Page 25 of So Close To Heaven
He fixed his gaze on her, his golden-brown eyes fastening on her with that heavy, unwavering weight that made her insides squirm. “Aye.”
She swallowed hard, her mouth suddenly dry. “I’m not... I’m not from here. Not just not fromherehere, like this place, but—” She gave a shaky laugh. “God, this sounds crazy. Itiscrazy. But I don’t belong in the year 1305.”
His brow furrowed, but he said nothing, waiting.
“I—” She broke off, squeezing the previously brutalized linen, then blurted in a rush, “I come from the future.”
For a heartbeat, silence. Then his brows drew together, the lines of his face darkening in confusion.
Silence stretched, heavy and unyielding. Ivy’s pulse pounded in her ears.
When he didn’t immediately reply, Ivy let out a nervous laugh, and wet her lips, babbling to fill the silence. “You probably think I’m insane. Honestly, I don’t know that I haven’t lost mymarbles. But it’s true. I swear. I was hiking in the twenty-first century and—bam, I don’t know what happened—but suddenly I was here. Well, notherehere, but—” She gestured helplessly at the loch. “here, in the fourteenth-century.”
“Ye come from the future?” He repeated, his voice low and crisp.
“Yes,” she whispered. “From centuries ahead. I didn’t mean to...to travel through time. I don’t even understand how it happened. But I’m not lying to you—seriously, you can’t make this up.”
His mouth opened, closed. He snarled, like literally snarled.
“Ye claim to be a spirit? A seer?”
“What? No. No, no, just—just a woman. A normal person, I swear. Just...me. Only,” she went on, shrugging helplessly, “only I was born seven hundred years from now.”
His jaw tightened, disbelief hardening into something harsher. “Ye take me for a fool?”
Despite the way her stomach twisted, anxious over his dark and angry reaction, Ivy was quick to refute this. “I’m not toying with you,” she said quickly. “I know it sounds insane, but—”
“Mad, aye.” His voice quickened, sharp as a blade. “Or wicked. Which is it? Do ye mean to vex me wi’ this nonsense, or confess ye’re some witch come among us?”
“No!” Her voice cracked with desperation. Tears pooled in her eyes. “I swear to you, I’m telling the truth! I only told you because I’m afraid.” She laid her hand and forearm over her stomach. “I’m going to have a baby, and I don’t know what to do about that, and I’m scared. I thought—” she stopped talking, made very afraid by the thunder in his expression, the anger that boiled where confusion had been.
He snatched up his boots and rose in one swift movement.
“I’ll hear nae more of this,” he growled. “Keep yer lies, woman. I’ll nae be made sport of.”
And with that, he strode away, boots in hand, leaving Ivy staring after him, the summer air suddenly colder for his absence.
Great. What now? she wondered.
Chapter Seven
The young soldier’s breathing had grown shallow, his lashes sinking lower with each blink. Ivy sat crossed leg beside his pallet, smoothing a strip of damp, cool linen over his brow. His fever had broken sometime in the last few hours, and now he hovered in that thin place between waking and sleeping.
“You’re going to be just fine,” she murmured, though she had no way of knowing it. He gave a faint grunt of acknowledgment before drifting off, his lips parting with a small sigh. She set the cloth aside a few minutes later, quietly pleased that he’d managed to find rest.
Yesterday, when she’d returned from the loch with her hands raw from lye and essentially soaked through from the waist down, Tàmhas had been the one to meet her. She’d braced herself for wariness or coolness, but the gruff surgeon had studied the neat stacks of drying and dried bandages and had given her a short nod of approval. He hadn’t merely dismissed her, though, but had directed her with a kind of brisk patience, where to lay them, which size strips were best for which wounds. His manner was still clipped, but there was warmth under it now, as though she’d passed some unspoken test.
This morning, he’d greeted her with a nod, which felt rather friendly to Ivy, so that she found herself inquiring if he could use an extra set of hands. If he were surprised by the offer, he didn’t let it show, but he was certainly agreeable and soon enough, he was barking out orders at her as if she were simply another grunt in the MacKinlay army—“More water, lass. Bring a fresh cloth. Hold this steady.” Not once did he question her presence, and once, when she managed to anticipate what he needed before he asked, she thought she’d caught the faintest glimmer of a smile in his beard.
It wasn’t much, but to Ivy, who had felt nothing but alien here, it was something. A foothold, anyway.
When she was certain the young soldier she’d been tending would rest soundly for a while, she rose from his side and shifted to the next pallet, where another man lay awake. He couldn’t have been much older than she was — maybe mid-twenties, if that — with a boyish face under the scruff of a few days’ beard. His arm was bound in fresh linen, and he looked pale but alert.
She crouched beside him and adjusted the linen around his shoulder, tucking in a loose end.
His eyes lit faintly. “Ye’ve a gentle touch, lass,” he said, his voice hoarse but eager. “Better than Tàmhas, anyway. Hands like an ox, he has.”
Ivy smiled. “Tender care is not his job—saving lives is.”
