He’s going to kill me.
“The lower ribs,” he said, tapping the blade against my skin. “You don’t actually need them. But I do.”
And then he plunged the knife into my skin.
Crushing weight. Darkness, and a fire inside, close to my kidney. Pressure, and a wetness between my legs.
Something began to scrape and whine against bone.
Pulling.
He wrenched so hard that my whole body lifted off the table.
I could see liquid pooling on the ground beneath me and for a half second I thought it was grape juice.
Blood. It’s my blood.
I must have blacked out because when I came to, a threaded needle appeared in front of me, pinched between a finger and thumb.
“I’m stitching you up now,” he said. “I’d prefer that we stick to the living part, just in case. OK?”
And then the tug of the thread, binding my skin together. I was slipping under, the fringes of my consciousness starting to flicker and darken.
Smelling salts ripped me back. Patrick’s face appeared at the fringe of my vision. “Stay with me, sweet Amy look-alike.” He smiled and stroked my cheek with a bloodied hand.
“We’re not done yet.”
III
It was night when I came to. I felt weak and light-headed from loss of blood, forgetful for a moment of all that gone before. Above me, the stars told their stories as they had done for centuries before. The sea nudged at me to get up, and slowly the memory of what had happened before crystallized in my mind. Amy. The flame. The cave.
I pulled myself upright. It was dark, but the moonlight fell on the broch, white restless waves dancing all around it. I was freezing cold and the desire to curl up and sleep was insistent, but somehow I managed to half crawl, half stagger my way to the broch.
It was empty. No sign of Amy or Angus and his men, but also no sign of the stakes. No smell of flame on the air, no scorch marks on the stone.
I used the last of my strength to make for the woods, where I made a small shelter to protect against the rain and a fire to ward off the cold and the wolves. Then I took a stone, set it in the flame to cook it, and when it was hot enough, I used two sticks to pick it up and hold it to the wound in my chest, suturing it.
There was a fresh wound on my arm, the skin raw as though I’d been burned, and a small row of digits confirmed the year:
1
7
4
2
The next day I explored my surroundings, frantic, terrified. The island looked almost the same, wild and wind-combed, the sea beating thick clods of creamy foam up the beach. A man and a child were standing there, watching me. I wanted to ask them where Amy was, but there was no use—it was almost a century since she had been born.
I went through Witches Hide again. But when I fell out the other side, I did not arrive in 1667. I arrived in 1801. I went back again and again, and each time I emerged, coughing and spluttering on the shore and branded with fresh digits.
I had to change my approach. Amy had discovered the secret to the cave’s magic. I had seen her write down the runes in her book of spells, had learned a small amount of Icelandic. I would have to take time to remember, to get it right. Otherwise, I risked losing her forever.
When I emerged for the last time, the broch seemed to have sprouted into a white tower. A lighthouse, I later learned, designed to guide ships. I was branded with a year I’d never imagined. 1994. Three hundred and thirty-two years after Amy’s birth.
I built a shack on the small piece of rock that seemed to have been spewed from the larynx of Lòn Haven by the bay, forming a smaller island where some old dwellings had been left to ruin. I covered one of them with branches, then leaves, fashioning a roof. I stole clothing, visited the village. Much had changed, and it daunted me. I spent those first weeks in a perpetual state of dizziness, like a small child. I turned nocturnal, sleeping during the day and exploring the new world at night. It seemed easier, somehow, to sniff out the corners of this new version of the island like a fox when no one was around. I had to relearn much of what I knew.