Dagger Magic

The carts and wagons going into the town gave Adam his first clear indication that he was no longer operating within the confines of present time, and the wealth of detail suggested that this was more than a mere stage set devised by Claire's imagination to serve as backdrop for some romantic daydream. On the contrary, Adam realized with a rising wave of excitement that he was almost certainly dealing with a vision drawn not from fantasy, but from the memory of a historic personality - Claire Crawford's.

That Claire should possess a historic past was a discovery of no mean significance. Genuine experience of past lives was one of the hallmarks of individuals with Adept potential. That Claire herself seemed unaware of her historic past reinforced his earlier speculation that Claire might be a wounded fledgling - which made it all the more imperative that she should be healed and brought back into harmony with the Light.

Spurred on by this possibility, Adam surveyed his surroundings, trying to deduce where he might be, and when. Scotland, certainly; the crowstepped gables of the town roofs were a distinctive feature of Scottish architecture. And in a town of some consequence, given the presence of the tower house and the size of the parish church. Probably no later than the mid-seventeenth century, judging by the fact that the burial ground contained only grave slabs and table-tombs. Standing monuments, he recalled, had not become a feature of Scottish burials until shortly before the turn of the eighteenth century.

His interest deepening, Adam left the path in order to examine the inscriptions on some of the newer tomb-slabs. A preponderance of Scotts and Douglasses amongst the names suggested a location in the central Borders area. The most recent date he could find was 1640. Before he could begin to speculate further, the sound of a door opening behind him made him turn his head in time to see a tall, dark-haired woman emerge from the church porch with a flat basket of flowers looped over one arm.

She was dressed in a style that reminded Adam at once of portraits executed by the seventeenth-century Scottish painter George Jamesone. Her full-skirted gown was a blued-grey shade of plain, dark wool, but the quality of the cloth itself proclaimed her a member of the gentry. About her shoulders she wore a shawl of fine Flemish lace, with more lace frilling the cuffs of her full, elbow-length sleeves. The face beneath the sweep of a broad-brimmed chapeau was striking rather than pretty, and unfamiliar, but the eyes gazing out across the churchyard belonged to Claire Crawford.

She had three children with her, two small boys of perhaps five or six, and a girl who looked to be several years older. Shooing them off with a smile to go play with the lambs at the far end of the churchyard, this Claire-who-had-been left the path and picked her way decorously across the grass toward a handsome granite table-tomb on the south side of the church door. When she reached it, she paused a moment with her head bowed as if in prayer, then knelt and began arranging flowers in a stone sconce at the foot of the tomb.

Adam drifted over to join her. Halting a discreet distance behind her, he took a moment to glance over the Latin carved on the face of the tomb. Thomas Maxwell of Hawick, aged thirty-one, had been buried here with his three children: James, Margaret, and Eilidh, the last a mere infant. The year was the same for all four: 1636.

He needed nothing further to tell him how the four had died. Like the rest of Europe, Scotland had been visited by periodic outbreaks of plague from the fourteenth century onward. Prior to the turn of the seventeenth century, those outbreaks had been confined largely to the coastal ports, but with the stabilization of the English border in 1603, the increase of overland trade had brought the plague inland. One such outbreak had ravaged Hawick in 1636.

At that moment, the woman kneeling at the tomb glanced around and gave him an inquiring look from under the brim of her hat.

"Good day to ye, sir," she observed pleasantly, the lilt of the Borders in her accent. "I dinnae think I know ye. Are ye a stranger here?"

In his vision, Adam shook himself out of his reverie, amazed that she could see him.

"In a manner of speaking," he said. "My name is Adam Sinclair."

"And mine is Annet," she returned with a smile. "Annet Maxwell."

There was nothing in her manner to suggest she found anything at odds with his appearance. Adam could only infer that just as Claire's imagination had lent shape to her earlier visions, so her submerged memories must be coloring her present perceptions. And the fact that he had been drawn into her vision at all suggested that Annet Maxwell had something to convey to him, having recognized another soul with a historical past.