Page 9 of Beyond Dreams

Chapter Three

The witchy woman—therewas no other way to think of her—barely left Holly’s side. This was both a blessing and then not. She spoke English and she was familiar, even if that was via Holly’s own current implausible, wholly bizarre nightmare, since Sidheag was attached to the beginning of it. But she was also kind of freaking out Holly, who feared she might actually have the power to turn her into a toad or something.

And she was the most exasperating person, seeming to know more than anyone but unwilling to share so much information with Holly, despite tears and threats and begging for information about what was really happening.

Yesterday, Holly had exploded at her after Sidheag had expressed an infuriating lack of concern about what details Holly needed to be made aware of regarding this supposed wedding with some medieval man—her own wedding! “Fine. Keep your stupid secrets and keep on with this stupid game,” she’d childishly yelled at the old woman, who was maddeningly unperturbed. “I’m not marrying anyone until you give me back my things—my clothes, my purse, and my phone. And I need an outlet and one of those converter things—mine’s at the inn where I was staying—don’t make that face at me. And stop pretending we really are in the 14th century. It’s getting annoyingly old, as in this farce has gone on long enough.”

It was said with more hopeful bravado than any real belief in the harsh words. Either this was the longest known dream ever recorded in history or it had to be true, what the crazy witch said. Any other hope, maybe that this was some elaborate, well-executed prank played on unsuspecting tourists, had long ago stopped being plausible.

So even as it was crazy, the very idea, and even as it seemed something only Hollywood could invent and pull off, Holly had a seriously dreadful suspicion that it was in fact truth, that she’d been transported back in time. But then, because that was so friggin’ unrealistic, she regularly waffled between several different explanations for what was really happening to her.

Holly’s quasi/partial/wary belief that she might actually have traveled through time—beenkidnappedthrough time seemed more accurate if it were to be believed—was the most frightening of possibilities but then also, sadly, the one that seemed somehow to make the most sense, all things considered. Another fear was that Sidheag was the only one who might possibly be able to return her to the twenty-first century. But she would not.

Could not, Sidheag had said, explaining it cryptically as, “If I were still bound and devoted to the daughters of shadow, I should think I would be able to return ye, but alas,” she said, leaving it at that, shrugging as if to say it was out of her hands.

Of course, Holly had asked her about those so-called shadow daughters, hardly able to believe some of the things that had come out of her mouth since she’d come to this place.This time, she was compelled to correct herself, in and of itself an absurdity. Sidheag had allowed only another exasperating abstraction, telling her, “Sure and that’s another tale for another day.”

This place, she’d been told, was Hewgill House, home to the MacHeths. Hugh was their clan chief, Sidheag had explained. “He is nae the wisest nae the strongest, but he has the surname, son of many sons before him of that original Heth. He wished he were nae the laird, would rather be one of the peons, of the multitude of marching soldiers.”

At Holly’s agitated reaction, finding almost everything said to be either implausible or surreal, Sidheag had eyed her strangely, a bit defensively. “I dinna read minds,” she defended as if Holly had accused her of such. “He said as much, and more than once. Instills great confidence, as ye can imagine.”

The rest of the MacHeths, all men with similar habits of hygiene—either neglected or unknown—were all weird in Holly’s estimation. The chief, Hugh, was obviously off his rocker, wanting Holly to pretend to be his dead sister and marry a neighboring clan chief to prevent war—which was just fantastic enough that she was able to cling to some fading hope that she must be dreaming. If not, she’d simply gone nuts and was doomed to live inside this miserable fantasy her defective brain had conjured. Other men, all similarly dressed in their medieval togs, tended to stare at Holly as ifshewere the witch.

Like so many other concerns of Holly’s, Sidheag had waved this off when Holly had questioned the abundant and mistrustful gazes sent her way. “’Tis yer pronounced likeness to the chief’s sister, that’s all,” she’d said.

Ah, yes.The one she was expected to pretend to be.

It had been two days since she’d woken up in that room upstairs, which she’d since discovered had a pretty good bolt on the door—on the wrong side of the door—and which they’d used each night since she’d come. She was, in essence, a prisoner. But honestly, what she’d encountered in the house—creepy old-fashioned citadel is what it was—was frightening enough to keep her from wanting to run away from it. Holly was terrified the grass might not truly be greener out there.

Actually, she had been allowed outside. Sidheag had arranged it after Holly had pled with her. They’d walked about, followed by two men with dull metal helmets and swords at their hips, both of which agreed with Sidheag’s declaration that they were currently living and breathing in the beginning of the fourteenth century. Nothing made sense. While she looked around, frantically and constantly, for some clue to reveal all of it as a charade, Holly only found more evidence to support the unlikely and irrational possibility that Sidheag hadn’t lied. She couldn’t conceive of a charade so grand and detailed, couldn’t imagine that unless she was on a big budget movie set with costumed extras and a built-from-scratch stone castle with six foot thick stone walls, including larger-than-average horses and oxen, that she wasn’t actually living in the past.

Hewgill House sat upon a flat plane of land on the side of a mountain, surrounded by a rather gentle slope and more pine trees than she could count. The mountain rose another hundred or so feet above the shelf where sat the house. Thekeep, she’d been reminded more than once. It wasn’t called a house here.

“Or stronghold,” Sidheag had suggested as an alternative for the very plain but well-positioned rectangle of a castle, complete with the expected array of dull-faced people in the background, servants indoors and outside meant to be seen and not particularly heard or known.

I think ‘expected’ as if I’d imagined such a bizarre scenario, she realized,or as if this was indeed a movie set and those extras were meant to be unobtrusive, unnoticeable, saving the screen for the star of the show.

The look on the faces of the people who stole glances at her unnerved her nearly most of all but not for any malevolence detected or threat assumed. It was in the gazes themselves, wary and uneasy—and because there were and hadn’t been any cameras around to say that this really was a movie set, their gazes struck Holly as genuine, as if they knew she was not from around here, not from this time.

“Why do they stare at me so warily?” She’d whispered to Sidheag as they’d strolled briefly in that narrow, walled yard of Hewgill House. “Do they know that I’m from....where I’m from?”

“They understand little,” Sidheag had scoffed, “and dinna want to understand much more than that. I said to ye already, they watch ye because of the likeness ye bear to Ceri.”

“Is that why...you picked me to move through time?” She hated asking questions like that, where it sounded as if she’d accepted that scenario as reality.

“I dinna pick ye. Fate did.”

Annoyed by yet another cryptic and very unhelpful answer, Holly sighed and then thought to ask, “What happened to Ceri?”

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