The Dark Highlander
Page 56

“No lips,” Drustan warned. “Unless you wish me to be kissing Chloe.”
Dageus averted his face swiftly. “How are the wee bairn, lass?” he asked, with a glance at her rounded belly.
Gwen beamed and prattled on about her most recent doctor’s visit. When she paused finally for a breath, she peered at him intently. “Has Drustan told you our idea yet?”
Dageus shook his head. He was still having a hard time fathoming that Drustan had known he was dark all this time. A hard time believing he was home, that his brother had welcomed him. Had, in fact, been waiting for him.
“You’re my brother,” Drustan said quietly, and Dageus knew that he’d read his feelings in that uncanny way his twin had. “I would never turn my back on you. It wounds me that you thought I would.”
“I but thought to fix it myself, Drustan.”
“You hate to ask for help. You always have. You’ve ever shouldered more than your share of the burden. You had no right to sacrifice yourself for me—”
“Doona even start with me—”
“I didn’t ask you to—”
“Och, you rather be dead?”
“Enough!” Gwen snapped. “Stop it, both of you. We could sit here for hours arguing about who should or should not have done what. And what would that accomplish? Nothing. We have a problem. We’ll fix it.”
Dageus hooked a ladder-back chair with his foot, turned it about and dropped into it backward, stretching his legs around the frame, resting his forearms on the top of the back. He took a perverse pleasure in seeing his elder brother chastened. Drustan was well met by his wee, brilliant wife. The bond betwixt them was a precious thing.
“We’ve given this a lot of thought,” Gwen said, “and we think we can send someone back to warn you before the tower burns, that it’s going to burn. That way you can prevent the fire, which would save Drustan, and keep you from ever turning dark.”
Dageus shook his head. “Nay, lass. It wouldn’t work.”
“What mean you? ’Tis a brilliant solution,” Drustan protested.
“Not only doona we have someone we could send, because that person might be forever stuck in the past, but I doona believe it would change me now.”
“No, Drustan and I thought of that,” Gwen insisted. “If the person was one you met as a result of turning dark, like—oh, say, gee, Chloe—the same thing that happened to me should happen to her. She’d be sent back to her own time the moment she succeeded in changing your future.”
“Chloe goes nowhere without me. And she doesn’t know. You didn’t tell her, did you?” The tension was back again. He’d been so caught up in seeing his brother again, so relieved to be accepted, that he’d forgotten to warn Gwen to say naught to Chloe of his plight.
“I didn’t say anything,” Gwen hastened to assure him. “It was apparent she knew very little, so I kept the conversation light. We talked about college and jobs mostly. Who else have you met in this century that we might send?”
“No one. It wouldn’t work anyway. There are things you doona know.”
“Such as?” Drustan probed.
“I’m no’ the same man anymore. I suspect that even if someone went back and warned the past me, and the past me didn’t break his oath, what I’ve become would still exist in the here and now.”
“That’s impossible,” Gwen declared, with the firm conviction of a physicist having weighted her proofs both valid and true.
“Nay ’tis not. I tried something very similar. Shortly after I broke my oath, I went back to a time before the fire, hoping to cancel myself out. To see if the past me might cause the dark me to cease to exist.”
“The way things occurred when I took Gwen back into the past,” Drustan said thoughtfully. “The future me ceased to exist because two identical selves couldn’t coexist in the same moment in time.”
“Aye. I even managed to carry a note to myself through the stones, so the past me would know to move you from the tower. But the canceling hinges on two identical selves.”
“What are you saying?” Drustan demanded, hands clenching on the arms of his chair.
“When I went back, not only didn’t the future me cease to exist, neither me did. I watched myself through a window for hours before fleeing again. He never disappeared. I might have strolled in and introduced myself.”
“ ’Tis wise you didn’t. We must be ever wary of creating paradoxes,” Drustan said uneasily.