I could not kill Amy. I knew that, as much as I knew I was looking at the mark of a wildling on my wife’s skin. I could never kill her, not for anything.
I told her to relay to me what had happened when she’d gone through Witches Hide. She said that she arrived on the shore and found herself addressing the daughter of Christopher Darroch, Marion, who told her that the year was 1707. The proof, she said, lay in the church graveyard, where a fresh tombstone was marked with the year—1707, just as the mark on her skin stated.
Amy was mesmerized, she said, and terrified, for although she looked for me, she could not find me.
She climbed back into the cave and went through once more, hoping to arrive back in 1667. She went dozens of times, the cave spitting her out at whim to the years before her own birth, before her mother’s birth, and far into the future. She said she passed through the cave and it sent her where it wished her to go, branding the year on her skin each time like a burn.
Slowly, she lifted her right sleeve. Just as trees are ringed inside their bark with each passing year, so, too, did the flesh of her arm report hundreds of fiery red numbers, etched painfully into her skin. All marking the years to which she had traveled.
“Time’s stigmata,” she said, fingering a particularly livid wound.
She told me she spent two months in 1921, hiding in an abandoned croft on the south of Lòn Haven and living off crops and stolen milk from a nearby farm. She knew she had to work out the spell to enable her to return to her original time. And once she did, she went through.
“So . . . do you know everything that is to come?” I said, feeling sick at the thought of it. What would that kind of knowledge do to a person?
“The boy they killed,” she said. “Angus’ son. He wasn’t a wildling. He had traveled through the cave from the future.” She turned her face to the fire, her jaw set. “I’m going to tell the Privy Council that the mark isn’t what they think. That it’s not the mark of the fae.”
I told her, as gently as I could, that they’d never, ever believe her. They would believe she was bewitched, or in league with the Devil. They would kill her for possessing the mark.
It had to remain a secret.
“Why don’t we go through the cave together?” I told her. “You’ve worked out the spell that sends you back to the time you came from, have you not?”
She nodded. “There is a problem with that idea,” she said. There was a possibility of encountering yourself in the past, or in the future. In such a case, there would be two of you. Two Amys, or two Patricks.
I could not comprehend this.
“If this happens, you must be careful not to take hands with your other self. If you do, the two of you will become one.”
She was both in awe and fearful of the magic, of interrupting the course of events. We were taught, as children, not to dabble with the course of nature. This was the same; she had seen her sister in the past, but did not approach her for fear of changing the order of time. And while she ached to prevent her sister’s death, she knew that there were consequences to using such magic.
We planned one day to go through the cave together. We just had to decide on the year.
But the Privy Council had other ideas. Despite her efforts to conceal the marks on her skin, Isobel Boyman, one of Amy’s good friends, spotted them while they were walking. She told the elders, and a charge was given to apprehend her immediately.
Not just Amy.
They also came for me.
“Amy and Patrick Roberts,” a voice called from the front door. I looked through the slats of the wood and saw a crowd of ten men, maybe more, all of them armed.
“Come out now or be forced out by fire!”
SAPPHIRE, 1998