laid out some meat and cheese from his provisions. We sat wrapped in the bags and ate a meal while sipping our coffee.
I sighed at the last bit of warm drink. “That was wonderful and so necessary.” I placed our food and mugs tae the side trying to hide that I was blinking a tear away.
So much crying. So much loss and what the hell were we going to do?
I pulled the sleeping bag up around my head so only my eyes peeked out. “I just miss Isla so much. And I miss Archie, his little fingers wrapped in my hair. His little sweet sweaty brow when he’s sleeping on my chest, but Isla.... I ache for her. My heart. My arms. Her sweetness. Even her cry. Even her babyshit. I miss it so much. And look at my poor breasts.”
I pulled away the sleeping bag to show him. They were gigantic, round, like they were going to explode.
“It looks verra painful.”
“It is! It hurts so bad. Do we have a towel?”
He dug in a bag for a towel. I put it under a breast and did the motion that Emma had taught me: ‘expressing’. A second later there was the feeling of my milk letting down and streams sprayed into the towel. I laughed in relief. “Oh my god, that feels so good. It’s just — ugh, I’m wetting the whole towel.” The force of the stream subsided. Slowly. “This is so awkward. There’s milk pouring out of me.“
“I ken, tis quite the miracle.”
I dropped the wet towels beside our sleeping bags and curled up against his side. It took a little fidgeting to get my breasts in a comfortable position and my back in a good place, so many bruises, everything hurt.
“Do you think we’ll be going home tomorrow?”
“I daena ken.”
I twirled my finger around on his chest. “I mean, no matter how long it takes to figure out, no matter what it takes, Lady Mairead will be able to come. She has to, eventually. We can’t be stuck here indefinitely. Then she’d need to find the transmitters, and find us, but that won’t take long, and then we all go home. And we can go home to just the time when we last saw Isla and Archie. She won’t even miss us, right? And Archie will, but he’s old enough to understand that we’ll be back soon.”
“Aye.”
“So that’s what we need to focus on. We’ll be home to see Isla and Archie any day now. Really soon, right?”
He kissed the top of my forehead.
I thought and twirled my finger.
“Because if you think about it, Magnus, if the vessels could go back in time to the year 1557 and then stopped, they must be able to go further back — there’s no reason why not, like there’s nothing special about that date. At all. Your mother will figure it out. You’re too important.”
I sat up and wrapped the second sleeping bag around myself. And looked down on him. “So tell me what happened.”
And so he did.
Thirty-nine - Kaitlyn
“Fraoch is your brother?”
“Aye. I came verra close tae killin’ him for it. We met in St Augustine because Roderick hired him tae kill me.”
I took in a deep breath. “How can that be?”
“Roderick always wanted tae twist people tae his own evils.”
“No, I mean, Fraoch has a mother, a father, how—?”
“I think the father he kent wasna his real father. And his mother died afore she could tell him of it. Donnan sired him and there was a vessel given for his safe-keeping.”
“And Hayley knew?”
“She did, only about the vessel.” He shook his head. “I daena ken why she dinna tell me.”
“Maybe the whole, ‘you sometimes have to kill members of your family’ thing.”
Magnus groaned, the dim lamp-light shining on his dismay. “Tis my way? I am such a cold-hearted killer that I am nae tae be trusted?”
“That’s not exactly—”
“I can kill, I am verra good at it. Tis true. I was bested on that battlefield. I turned m’self over tae Roderick, I had lost, and then the battle turned, and... I killed so many men, Kaitlyn. I could barely stop once I had begun.” He raised his head. “Did I tell ye what Sean said?”
“No, what did Sean say?”
“He said for me tae calm down, that I had killed enough a’ready.”
“That’s rough.”
“Aye.”
“That wasn’t exactly what I meant though, I meant, if you think about it, that as the king, you can’t really trust someone who also has a claim