A Duke Across the Tides

Sara Miller stood on the doorstep of her aunt's house and let the wind hit her full in the face. Salt spray, cold air, the roar of waves somewhere below the cliff's edge. She had not slept more than four hours straight in six months, and her last client meeting had ended with her boss saying the words "mandatory leave of absence" while Sara stared at the spreadsheet until the numbers stopped meaning anything. She had packed a suitcase that same night and driven east until the land ran out.

The door swung open before she knocked.

"You're thin," Agnes Sutton said. She was tall and silver-haired, draped in embroidered velvet that belonged in a period drama, and her sharp blue eyes moved over Sara's face as if she were reading the fine print. "And exhausted. Come in before you blow off the cliff."

"Hello to you too, Aunt Agnes."

Agnes pulled her inside and shut the door against the wind. The house smelled like old books and woodsmoke and something baking. Every surface held a stack of papers, a candle stub, or an object she could not identify. A brass astrolabe sat on the hall table next to a pile of mail. A taxidermied raven watched from the banister.

"Bath first," Agnes said, steering her toward the stairs. "Then food. Then we'll talk about why you look like a ghost who's been haunting a conference room."

Sara wanted to argue, but the fight had gone out of her somewhere around Pittsburgh. She let herself be guided upstairs to a bathroom with a claw-foot tub and water so hot it turned her skin pink. She soaked until her muscles unclenched and her thoughts stopped racing in circles about campaign metrics and quarterly reports and the voicemail from her doctor that she had been ignoring for three weeks.

When she came back downstairs in clean clothes, Agnes was waiting at a small table by the kitchen window. The meal was simple: bread, cheese, soup that tasted as though someone had simmered vegetables for hours with careful attention. Sara ate three bowls before she realized she was being rude.

"Sorry. I forgot to eat today."

"You forgot to eat for longer than today, I suspect." Agnes watched her with something that was not quite concern and not quite amusement. "Your mother did the same thing when she was overwhelmed. She'd get so focused on surviving that she forgot to live."

Sara set her spoon down. Her mother had been dead for fifteen years, and Agnes was the only person who still talked about her as if she had been real. "I'm not overwhelmed. I'm just tired."

"Of course you are." Agnes stood and crossed to a tall bookshelf near the fireplace. Her thin, ink-stained fingers trailed across the spines, pausing here and there, until she selected a volume from the top shelf. It was bound in dark leather, cracked with age, and she held it in both hands as if it weighed more than it should. "I have something for you."

"A book?" Sara tried to keep the skepticism out of her voice. She had brought her own books. Paperbacks, mostly, the kind you could drop in the bath and not mourn.

"Not just a book." Agnes set it on the table between them. The leather was warm brown, worn soft at the corners, and the pages were edged in gold that had gone dull. No title on the cover. No author's name. "I've been saving this for you. It belonged to someone who mattered a great deal to me, and I think it's time you read it."

"Who did it belong to?"

Agnes smiled, and the smile did not quite reach the sharp blue of her eyes. "Read it first. Ask questions later. Take it to the study, the one with the window that looks over the water. I find it reads best there, especially as the tide comes in."

Sara ran her fingers over the cover. The leather was smooth as skin, and touching it tightened her chest. Tight, but not in the way it tightened before a panic attack. Different. "This is very dramatic, even for you."

"Humor your eccentric aunt. It's why you came all this way, isn't it? To be somewhere that doesn't run on spreadsheets?"

Sara could not argue with that. She carried the book into the study, which was small and warm and paneled in dark wood, with a window seat that looked out over the sea. The tide was coming in. White foam churned against the black rocks below, and the sky was going pink and gold at the edges. Curling into the window seat, she pulled a wool blanket over her legs and opened the book.

The handwriting inside was not typeset. It was script, elegant and old-fashioned, brown ink on cream paper. The first page read: An Account of Niall MacDonald, Duke of the West March, in the Year of Our Lord 1478.

Sara blinked. A medieval duke. She had expected poetry. She turned the page.

The duke sat at the long table in the great hall, his captain at his right hand and his steward at his left, and listened to them argue about training drills as though the castle were not crumbling around their ears. He was a tall man, broad through the shoulders, with dark auburn hair that fell across his forehead and green eyes that had not laughed in years. The steward wanted more funds for grain. The captain wanted more men for the garrison. The duke wanted a hot meal and an hour of quiet, but he had learned long ago that a duke got what he needed, not what he wanted.

The prose was vivid in a way that made Sara's skin prickle. Smoke from the hearth and damp wool rose from the hall. She turned another page, and another, and the room around her felt less solid. The sound of the waves grew louder. The words on the page shimmered.

Niall MacDonald rubbed his temples and wondered, not for the first time, whether his father had felt this tired in the years before the fever took him. Whether the weight of a border fortress ever got lighter, or whether you simply grew strong enough to carry it without noticing the strain.

Sara read his name under her breath. "Niall MacDonald."

The room tilted.

She grabbed the windowsill, but the windowsill was not there. The book was not there. The study dissolved around her, the walls pulling away like fog, and she was falling. The sensation was unlike sleep. It was like being grabbed by something enormous and yanked sideways through a door she had not seen. The roar of the sea became a roar in her blood, and the golden light of sunset went black, and Sara Miller, who had only wanted a quiet vacation with a stack of paperbacks, was gone.