Page 72 of Long Live the King

Lochinvar said, gruffly, “Aye, it shouldna be allowed.”

Lady Mairead said, “Ye are correct, Colonel Quentin, tis another cousin.” She waved her hand and brought up a video on the wall. A large man with his shirt off was on a stage, muscles ripplin’ as he posed for the camera.

I sneered. Then the images shifted tae one of him wearin’ a suit with his hand up wavin’ at a crowd.

Lochinvar said, “He looks stupid.”

“Aye.”

Colonel Quentin said, “He looks as if he has worked hard on his surface. He’s definitely in it for the notoriety and prestige. There’s no way he could beat you, even if he wanted to. He can’t even scratch his own back.”

“Thank ye, Colonel Quentin, ye are a good friend for saying it. Where was this event?”

“A movie premiere.”

“He is modern?”

“He was raised in the past, as is usual for our family, though as a cousin twas hardly necessary. His name is Dugal Denoon. ”

Lochinvar said, “Och, he grows even more tediously stupid.”

Lady Mairead said, “I am only telling ye tae keep yer eye on him. We winna accept his challenge, I refuse tae even acknowledge it. Ye should ignore him, put it off as long as possible.”

“Aye, but in the meantime ye must monitor him, make sure he daena cause any trouble...”

“I will. Speaking of, Magnus, hae ye been having more of the dreams ye mentioned last time?”

I said, “Aye, they hae grown more frequent and more realistic.”

She sighed.

I added, “Archie is havin’ them as well.”

“Och nae, what sort of dreams is he having?”

“He is dreamin’ that he is bein’ crowned king, and the crowd is yellin’ ‘The King is Dead, Long Live the King!”

“I daena like the idea of that.”

“None of us do.”

She smoothed down her skirts. “Well, the ChronoGuard has found a discrepancy.”

“Och nae, ye are tellin’ the story backward, Lady Mairead, ye ought tae tell us of the discrepancy first and the ‘unimportant challenge we intend tae ignore’last.”

“I will tell the story as I deem necessary, Magnus.”

Lochinvar asked, “What is ChronoGuard?”

Colonel Quentin said, “It’s a history monitoring software that tries to detect shifts, it doesn’t find all of them, but?—”

“How would it do it?”

Quentin said, “We have servers set at different points in time, they keep records, then the records are compared, any points in time that don’t match are flagged. Then it’s run through a deeper comparison.”

Lady Mairead said, “We hae been developing it for years, it works verra well, considering, though last time Magnus visited he had concerns and it dinna hae anything new, but now... it has noticed a discrepancyverrafar back, in the interregnum period at the end of the thirteenth century.”

“Aye, when I was crowned king.”

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