Forged in Dreams and Magick (Highland Legends #1)(13)
“You’re Mairi?” I asked.
She nodded.
“I’m Isobel.”
She nodded again, turned, and briskly walked toward wide stone steps lining the front wall. Her glance and a head jerk over her shoulder wordlessly suggested I follow. I darted after her.
A cozy chamber on the next level held a twin-sized bed, a low wooden chest, and a small chair and table next to an unlit hearth. A light layer of dust coated every surface in the musty room. Mairi systematically laid out her items onto the bed: two gowns, two linen chemises, a leather-braided belt, and their folded clan plaid. She placed flimsy, brown leather shoes on the floor.
“Thank you,” I said. Her blank expression told me she had no idea what I’d said. I pointed a finger at the outfits, feeling like a tour guide in my own foreign movie where someone forgot to add the subtitles.
While I assessed the limited clothing options, a soft click of the door marked Mairi’s swift departure before I even had a chance to say goodbye. I shook my head, snorting, figuring the welcoming committee must have been invented sometime later than the thirteenth century.
Although no fire yet burned in the room, the air’s ambient chill didn’t bother my thin Golden-Coast blood. I pulled my sweater over my head. While stacking discarded clothes on the corner of the chest, I considered leaving on my black, French lace bra and panties, but opted for commando under the chemise, lovingly tucking my only lingerie inside the folded skirt.
With a final tug of the plainer of the two gowns over the linen slip, I’d transformed into a medieval woman. I looked down, straightening the pale yellow fabric. The color matched the ends of my hair curling over my breast. Cinched ties, laced across the bodice, compensated for a slightly large fit. The brown toes of my comfortable boots peeked out from the floor-length hem. I defiantly plucked up the provided slippers and deposited them next to the stack on the chest.
The clan plaid remained. I admired the fabric’s green, black, and gold pattern, remembering historical record. Kilts, or plaids as I liked to call them, did not exist prior to the sixteenth century. I grinned.
If only they knew what I’ve seen. Nothing like rewriting history books from firsthand knowledge. I shook my head. The odds of that happening, short of dragging their self-righteous, narrow-minded asses back in time for irrefutable evidence, hovered around nil, zilch . . . nada.
I wrapped the awkward fabric around me, starting at my waist. Material pooled at my feet when I finished, a glaring clue I’d done something wrong. I began again at the other end, which resulted in bunched pleats falling around my hips. After three failed attempts, I growled, tossing the unwieldy mess back on the bed. They want the clan plaid on me? They’ll have to put it there.
Muted sounds of clanging metal drifted up from the training field. I crossed to the tapestry on the wall, peeling back a corner of the heavy cloth, revealing the courtyard below where shirtless soldiers sparred in small groups. Beyond them, Iain and Duncan stepped out from the smithy.
Iain stopped. He tilted his face up, locking onto my gaze. Power emanated from that ruggedly handsome man, easily detected even from my vantage point. He smirked at me and continued walking toward his men on the field. I dropped the tapestry, annoyed at his never-ending cockiness.
Riled, I stormed from the room to learn about Iain’s castle and its people. With firm belief in the old adage knowledge is power, I intended to become more and more powerful by the minute.
I trotted downstairs, searching along the outer wall. A good distance from the sleeping chambers, I found the garderobe. The medieval bathroom’s design had two snug-fitting doors, one after the other, preventing odors from escaping into the hall. Two clerestory windows circulated the air and brought in light. On a high wooden table, folded linens and lavender sprigs sat alongside a water pitcher, soap rounds, and a small basin. Near the wall, a low wooden stool with a center hole, sat over an angled tunnel, likely leading to a moat or cesspool. My spirits lifted. A simple room gave me one less worry amid a thousand lost conveniences.
Once I’d taken care of business, I backtracked. My steps slowed as the castle’s uniqueness settled into my awakening brain. This was not Brodie Castle, at least not the Brodie Castle in modern-day Scotland; it wouldn’t be built for another three hundred years. Architectural details I’d witnessed in Iain’s castle raced through my mind: the massive, curved corner towers; the size and number of windows . . . and the gigantic groin-vault ceiling in the great hall. My pulse quickened with my pace as I rushed back to study the anomaly.
Standing under the impressive design yielded no further explanation of its bizarre existence. With my neck craned back, I stared in open-mouthed disbelief at an engineering impossibility. Graceful, perfect curves crossed the ceiling from the room’s four corners, the arching gray stones peaking in the center where the bowed panels joined together. Churches and castles throughout Europe and Scotland had the popular method of construction—the Roman design eliminated a need for substantial buttressing—but to the scale above me in thirteenth-century Scotland?
My attention jerked down, as two men hustled by carrying sacks over their shoulders. I discreetly followed them to the larder, rubbing a neck cramped from excessive ceiling watching. They deposited their load and exited the way they came, passing me without a glance. Fairly certain I hadn’t gone invisible, I thought it strange no one questioned my presence.
“Knowledge is power. Knowledge is power . . .” My murmured chant spurred me on.