“Crawl, get away!” he roared again, dodging swords and ducking arrows.
“Stay back,” Gwen screamed. “Protect yourself!” He would never make it through so many weapons.
But he didn’t stay back, he kept running, heedless of the danger.
He was no more than a dozen yards from her when an arrow slammed into his chest, taking him off his feet. As he collapsed on his back, suddenly she was…
…on the flat rock, sunning herself, in the foothills above Loch Ness.
“Noooooo!” she screamed. “Drustan!”
“The release of atom power has changed everything except our way of thinking…the solution to this problem lies in the heart of mankind. If only I had known, I should have become a watchmaker.”
—ALBERT EINSTEIN
“The heart has its reasons—of which reason knows nothing.”
—BLAISE PASCAL
25
Gwen lay on the flat rock for time uncounted.
She was mindless, wracked with grief. When a sip of reality finally returned, it couched an impossible pill to swallow—reality without him. Forever.
How had she—the brilliant physicist—failed to see it coming?
How could she have been so stupid?
She’d been so thrilled to remain with Drustan in the sixteenth century, so lost in dreamy plans of their future, that her brain had gone on strike, and she’d failed to take one critically important factor into account: The moment she changed his future, she would change her own.
In the new future they’d created, Drustan MacKeltar was not enchanted. Was not buried in the cavern for her to find.
And so—in this new future they’d created—because Drustan was not enchanted, she’d not found him, and he’d never sent her back to him.
At the precise moment the possibility of him being enchanted had reached absolute null, Gwen Cassidy had ceased to exist in his century. Reality had plunked her right back where she’d been before she’d fallen down the ravine. Right back when she’d been. No need for the white bridge. Sixteenth-century reality had spat her out, rejecting her very existence. An unacceptable anomaly. Drustan was never enchanted—hence she had no right to exist in his time. So much for the theories that claimed Stephen Hawking was wrong for advocating the existence of a cosmic censor that would prevent paradoxes from piling up. There was clearly some force keeping things aligned in the universe. God abhors a naked singularity, Gwen thought with a half-snort that quickly translated into a sob.
She clutched her head, suddenly fearing her memories might melt away.
But no, the scientist reminded her, the arrows of time remembered forward, and so her memory would remain intact. She had been in the past, and the memory of it was etched into the essence of her being.
How had she failed to realize that by saving him, she would lose him forever? Now, looking back, she couldn’t believe she’d not once thought through to what the inevitable finale would have to be. Love had blinded her, and in retrospect she realized that she hadn’t wanted to think about what might happen. She’d studiously blocked thinking about anything to do with physics, busy savoring the simple joy of being a woman in love.
“No,” she cried. “How am I supposed to live without him?”
Tears slipped down her cheeks. She scanned the rocky terrain, seeking the ravine down which she’d tumbled, but even that was gone. There was no longer a crevice splitting the northeast face of the foothills. The gypsies must have had some part in creating it, she realized, perhaps lowered him though it, who knew?
What she did know was that even if she dug beneath the mountain of rubble upon which she perched, she would find no sleeping Highlander beneath it.
“No!” she cried again.
Yes, the scientist whispered. He’s five hundred years dead.
“He’ll come through the stones for me,” she insisted.
But he wouldn’t. And she didn’t need the scientist to point that out. He couldn’t. Even if he had survived the arrow wound, he would never use the stones. It would be like someone saying to her, “If you finish your research, create the ultimate weapon and unleash it upon an unsuspecting world, you can have Drustan back.”
She could never release such capacity for evil, no matter the enduring grief.
Nor would he. His honor, one of the many things she loved about him, would keep them forever apart.
If he’d even survived.
Gwen dropped her head against the rock, scooped her pack into her arms, and clutched it tightly. She might never know if he died from the arrow wound, but if he hadn’t died in battle, he’d still died nearly five hundred years ago. Grief smothered her, grief more intense than anything she’d ever imagined. She buried her face in the pack and wept.