“What if I need to protect myself from you? That’s what my father says.” The words almost slipped out.
His scent filled my senses. Forest and earth, fresh air and him. They all mingled together until my head swam. My body shifted closer. I wanted to feel his hands sliding along my skin. Why did it feel like I’d known it before? Why did it feel like his touch should belong to me?
“I would never hurt you.” His expression clouded and he leant back, stealing his intoxicating smell away from me.
“I know.” I reached for him, but he slipped out of reach. “Tristan.” Again, the wrong name slipped from my lips. Why was his name coming out wrong? “Tristram, please.”
“You have always been my heart, Mae. Why you would doubt me now I don’t know.” His body straightened as though his remorse and hurt were filling his veins, much like my magic and gold were filling mine, pulling me closer to him.
“I don’t want you to die.” A tear dropped along my cheek, springing like water out of a fresh waterfall.
“Where are you getting this from? Why do you think I’m going to die?”
I wrung my hands, folding them into the skirt of my dress, shaking my head from side to side. “I don’t know. I just know it to be true.”
Tristram watched me for one long moment, his face a mask of betrayal and hurt. Then without a word, he turned on his heel and marched for the door. I heaved, my chest labouring under a repressed sob. Swiftly, I turned my back as my father strode back in.
“What did you tell him?” he demanded.
“Nothing. I told him nothing.” My shoulders lifted, but I kept my sob buried deep inside where it mingled with the gold and power in my veins; swilling my magic around until I wanted to kneel in the earth and give rise to a new forest, a new land, a new isle.
I couldn’t do that though. Could I?
It was a jest. I didn’t know what I could do. Everything about me was unknown. Unchartered.
“I’m thinking of offering Alana as his wife.”
Father’s words rang in my head, but they didn’t surprise me. I’d heard them before. They echoed back at me from the depths of my memory.
I turned to my father. His mouth was open, ready to explain.
He was going to tell me it was for the greater good, he was uniting the power of our people tightly together.
I held my hand up. I knew. I knew it all.
Then I ran. I ran from what I knew, to what I didn’t understand, and the whole time the forest told me to run faster; the gold in my veins told me to be free. To fight, to save, to love.
I ran, with just the wind in my hair and the rain on my face.
Chapter Four
A cold chill slapped against my skin, stinging against the heat of my exertion. Solid stone walls called to me, an escape from the endless rain.
Someone called my name. “Mae! Mae!”
I kept running until my legs couldn’t take anymore.
I stopped, bent low, catching my breath. The pendant swung towards the earth on its chain, slipping from under my dress and I caught it neatly in my hand, clutching it tight.
It’s to connect you. Heather’s words echoed in my ears. I breathed and concentrated while shattered memories filled my mind. Alana singing and dancing in firelight. My father clapping and smiling, his gaze as he turned to me dark and pensive. Tristram’s jet black eyes landing on my mouth, his hands in my hair, his lips pressed to mine. His clothes different, soft cloth stretched across his hard chest. “More than love,” he whispered.
A mirror and my reflection staring back. A navy skirt and blazer; my hair, wild and red, bundled on the top of my head like a knot in a tree trunk.
“Mae.” I whispered. “Mae Adams.”
The pendant pulsed, warm and hot. Again and again it beat against my palm. Memories I shouldn’t have battered inside my mind. Tristram’s lips sweeping across my mouth, my breath gasping. His long legs stretched out under a table, his foot tapping mine, the curve of his mouth tilting at the edges into a secret smile.
But Tristram had never kissed me like that… his name… the other name… it was right there on the tip of my tongue.
Tristan.
Tristan Prince.
Room Thirteen. Bones on stones, blood and flowers.
It’s to connect you.
Mae Adams. I looked around at the forest, familiar yet strange all at once. The trees seemed to be almost tilting towards me.
I’m… Mae Adams.
The revelation was astounding. My breath caught in tight gasps of air that didn’t want to leave my chest.
I was Mae Adams.
But I was also Mae. My Baduri.
I was her and I was me.
The pendant cooled as soon as my realisation hit home. In my mind the past and present stretched in an endless pathway which went back and forth like a rainbow with me sat right in the middle.
“Thank God, I’m not losing my mind,” I uttered. I knew who I was and in the moment that was all that mattered. I’d stepped through the stones. My Tristan had watched me leave, his face marred with worry and concern and I’d stepped straight through and into the arms of my own Tristram. No. Her Tristram.
In my veins the gold rushed with renewed vitality. Crouching to the ground I pressed my hands hard into the dirt. I was here to learn. I was here to live, to save Tristram and I from dying. Let’s see what I could do.
I laughed as the earth tingled back. A little stab prodded my left hand and I searched to where I sensed it coming from. A beech tree, its leaves curled and withered, shimmied its branches at me. Wow. I was doing this. Me, Mae Adams. No, not even just the me of the twenty first century who had walked
