Page 15 of So Close To Heaven
“With England?”
He glanced down sharply, giving her a sidelong glance as if to be sure she wasn’t mocking him. “Aye,” he said, stating what should have been known to her, clipped and cool. “With England.”
“I thought I read somewhere that in 1305 there was a—” she broke off abruptly and then started again. “Isn’t there a truce now?”
He stiffened. “Aye. Some say so.”
“And you?”
“I dinna make pacts with men who butcher bairns and murder thousands, trying to seize what doesnae belong to them.”
“So if you don’t follow the truce, are you part of some rebel army?”
His jaw twitched. “We’re nae rebels,” he said emphatically. “'Tis our land. We dinna rebel against it. We fight to keep it.”
“So you’re a patriot,” she said, with a strange note in her voice—as if she were weighing the word. “A freedom fighter.”
“Call it what ye like,” he muttered, bewildered by her questions, her seeming lack of understanding about... anything. Everything.
They rode for another stretch in silence, the wind threading softly through the trees, and she pulled the breacan more tightly around her.
“What were ye doin’ out there this afternoon?” he asked when several minutes had passed. “Near the clearing?”
The hesitation was visible. Her breath seemed to catch.
“I don’t know,” she said at last.
The scowl that had only seconds ago eased, returned. “Ye dinna ken?”
She shook her head faintly. “I mean... well, yes—I don’t know. I have no idea how I got there. I was literally just out for a walk, hiking the Great Trossachs Path—Loch Katrine was only a couple of miles away,” she said. “That’s why I asked if I could be taken back there. I thought if I got back there, there’d be... something. Help. People. A road.” She shook her head thoughtfully. “I still have no idea how I got to where you—and the fight—were. You said it was forty miles away. I don’t understand how that happened or why Kendrick said it was—”
She stopped herself abruptly, but Alaric asked the question that had been bothering him, which he believed she’d just stopped herself from addressing. “Why did ye need to ask the year?” Alaric’s voice was low. “Why did Kendrick’s answer cause ye such distress?”
Ivy Mitchell sagged against him, her spine curving into his chest as if the fight had gone out of her. “I... I can’t explain it—or rather, you’d never believe me.”
“Ye willna even try?”
She gave a short, mirthless laugh. “I don’t even know where to start. I haven’t made sense of it myself.” She exhaled, slow and weary. Her mouth opened and closed but she said no more just then.
He studied the top of her head, the subtle tension still clinging to her frame. “Were ye struck in the head? Fevered? Or insensible for some long stretch—long enough that hearing the year would rattle ye so?”
Her slim shoulders lifted in a faint shrug. “I don’t know—no. No, that’s not possible. That’s... backwards.”
“Ye speak in riddles,” he said, not unkindly, though the edge in his voice betrayed his mounting frustration.Shewas backwards, he decided. There was something off about Ivy Mitchell, something that scraped against sense. It wasn’t only her strange arrival in the midst of a bloodied battlefield, or the garb she wore, or the way she laced her words with unfamiliar cadence—it was this fumbling, shifting refusal—or inability—to explain herself. And Alaric, a man who trusted action over answers, found her vagueness unsettling in a way he couldn’t name.
Another few moments of silence passed between them before Ivy tilted her head and face up at him. “But is it really thirteen hundred and five?”
Again with the year, while she refused to answer his questions about it. His rising anger was tempered, however, by the sight of tears once again glistening in her eyes.
“Aye, it is. Same as it was earlier when ye asked Kendrick, when ye asked me,” he said, his tone harsh despite the tears.
She lowered her face and turned away from him. “Okay, I’m sorry,” she said, sounding weak and small now. “I won’t ask again.”
Supposing that he should feel like a brute for what she might deem his insensitivity, he nevertheless managed to cling to his annoyance, unable to rouse any sympathy. Aye, she was beautiful. And aye, her condition counseled caution, but he wasn’t about to be swayed by either her inadequate words or her weeping.
“Keep yer secrets, Ivy Mitchell,” he muttered. “We’ll be parting ways soon enough.”
Whatever her reaction was or might have been would remain unknown to him, for at that moment, the sound of a swiftly approaching horse reached his ears. The rest of the army was moving at a steady walk, their pace plodding after so many long hours, and what little noise they made was swallowed by the forest.
