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

Cassie
said.
    “ I can handle three miles,”
Callum said. “My only injury is to my head, along with some bangs
and bruises from the fight.”
    Cassie looked at him, skepticism
written on her face. “You have a concussion.”
    “ I’ve had one before,”
Callum said. “I’ll feel terrible for a few days and then I’ll start
to feel better.”
    “ From what I saw at the
ambush, you fought well. Have you been in battle before?” Cassie
said.
    “ Not here,” Callum said.
“In Afghanistan.”
    “ I didn’t know you
guys—Brits, right?—fought there too,” she said.
    “ Our forces fought there
especially,” Callum said.
    Cassie picked up the padded shirt that
Callum wore under his mail and held it out. “I know you need help
getting dressed so don’t bother to pretend you don’t.”
    Cassie had taken the mail off him by
brute force, but putting it on again correctly was more difficult.
Together, they managed it. While nobody was going to confuse Callum
for a Highlander, he once again resembled a knight in the service
of the King of England. The men who’d attacked his company had worn
armor over shirts and pants, though of a different style than
Callum was used to: shorter pants, longer shirts which were more
like tunics, and no kilts like he might have expected. Instead,
they had worn blankets wrapped around their shoulders and torsos
like cloaks, and pinned.
    While Callum belted his sword around
his waist and slung his cloak over his shoulders, Cassie pulled off
her sweater and stepped into a dress, tugging it up over her shirt
and pants. Cassie saw Callum watching her and she wrinkled her nose
at him. “The lord prefers it.”
    She put the sweater back on, a cloak
over the sweater, and then snapped her quiver onto a heavy
backpack, the contents of which she didn’t share with Callum. She
slipped the straps of the backpack through slits in her cloak
before buckling them across her front. Callum pulled an arrow from
the quiver. It was shorter than the yard-long Welsh longbow arrows,
but then her bow was shorter too.
    “ Why were you hunting with
a recurve bow instead of a compound one, a crossbow, or even a
gun?” Callum said.
    “ My grandfather is a
traditionalist,” Cassie said.
    She picked up her bow and Callum
picked up his gun from where he’d left it on the bed. He slid it
into its holster at the small of his back.
    Cassie watched him, her lips pressed
together. “You haven’t fired it.”
    Callum turned around. “You
checked?”
    Cassie nodded but didn’t ask
forgiveness for meddling with his things. Callum gazed at her for a
few seconds before he realized she wasn’t going to.
    He shook his head. “Too many
complications would ensue if I used the gun. It’s not worth
it.”
    “ Not even during the
ambush?” Cassie said.
    “ Especially not during the
ambush,” Callum said. At Cassie’s raised eyebrows, he added, “David
and I talked about this. He’s been here since 1282, and while I’ve
only lived in the Middle Ages for six months, I can see that what
he says is true: you can’t fix everything, even if David is going
to try. If I’d opened fire on the MacDougalls when they attacked
us—what then?”
    They both thought about that for a
moment. “The noise alone would’ve brought everyone up short,”
Cassie said. “You could have given your company time to sort
themselves out.”
    “ True,” Callum said, “but
after my clip was empty? The MacDougalls would have seen I was out
of bullets and attacked. And then, if I survived, just by its very
existence the gun would have called attention to me, to King David,
and to everything that we are.”
    “ Saving the bullets
wouldn’t have done you much good if you were dead,” Cassie
said.
    “ That is the weak point in
this argument,” Callum admitted. “My death isn’t the worst thing
that could happen, though. And I didn’t feel like I was going to
die. Not on that road.”
    “ What if using the gun was
the only way