are near frozen."

Gwen tried desperately to ask, "What's the date" and "Is he okay?" But damn it all, she was passing out.

Her fading consciousness chuckled richly when she thought she glimpsed Albert Einstein, the greatest theoretical physicist of all time, bending over her, wiry white hair and wrinkled impish face, a mischievous light in his eyes. If she was dying, she was going to be in fine company, indeed. He bent his face close to hers and she managed to whisper, "Drustan."

"Fascinating," she thought she heard him remark. "Let's get her warmed up and put her in the Silver Chamber."

"But that chamber adjoins Drustan's," Nell protested. " 'Tis not proper."

"Propriety be damned. 'Tis the most suitable."

Gwen didn't listen further.

Drustan was alive and they were putting her near him. She would rest for a moment.





* * *





the next morning





Chapter 12




"Why must ye live all the way up here, Silvan?

Yer like the bald eagle nestin' on the mount," Nell said, nudging open the door to his tower chamber—one hundred and three steps above the castle proper—with her hip. "Had to settle on the highest limb, dinna ye?"

Silvan MacKeltar popped his head up out of a book with a bemused expression. A silvery-white mane was sleek about his face, and Nell found him terribly handsome in a sage way, but she'd never tell him that. "I am not bald. I have quite a lot of hair." He lowered his head again and resumed reading, running his finger across the page.

The man was completely in his own world most of the time, Nell mused. Many were the times she'd wondered how he'd managed to get sons on his wife. Had the woman slammed his tomes shut on his fingers and dragged him off by the ear?

Now, there was a fine idea, she thought, watching him through eyes that did not nor had ever, in the twelve years she'd been there, betrayed one ounce of her feelings for him.

"Drink." She plunked the mug down on the table next to his book, careful not to spill a drop on his precious tome.

"Not another of your vile concoctions, is it, Nell?"

"Nay," she said, stony-faced, "'tis another of my splendid brews. And ye need it, so drink. I'm not leaving until the mug is empty."

"Did you put any cocoa in it?"

"Ye know we're nearly out."

"Nell," he said with a put-upon sigh, flipping a page in his book, "go on with you. I'll drink it later."