Dunadd Fort, Argyll and Bute, May 1313
“A footprint.” David Wakeley shook his head and stabbed his index finger at a carving in the stone he was standing on. It was in the form of a foot, or an ancient axe head, depending on how you looked at it. “I can’t believe this is what two years of searching has led to.”
Dùghlas Ruaidhrí furrowed his blond eyebrows and crossed his huge arms over his chest, muscles bulging. A tall, broad Highlander with a claymore in the sheath at his back, he stood several steps away from David. They were on top of the Dunadd hillfort, surrounded by the moss-covered remnants of the ancient stronghold and blown by strong winds from all sides. But despite the cold, Dùghlas wore a pale blue linen tunic with his braies, or medieval breeches, because it was May, and May was warm for Highlanders.
Cool gusts coming from the sea in the west made David shiver in his leine croich. He hadn’t grown up in an icy medieval castle. He’d grown up in Chicago, and though the winters there were freezing, they’d had down jackets, scarves, and hats to keep them warm. And he’d never take central heating, hot water, and warm cars for granted again.
“Um,” Dùghlas said, “are ye surprised, man? ’Tis where ye asked me to take ye.”
David went into a pocket at the side of his tunic and retrieved a rolled piece of vellum with a hand-drawn map of Scotland showing ten crosses around it. It was soft and smooth, and it was the most precious possession he owned. His way to freedom.
“I did.” He looked up at the horizon to the west, where the coast of Loch Crinan silvered between dark hills and mountains. A cloud hung above it, spreading rain like fog.
River Add snaked around Dunadd hill, cutting through green, rusty, and yellowish fields. The country spread all around them in brown, green, and gray valleys, hills, and mountains. The bogs of Moine Mhor extended in a rust and ochre carpet to the west. Black sheep, their fleece still short after the spring shearing, grazed peacefully on the slope. Seagulls squawked above them. Gusts coming from the sea brought the scent of rain and salt and trouble. The wind caught the birds and shut them up, and they soared, fighting against the invisible force, hanging in the air as though someone had put them on pause.
David bit his lower lip. He brought his pointy-shoed foot closer to the carved footprint, attentive to any feeling of strangeness in the air—a buzzing, sucking sensation, the scent of lavender and fresh grass that had accompanied Sìneag, the faerie who had sent his sister, Rogene, through time. And because he had foolishly not believed Rogene and grabbed her arm to stop her, he had traveled in time, too.
And he’d been hunting for that scent for two years.
But the scent of moss, wet earth, and stone, accompanied by a whiff of sea and sheep dung, was undisturbed. Sìneag was nowhere around.
David’s stomach flipped, churning and twisting. He had been hoping one of the rocks he had visited over the past two years would glow and buzz and open for him, let him return to the twenty-first century.
Back to the life unlived.
Back to fulfilling his full potential.
Back to the football scholarship that would allow him to go to college and get a degree and make something of himself.
That would allow him to prove to himself—and to everyone—that he wasn’t just a dumb fuck with a reading disability born into a family of geniuses. The scholarship was being held for up to three years and would expire in July.
He was only twenty-one; he had his whole life ahead of him. But he was wasting it among fourteenth-century warlords, medieval knights, and warriors.
He had his sister here, but nothing else that held him. He was stuck in this medieval prison the goddamn faerie had put him into without his consent.
Three years. Two of them spent searching. Nine stones he had slammed his hand onto.
Zero faeries found.
Zero tunnels through time open.
Zero chances to go back.
“I just didn’t think it would be this, Dùghlas,” he said. “This nothing. You told me this place is supposed to be swarming with faeries and spirits or whatever. You told me faeries leave glass beads here and carve things in stone, and people goddamn disappear.”
Dùghlas’s silvery eyes were like a sharpshooter’s rifle scope on him. “Aye, ’tis what folk say. Did ye really expect to see a faerie?”
Yes, he had. But he couldn’t say it out loud. When Rogene had told him a faerie had sent her through time to 1310, he’d laughed at her. Dùghlas would think he’d lost it.
“This was my biggest hope,” David murmured. “My sister told me something about this place, but I didn’t listen very well. It’s a place of power, apparently. The inauguration stone, right?”
Yes, Rogene, a historian in 2021, and wife to Laird Angus Mackenzie in 1310, had told him many things about Scottish history. Only, he’d been too drunk—or too tired of being lectured—to pay attention.
Now, it wasn’t like he could pick up a phone to ask her. And Eilean Donan was about a week away on horseback in good weather.
The inauguration stone was different from the time-travel stones, of course, but the principle was the same. Carved symbols in stone had power. There were some carvings next to the footprint that David couldn’t quite decipher. They could be connected to the time traveling rocks for all he knew. Maybe they would even work when the time travel stones wouldn’t.
Your time will come after you meet the woman you’re destined for. That was what James—one of the other time travelers and the husband of Angus’s sister, Catrìona Mackenzie—had told him the day David set off on his travels. Sìneag had apparently told James about this when he’d tried to take David back to the twenty-first century with him.
David didn’t want to believe it. He was afraid of being stuck here forever if he fell in love like his sister had with Angus, like James had with Catrìona… Others, too.
He stubbornly believed he could find a way through the rocks without Sìneag’s unwelcome condition.
But, proving James’s words, none of the time travel stones worked for him—the ones with a handprint, with the river of time, and the tunnel carved on them. So, he’d considered Albert Einstein’s quote “The definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results” and decided to try something new.
This rock.
Holding his breath, he stepped into the footprint.
Nothing happened. He didn’t travel in time. He was just standing there, inhaling the wind, and trying to fit his large foot into the small footprint.
“Ye’re now King of Dál Riata,” Dùghlas proclaimed. “Congratulations.”
David cursed under his breath and stepped back, disappointment dripping from him like sweat. Dùghlas went to a bowl carved in a stone five steps away from the inauguration stone, sank to his knees, and gathered rainwater from the bowl in both hands. Then, still on his knees, he stretched his arms to David.
“Would Yer Grace allow Taranis, the feared god of thunder and rain, to bless yer reign for years to come?”
David gritted his teeth. “Only if Taranis sends a lightning bolt up your ass.”
The anger, the constant sense of helplessness, of being locked down against his will, was a sickening, corroding storm in his guts. He needed the only thing that helped him to forget...
