tracing steps with you
Dawn is breaking; dew is covering the heaps of stones around them as well as the high tree trunks towering like giants. It's almost magical, Bella thinks, like in the old tales of faeries and monsters. She thinks she can see wisps of light hiding in the shadows of dark roots and hear soft, alluring tittering from the tree tops.
They'll have to get back soon. They shouldn't even be here this time of the night. Yes, the quaint Scottish village they've booked for their honeymoon is sleepy and peaceful, but the surrounding grave mounds and forests are a tourist hotspot – forbidden to enter after nightfall.
"Stop it..." Bella exclaims when Jacob whistles at the moon disappearing between the first rays of sunlight. "You're not a wolf." She smirks and her groom laughs.
"How do you know?" he answers, traipsing around the mounds, turning off the flashlight in his hand. Soon it will be morning, and with golden sunrays, the magic will vanish. The world will return to its grey-tinged tristesse.
Bella still isn't quite sure this whole marriage was the right decision. But he's always been the only guy who paid her any attention in her dad's rotten hometown, and hey, he's better than nothing. And she likes him. She really does. He makes her laugh occasionally and he's tall, dark, and handsome. Bella's a lucky girl. She really is.
"We should go," she tells him, "don't want them to catch us." The first caretakers of the forest-park-thing would arrive soon and they definitely wouldn't take kindly to a young couple trespassing by night.
Jacob just shrugs. There's a brand new TV in their hotel room and she knows he's been itching to try it out. "Yeah, all right. One more mound and we'll leave."
Bella assumes that's the best she'll get, so when she reluctantly shrugs, Jacob is already running over another hill. She follows him and when she reaches the top, she inhales sharply.
It's huge. It's beautiful. It's eerie.
Jacob senses it as well, it seems; he's stopped right next to her and looks down.
It's nothing like Stonehenge, but this stone circle could stand its own in a fight to the death between stone circles. Some stones have fallen over, covered in moss and mushrooms, and the half-light illuminates it in an otherworldly blue tinge. Grass doesn't seem to grow near it. The cacophony of early birdsong that has followed them so far has suddenly fallen silent. There are groups of small bones clustered on the stones, and Bella prays those are a goat's bones or a sheep's.
But the strangest thing is the faint whispering coming from its center, drawing her forward even when Jacob, sweating, tries to grab her hand and pull her back. She swats his hand away and moves forward with a purpose, although she doesn't know what it is, exactly.
Jacob's voice cracks but she doesn't even hear him over the blood rushing in her head. She steps forward again. The moss makes soft noises beneath her feet and a single red ray of sunlight falls on the heart of the stone circle. Another step forward and she's standing inside the circle. Bella is distantly aware of Jacob running after her but pausing; she is drawn to that single ray of sunlight and gingerly steps forward.
Then she can't hear anything anymore. She goes blind and deaf and numb and when she closes her eyes, she doesn't open them again for a long, long time.
It's noon by the time she wakes up. She's lying in the middle of the stone circle and feels as if she's just been hit by a rocket launcher. In fact, several rocket launchers. And two tanks. And a few assorted pills for good measure.
She tries to sit up and wavers, but somehow manages to succeed. The sun is shining brightly and there's not a single person in sight. The trees around her are looking a bit different, she notices, but still there's no birds singing, although she's sure they should be singing.
"Hello?" Bella calls out. Silence is the only answer she receives. Her throat is parched and this is worse than the morning after she'd had a whiskey (a whole bottle of whiskey, it should be noted) and had lain in bed for at least seven hours, nursing a spectacular hangover.
It's a miracle but somehow, she manages to stand up without falling. She staggers out of the stone circle.
"Jacob?" she calls, but somehow in her heart, she knows he's far, far away. She climbs the hill and there's nobody around. Not a single tourist. Nothing. Nobody.
"Hello?" she calls out again and grows uneasier with every passing moment. She climbs down the hill and another, and another, and another.
Civilization has vanished. Birds have begun to sing again and small creatures shuffle beneath the leaves covering the ground, but there are no sounds of humans.
Somehow, Bella ends up in a small clearing. She remembers that clearing. It's where the tickets for the burial mound landscape were being sold. Now, there's nothing.
She sits down and cries. Something has happened; she doesn't know what; it scares her to death. Bella sniffles and then decides that she can't give up just yet. She'll find something. Someone. Then, she looks up, and it's as if the air's knocked out of her.
There is someone. He's tall and pale and he's got dark hair. He stands in the shadow of an old, huge tree; almost invisible, shrouded in this hidden spot. His appearance is strange, alien, somehow more mysterious than the stone circle. His clothes look old, but not worn; in fact, ancient. Bella never paid much attention in history class but that is renaissance fair stuff. Who wears a kilt these days? But somehow, it's not a bad look on the man. She doubts anything could look bad on him. His cheekbones are high and as pronounced as his jawline; his hair seems to shimmer; his eyes... his eyes...
He's watching her.
Her heart flutters.
"Who-" she begins. The man turns around and vanishes.
Bella sits on the hard ground for another few moments. By then, the appearance has turned to a dreamlike feeling in her gut. She isn't even sure if he was real or just a figment of her desperation. She gets up and starts walking.
By the time her eyes see something akin to civilization, it's almost twilight. Not that this sprawling village in the shadow of a grey, looming castle could qualify as civilization in her books. It looks as if it's from another century. The first person apart from the dreamlike creature she meets is a woman of middleish age, thick around the waist and with laugh lines etched into her face; her shaggy brown hair is bound back and she carries a wooden basket from the forest Bella has emerged from as well. "Who're you, gal," the woman greets her, and there's suspicion shining in small eyes, "never seen you before around here. And what're you wearing?"
Bella could ask the woman the very same question – she, too, looks like she either just escaped from the renaissance fair or from the set of a movie called The Black Plague – Medieval Times suck. Bella's wearing skinny jeans and a white cotton shirt with the words 'You've cat to be kitten me right meow' printed on it, as well as a tight blue jacket. The shirt is a wedding present from her father. Sometimes she really doesn't know what's going on in that man's head. Anyways, there's really nothing unusual about this outfit.
"Yeah. I dunno either. My dad thought it'd be funny. He's a bit strange sometimes."
The woman looks at her as if she's a particularly complex physics lesson. Somehow, it doesn't lessen her suspicion.
"Where'd you left your skirt?" the woman asks. They arrive at the outskirts of the village, and Bella sees more and more people clothed this strangely. She starts to feel somehow out of place. (She doesn't feel out of time, though. Not yet.) She crosses her arms in front of her chest.
"I don't like wearing skirts," she merely states. The woman narrows her eyes.
"Where you from where they don't wear skirts?" The Scottish accent is thick; thicker than Bella's ever heard before.
"Forks," Bella replies curtly. Then, suddenly, there's a man grabbing her arm.
"Abigail, who's this?" he asks the woman walking with her, who looks relieved. The man – rather, boy – is tall and as pretty as a girl, with red hair and a tuft of beard and – he's wearing a kilt as well.
"I'm Bella S- Bella Black," she replies instead of the woman. "I'm from Forks if you wanna know that too and please let go of my arm."
The boy looks at her closer. He can't be older than sixteen. "You're not from here?" he asks. Bella shakes her head, slightly exasperated. She just said that!
"She could be a spy," the woman tells him. He nods abruptly.
"You're coming with me," he tells her and drags her along. She yelps, and he lets go, casting his eyes down in a silent apology. Bella shrugs. Fine, she'll go with him, but only because she has no other idea where to go.
Except to find that man with the dark hair and pale skin. She wouldn't mind finding him.
"Thank you, Jamie," says an old bearded man in a grey room. The sunlight stops right in front of his window and it's unusually dark, unusually damp in the room. He eyes her much with the same suspicion the other people have so far presented her with. It only makes Bella want to raise her head higher and stand straighter. "You may leave." The boy bows and vanishes. Bella regrets it. He's quite young, but she bets he's got a ton of village girls admiring him. Besides, he seemed the kindest of all the people she's met so far.
The door closes behind Jamie. Bella has to face the old man, who introduces himself as Colum MacKenzie, alone. Her dad is a policeman, and she knows interrogations, but she's never seen such a thorough one. The man wants to know everything about her. She tells him freely enough: her origin, her name, her friends, her education, her reason for being in Scotland, and then even Jacob, and that she's sorry for staying in the burial mounds park after dark, she really is, and if he's got a phone she could use?
It turns out that surprisingly, Mr Renaissance Fair here in his ancient castle does not own a phone. Or a fax. Or one of these computers Bella's dad sometimes uses at work. When she asks to send a letter to the United States, he looks at her as if she's asked him to cross-dress and dance the hula in front of her.
Instead, he tells her that he suspects her to be an English spy. She points at her decidedly American accent. He doesn't trust her. She tells him that she just started studying medicine and that she really needs to get in touch with her husband.
"I have neither heard of you, Bella Black, nor of this Jacob Black. Your name and your clothes are very foreign. I would like to believe you, but..."
Bella doesn't like his tone, vaguely threatening and menacing, and she decides to interrupt him. "You're in pain, right? Your joints are swollen. Gout. It's worse when the weather's bad. I can help you. Not well, obviously, since I doubt you got any vic, but I believe there's some adequate substitutes I can help you with. Just let me contact my dad, all right?"
The man – MacKenzie – looks at her completely dumbfounded. Then he nods, seemingly to himself, and calls another man's name. A tall man, wearing a kilt (Bella isn't even surprised about the fashion choices around here anymore) enters and takes her arm. He's far rougher than Jamie's been. Bella instantly decides she can't stand him.
"Listen – Miss Bella Black – I do not know what you are doing here, but it cannot be well. You are presenting too many questions. Too few answers. There are only two possibilities how you could know of my... painful... situation."
One, Bella thinks. I'm a professional.
"You are either an especially foolish English spy or a witch." The man who's holding her arm gasps audibly. Bella rolls her eyes.
"Seriously?" she asks him. "Witchcraft? This is 1989, you know. I think even you Europeans got over that whole burning innocent women thing a few hundred years ago."
MacKenzie looks at her from shrouded eyes. "1989," he repeats her words slowly. Bella feels as if there's a joke in the room, but neither of them has quite understood it yet. "The year1989, you mean?"
Bella shrugs as far as the tight grip on her arm allows her to. She's starting to shiver in her shirt and thin jacket, in the drafty castle. Then she nods.
"You are mistaken, Miss. We have just celebrated the beginning of the seventeen-hundred thirty-ninth year after the birth of our Lord and Savior."
Bella blinks. MacKenzie says "To the cells!" and the man who's holding her proceeds to drag her away. Bella complains, and not quietly, but he doesn't seem to care.
The boy named Jamie comes by the cells later. They talk for a while. His voice is pleasantly soft, but Bella feels like crying, and after a few minutes, he tells her that they want to put her on trial. It's very possible, he says, that she'll be dead by the end of it. Bella doesn't expect she can call a lawyer. Jamie seems to feel guilty – even though it wasn't truly his fault she ended up in this situation. She asks him to keep his eyes open for her husband, although when she tries to describe Jacob, he looks far less like Jacob and far more like the mysterious stranger she's seen. Jamie promises.
After he leaves, Bella lies awake for the longest time. The cells are dark and ugly, the ground hard and cold beneath her. They've given her a flea-ridden, coarse blanket, but it does nothing to keep out the moist cold that's seeping into her bones. The walls of the cell are just as harsh as the ground. They look as if they've been standing for a hundred thousand years and will be standing for a hundred thousand more. That's a depressing thought.
Bella stares at the faint flicker of a torch around the corner. Sometimes she can hear the warden coughing or shuffling his feet. Sometimes she can hear other inmates, but can never see them. One seems to be scratching at the walls with his fingernails. Another mumbles incoherent words. Her eyelids droop despite the horrible cold.
Bella doesn't want to die here. She thinks about everything she left in 1989. There's her mom's old dog, the amazing place at her college, her brand new CDs and video tapes, the truck dad bought her as a wedding gift (to make up for his horrible shirt), the trees she used to climb as a child, the high school she never wants to see anymore either way, the... she thinks about wind on her cheeks and warm tea and cotton candy on her tongue and the way an old friend once played the piano for her. She thinks about bonfire in summers and thick blankets of snow in winters. She thinks about all those small things that made her life better.
She does not want to die, not here in this unknown, unforgiving place; she does not want to die.
When she finally falls asleep, it's only after she's cried for hours.
Bella doesn't notice the new day beginning; there's no window in her small cell. It could be any time of the day when she wakes. She's confused for a few moments until the memories rush back, and then she's confused of what woke her. There's still the faint sounds of inmates and the warden and the mouldy smell of too much humidity in a too small cellar. Nothing out of the ordinary.
Until a shadow is detached from the wall. In Bella's cell. She brings her hands up to her knees and tries to stand wobbily, the disgusting blanket wrapped around her shoulders like a superhero's coat. There's almost to no light in the dark cellar.
"Who're you," Bella whispers. Her throat is hoarse. "Why are you here." It's such a cliché thing to say, but it never fit a situation better than this.
The stranger breathes audibly. "You're from 1989?" His accent is strange. Stranger than that of the other people she's met so far. The voice is dark and deep and the shiver that runs through Bella's spine is not caused by the cold. She raises her head.
"I asked first."
The stranger doesn't seem to react at first. For a moment, Bella thinks he has vanished again. Maybe he's only a hallucination, or she's still dreaming? Maybe all of this is just a bad, realistic dream. Maybe Jacob is making fun of her and this is all a very elaborate ploy. Maybe...
"Edward," the stranger says quietly. "Edward McCullen." She nods curtly, although she's aware he probably can't see it.
"I asked second," he reminds her. Bella is slightly startled. She steps back and a wisp of air tells her he's following her.
"Yeah. I'm from 1989. I was on my-" Somehow, she doesn't want McCullen to know she's married. "-vacation, and then I found this stone circle, and then I woke up here. Yesterday. Today. A few hundred years in the future. I don't know."
"You should be dangerous with such words," McCullen answers. "It sounds like magic. Witchcraft."
Bella stares at the ground for a moment.
"I'm fucked either way," she murmurs. McCullen draws in a breath sharply.
"I've seen you before," he says. His voice is monotone and strangely lulling, yet her body is on edge. It's as if it's unsure if she should trust this man unquestionably or be scared of him. A part of her wants to reach out and drown in his words; another wants to cower in fear. Instead of doing either, she merely cocks her eyebrow.
"Oh?"
"When I was younger. I was a child. You saved me."
Bella can't remember ever saving a child.
"But you were older. You're so young. Bella."
"How do you know my name?" she asks and instinctively steps back. Yet again, McCullen follows her. She can see the curves of his face casting shadows and can hear the sound of his breath.
"That stone circle... you need to go back there. It is a kind of... door into other eras. But only when it is touched by the first light of the day."
Bella shakes her head. "I can't go back. They want to put me on trial."
The stranger breathes again, and sighs, and then it's silent in her cell again.
Bella says, after a while, a murmured "Edward?" but she receives no answer.
The sun is harsh on the day Bella Black neé Swan will die. Jamie has come back once more and has told her he hasn't been able to locate her husband. Bella isn't surprised. They drag her out in the castle's courtyard and put her in front of the man MacKenzie she met; and three other old men. All of them have beards. She's being sat down on a wooden chair and tied to it, with two warriors next to her – as if she could even overpower one of them – and the four old men gazing at her.
She's asked series of questions Bella feels she's answered a thousand times already. Where is she from, what's her name, her age, why she decided to spy for the redcoats. Half the population has come to watch the spectacle, it seems to her; they're crowding the place, dirty people with bad teeth and bad breath yelling. Children run around, but only a few. The people seem old in a way Bella never thought possible, and there's too many women.
Her trial is not going well. By noon, all seems to be said and done. The verdict, MacKenzie announces, will be given in another hour. Bella is left to sit on the chair, her guardians by her side. She starts to count her remaining seconds and wonders if she'll die for being a witch or a spy. It doesn't matter in the end, but if she could choose, she'd want to be hanged for being a spy instead of burnt for being a witch. That sounds less painful and way more awesome. In a macabre way.
The sun is laughing at her, but still she's freezing. It's at its zenith and Bella knows she'll never see it set again.
She doesn't know how much time has passed when horns are blaring through the air. The people who watched her trial have long since started with their usual tasks again, bustling about the yard, many with baskets full of food in their hands; and they're loud. But nothing is louder than those horns tearing through the world. One man rushes past her, and then more, and the women start to vanish into buildings. Bella asks one of the men standing next to her what is going on.
"Attack," one of them says through clenched teeth. "The English. Your friends."
Bella rolls her eyes. "Will you let me go hide?" The warrior doesn't even deign to look at her.
Then, the two are called to battle; they leave Bella behind. Still, she's bound to the chair with tight ropes and doesn't think she can escape any time soon. She prays the battle will rage outside the thick castle walls and don't spill inside.
Of course, since she doesn't seem to have a single iota of luck these days, that's exactly what happens. The great gate of the castle is broken through by fighting men; she feels like in a History Channel Special, only that much more immersed. She can hear the blood spilling on the dirty ground and can hear the dying screams of desperate boys.
They're going to kill her. Rape her and torture her and kill her. That's what happens to spoils of war like her, isn't it.
The battle moves to the place she's still sitting. She doesn't have much of a choice and tries to block out all the violent smells, sounds and sights. She even closes her eyes and when a hand touches hers, she suppresses a yelp. Then, as quick as that, her hands are free. She turns around and sees the mysterious man from the clearing. Her breath catches in her throat.
"Bella," he says, covered in blood from his pale cheeks to his kilt.
"Hide." She knows that voice.
And that's what she does. It's a miracle, but she evades all blows, all stabs, all bullets, and she arrives on the other side of the castle. There's a small door here, and she knows she could just – open it – vanish through – find the stone circle and leave this awful place behind. Her hand's on the huge wooden door. She pushes. Outside of the castle, there's endless rolling meadows, and she can see the forest in the distance, huge looming pine trees, dark green with the promise of safety.
Bella looks back. The clanking of swords is more subdued now. Edward is right in the middle. Has that been his own blood? She worries her lower lip between her teeth. Can she really leave him there? What if he dies? He just saved her life, in two ways. She can't just leave him to die.
Bella closes the door again. She sits on the ground and starts to count to a hundred.
When she arrives at one thousand two hundred and three, the sounds of the fighting are dying down. Then, the silence is only interrupted by the last breaths of dying men and the moans of the wounded. Bella runs over to the scene of the battle. It doesn't take her long to find Edward, lying on the ground, blood trickling through his dark hair. Her hand sweeps over that hair.
Not many men are still alive, but the gate at the front of the castle is closed again, so Bella assumes it's a victory for the Scottish. Rather, it means the Scottish women and children will live another day.
Bella lowers her gaze from the sky back down to Edward. She turns him around; the blood is caking his whole body, but Bella instantly sees that very little of it is his. She begins checking for wounds and finds only one large gash on his head; a few bruises, judging by the way he groans when she presses down on certain spots. Possibly a cracked rib. No; the worst problem is the head wound. She takes a dagger she finds sheathed in his belt and tears off a part of her shirt until she only wears 'You've cat to be kitten me' without meow. She uses the cloth to clean the wound from blood, sweat and grime; and is rewarded with a bright crimson gash. She's been training to be a doctor. She remembers such wounds from her textbooks and gets to work, ignoring the way her heart is hammering in her chest.
When she can't do anything else for Edward, the castle's inhabitants start filing out. Bella spots a small, thin woman kneeling down by one of the fallen warriors. She's wearing the same sense of determination Bella would see if she were to look into a mirror right now.
"Hey! Lady!" she calls out and thank God, the woman looks up. "Do you have a hos- a place for your sick to stay? This guy needs help." The woman joins her. She takes one look at Edward.
"Yes, indeed," she says, her soft voice belying the hard tone. "A good work you have done here. I shall bring help." She stands again and turns.
"I'm Bella," Bella says. The woman smiles at her, even though it's tired.
"Alice." With that, she waves at a few more women, and within moments, the yard is bustling again. The dying breaths are replaced by sobs of people who're recognizing friends and family, but Bella doesn't listen to that anymore. Alice has taken Edward away and Bella feels helpless, so she kneels down by the side of the next Scotsman.
It's dark by the time the last wounded have been taken care of, amongst them Englishmen as well. It will be dawn by the time all the fallen will have been buried, Bella knows, but when the sun sets, she sits by the side of Edward in a small, cramped building, along with the other wounded.
She doesn't take her eyes off him.
The next day, her trial is taken up again. Bella can't believe it at first. She's barely slept, tending to Edward and the others in the makeshift sick bay, but is dragged outside when the first cock cries. Yet Alice is not far behind her, and she whispers something into the ear of one of the old men, who raises his hand and performs a complicated gesture. The other old men start animatedly talking to each other. They look as bone-tired as Bella feels, and MacKenzie is sporting a bruise covering half of his face.
She wonders if he could have fought with his men; the gout must make it difficult.
Alice touches her shoulder lightly before vanishing again.
Bella is ruled innocent. Nobody is more surprised than she is. The men get up one after the other; MacKenzie shoots her a dirty look, but it seems he's been overruled; and the man Alice spoke to comes to talk to her. Bella isn't on a chair anymore, and there's no more watchers this early in the morning, so they're alone.
"You saved Edward," the man states. Bella shrugs. The man looks vaguely familiar to her.
"Dunno. I couldn't do much."
"Alice claims he would not be alive anymore without your aid."
Bella looks down at the ground. She shrugs again. "It's what everyone would have done." Although not everyone would have given up their chance for freedom for a man she barely knows. "And besides, that was only First Aid. Anyone with a license could've done that."
The man looks at her with that same look somewhere between suspicion and confusion she's grown used to receiving.
"Nevertheless," he says, "you saved a true Scotsman, and what's more, a man I consider my son. Thank you, Miss."
She tries for a lopsided smile. It comes out beaming and genuine.
Bella tells herself that she'll try to get back to her own time as soon as Edward's well again. She sits by his side every day during the convalescence. He wakes later the day of her trial, and she thanks him for setting her free.
That's when he smiles at her for the first time.
She helps the other soldiers as well. She's not well-versed in Scottish history, but she assumes they're fighting for their freedom and all that, and freedom is good, right? So it's not bad if she nurses poor men back to health.
Most of them succumb to their wounds either way. They are beyond help; certainly beyond Bella's help, lacking any medicinal equipment or even over-the-counter medicine. She desperately misses the 20th century luxuries, but when she turns to look over her shoulder and sees Edward McCullen staring at her, she blushes furiously and doesn't think she wants to be anywhere else.
The boy Jamie is there as well. He looks horrible, but he is quick to heal, and he starts joking with her as soon as he regains his speech. His curls are flattened, but his spirit is not. He's cute, in a boyish way, like a younger brother, and Bella likes spending time with him.
A slow friendship forms between her and Alice, who, as it turns out, is not only the daughter of the man who considers Edward his son, but also a person most similar to a doctor in this place. She runs the makeshift hospital, and next to the soldiers, there's also actual sick people here. The work is hard but meaningful, and Alice eats with Bella every day, so it's not too bad. Alice gives her old clothing from her mother Esme and teaches her how a proper lady is to be behaved.
Bella misses her father. She wonders what Jacob is doing. Is the police looking for her? Maybe they even suspect him to have murdered her? Whenever she thinks about Jacob, she starts biting her lips nervously, as if she's somehow letting him down. Her wedding ring is on her finger, so there's no reason for her to feel guilty, she argues.
It's the eleventh day after the huge battle when Edward is fit to stand and walk again. The wound on his head has hindered his movements, but now he insists on walking again. Bella only reluctantly lets him go. She knows that back home, he would've been kept in the hospital for supervision for at least another week – head wounds can become very serious very fast.
"Well," she says, "will you go off and fight again?" They're standing by the building's only window, a high glass pane that seems like it once belonged in a church. Bella can't stand the thought of him going off and getting himself killed.
He looks like he wants to say something, but then glances down at her hands and closes his mouth. Instead, what he says is a simple and clear, "Yes. It is my duty."
She looks down. There's nothing she can do about that, then. Bella shrugs. "Fine then, go and get yourself killed, see if I care."
That gets her a smile from Edward, and that in turn causes Bella to smile as well.
"I wanted to ask you one thing," Edward says. His voice is low. "Will you come to the stone circle with me? Just once."
Bella nods before her brain has fully registered the question.
They begin their walk in the early hours of the evening. Edward has procured a donkey and Bella rides it reluctantly. She falls down a few times, but isn't surprised. Horse riding really isn't her thing. The donkey is patient, though, as is Edward, and when they reach the forest, Bella starts talking about her home. Edward believes her; she trusts him. He listens wide-eyed to her stories. He doesn't really understand radio or computers, but he says he'd love to see electricity. When they arrive at the stone circle, the donkey shies and Edward helps Bella descend. Together they stand in front of it just when the first rays of sunlight touch the ancient stones.
"You want to return?" Edward asks nonchalantly. "To your cars and radios and planes?"
Bella nods. They don't look at each other but instead stare at those inconspicuous stones.
"I want to." Bella turns to look at him and takes his hand carefully. Edward doesn't move. "Do you want to come with me?"
"You have got a husband." he replies, and Bella kisses him.
It's beautiful. She feels like she's flying, able to take on the whole world, or at least one continent. His lips are chapped and taste like pine cones.
"No," she states and hears how he breathes in sharply.
"I can't come with you," he replies and she steps back. Her heart is beating fast. She can't leave him here. She can't just... she can't.
"It is my duty to stay here."
"You will die!" she says and her voice is loud. "I know my history, Edward! Scotland will become a part of the United Kingdom and stay that way for a long, long time! Any rebellion is doomed to fail!"
Edward winces. "Still. I have a duty to these people. They took me in when I would have died otherwise. I owe them my life."
"I saved you too," Bella says. She can't believe how heartbroken she sounds.
"Stay here with me," Edward pleads with her. "One year. No more. Then we can go."
"Home?" Bella asks, and she hates the hope that's blooming in her chest.
Edward is still breathing. He's gorgeous, Bella thinks suddenly, with the bright orange sunlight catching in his hair, haloing him like a heavenly creature.
"Yes. Home. My home. My father built this stone circle. Will you come with me?"
Bella has never been a history nerd – but she knows that stone circles were built long before the year zero.
She merely looks at Edward, speechless, before she finds her words.
"Edward," she asks, "where are you from? When are you from?"
He looks at her from eyes infinitely ancient.
"I do not know when I was born. Two thousand years before this Christ the people of this castle keep talking about. Maybe three or four."
He's old, Bella thinks, but she hadn't realized just how ancient he really is.
Suddenly, she's afraid – his lips were so soft – she begins to run and touches the light in the stone circle, and then there's nothing.
To Be Continued