Page 69 of Highlander’s Bride

The next day, Bryanna was allowed to leave the chamber that they called the Intensive Care Unit and was taken to a simpler chamber of her own. Since he refused to leave the hospital without Bryanna, he was allowed to use the warm waterfall that Bryanna called a shower. The moment he stepped into it, breathing the warm clouds of clean water, he thought humanity had done right. All of the struggle, all of the progress were worth this miracle of turning a metal stick and letting warm water pour on him from the wall.

He didn’t know how long he let the streams flow down his skin, burning his old—as well as his recent—cuts and wounds. He even liked the smell of the liquid soap, something very foreign and fruity that made him think of distant lands and of flowers he’d never seen. It was heaven.

The only thing missing there was his wife.

Three days later, Bryanna was allowed to leave the hospital and move into a dwelling in Edinburgh with her mother and her sister. As Bryanna explained to him, she needed to get a new passport since her things had been left in the fourteenth century, and she couldn’t leave Scotland and return home without it.

A heart-wrenching, five-hour trip in one of the demon-carts driven by Bryanna’s sister, and they were in Edinburgh. It would have taken him at least a dozen days on horse with good weather, or four to five days of travel by sea. The Isle of Skye, where Bryanna’s hospital had been, had belonged to clan Ruaidhrí, who’d always helped him if he needed…but Scotland wasn’t ruled by the powerful clans of the past in Bryanna’s time. There wasn’t a king or a queen of Scotland. No fortresses, no lairds, and no war.

This was a strange world, Raghnall realized as he observed every human with a wee rectangular thing that allowed people to talk and even see each other from a distance, pay with invisible money, read, and even listen to music. And everyone seemed to be completely and utterly taken with the wee rectangles, spending more time with them than with their loved ones.

Edinburgh overwhelmed him with the number of buildings. It was as though castles with big glass windows stood side by side. Hundreds of people walked, rode the demon-carts, and the strangest thing he’d ever seen—a few iron rods with two wheels that were put into motion by rotating two stirrups with your feet.

The whole way there, the car engine revved like a deranged bee. They turned on the radio, and he listened with every fiber of his heart to the modern music. Some of it shot right into his soul. Those were called rock ballads, Bryanna told him. Others, like techno and house, he didn’t understand. They were simplistic and lacked subtlety and poetry.

As Scottish hills, mountains, and lochs flashed by, he craved to open the window and let fresh Highland air in—the scents of grass and water and wet earth. But he didn’t want to make Bryanna sick and instead breathed in the stuffy air of the car, which added to the feeling of being trapped inside a cart from hell moving with an inhumane speed.

When Bryanna’s sister stopped the demon-cart by one of the castles, he wondered if everyone in this time was so wealthy that they could own one. But it turned out, they weren’t. People owned three to four chambers in the castle and called them apartments or flats, and they lived near one another, with just a thin wall separating families.

When he stepped out of the car, Edinburgh was loud with the whirring of the car engines, people talking, music being played on the streets in the downtown. It smelled of burned metal and bitter smoke, and Bryanna told him it was gasoline, the liquid that made cars move. There was also the smell of fresh bread, perfume, and wet stone.

Bryanna explained to him that this was the flat where they, and her mom and her sister, would stay until she got better and got her passport to be able to return home. Her country’s embassy was in Edinburgh as well as the airport. The airport sounded especially strange to him, like a giant field for dragon-like metal creatures to fly people into the sky. But he couldn’t imagine that dragons, something from the myths and legends his mother used to tell, would come alive in the future.

As they settled into the apartment, and Bryanna was well and fine again with the use of her insulin, he started enjoying himself as she showed him around the city. Drinking water running from the tap, and a clean and hygienic latrine were luxuries that made life here very pleasant, indeed. The chest, or fridge, that kept food cold, the stove and oven that heated up with no fire, the lights that came alive with just a press of a finger made life godlike.

He liked whisky, something that Scots had invented much later than his time. The wine, the ale, the food were exquisite. The convenience and safety of this society made him a little uneasy, but after a few days, he started to get used to that, too. Everything was faster, brighter, cleaner. Women didn’t hide behind layers of clothes, though he did find both male and female fashions here quite questionable.

Every day he watched Bryanna stab herself in her lower abdomen with that needle, and every day he thanked God for this medicine that kept her alive.

But every time she pricked herself, he winced, remembering what it was saving her from.

What he had saved her from.

Death.

He remembered the feel of her limp, lifeless body in his arms, the pale skin, the scent of her breath—sweet, like overripe pears—that meant she had much too much sugar in her blood, and it was killing her. Every time, that image brought the memory of another woman dying in his arms—Mòrag.

And the lad who was waiting for him to come home. Who waited for him to finally keep his word and take care of him.

Who wanted a father, which Raghnall was supposed to be for him.

Every day he saw that unasked question in Bryanna’s eyes… What would happen to the two of them?

It must have been two sennights after Raghnall had arrived in Bryanna’s time that they went to visit Edinburgh Castle. Raghnall had been amazed by the structure, the grandness of it, what humanity had added to castles with time. He’d never been to Edinburgh in his time, but the strongest castle in Scotland, Stirling, couldn’t compete with this.

Visiting the castle, seeing the rough stone walls, the thick gates with massive hardware, the familiar furniture from his time, smelling the old wood, and hearing the medieval ballads being played in the background, made him feel for a few moments that he was back in the fourteenth century.

The guilt, the ache to do the right thing weighed on him like a boulder.

When they came out of the castle on the esplanade, the sun was already setting and the city of Edinburgh was lit in orange and pink. They walked towards the rough stone parapet that surrounded the large open area with many tourists walking, talking, taking pictures in front of the castle and the view of the city.

As they walked, he looked back at the castle. It was dark, almost black…and so familiar. In front of him was the sunlit city, most of it modern.

He felt as if he was stuck between the past and the future—in his body, his mind, and his heart.

Losing Bryanna would destroy his very soul. Her diabetes ran in her veins like a wild predator waiting to crush her, only sedated by regular medication. But she was still sick.

She was always in danger.