Page 7 of Highlander’s Claim

Isle of Achleith, July 1313

Jenny woke up with a jerk. She was cold and her head hurt. The dry, pasty taste in her mouth told her she was dehydrated. Her head spun like the blades of a helicopter. She pushed herself up off the grass, and the wind threw her own hair into her face as she tried to untangle the long strands from her eyelashes.

“Oh gosh…” she murmured, holding on to her pounding head and looking around. “Where the hell am I?”

Next to her hand that pressed against the grass lay a coin covered in dirt. It was thick and the edge was uneven, not the perfect circle of modern coins. Her mind sluggish, she picked it up and looked at it, struggling to remember why she was here and what this coin had to do with it. She turned it around in her hand, thinking…

And then she remembered. Amanda and the girls… Champagne… Oh dear God, so much champagne… The boat broke down…

And then, a woman whose name she couldn’t remember saying something about her true love being a Highlander who lived back in time, then high-fiving the stone, joking about traveling in time to meet her soul mate or whatever. There it was, the rock, a foot away from her.

Completely forgetting the coin in her hand, she put it into the pocket of her dress. She needed to find her friends. And the boat. Jenny groaned as she scrambled to her weak feet. There was nothing around her but a piece of mossy, grassy, and rocky land about a hundred feet wide and the sea—all around her as far as she could see.

Where was the boat? And the girls? “Amanda!” she called. “Natalie! Kyla!”

No one replied. They must be already on the boat. Why didn’t they take her, especially if they saw she’d passed out? Seagulls squawked over her head, and she remembered something about a seagull sitting and watching her. As she walked to the edge of the cliff to see where the boat was, she realized something else was totally missing.

The surface of the island was completely empty. A cold droplet of sweat crawled down her spine.

“Where the hell is the lighthouse?” she cried, looking around.

But she wasn’t completely alone. Some distance away, there was a ship. She narrowed her eyes, trying to make sure she was seeing what she was seeing… It had a sail. A single, square sail. Was that a sailboat? No, it looked like a Viking ship, not that she knew much about history… The sail looked yellowish, with some sort of a red symbol across it.

“What the hell?” she said to herself.

Her head pounded. Maybe she was still drunk, although what she felt was much more like a hangover. She looked down the cliff. The gravel beach lay at the base of the slope.

And there was no boat. No dinghy.

And not a single person in sight.

Panic paralyzed her.

Except for the seagulls that would feast on her dead body, there was only one living thing in this vastness of sea and a tiny piece of barren land.

Whoever was on that damn Viking boat.

“Heeeeelp!”

* * *

Aulay braced his legs against the movement as the ship sank and rose on the waves. The sea was grayish blue around them, white-crested waves appearing here and there, like sheep in a field. The breeze blew into his face, tickling his beard and bringing the scent of the sea into his nostrils. The sail of his ship, Tagradh, which meant “claim,” flapped above their heads. The men’s eyes kept scanning the sea.

After days of searching, he was starting to worry they wouldn’t find the wrecked English ship bearing a king’s treasure of gold, armor, and weapons. But the Isle of Achleith had caught many a ship on its rocky shores. Mayhap his luck would finally change.

As his eyes focused on Achleith, he saw what appeared to be a single figure jumping and waving their hands.

“Do ye see that?” Aulay asked Colum. “Is that a person?”

Robert the Bruce’s sources had reported that England had sent the treasure ship to Ireland, intending to start an invasion into the Western Highlands. But it had been caught in a storm that had thundered over the sea more than a sennight ago. The Bruce had asked Aulay and his men to find that ship and take its contents before the English recovered it.

An invasion from Ireland could mean that the English would start with Islay.

And he couldn’t have that.

“Aye, I see that,” said Colum. “Is that a woman?”

Aulay squinted his eyes. Something very green flapped around the person’s figure. “Aye, she seems to wear a dress. She might be in distress since she’s waving her arms and jumping up and down.”