Page 13 of Her Highland Prophecy
As they walked, she noticed that Gordain kept one hand on his sword at all times and that he kept looking out to the trees.
“Expecting an attack?” she asked him. After her ordeal with the bandits earlier, she was more than a little anxious, and his vigilance made that feeling sharper. She glanced around them, seeing nothing but pine trees, and edged closer to him.
“Ye should always expect an attack in an unknown place,” he replied with a grave face. “Especially since we ken that there are highwaymen on yer tail.”
“They aren’t following us anymore, are they?” She looked around her frantically.
“I dinna ken. I havenae seen them but if this is their hunting ground, we’d have to be daft to ignore the possibility,” he answered.
She nodded. That was a sound strategy, she supposed.
The distance from the fairgrounds to the town was longer than she remembered. It had only taken her a few minutes before she exited the area, and the first houses were just beyond that. If Gordain was right about them being in the fairgrounds – and the empty space surrounding them made her doubt that – they should have already arrived at the town.
“Where is the town?” she asked impatiently.
“Ye keep calling it that. A ‘town’. Ballachulish is more of a village, and a small one at that.”
“What are you talking about? Of course, it’s a town. It even has its own train station.”
“What is a train?”
She stared at him incredulously, a little fed up with his act, and willed herself to calm down before she snapped at him. She didn’t answer as they continued their way in silence.
They had nearly arrived at the loch when the first structures appeared. Structures, she realized, not houses. A few dozen square buildings made of stone lined up next to each other along a dirt road.
And yet…
The shape of the bay in front of her was exactly the same as she remembered. A ring of mountains around the quasi-lake with a smattering of small islands extending from the shore to the middle of the open water.
She staggered. Where were the hotels? The restaurants? Where there had been several large houses and hotels, there was now nothing but trees and farmland as far as she could see. There was no train station or train tracks to be seen anywhere.
Either this was a dream, or something was genuinely wrong.
It was not possible. She had seen everything just the day before.
“This is Ballachulish?” she asked Gordain.
“Aye,” he confirmed.
She shook her head in disbelief. She hadn’t realized how much she had been hoping the fortune teller had prearranged this scenario until she stood there, her hopes crushed.
She could now see, this was something more bizarre than she could ever have imagined. The tiny village she just saw couldn’t be Ballachulish. If Gordain was being honest, it meant that wherever she was, she was alone.
Emotions she was suppressing for the past few hours had suddenly come to the forefront, manifesting in a hard lump pushing against her throat. She walked to a nearby rock, feet trembling beneath her and promptly dissolved into tears.
5
Gordain quickly gathered the weeping girl in his arms, making hushing noises. He wasn’t sure what had triggered her tears, but he could suspect.
The entire time she had been with him, she had insisted that she had only seen the gypsies in Ballachulish the day before. If he added the odd words that she kept using to describe things, well, he felt like she may be simple after all.
One moment she was acting completely normal, and the next, she was spouting nonsense. And yet, her emotions seemed all too real.
“It’s true. It’s all true,” she kept muttering, her arms wrapped around her body as she rocked back and forth slightly in grief.
“Hush,a nighean. I’m here. Ye’re safe,” he soothed as he patted her back over the too-large coat he had loaned her earlier. He continued to mutter calming things to her as he pondered the situation.
She was alone. The only family she had mentioned was supposed to be at the non-existent fair, so she also had nowhere to go, and there were highwaymen after her.
