A.N.: To Queen Ares, StephLauren and MeliaAlexander, thank you all for your reviews. This chapter is for you.

A Mhaighdean Bhan Uasal

02

"It's a dangerous business, stepping out your door. If you don't keep your feet, there's no knowing where you might be swept off to…"

During her second tour of the Middle East – Iraq, to be specific, the first time around – she had been stationed on the front-lines. Travelling anywhere was always a question of odds being stacked in one's favour, one false step and a mine detonated, taking legs or killing you outright; she had been the first point of contact to deal with a lot of such injuries. One day, a bomb went off only paces away – the sensation was the closest she could come to describing what she experienced when she touched that stone. The full-body shock, the impact of the bomb-blast throwing her body, the weightlessness and the churning, evaporating feeling in her stomach, seeming to be suspended in mid-air and in time itself, everything happening too quickly for the senses to notice let alone make sense of. Dazed and disoriented, she had woken with ringing ears, the Iraqi sun blazing down unforgivingly, the tang of copper and smoke and burning-flesh thick on the heavy air, superficial cuts and one incredibly fine bruise. Two men had been killed in the blast, and one of her friends had lost a leg. She had remained blissfully unscathed – until, returning to England, PTSD had hit her like a tank.

No bomb had detonated, her ears weren't ringing, but she could neither explain nor really remember what had happened beyond the realisation that something had happened. The screaming rocks, the flickers of – what, memory? Flashes of colour and incomprehensible scenes ripped from her sight before her brain could process them – and that suspended weightlessness, the impossible pressure of being hurtled through the air without moving anywhere…

She groaned, blinking up at a silvery grey sky full of ominously black clouds limned by the weak Scottish sun. They hadn't been on the horizon, but then the weather changed quickly in Scotland, and she sighed, hauling herself upright (wondering when she had fallen over, and grimacing at the state of the contents of her rucksack if she had dropped particularly heavily) considering paying for another night at the B&B rather than risk a night under canvas with those storm-clouds rumbling in.

Pulling herself upright, she sniffed in the cold, and her senses prickled in awareness, her mind taking seconds to catch up. The temperature seemed to have dropped at least ten degrees. And the light was different. Not because of the picturesque silver-edged black clouds obscuring the sun's rays. It was barely three o'clock, and she frowned – it was impossible…the forest…it had…gone… To one side of Craigh na dun, there it was, trees curling out of sight up to the snow-kissed peaks. Young trees. But otherwise her view of the snow-dusted plain was unimpeded. The landscape was not the one she had hiked through to get to the henge.

There was nothing blatantly obvious, no signage, there had been nothing but that briefest sensation of being caught in a bomb-blast, soundless, helpless and disoriented. Her instincts, honed by Granddad and sharpened like a weapon by Army training and multiple tours of hostile terrain in the Middle East, started piecing together clues. A soldier's ultimate instinct was survival and, if found alone in unknown territory, to be duly cautious – use the senses. They were all animals, Granddad used to say; they had evolved into the apex predator through instincts honed for survival. The three F's, she had dubbed them; the urge to fight, to flee, and to fuck. Survive, and propagate the species.

She was still within Craigh na dun. But the forest had thinned as if it had never overgrown the hillside. The drastic change in the weather, and…the quiet… It wasn't just the looming clouds threatening a storm: the little robins and blue-tits she had listened to had now fallen silent. A silent forest was an ominous one.

Had she hit her head? Had someone attached her? She felt no side-effects of having been drugged, her body was strong, no pains anywhere, her head didn't give her any reason to suspect concussion… She hadn't eaten any special fungi that might have brought on hallucinations…and even if she had, why envision a forest disappeared into three inches of snow? The stones of Craigh na dun themselves were unchanged. She didn't think they ever would. The forest that would grow up around them would shelter them from the elements.

Would. Had not yet grown. Not even a sapling.

A trickling icy sensation shivered down her spine, the wind whistling through those two central stones, and in the back of her mind, Granddad's low rumbling voice sang the song, the eerie one, the Gaelic fable of a woman transported through time. Had she fallen asleep? She had to be dreaming…but she couldn't ever remember dreaming so vividly. She didn't have the imagination – Bridie was the fiction-glut. Harry Potter, the Walking Dead, Vampire Diaries – she loved anything that provoked her imagination. Lillian, she was the Army medic, with all that implied; disciplined, calm under pressure, too busy to ever daydream.

And too used to the sound of gunfire not to duck down to a crouch, body tucked close, head down but eyes sharp, wary. She knew it was the final stretch of the roe deer doe-stalking season, which traditionally ended 31st March. But it was just past three p.m.; stalking happened at dawn or dusk when the deer were more active. And roe deer lived in forests; only a young, orphaned fawn might venture out into the open plains as surrounded the dune.

There was no Army base nearby; this wasn't land on which the military ran training drills. She would know.

And there wasn't a road for miles to hear an exhaust backfire. Besides, she knew a gunshot when she heard one. And she was easily visible to anyone. In the back of her mind, she knew this was not the same Criagh na dun she had hiked to. Keeping low to the ground and glad of the tartan around her for camouflage, she melted into the trees. The shot seemed to have come from the open ground, not the trees. And if it wasn't stalkers after roe deer, then – what? – What had she accidentally witnessed, if only audibly?

Young trees muted the wind, and snow crunched softly underfoot, and she became aware of the ringing clang of metal, or hoarse male voices shouting a now-defunct language she recognised only from Granddad's stories. Into the woods, she glanced around – up a tree was a better place to hide, Katniss had had the right idea, but they were too young, the branches far too slender to bear her weight. Down through the rocky, uneven ground, glad of her leather gloves to save her hands the scrapes of jagged, razor-sharp crags and boulders frozen over with bracken and deceptive moss. Tucking herself into the gnarled roots of a tree in a ledge hidden from view from above, she became aware of her heart-beat thumping against her ears. Her breathing was calm, though, and her training had kicked in as it always had. The tension she had felt in the woods, the coil pulled taut ready to spring back, exploded: those hoarse voices again, shouting in Scottish Gaelic, close enough that when she peered around the frozen ferns, she could see two – three – dark bearded men in kilts and armed to the teeth with broadswords, dirk and antiquated pistol, hurrying past on the path she had just jumped from. One paused long enough to shout something in Gaelic, firing the pistol in a flash: she wondered at the recoil he seemed not to feel, even more than the hollowness in her stomach that came with the realisation that he had fired live ammunition.

From the Gaelic, and Granddad's insistence on her learning her weapons history, she would hazard a guess those men were made up to look like eighteenth-century highlanders – a fleeting thought further compounded by the appearance of two bewigged men in the striking scarlet uniform that every American child at least knew on sighed as a 'Redcoat'. A soldier of the English Army, and by the cut of the coat Lillian would say the early 1700s.

Had to be. Gaelic and tartan were both outlawed in the Highlands after the failed uprising of 1745. The end of the clans, of the proud Highlander way of life steeped in ancient tradition.

In the space of a second, Lillian registered all of this and more, the stones and Granddad's songs murmuring in the back of her mind – a second, but long enough for one of the Redcoats to pause as he ran headlong, aim his musket at her and fire without hesitation. Snow and frozen earth exploded a foot from her face, making her jerk back her head, stifling a gasp. Bastard just shot at her! So well-concealed – her hair! With a glare, she grabbed her hair in her first – bright, glowing, unavoidable red. She was a huge ginger in the middle of a frozen wood, as visible as the Redcoats she had always disdained for their choice of dye.

If nothing else, the Redcoat's complete lack of any hesitation in aiming his musket to shoot – to kill – gave her a clarity that settled nerves jarred by being shot at, the bemused delirium she seemed to be floating in; with a certainty that could not be shaken, she knew…

Granddad's songs, the stones… A bloody musket-ball a foot away from her head… Something unexplainable had happened. The stones. Those two fractured great stones in the centre of the henge. Fractured. A schism. A crack… "A crack in the skin of the universe. Two parts of space and time that should never have touched, pressed together…"

Too much Doctor Who, she thought. She was not from Gallifrey, there was no such thing as time-travel, and as of her last medical she had but the one heart, nor had any eccentric men with noisy tools approached her.

Was this her mind fracturing? Had the combination of loss and a staggering case of PTSD broken her? Imagining men of the eighteenth century waging out ambushes in the Highlands – well, that was Granddad's influence. To keep him with her, because she couldn't handle his not being part of her life anymore…

Why would her mind orchestrate any scenario, particularly with her history, in which she was being shot at by soldiers of a bygone age? The rational, soldierly part of her mind, the part keeping her alive on instincts honed from training, muttered that at least it wasn't the Somme. And if this was real, as the biting drizzle now splattering through the unguarded of the branches freezing the snow to ice seemed to indicate, well, better a handful of redcoats and kilted Scots engaged in guerrilla cattle-raids than the trenches.

At least there's plenty o' whisky, Granddad's voice said cheerfully.

It could not have been more than a minute, hidden in the tree-roots, between the shot being fired at her and moving off in pursuit of either safety or higher ground, but the Lillian who left her hiding-spot was Corporal Egan, highly capable front-lines CMT. Instinctual, brave and uncompromising. There was no room for doubt: she had to accept the impossible and run with it.

Gritting her teeth, she regretted her red hair as it swayed in a curtain past her face, stepping carefully, sliding down a gentle hill pockmarked with slick, lethally-sharp boulders. Glad of her leather gloves and the icy drizzle stinging her exposed face and covering her tracks in the melting snow, she plunged on, hastily pulling her hair into a loose plait she couldn't tie up. But it was out of her face, and by the sounds of it the rucks with those men had moved on. She could still hear them, though, and took care to make as little nose as possible trekking through increasingly wild, beautiful terrain, until she lost her footing on a deceptively solid-looking patch of mossy earth – stumbling, feeling a slight twinge in her ankle, she started to hurtle down the slick bank, quickly and direct down the side of the hill on her arse, legs jarring as she tried to dig in her heels, hands snatching at lichen and dead ferns and gnarled roots, catching her breath with a gasp of relief three feet from a jagged outcrop of rock that spread and grew before her, guarding what she could hear was the river she was sure Granddad had taken her to, teaching her to tickle trout.

She had her bearings, at least, knew this stretch of the river featured a good amount of cover from natural caves. Panting slightly, she groaned, taking stock in the sudden stillness. Raw arse and the backs of her thighs smarted, but she doubted the skin had broken, protected by her leather trousers; her Army-issue boots had supported her ankle, preventing a sprain. She glanced up around her, eyes flitting over the messy tracks left behind by her descent. Who knew her arse could cause so much damage? Luckily the rain was working in her favour to melt the snow, eradicating obvious signs that a person had clambered – mostly slid – down the side of the hill. A Redcoat wouldn't know the signs; Highlanders were part of this land, they grew up hunting and tracking – and fighting. Despite the cold, she would rather be agile than warm: she stripped off her earasaid, halving it and rolling it neatly with the swiftness of habit, clamping it under her arm as she covered the distance to level terrain, unhooking one strap of her leather rucksack, pausing only long enough to buckle her tartan to her rucksack. Fumbling in one of the outer pockets for a hairband, she ducked hastily into the shelter of a rocky outcrop dripping into a picturesque, gurgling river-bend.

She buckled the pocket, tucking a few hair-pins into her trouser-pocket, and grunted at unexpected impact. Something sturdy – and more vibrantly scarlet than her hair – caught her.

"And what have we here?" The hands that clamped around her upper-arms were like steel bands through her flimsy shirt. Her immediate impression was of a wig, cold dark eyes and cruel lines etched either side of thin, unforgiving lips. There was a nasty, taunting smile on them that did not reach the eyes. With a jolt of recognition, Lillian wondered suddenly if she had been drawn into one of Granddad's history-books. Did this apparition add more weight to the mental argument that this was a dream brought on by a mental fracture combined with Granddad's research? For here he was, the "scourge of the North" as Granddad growled whenever he had brought up Jonathan "Black Jack" Randall during discussions of his research.

For she knew this was Jonathan Randall, esquire. She had seen the face before. Many of Granddad's published works had specialised on Scottish history between the years 1688 and 1746, and she remembered proofreading his chapters of research on particular historical figures such as the Duke of Sandringham – politically wily, rather effeminate, friends to local lairds, a lover of beautiful things (especially male), a suspected Jacobite and patron of a nauseatingly cruel English captain of the Eighth Dragoons stationed at Fort William. Captain Jonathan "Black Jack" Randall.

During his exhaustive research into the Duke, a rather enigmatic figure, Granddad had gone off on a tangent researching the captain, sourcing a rather fine portrait in a stately home in Sussex. Lillian remembered the portrait; they had toured the great house together and had scones in the tea-shop while Granddad had picked the brains of the resident historian in charge of maintaining the estate for the National Trust. What had struck her wasn't the bold uniform, gold buttons polished until they glowed, or the beauty of the artist's technique; it was the cold, hard lines of cruelty etched either side of the mouth like carved stone. The artist had been uncompromisingly accurate with his portrayal of the Captain – who now stood before her eyeing her like a cat watched a wounded bird – a bird it had wounded, and intended to hurt again.

Only, she wasn't wounded.

"I'll thank you to remove your hands, Captain Randall," she said coolly, hyper-aware of Randall's closeness and the bruising grip he maintained on her arms. He blinked, for a moment taken-aback, even taking a half-step back in surprise. But he squeezed tighter, setting his jaw when her eyes didn't widen in alarm, and gentled his hold.

"You have me at a disadvantage, madam," he said politely, but it didn't diminish the glacial quality of his eyes, boring into hers. "I do not seem to know you."

"No. And yet I know you," she said honestly, staring unflinchingly into those black eyes. "One cannot travel these parts without stories of Black Jack. None at all palatable." Again, true. All she truly remembered of Randall, staring him straight in the face, flesh and blood and bruisingly real, was reading enough of Granddad's research to diagnose him a sexual sadist. His taste for floggings had been marked, and his superior officers had made notes about his conduct toward prisoners and women left alone in his presence that had made the hairs on the back of her neck stand on end. Even in one of the pubs in Inverness, his likeness was pinned above the dartboard, the paper so pockmarked by darts as to be tatters of fragile, cigarette-stained paper, but the uniform was identical, if not the jaw. Black Jack had been notorious in this area for a reason.

Was notorious.

"One is unlikely to hear Valentine sonnets travelling the Highlands, madam," Randall said calmly. "Your name?"

"Yes, I have one," Lillian said calmly.

With an alarming swiftness, he changed. The pleasant mask concealing his features disappeared, replaced with something ugly, something predatory and brutal. Cruel. The grip on her arms tightened painfully, but Lillian stood her ground, only narrowing her eyes in a dangerous glare. She was not some defenceless farmer's daughter; she was a Corporal in the Royal Army Medical Corps.

She would bet her military training was far superior to his.

During her training, and her experiences amassed over four long tours in the Middle East, Lillian had come to learn a lot about herself. Chiefly, that fear did not shut her down. It woke her up, lit a fire in her. She was her bravest and most clear-headed when she was most afraid. She hadn't risen to the rank of Corporal for no reason: she took hideous situations and glided through them with a serenity most people found unearthly. Straight-shouldered, back straight as a pin, she raised her chin, looking at Randall through her eyelashes in her most disdainful, unconcerned look.

"You must think me the fool," he hissed, his voice low, dangerous. Unyielding. Used to giving and having orders obeyed without question. Preying on others; she had known officers like him, who fed off fear, bullies. And she was sure none dared stand up to this man. The English Army hadn't been what Her Majesty's Royal Army was today. In 2016, she meant. "You'll be well advised to tell me exactly who you are and why you are here."

She didn't try to jerk away; knew he held her gripped tight to him, leering down at her for a reason. She lifted her chin, smoothing her features to an expression of complete disinterest, boredom, even, and levelled a look at those black eyes. "Sir, you would be well advised to remove your hands."

"I think I'd prefer to keep them where they are," Randall said quietly. "In fact, I believe I've a rather fine set of shackles that would suit you well, madam. They would match those fine earrings you wear. A gift, perhaps, from your patron?"

Her mother's, actually. She had forgotten about them – 24-carat gold, dainty hoops set with tiny brilliant-cut diamonds, and large pearl drops. The Duchess of Cambridge had a similar pair. She knew what he implied, that she was a wealthy man's mistress – or more likely simply a whore. She gave him a gentle smile. "I buy my own jewellery, sir."

"An Englishwoman who speaks like a lady and yet scrabbles about the Highlands in leather breeches does not afford her own jewels, madam."

"Does she not?" Lillian sighed, tsking softly under her breath, relaxing her body. With the ruckus going on around them, renewed musket shots, Gaelic curses and pitiable screams shivering on the frigid air, Lillian was where she had been more often than not the last decade – in a warzone. No matter how small-scale. And she knew she had to get away from this man, this Captain of Dragoons, the notorious sadist Black Jack Randall. The noise was a reminder of not where but what she was, a reminder of what she was capable of. She was more than equipped to handle this man – she just needed a little space. Lull him into a false sense of her complete helplessness – and he would be hers. Shackles? She didn't think so. She smiled wistfully. "I wish someone might have told me."

"You will tell me why you are here," he growled.

"To make record of the local stories," she said gently, opening her eyes a little wider in feigned innocence. "Before those in His Majesty's Army eradicate anyone who could tell them." His eyes narrowed.

"Think you anyone cares to hear the grunted stories of a people destined to ruin?"

"I'd wager some asked the same of Troy," Lillian blinked. Classical Civilisation was one of the GCSE classes she had enjoyed, alongside her History and science lessons. And she knew the mark of a man's education was how well-acquainted he was with Greek and Latin. "Were you not tutored on your classics, sir? Odysseus and the Cyclops, Medusa and her withering glare? The Furies, who punished evil-doers." She let her eyes bore into his, challenging. "I wonder at the Gaelic equivalent. Given the fearsome nature of mortal Scottish women alone, I'd hazard a guess even you might second-guess crossing them."

"Perhaps, madam, and yet you are not one of them," Randall said quietly, his hold on her arms loosening. In surprise, maybe?

She gave him a sweet, lulling smile. "Aren't I?"

Her training kicked in, with the element of – not surprise, complete and total shock. Moving swiftly and leonine, unencumbered by uniform or pack, she first spat full in his eyes, moving methodically and using the benefit of her size and strength, her knowledge of anatomy and the jujitsu and boxing training Granddad had insisted she learn as well as the military training, to jab, strike, punch, daze and finally kick her foe into submission, sprawling onto the snow-covered mud at the river's edge, moaning and lingering on the border of consciousness.

She rolled her shoulders, feeling the strain of unusual activity on her body after only three months home from Iraq. Well-honed but out of practice, she wasn't sure she had the strength to inflict maximum injury – but if she wasn't bigger or stronger than her opponent, she knew how to optimise her strength and strike strategically. At the very least, by the sight of him alone, she would hazard an educated guess that Captain Jonathan Randall now suffered from ringing ears, a broken, dislocated jaw, three cracked ribs and four broken, a traumatised solar-plexus, his diaphragm haemorrhaging. It would take him as little as six weeks to recover physically. The shock of being injured in such a way – by a woman – well…that would take a lot longer for him to reconcile.

Yes, she thought, peering at him as she panted lightly, feeling warm for the exertion, resting her hands on her knees to look down at the damage she had inflicted. Definitely a dislocated jaw, with a possible break if the swelling was any indication, she saw with some satisfaction. Randall stilled, eyes closed; he had fallen unconscious. She cocked her head, reached down and unsheathed his sword, spinning and hurling it bodily into the river. Bloody heavy, she thought. She'd never held a sword before, had new respect for Jon Snow wielding one weighed down under all those furs. She preferred a knife.

Glancing down at the unconscious heap at her feet, she sighed, deciding to root through the pockets. Waste not, she thought with a tiny grim smile, wondering whether she might come to regret having beaten him so badly. A small coin-purse, she didn't stop to inspect its contents but tucked it into her trouser-pocket and turned to leave, stooping to retrieve her rucksack lying on the ground, the leather stained with the rain.

A twig snapped behind her; she whirled, but felt a sharp, fiery pain in the back of her skull, and had the fleeting sensation of falling from a great height before impact, and darkness shrouded her mind. Her last panicked thought; she didn't know which to hope for, Scottish rebels or the Redcoats.

A.N.: Lillian's looks are inspired by Léa Seydoux. I love the almost sombre beauty she has, it's subtle and commanding. And I've a picture on Pinterest of a girl with the most amazing red hair. I've made a board, 'Sassenach,' if anyone wants a browse.