Exiles in Time (The After Cilmeri Series) by Sarah Woodbury

home. Couldn’t she?”
    Callum had been leaning forward too,
but now he straightened. “Who’s to say?”
    His tone struck Cassie
as off . As if
they’d been revealing truths to each other and now he was hiding
something. “But she’s done it three times. Why couldn’t she
again?”
    Callum let out a sharp breath. “The
problem is the way she does it. I’ve spent far too much time
considering the possibilities myself, believe me. What’s she
supposed to do to help us? Fly an airplane into a mountain?
Deliberately cause a car crash? Jump off a cliff?”
    Cassie pursed her lips as
she studied him. “I didn’t really catch it the first time, but you
meant that her traveling happens only when she’s in danger, is that
right?”
    “ When we fell through time
most recently, when I came here with her, she jumped off the
balcony at Chepstow Castle. It’s a four story drop into the Wye
River.”
    Cassie sat back on her heels, her
enthusiasm squashed. She felt reality condensing around her again.
“Oh. That’s a problem.” Then she got to her feet and turned towards
the fire so Callum couldn’t see her face as she composed
herself.
    “ Just because you can’t get
back to our world doesn’t mean you have to stay here, in this
place,” Callum said.
    Cassie stopped in the act of stirring
the pot over the fire, the spoon suspended over the porridge. “What
do you mean?” she said without turning around.
    “ David is the King of
England,” Callum said. “He grew up in Oregon, like you, until he
was fourteen. He would welcome you to London or to any of his
castles in Wales, any time you wanted to come. You don’t have to
live alone anymore.”
    Cassie held very still.
Callum’s words had frozen her feet to the floor. Not live here? One hand
went to her long braid. Cassie caught the end in her fist and she
tugged on it. “Let’s—let’s leave that for another day.” She tossed
the braid over her shoulder and turned to look at Callum. “We have
more important things to worry about right now.”
    “ Like getting word to King
David about what has happened?” Callum said.
    Cassie laughed. “Not hardly. That can
wait. Aren’t you concerned about what the MacDougalls have done
with the rest of the men in your party?”
    Callum’s mouth dropped open. Cassie
had surprised him. “You mean there were survivors?”
    “ About a dozen,” Cassie
said. “The MacDougalls gathered them up and marched them away,
heading west.”
    “ Do you know where they
took them?”
    “ My guess is Mugdock
Castle, or close to it,” Cassie said. “I’m surprised that Lord
Patrick is openly involved, but even if your friends aren’t there,
he’ll know where they went. This is his land. The MacDougalls are
his allies and they wouldn’t have marched across it without telling
him they were coming, even if they didn’t tell him why.”
    “ Where’s the MacDougall
stronghold?” Callum said.
    “ Dunstaffnage. Fifty miles
from here.” Cassie had been there. The castle had been built on a
prominent rock and was surrounded on three sides by the sea. Meg
and Marty, admittedly unbeknownst to them, had dumped Cassie in a
forest a mile to the east of the castle when they’d shifted
worlds.
    “ Too far.” Callum’s chin
was set as he thought.
    It looked like Callum was starting to
think like a soldier again. Just as long as he didn’t think he
could act like one too soon: that concussion was going to give him
trouble for at least a week.
    “ There’s too much daylight
between here and there,” Callum said.
    “ I think you’re right,”
Cassie said. “They had wounded of their own and would have had to
go to ground closer than Dunstaffnage, at least for what was left
of the night.”
    Callum looked hard at Cassie. “Do you
really think they hoped to capture—or kill—King David? How could
they possibly have thought that would end well for
them?”
    Cassie shrugged. She’d heard about the
Battle in the Severn Estuary