AS THE HIGHLANDS flew by in a blur, Murdina Stroud relished the sunlight that flashed on her face. Nature had not changed in this new age, but the rest of the world seemed altered almost beyond recognition. From the odd garments she wore to the contraption called a car, everything seemed so complicated and contrived. This was not her world. Why had she been awakened here?

The trews and tunic she’d taken from the female villager on Skye perplexed her. Why did women dress like men? She would have worn her own robes, but being trapped in the Storr for two thousand years had reduced them to dust. She had emerged from the rubble as naked as a newborn. Apt, for this was a day of rebirth as well as release from imprisonment. She and Hendry had returned to the world.

Today would be the beginning of everything. She had to remember that.

Looking at the man driving in the front of the car made Murdina want to scream. They’d left his woman naked and unconscious back on Skye while compelling him to bring them to the mainland. He had offered no resistance to the simple spell Hendry had cast to control him, but his strangeness gnawed at her. If she had a dagger to open his veins, she could watch him die. Spilled blood made such pretty patterns on flesh.

“You set fire to my heart, beauty mine,” Hendry Greum said, wrapping his slim hand around hers. His white-streaked silver hair brushed her cheek as he leaned closer. “I thought never again to see you.”

Gazing into her lover’s eyes brought Murdina out of her ruinous haze. Every color of the forest’s shadows lay in Hendry’s deep-set hazel irises, framed by frosted gray lashes. Like her, he hadn’t aged a day since they had been imprisoned. Now that they had awakened as immortals, neither of them would ever again change. Hendry’s angular jaw and slightly crooked nose would remain just as they were forever.

Her brief joy charred to bleak wrath as she recalled why eternal life had been bestowed on them: to keep their souls from escaping their bodies and the Storr.

“They took everything.” The words came out of her with a ragged rasp. “If you hadnae been beside me–”

“Naught could keep me from you,” he murmured, kissing the space between her brows. “’Tis behind us, Murdina mine. Now we must free our caraidean, our friends as they’d say in this age. Then we must go back.” The shadows in his eyes deepened. “Bhaltair Flen and his tribe will answer for what they have done.”

“Aye.” She embraced him, grateful for his unshakeable resolve. The way he stroked her back made her wish to be naked again, to feel his touch on her skin. It kept her from remembering the endless, yawning dark from which she could not escape.

“Master, this is Corrimony,” the damp-faced driver said, and looked at them in the sliver of mirror by his head as the conveyance slowed to a stop. “You’ll no’ be able to visit the cairn. They’ve closed the site.”

Hendry peered at the yellow-and-black striped barricade and large, lettered sign blocking the footbridge over the stream. “Tell me the meaning of those words.”

“NOSAS stands for the North of Scotland Archaeological Society. They’re having a dig here to uncover something buried near the old cairn. Been on the telly box for weeks.” His hand shook as he pointed at other mortals working inside a flimsy wire fence. “See the men ’round that pit? They’ll no’ let you near it.”

Murdina spotted shattered casing stones piled around the pit, and a wide curve of blackened wood supported by thick stumps. “They’ve uncovered it. How thoughtful.” Perhaps she’d allow some of them to die quickly.

Hendry gripped the mortal’s shoulder. Power flared bright green beneath his palm before it funneled into the man’s mouth. When he released him, the mortal climbed out of the conveyance and went to the back to open a hatch there.

As Hendry helped her out of the car, Murdina eyed the gathered mortals. None of them was druid kind. “Naught to concern us here. Shall I kill them all?”

“If they meddle, that one will attend to them.” Her lover nodded at their driver, who now held a metal rod with a curled end. “Now come, miracle mine. Our caraidean sense our presence and grow impatient.”

She walked arm-in-arm with Hendry around the barricade and across the footbridge, glancing back to assure the driver followed. Two scowling workers came to meet them halfway between the road and the pit. The older of the two held up a callused hand in a stopping gesture.

“Did you no’ read the sign?” the younger man demanded. “Site’s closed. Leave.”

“No’ yet,” Hendry murmured to the driver before he regarded the unruly mortal. “We wished to ask how you located the wood henge.”

“We were using ground-penetrating radar equipment to survey the site when we found it,” the older mortal said, and frowned. “Who told you it was a henge? We’ve no’ released that information to the public.”

“And the casing stones?” Hendry gestured at the rubble being piled around the pit. He sidestepped the men, making them turn toward him. “How did you break through them?”

“We found them goosed this morning,” the younger man snapped. “Now quit your blethering or we’ll have the police come and–”

His words dissolved into a sharp cry as he dropped to his knees and toppled into the grass, the back of his neck streaking with blood.

The older worker stumbled back, but not far enough to avoid the driver’s second blow, which felled him next to his moaning companion.

Seeing the gleam of the wet red excited Murdina. “Let me have them.”

“’Twill take too long to kill them all.” Hendry lifted his hands, his power growing bright as it gathered and seethed over his palms. “In terror and silence be, away from mine and me.”

Murdina watched his power divide into dozens of glowing green orbs. They flew forward to burst over the mortals around the pit. As soon as the magic touched them, the mortals dropped their tools without a word and fled.

“Stand guard,” Hendry told the driver. To Murdina he said, “I sense the traces of Flen’s broken enchantment. The conclave had him use sunlight to power the imprisonment spells here and on Skye.” His upper lip curled. “How predictable.”

“Yet the sun still shines,” Murdina said, gazing at the sky. A strange resonance still lingered around them. “And the light trembles.”

“’Twas a sun storm,” her lover said. He grimaced as he shielded his eyes and followed her gaze. “In our time such couldnae affect such enchantments. The sky now is thinner, and the air tainted by smoke and more I dinnae ken.”

He led her to the edge of the pit, where the mortals had removed most of the shattered stone casings and burial soil. The wide oval of tall oak tree posts appeared intact, still joined together by an enormous ring of ash wood inlaid with polished cabochons of dark topaz. Fragments of long-dead mistletoe vines still wrapped around each of the fifty-six posts. Nothing grew in the earth around the henge. Bhaltair Flen had salted the burial soil so much it resembled blood-stained snow.

Murdina had expected the worst, but to see their caraidean’s prison brought back all the old pain. “Can you free them?”

“With your power joined to mine, aye.” He clasped her hands between his. “Open for me, best beloved mine, and give me all.”

An unexpected shame filled her. “I’m no’ as once I was for you.”

“Nor I.” He brought her hands to his mouth, kissing the center of each palm before pressing them against his chest. “I dinnae care. With you I am everything, my lady.”

The love in his eyes soothed Murdina as she lowered the wards that contained her own power. As Hendry’s magic drew on hers, she felt the changes their long exile had wrought in him. His anger had grown like hers: a constant, boiling fury, fed by his desires to see those responsible suffer. The clarity that had once guided his clever mind now lay behind a fortress of icy, ruthless ambition. Just when she thought they had both gone mad, his feelings for her engulfed her.

All fell away as she wrapped herself in those deep, eventide shadows. “My poor love,” she whispered.

He caressed her cheek. “’Twill be as I promised. Once the reckoning is finished, the world belongs to us and the caraidean.”

Hendry reached out over the pit, her hands still entwined with his, and closed his eyes. Murdina felt his lean body shake as he gathered and combined their powers to fuel the spell he murmured. Popping and splintering sounds rose from the pit. In the next instant the dark brown gems hurled upward from the warping ring of ash wood. As the last words of the incantation left her lover’s lips, the circle cracked and fell away from the oak posts. The massive wood columns groaned, the pitch spiraling upward, until loud cracks split the air. As the oak posts ruptured into halves, the immortal spirits within escaped.

A soft rumble spread out over the land, like the distant roar of an immense beast uncaged.

Murdina watched the caraidean emerge from the henge, her fear fading as awe swelled in her breast. Each of the fifty-six spirits rose from the pit as a phantom of what they had once been: massive totems carved of sacred oak. Now they hovered in the air, shimmering and bodiless. They stretched up as they had in life, more than seven ells tall, four times the size of a human. Their broadness invoked the mightiness of the massive trunks from which they had been hewn, and their limbs bulged just as thick and unyielding.

Nothing that had ever walked the earth could match their magnificence.

“We didnae forget,” Hendry called out to them.

Closing his eyes and murmuring under his breath, he cast a little known spell. From each post, a splinter rose up from the pit to hover above it. With a flick of his hand, he scattered the fragments over the grass beneath the phantom oaks, which slowly descended and enveloped them. The slivers of wood swelled and elongated, taking on the shape of the totems they had once been. Now Murdina added her own magic to their efforts, casting a wide swath of transmuting power over the giants, which shrank them down as they took on human form. When the intense light dwindled and vanished, fifty-six enormous warriors stood on the other side of the pit, each watching them.

“Welcome back, my friends.” Hendry bowed so low his brow nearly touched his knees.

Murdina had no skirts to sweep back into a proper curtsey, but she did her best in the strange garments. “We came as soon as the sun storm freed us.”

One of the largest of the transformed hobbled to the front, rocking unsteadily on his new legs as he came around the pit. The ground beneath their feet trembled with each step he took.

“Gratitude,” he said in a creaky voice. As he came to a stop in front of them, he touched his own jaw and ran his hand over his neck, producing an eerie grating sound. “You remade us. Why, Hendry Greum of the Wood Dream?”

Hearing the name of their slaughtered people spoken after two thousand years, even in the giant’s grating, unnatural voice, made Murdina clutch her lover’s arm. If the immortal caraidean remembered them, then they had not changed.

“Aon,” Hendry said, “we must go back and punish the Dawn Fire tribe for what they did. Then we would begin the reckoning.” He knelt before the giant. “For this, we ask your help. If ’tis no’ your wish, I shall restore you to your true forms, and bid you farewell.”

The giant lifted and turned his hand to inspect it before he offered it to Hendry, tugging him to his feet. “We shall return with you for the punishing and the reckoning.”

Murdina glanced at the other giants, who were testing their new limbs by milling about in an uneven circle. They would be clumsy until they became accustomed to their new forms, and then they would be unstoppable. She would have to ask Hendry to save Bhaltair Flen for her, however. She had spent several centuries in the darkness planning what she would do once the old meddler’s soul was in her hands, and an easy death would not be his. Indeed, what she would see him suffer would make being trapped in the Storr seem like a benevolence.

“The druids used a portal to put us in the henge,” Aon said and stretched out a long, bulky arm toward the stream. “There.”

“The ancient cairns here remain intact,” Hendry said, “so too may the portal.” He slipped his arm around Murdina’s waist. “Shall we begin our new journey, druidess mine?”

As they made their way to the secluded oak grove, she wanted to skip beside the sparkling stream. But they slowed when they neared the sacred grove. Waist-high weeds choked the clearing in the center, and the trees surrounding it had grown into each other. Most of their twisted, interlaced branches had died, reminding Murdina of funeral pyre wood. She tugged on her lover’s arm until he halted just outside the grove.

“Bhaltair may have left a trap for the caraidean, should they escape the henge.”

“No snare magic here, druidess,” Aon said and gestured toward one of the other giants, who had a deep scar running down the center of his face. “Tri, open the portal.”

The big warrior trudged through the oaks and stopped on the edge of the clearing. He reached down to touch the ground—but nothing. Then he slammed his fist into it but still there was naught. After several other attempts that included his feet and head, he came out and stopped before Aon.

“They willnae permit,” Tri creaked in his surreal voice. He glared back at the overgrown oaks. “Silent to me.”

Aon sent more of the giants to test the portal, yet none could open it. At last the leader of the caraidean tried himself to gain entry, but the clearing remained closed.

“This grove cannae remember us,” the giant finally said and surveyed the trees. “They came up after the old trees burned.”

“Mayhap they dinnae recognize you in your altered form,” Hendry said, and drew Murdina with him to enter the clearing. “Follow us once we open the portal,” he called back to Aon, but when they stepped into the center, the ground did not open.

More disturbing to Murdina was how the oaks remained still and quiet with two druid kind in their midst. “Surely they cannae refuse us.”

Hendry dropped down and pressed his hands to the soil for a long moment before he rose. “More of Flen’s scheme. None of us can use the portal.”

She realized what he meant. “The oaks cannae sense us as druid kind.” Panic shot through her as she stared at the ground. “We’ll be trapped here.”

“No,” Aon declared. His cold shadow stretched over them. “We begin the reckoning here. Now.” He lifted his huge arm and splayed his hand against the wind. A thick mist released into the air that then silvered. It showed an opaque image of a young woman among trees. “There, walking in the forest. A female of the Dawn Fire. She shall open the portal for us.”

“So, druid kind persist,” Hendry said and spat on the ground. “But this era is full of flimsy creatures, so we shall need more than one. How many other druid kind females do you sense near us?”

Aon raised both hands and turned in a slow circle. The air around grew dense with a haze of particles emanating from his form, and took on a woody, sharp scent. At last he regarded Hendry. “Four others may be taken.”

The particles Aon had released turned silvery as the first one had, and showed images of the females he had located.

Hendry studied all of them and smiled at one in particular. “Lady mine, do you see what I do?”

“By the gods,” Murdina whispered as she gripped his hand tightly. “How can it be?”

“By the gods,” her lover echoed, and kissed her brow. To Aon he said, “They’ll serve our purpose. Only remember, we need them alive.”

“As you will, so we do.”

Aon rejoined the other giants, choosing four among them to walk out of the grove.

Murdina and Hendry followed, and she leaned against her lover as the five caraidean sank into the ground. Once they had submerged completely, raised ridges of earth began to streak out in different directions, toppling trees and smashing through fences.

“So, it begins,” Hendry said, sounding very satisfied as he glanced around them. “’Twill be a very different world when we’re finished.”

She nodded. “Once we kill all the humans, ’twill be ours to remake.”