The Dark Highlander

She loved Silvan more than life itself, though she rarely let him know that. There was something stuck in her craw, a thing she’d never make peace with. Silvan hadn’t given his first wife the binding Druid vows of mating. That had heartened her when he’d asked her to wed him, but in three and a half long years, he’d not offered them to her either. And so long as that distance was betwixt them, she would never be able to make completely free with her heart. She would always wonder why, always wonder how come he didn’t love her enough. A woman hated knowing she loved her man more deeply than he loved her.

Silvan was, as she’d expected, in his tower library, one hundred and three steps above the castle proper.

He was also, as she’d expected, downright broody.

“I brought ye cocoa,” she announced, placing the tray on a small table.

He glanced up and smiled at her, though with an utterly distracted air. For a change, there was no book on his lap. Nor was he seated at his desk, scribing away. Nay, he was in a chair near the open window and had been staring sightlessly out it.

“ ’Tis Dageus, is it no?” Nell drew a chair close to his and sipped at her cocoa. Silvan had long had a fondness for the costly chocolate drink, and during her pregnancy she’d developed a taste for it herself. “Why dinna ye tell me all about it, Silvan,” she encouraged gently. She knew what he was thinking, for she was worrying the same things. Dageus had always been her favorite of the Keltar lads, with his wild passionate heart and private pains. As she’d watched him grow, watched the world harden him, she’d prayed a special lass might someday come along for him, as Gwen had for Drustan. (Gwen who’d gotten the blethering binding vows from her husband!)

Silvan’s brown eyes sobered and he raked a hand through his snowy mane. “Och, Nellie, what am I to do? What I felt in him six moons past, before he left, is naught compared to what I now sense.”

“And there’s naught in the tomes ye’ve been searching that tells how to reimprison them?”

Silvan shook his head and exhaled dismally. “Not a blethering thing.”

“Have ye checked all the tomes?” she pressed. Since the day Dageus had left, Silvan had been a man fair obsessed, laboring from dawn till dusk on his studies, determined to find something to pass on to Drustan, where they’d both suspected Dageus had gone.

Silvan replied that he’d thoroughly searched both his tower library and the study belowstairs.

“Did ye check the chamber library?” Nell asked, frowning.

“I told you I checked the study.”

“I dinna say the study. I said the chamber library.”

“What are you talking about, Nellie?”

“The one beneath the study.”

Silvan went very still. “What one beneath the study?”

“The one behind the hearth,” she said impatiently.

“What one behind the hearth?” Silvan snapped, surging to his feet.

Nell’s eyes flew wide. “Och, for heaven’s sake, Silvan, dinna ye know about it?”

Silvan grabbed her hand, his brown eyes flashing. “Show me.”

• 19 •

Chloe clutched the stallion’s mane as they sped across heather-covered fields toward a lush, overgrown forest.

When she and Dageus had ridden out from the castle half an hour ago, she’d seen more evidence that she was truly in the past. A towering wall that hadn’t been there yesterday, patrolled by guards, encircled the perimeter of the estate. Clad in authentic medieval garb and armor, the guards had been toting weapons that made her fingers curl. She’d barely resisted the temptation to pluck them from their hands and lock them up somewhere safe.

When they’d exited the gates she’d peered curiously down into the valley, not really expecting to see the city of Alborath. Still, seeing the vast vale, that twenty-four hours earlier had been filled with thousands of homes and shops, currently occupied by contentedly grazing, fat sheep, had left her feeling utterly discombobulated.

Face it, Zanders, however he did it—physics, Druidry, archeoastronomy—he took you back.

Which meant that the man behind her on the horse, who’d not spoken a word since they’d ridden out, guiding them at a dizzying speed across wide-open fields, was a man who possessed the knowledge to command time itself.

Wow. Not exactly what she’d expected the day she’d stood in his penthouse fantasizing about what kind of man Dageus MacKeltar might be. Nope, not once had she thought “time-travelling Druid.” It was making her reevaluate her entire concept of history—how little historians really knew! She felt as if she’d been sucked into one of Joss Whedon’s scripts, into a world where nothing was what it seemed. Where girls discovered they were vampire-slayers and fell for men who didn’t have souls. A Buffy addict to the bone, she wondered who Dageus was more like, Spike or Angel?