Cian did not drag her.
That should not have mattered as much as it did.
Cara had been pulled from the sky, dropped in a ring of impossible stones, stripped of aircraft, crew, radio, certainty, and apparently the century. Under the circumstances, one tall man in rain-dark wool choosing not to haul her by the wrist should have ranked low on the list of miracles.
It did not.
He kept one pace ahead and half a pace to her left, close enough that if her injured leg failed again he could catch her, far enough that she did not feel caged. He had the lantern in his right hand now, the flame cupped against the storm. The light moved over the wet grass in brief gold sweeps, catching black stone, heather, slick rock, the white wild eyes of sheep huddled against a broken wall. Every few seconds he looked back, and every time he did, Cara hated how much relief moved through her.
Do not imprint on the first competent male in the hallucination, she told herself.
It was a good rule. Sensible. Evidence-based.
Her body ignored it.
The cloak around her shoulders was heavy with rain and his heat. It smelt of smoke, salt, lanolin, and crushed herbs. When the wind drove through the wool, it brought the memory of his hands: broad, scarred, careful. He had caught her like she weighed nothing and released her the instant she ordered him to. Modern men with half his size and a tenth of his danger had managed worse manners in hospital corridors.
That did not make him safe.
It made him interesting.
Interesting was not a medical category. Cara disliked it on principle.
The path from the stones sloped down through rough pasture toward a scatter of lights that looked too warm to be real. No streetlamps. No sodium glare. No blue-white LED sting. Just fire: low and amber behind hide or oiled cloth, trembling in cottage windows, sliding under doorways, burning in iron baskets along what might have been a lane. Beyond the settlement, the sea roared unseen. Behind it, farther inland, black hills shouldered the storm.
Dúnmara—DOON-mah-rah, sea-fort.
The word from her navigation screen sat inside her skull like a lodged shard, and now it had a sound her exhausted brain could hold.
DOON-mah-rah. Sea fort. A name that sounded less like a place than a verdict.
She had never been here. She could not have been here. She was a Dublin-based air ambulance pilot with a mortgage application she had avoided submitting, a dead grandmother's pendant under her shirt, and two crew members who might currently be somewhere in the same nightmare or dead in the real world because she had followed coordinates that should not have existed.
Finn.
The thought hit hard enough to make her stumble.
Cian turned at once.
"I'm fine," she snapped, because apparently the urge to lie to medical personnel survived time travel.
He did not understand the words. His eyes understood the tone. One dark brow lifted with a restraint that should not have been attractive and absolutely was not helpful.
"Don't look at me like that," she said.
He said something in Irish. Older Irish. Beautiful Irish. Useless Irish.
"Yes, exactly. We're communicating brilliantly. United Nations who?"
The corner of his mouth moved.
Barely.
Cara stopped noticing his mouth immediately. Aggressively. With discipline.
The bell rang again from the village, closer now. Dogs barked. Men's voices carried through rain. Cian's expression sharpened. He raised the lantern once, shielding it with his body, then blew it out.
Darkness collapsed around them.
"Oh, fantastic," Cara whispered. "A stealth portion. Love those. Very on reputation for my concussion."
Cian touched one finger to his lips.
"I know what quiet means," she muttered, but softer.
He guided her off the open path and along the lee of a stone wall. The wall was old. Not charming-old. Not restored-for-tourists old. It had the patient, indifferent look of something built by hands that expected weather, hunger, and neighbours to be equally troublesome. Cara's palm skimmed it for balance. Lichen smeared cold against her skin.
Her thigh had begun to throb in earnest. Blood warmed the inside of her trouser leg, then cooled. The wound was not pouring, which was something. She had no idea how deep it was. Her ribs complained with every breath. Her head pulsed behind her left eye. Shock kept offering her a bright, false calm and then yanking it away.
A shape moved ahead.
Cian stopped so abruptly she nearly walked into his back.
A boy stepped out from the darkness with a shepherd's crook in both hands. Fourteen, maybe fifteen. Barefoot despite the cold. His hair was plastered to his head, and his face held the ecstatic terror of someone who had found a story before any adult could ruin it with sense.
He stared at Cara.
Then at Cian.
Then back at Cara.
He spoke so fast Cara caught nothing but the shape of a question.
Cian answered in a low voice.
The boy's eyes dropped to Cara's strange black flight trousers, the reflective strip on one calf, the boots, the cloak, the flash of silver pendant at her throat. His mouth fell open.
"No," Cara said, pointing at him because panic made her rude. "No shouting. No villagers with torches. No. Absolutely not. I have seen this film."
The boy blinked.
Cian said his name sharply. "Tomas." TOH-maws. Thomas, stripped back to an older sound.
The boy shut his mouth.
Good. So names worked.
Cian stepped between them, one hand low, not quite shielding Cara, not quite presenting himself as barrier. His body was built for that kind of decision. Even in darkness she could read the breadth of him, the controlled stillness. A man who did not need to puff up because the world had already issued the relevant memo.
Tomas spoke again, quieter. This time Cara heard one word repeated.
"Bean?" BAN, woman. A question, and maybe an accusation, packed into one small word.
Woman.
A second word: "spéir"—SPAYR, sky.
Sky.
Sky woman.
"Oh, brilliant," Cara whispered. "That's going to stick."
Cian gave the boy a task. Cara knew it from the rhythm, the authority, the way Tomas resisted for half a heartbeat and then obeyed because Cian's patience had edges. The boy darted away down the slope toward the village, not shouting, thank God, but moving fast enough to make trouble in record time.
"Was sending him ahead good or bad?" Cara asked.
Cian looked at her.
"Right. Forgot. You don't speak traumatised HSE consultant."
He pointed toward the lights, then made a small motion with his hand: stay close.
"You realise I am only following you because the alternative is hypothermia and possibly wolves. Do you have wolves? Ireland had wolves in the sixteenth century. Did it still? Yes. Probably. Excellent. Love that for us."
Cian's head turned slightly at the word Ireland.
Cara went still.
"Ireland," she repeated, tapping the ground. "Éire?" AIR-uh. Ireland, but older in the mouth.
His eyes narrowed, not in suspicion this time but recognition. "Éire," he said, and the word sounded less like a country than a living thing.
The sound in his mouth was older, fuller, less flattened by centuries and road signs.
Cara swallowed.
"Year," she said. She held up both hands, then stopped because miming Gregorian calendar systems to a sixteenth-century healer during a storm was where dignity went to die. "Date? Anno Domini?"
Nothing.
"Of course not. Why would that be easy?"
He touched his chest. "Cian O’Dálaigh."
She pointed to herself. "Cara Sullivan."
"Cara." He said it carefully, as though the name had weight.
A dangerous warmth moved through her, uninvited and therefore deeply irritating.
"No," she said. "Do not say it like that."
He waited.
"You don't understand me, which is probably for the best."
The path dropped between two low ridges and the village emerged properly.
It was smaller than the lights had promised, huddled against the land as if the Atlantic had tried for years to scrape it off and failed. Cottages crouched under thatch weighted with rope and stone. Smoke pressed low in the rain. A larger hall stood beyond them, timber and stone, its roofline dark against the sky. Nearer the centre, a squat church shape lifted a small bell gable into the storm. The lane was mud, not road. Real mud. Deep, gleaming, churned by hooves and feet. Cara's boots sank.
The smell hit her next.
Smoke. Wet wool. Animals. Seaweed. Human closeness. Dung. Fish. Earth. Beer. Iron. Herbs. No petrol. No hot asphalt. No disinfectant. No electrical ozone. No city undertone of rubber and takeaway grease and exhaust.
The world below had rules, but not the rules she knew. This was not tourist Ireland, not museum Ireland, not the tidy green country sold on postcards and airport whiskey boxes. This was a Gaelic settlement beyond the easy reach of Dublin's English law, a place of cattle, kinship, fosterage, feud, and obligation. Cara did not know the words for it yet. She did not know about the Pale -- the English-held strip around Dublin where law wore a different face -- or about the queen across the water whose officials were trying to press Ireland into a shape it had never consented to hold. She only knew that every cottage, every watching face, every armed man in the rain belonged to a world where protection was not a courtesy. It was survival.
Her stomach turned.
Not from disgust.
From proof.
You could hallucinate images. Smell was harder to lie about.
A door opened ahead.
Light spilled out.
A woman stood framed inside it, broad and straight-backed, grey hair braided down one shoulder, a shawl pulled tight around her. Her face was a map of weather, age, and decisions no one had been allowed to vote on. She held a candle in one hand and what looked very much like a fireplace poker in the other.
Cara liked her immediately.
The woman looked at Cian, then at Cara, then at the blood darkening Cara's trousers.
She said one word.
Cian answered.
The woman hit him on the shoulder with the poker.
Not hard enough to injure. Hard enough to communicate a full paragraph.
Cara's mouth opened.
Cian accepted the blow with the weary dignity of a man who had been hit by this woman before and expected to be hit by her again.
The woman turned to Cara. Her eyes were sharp as broken glass.
She looked at the cloak, the boots, the torn black fabric, the pendant, Cara's wet hair, Cara's face.
Then she snorted.
"Well," Cara said. "Lovely to meet you too."
The woman seized Cara's wrist.
Cian moved.
The woman snapped something at him without looking away from Cara. He stopped.
Her fingers were warm, blunt, strong. She was checking pulse. Not properly by modern standards, but with the instinctive competence of someone who had held hundreds of wrists and known which ones were sliding away.
Cara stared at her.
The woman stared back.
Healer.
Not doctor. Not nurse. Not licensed, registered, insured, indemnified, audited, appraised, and morally exhausted by admin.
But healer.
The woman's thumb shifted over Cara's pulse. Her eyes narrowed.
"Tachycardic," Cara said. "Cold, injured, probably concussed. Also having a spectacularly bad evening."
The woman barked a question at Cian.
He answered with Cara's name.
The woman's gaze flicked to the stone circle above the village.
Fear crossed her face so quickly Cara might have missed it if she had not spent years watching relatives understand bad news before words reached them.
Then the woman shoved the poker into Cian's hands, took Cara by the elbow, and hauled her inside.
Apparently consent was a work in progress.
The cottage swallowed her in heat.
After the storm, it was almost violent. Fire burned in a wide hearth. Bundles of herbs hung from rafters. Steam breathed from a pot. The air was thick with peat smoke, wool, dried flowers, vinegar, old wood, and something bitter steeping in water. Shadows leapt over shelves crowded with jars, folded cloth, bowls, bone needles, knives, thread, clay cups, and objects Cara could not name but did not trust.
A table stood near the fire. A pallet occupied one wall. A stool sat beneath a window covered with oiled skin. There was no electricity. No sink. No steriliser. No sharps bin. No monitor.
Cara's heart lurched toward hysteria.
Do the next useful thing.
The woman pointed to the stool.
Cara sat before her leg gave the same opinion.
Cian entered behind them and shut the door. The storm became muffled, though not distant. It pressed at the walls like a large animal denied entry.
The woman spoke again. Her voice had authority hammered flat and practical over decades.
Cian answered.
Cara caught the cadence of an argument. His tone was respectful. Hers was not. The names repeated: Cian. Bríghid.
So this was Bríghid—BREE-id, almost Bridget but older, sharper, with smoke in it.
Aunt? Mother? Village executioner? Unclear.
Bríghid knelt in front of Cara and reached for the torn fabric at her thigh.
Cara caught her wrist.
Everyone froze.
Cian's attention snapped to Cara's hand on Bríghid.
Bríghid looked down, then up, and one eyebrow rose so high it should have required medical assessment.
"Sorry," Cara said, releasing her. "Reflex. No offence. Also please wash your hands."
Bríghid clearly understood none of that. She reached again.
Cara leaned back. "No. Wait. Clean water? Boiled? Cloth?"
Blank looks.
She mimed washing. Then pointed at Bríghid's hands. Then at the pot. Then made what she hoped was an internationally recognised gesture for do not rub mystery floor bacteria into my open wound.
Bríghid stared.
Cian stared.
Cara stared back.
"I am not dying of sepsis because time travel has poor infection control."
Bríghid said something dry and devastating. Cian's mouth twitched again.
"Did she insult me?"
He looked far too innocent.
"She did. I can tell."
Bríghid rose, muttering, and went to the hearth. She poured steaming water into a bowl, added cooler water from a covered jug, then held up both hands in exaggerated question.
Cara nodded. "Thank you. See? Civilisation."
Bríghid washed like a woman humouring a lunatic and perhaps enjoying herself despite better judgement. Cara washed her own hands after, wincing as warm water found torn skin across her knuckles. Cian watched every movement as if she were building a cathedral.
Then Bríghid cut open the fabric at Cara's thigh.
The wound was ugly but not catastrophic: a long, ragged laceration along the outer thigh, shallow in places, deeper near the midpoint. It needed irrigation, closure, antibiotics she did not have, tetanus prophylaxis she definitely did not have, and a universe that obeyed normal rules.
Bríghid made a low sound.
"Yes," Cara said. "I've looked better."
Cian stepped nearer.
Cara saw his face change when he saw the blood. Not panic. Focus. The same shift she felt in herself when a patient stopped being a story and became tasks.
He put the lantern on the table, rolled his sleeves, and opened the satchel.
There he was again: healer. The dangerous cliff-made man with dream-blue eyes and shoulders capable of blocking a doorway became precise. He laid out cloth, a small knife, a needle, a stoppered vial, a twist of dried leaves, strips of linen. His hands, so large around the lantern, moved with controlled gentleness.
Cara felt something inside her give a tiny, inconvenient click.
"Absolutely not," she whispered to herself.
Cian glanced up.
"Nothing. Continue being...whatever this is. Competent. Irritating. Historically damp."
He did not understand, but his eyes warmed as if her tone translated enough.
Bríghid cleaned the wound.
Cara did not scream, which she felt deserved recognition from someone. The universe failed to applaud. The warm water went pink. Bríghid added something that stung like betrayal and smelt of vinegar and herbs. Cara hissed through her teeth.
"If that's eighteenth-century TCP, I'm suing."
Bríghid patted her knee in a manner that was almost kind and absolutely condescending.
Cian threaded the needle.
Cara looked at it.
Then at him.
"No."
He paused.
"No, not because of you. Because that needle has seen things."
She reached for it. Bríghid slapped her hand.
Cara gasped. "Did you just—"
Bríghid pointed at Cara's leg, then at Cian, then made a sharp staying gesture.
Cian said something quietly.
Cara understood none of the words and all of the promise: I know what I am doing.
That was the problem.
He probably did.
Cara swallowed. "Fine. But if I lose this leg to preventable infection, I am haunting everyone in this cottage."
He leaned closer, not touching yet, and said her name.
"Cara."
The sound of it settled over her like the cloak had. Warm. Heavy. Wrongly familiar.
She looked into his eyes and wished, violently, that they were ordinary. Brown would have been easier. Hazel. Anything. Not that storm-broken Atlantic blue, not those watchful healer's eyes that made her feel seen down to the parts of herself she preferred to keep under lock and sarcasm.
He pointed to the wound, then to himself, then made a small gesture like stitching.
Permission.
He was asking permission.
In a cottage in what was very likely sixteenth-century Ireland, with bells ringing outside and unknown men shouting somewhere in the rain, this impossible man was asking permission before closing a wound.
Cara's throat tightened.
"Yes," she said.
He waited.
She nodded.
Only then did he begin.
The first stitch burned.
Cara gripped the edge of the stool hard enough to ache. Bríghid shoved a folded cloth into her free hand. Cian worked steadily, head bent, wet dark waves falling over his brow. Firelight moved over the planes of his face, the strong line of his nose, the short beard, the concentration in his mouth. His big hands made the needle look absurdly small, yet every movement was controlled, delicate, exact.
A man built like a wall, sewing skin as if it were sacred.
The thought did not help.
Neither did that he looked up between stitches, checking her face each time.
She had been checked by doctors, nurses, consultants, paramedics, police, supervisors, ex-boyfriends, and one memorable dentist with boundary issues. None of them had looked at her like this: as if her pain physically mattered to him, as if he would take it apart with his hands if the world allowed.
Cara focused on breathing.
In through nose. Out through mouth. Do not faint in front of the dream husband hallucination. Maintain standards.
A crash sounded outside.
Voices rose.
Cian's hand stopped.
Bríghid swore.
That one translated beautifully.
The door banged open.
Three men crowded the threshold, rain and cold pouring in around them. Tomas hovered behind, pale and thrilled. The man in front was thick-shouldered, bearded, and armed with a spear. His eyes went first to Cian, then Bríghid, then Cara's exposed bloody thigh, then up to her face.
His expression hardened into suspicion so fast it might have been waiting there.
He said one word.
Cian rose slowly.
The room changed.
He had been healer a heartbeat ago. Now he was something else. Not warrior, not exactly, though his body knew how to become threat. His shoulders squared. His voice dropped. The air seemed to arrange itself around him.
The man with the spear did not step back, but he noticed. Everyone did.
Cara pulled the cloak tighter over herself with one hand and kept the other pressed to the edge of the stool. Her leg throbbed. Her ribs ached. Her head pounded. She was half dressed, half stitched, freezing and overheated at once, and apparently about to be burned, married, arrested, or adopted by a sixteenth-century village.
The spear man's gaze dropped again to her curves under the strange black clothing, and the suspicion in his eyes gained an uglier edge.
Cara's fear cooled.
Pain made her sharp. Men looking at wounded women as if vulnerability were an invitation made her sharper.
She lifted her chin.
"Eyes up," she said.
He did not understand the words.
He understood the tone.
His brows rose.
Cian moved before Cara could blink.
Not much. One step. A repositioning. His body came between her and the spear man's line of sight with such quiet finality that Cara felt it like heat.
Oh, she thought, furious with herself. Oh, that is going to be a problem.
The men argued.
Names flew. Cian. Bríghid. Fionn. The stones. Sky. Witch, maybe. Cara could not be sure, but some words did not need translation when delivered with that much spit.
Bríghid snapped at all of them, then returned to Cara's leg as if armed men in her doorway were an ordinary household nuisance. She held out the needle to Cian without looking.
Cian did not take it. His eyes remained on Fionn.
Cara understood suddenly that this was not just about her.
This was a fault line.
Cian the healer. Fionn the armed man. Bríghid the elder. A village frightened by bells and storms. A strange woman from the stones bleeding on a stool.
She was not a person to them yet.
She was an event.
Events were dangerous.
She needed to become useful before they decided what kind.
From outside came another shout, different from the rest.
Urgent.
A woman screamed.
Every head turned.
Then Tomas appeared between the men, breathless, eyes huge. He said something fast, pointing down the lane toward the sea.
Bríghid stood so quickly the stool scraped.
Cian's face changed.
Fionn swore.
Cara pushed herself upright.
"What?" she demanded. "What happened?"
No one answered.
Then, through the open door, she heard it.
A child's cry.
Thin. Strangled. Wrong.
Not ordinary fear.
Not tantrum.
Airway.
Cara's body knew before her mind did.
She shoved the cloak aside and stood.
Pain flared white up her leg. Cian turned toward her, alarm cutting through whatever he had been about to say.
"Move," Cara said.
He reached as if to stop her.
She pointed toward the cry, then to herself. "Doctor."
He did not move.
The child's cry came again, weaker this time.
Cara stepped toward the door, nearly falling. Cian caught her elbow. She did not pull away.
"Listen to me," she said, uselessly, fiercely. "If that's what I think it is, every second matters."
He held her gaze.
Something passed between them. Not vision this time. Not magic.
Recognition of purpose.
He released her elbow, then turned on Fionn with a command that cracked through the cottage like thunder.
Fionn objected.
Cian cut him off.
Bríghid grabbed a leather satchel, shoved it into Cian's chest, then thrust another bundle at Cara as if Cara were now officially part of the problem-solving apparatus and God help anyone who disagreed.
Cara took it.
Her hands were shaking.
Good.
Hands could shake and still work.
She limped into the rain with blood running warm beneath fresh stitches, Cian at her side, Bríghid behind her, and half the village staring as if the storm had spat out a woman and demanded they decide whether to fear her before she saved one of their own.
Above them, unseen on the headland, the stones hummed once.
Low.
Patient.
Waiting.