The girl turns. She removes her sunglasses and squints at Luna. Then she breaks into a run toward her.
IV
I have done a lot of wrong things in my time, and I’m sorry for most of them.
But doing what I needed to do in order to find Amy? No, I’m not sorry for that.
And as I said, I was a skilled butcher. I had learned anatomy, both animal and human. The woman I had mistaken for Amy would live.
Her bones completed the spell, and for that, I wish her a long and happy life.
After I took her ribs, I placed tall branches all around the sides of the Longing and set them alight. As the flames climbed to the windows, I rushed through to the end of Witches Hide, diving deep into the water and coming to shore.
I tore off my clothes from 1998 and began to race toward the forest. I recognized Lòn Haven as it had been, that raw, wild landscape dotted with white crofts, the forests thick and lush again.
But a scream stopped me in my tracks.
I turned back and saw smoke rising from the bay. The broch squatted there, bleak and ominous as it had once been. I ran toward the broch and was astonished by what I found: Stevens and his men tying Amy to the stakes, her head bloodied and shorn, just as I had left her.
Amy was already dead, I thought, her body limp. My knees buckled and I sank to the ground, the horror that I had arrived too late to save her thudding in my bones.
“Bring her down,” a voice called out. It was Father Ross, newly installed at the kirk after the death of Father Skuddie. “She has not stood trial.”
I lifted my head from the cold rock and watched as the men laid Amy’s body on the stone. A moment later she coughed, and relief flooded through me. She was yet alive. I inched forward toward her. Stevens spied me and raised a baton to knock me down, but Father Ross prevented him.
“Douse the flames,” Father Ross said, and though the men grumbled, they did as he asked.
“This woman bears the markings of a wildling,” Angus said, lifting the blanket that I’d placed upon her to reveal the livid numbers there. “You know the mandate as well as I do, Father. No trial is needed to deal with a wildling.”
“Wildlings take the form of children,” Father Ross replied, looking over the marks. “These markings look like they were self-inflicted. I have seen such on the limbs of those who are in mourning.” He looked at me for confirmation, and I nodded. I had taken the bones of an innocent woman to get here and I would lie to a priest. Anything to be with Amy.
“I think you are mistaken, Angus,” Father Ross said. “This woman is not a wildling, and you are to return her to her home. May God forgive your soul.”
He was visibly angry, but Angus did as Father Ross instructed. Buckets of water were swept over the stakes to put out the flames, and the man who would be our executioner rode Amy and me back on his horses to our croft, where Mrs. Wilson, a healer, attended to our wounds.
The violence meted by Stevens and his men caused Amy to lose the child she was carrying. “I’m sorry, wee lamb,” Mrs. Wilson said as she attended to her. “There may be a chance of another.”
We mourned our loss. But I told her where I had traveled, and for how long.
We learned from that day.
We swore we would not meddle with history. We lived in dangerous times, but we had glimpsed danger in every time, past and future. We could face the danger, so long as we were together.
At first, we decided to block the entrance to the tunnel. It seemed a simple and effective way to spare more children’s lives, and so I commissioned a blacksmith to make a grate—or a gate, I told him—that we would put across it. However, we quickly found that the presence of the grate only served to heighten curiosity, with older children devising stories about the origin of the grate, and then methods to get around it. We put wood over it to conceal it. But it wasn’t enough.