A.N.: The premise of a WWII nurse travelling through time is a good premise – I'm more interested in a ferocious female Army medic from 2016 trying to navigate the Highlands in a corset.

I was making parmesan biscuits when suddenly I was struck by an apostrophe: Dougal Mackenzie is also Dwalin from The Hobbit.

I was inspired by Brave, Billy Connelly and Jamie's shoulder-muscles.

A Mhaighdean Bhan Uasal

01

"A naoidhean bhig, cluinn mo ghuth

Mise ri d' thaobh, O mhaighdean bhàn

Ar rìbhinn òg, fàs a's faic

Do thìr, dìleas féin

A ghrian a's a ghealach, stiùir sinn

Gu uair ar cliù 's ar glòir

Naoidhean bhig, ar rìbhinn òg…"

Noble Maiden Fair, Brave

2016. It was the year of the Rio de Janeiro Olympics. The Zika virus. The previous September, Queen Elizabeth II had just outlasted Queen Victoria is the longest-reigning British monarch at sixty-three years on the throne. Great Britain was considering the wisdom of leaving the EU; the Syrian conflict was ongoing, and the Paris bombings were still in the back of everyone's minds, shaping the American presidential election-campaigns. Should the clever, racist Trump win the election in America, the world political stage would be altered maybe irreparably. How much damage could one man do in four years, she wondered, and was glad America could only turn on itself if things came to a head. As America had done after the Great War, the rest of the world could turn its back on an arrogant nation with a floundering economy and an overt racist at the helm.

The recent rash of dystopian fiction turned into film franchises had caught her up in its tide; she adored films, having her heart broken and drawing her to the edge of her seat in the grips of terror, anticipation. She had often wondered how America had become The Hunger Games' "Panem", sending children into gladiatorial arenas. She wondered, should Trump win, how America would schism in the event Europe and the rest of the world – a great majority of countries whom America had embargoed – cut political ties. She wondered where the line was, the one that heralded a second American Civil War. What would that look like?

She had been in active warzones more than she had been out of them the last ten years. After the damage she had seen out in the desert, the loss of civilian life as well as that of soldiers, her friends, she wondered whether a good shakeup like a civil war might do America some good. The last domestic war the continent had seen had started in 1864 – even during World War II, it was Pearl Harbour that suffered the only direct attack on American soil by the Japanese. She didn't hanker for war, but watching the BBC News every night, listening to and becoming more and more angered by Trump's jargon, she couldn't help feeling that a good sharp slap in the face was needed.

A welcome reprieve to the news had been the Six Nations – she had flown home from her fourth (and final) tour before the new year, exhausted mentally and physically, brain whirring with plans she knew she needed to make, and in agony at the sight of her granddad.

After eighty-five years, he had waited only long enough for confirmation from the publisher that his last book, his swansong, was going into print, watched the Six Nations with her, shared a bottle of his favourite whisky, told her old stories he hadn't repeated in years, sang her favourite lullaby, and died peacefully in his sleep.

She had promised him that she would take a deep breath before she dove headfirst into another adventure. No more tours of the Middle East with the Royal Army, no, she wanted to move in a different direction. Not active service but still helping people – she had been looking at Help for Heroes, helping soldiers rehabilitate. It would be different, helping them with their recovery after being the immediate point of contact for wounded soldiers on the front lines. She had the idea; she just needed a rest. A long one. She had put herself under too much strain the last few years, lacking any purpose beyond work after Tommy's death. And she wanted to…to make a sort of pilgrimage – to breathe in the cutting Highland air as she hiked throughout Scotland visiting Granddad's favourite haunts. To remember him. A B&B every few nights was what she could afford; otherwise, her single-man tent and thermal sleeping-bag were her best-friends. Granddad would be proud; he'd tried to raise her on whisky and midges, and might have succeeded without the intervention of her more sophisticated Parisian mother – who had moved Lillian and her sister Bridget from Hampshire to north-eastern Scotland after the premature death of their father.

She had set out from Inverness after a spine-tingling encounter brought on by stories of hauntings, witch-burnings, a whisky-induced vision of a Highlander in full kit, smiling at her in a flash of lightning, gone as she had glanced over her shoulder, interested in spite of herself. The odd thing about him hadn't been his kilt, or his height, or the way the fine hairs at the back of her neck prickled up as her breasts grew heavy and her stomach filled with that deliciousness like whisky… His kilt hadn't moved in the driving rain and wind. She had chalked it up to too much whisky, and the storm; she'd probably imagined him… It had been so long since she'd realised a man was interested in her that her friend had started to call her 'Echo' – merely a sigh on the wind, pining for a long-lost lover. Charming, she had thought; but it wasn't far off.

Putting the kilted man out of her mind as she read the morning paper, she had thanked the owner for her breakfast and for lighting the fire in her room last night in anticipation of her sodden return, paid her bill, and set off. Inverness was a town full of ghost-stories, and she knew Granddad would have listened with an amused twitch to the corners of his lips, eyes alight with the brightness she had always associated with him keeping secrets or telling his favourite stories. Granddad had had a wealth of knowledge about this area – most of Scotland, really, wherever the Jacobite uprisings had had particularly strong local support or where ghost-stories and interesting titbits of history were prevalent, but he'd never told her stories of a Highlander ghost before – at least not male; there were plenty of stories about women burned for witchcraft screaming in the square. Most of the victims had been from the late seventeenth-century, but further North there had been trials into the 1740s, and a few years ago, Granddad had gleefully uncovered evidence of a case where two accused witches had simply vanished into thin-air from their prison-cell. She had rolled her eyes at Granddad's eerie fascination with the macabre – why he thought it important for Lillian to grow up on stories of witch-burnings, taking willow bark tea for pain-relief, learning the tartans of Scottish clans by sight, she would never know. But she couldn't say she wasn't interested, either; through Granddad she had developed a love of learning, and, as it gave them some common-ground, she had enjoyed reading up on eighteenth-century, learning details of lives lost to history.

After last night's storm, the skies had cleared and everyone seemed to be enjoying a rare fine day; she wandered the shops, unimpressed by the modern developments that made Granddad writhe with annoyance, muttering darkly in Gaelic to himself. She'd only ever understood the swear-words he used – and he'd flick her ear if he ever caught her repeating them. She couldn't help smiling as she ate a Scotch pie – with baked beans and a poached egg on top! – thinking of how Granddad would swear with gusto and be scandalised to hear her and Bridget bitching each other out. Licking egg-yolk off her fingers, she exited the little café, consulting a map and examining the schedules at the bus-station just off the High Street before paying for a ticket, pondering how little could be bought with a pound these days, and watched the scenery, tuning out the gossip of some blue-rinse biddies behind her, growing more content as the town fell away, the landscape becoming wilder. Less civilised. The soundtrack of the recent Far from the Madding Crowd filled her mind, the entrancing, heart-breaking melodies and swooping crescendos that had so embodied the Dorset scenery captured for the film; Scotland had Braveheart, and pretty as the Princess's theme was, it wasn't quite the same. Scotland deserved someone to immortalise the incredible beauty of the peaks and carpets of heather, the snow-capped duns and mirror-bright lochs.

Her stop was halfway into the middle of nowhere, down a long, winding forest lane that saw little traffic beyond the twice-daily bus. The road had become overgrown, marked with potholes that set her teeth on edge, but it was real, and raw, when she stepped off the bus. She breathed a sigh of relief once the rumble of the bus engine had faded into the distance. A chilling wind had caught up since she had stepped onto the bus – or perhaps it was merely that leaving the perceived protection of the town had left her feeling exposed. She didn't mind, but the wind cut through her sharp white blouse. Not being a hiking day, she had dressed herself up a little more nicely than she usually would. Since leaving the Army, she had worn her hair down nearly every day that she hadn't been hiking; for the first time in ten years (except when not on active service) she wore jewellery. She had put on her favourite pair of real leather trousers, buttoned at the crotch rather than zipped, tucked into her Army-issue boots. They had served her well, and she wouldn't have felt comfortable in walking-boots.

Attached to her worn brown-leather rucksack was rolled up the tartan of her clan, the MacEwans. Once upon a time, Granddad had found their name recorded as Mac Eoghainn; she preferred the Gaelic spelling, thought it interesting and odd. And the yards of thick wool tartan she unfurled were the tartan of Clan MacEwan that hadn't changed in hundreds of years. Granddad had refurbished and kitted out with traditional flying shuttle looms an early eighteenth-century mill that now held landmark status as the only traditional tartan mill in Scotland. The tartan was made by hand, with Scottish wool and natural dyes set the old-fashioned way, sought-after by enthusiasts and used in Hollywood movies and BBC costume-dramas. Just another more accessible part of the legacy Granddad had left his country when he had died, alongside the fifteen historical books he had written, the poetry, the active involvement in the Highland Games.

A lot of people thought traditional tartans were the gaudy bright-reds and yellows more often than not worked into Hogwarts uniforms by teenagers writing fanfiction. In truth, a glaring crimson kilt was more likely to frighten off game and get you killed if you wandered through the forest in it. No, the MacEwan tartan was an exquisite mixture of sage- and dark-greens, creams and fawns, emulating the colours of the Highlands themselves, misty and dark at once, threaded with whispers of heather-purple and the forget-me-not of a rare sunny sky, or carpets of bluebells in the forests. Granddad had worn a kilt every day of his life; and he'd taught Lillian all about them. Women had never worn kilts, though they had a feminine equivalent, developed from the sixteenth century; the 'earasaid'. Her sister Bridget had once rather unforgivingly called it a pleated blanket. And it was true, as Lillian unfurled the fabric, it was just a rather long blanket, and to wear it traditionally, she would have pleated it and tucked it over her head, belted at the waist or pinned at the breast. She wrapped it around herself, over her rucksack, and felt the immediate effects of being cocooned by the thick wool.

She was a few miles from where she wanted to be, thankfully the expansion of Inverness had left some things untouched by the destruction of modernity. And this had been Granddad's favourite place.

Craigh na dun.

He used to tell stories about it, had brought her and Bridget here at half-term holidays. Surrounded by woodlands, the small henge existed outside the knowledge of everyone except those who knew where it was. Ancient trees surrounded it now, but Granddad said at one time it must have commanded the attention of everyone who passed, on the top of a gentle hill, surrounded by plains and then snow-capped mountains. The mountains were still here, but the forest was now an old one, some of the trees themselves were protected. She was just thankful no official arsehole had decided to 'protect' the henge by making it unapproachable. It was hardly famous, Craigh na dun, it wasn't like Stonehenge, erected in the middle of Salisbury Plain where now pig-farms and the only direct link to Exeter and Plymouth wound past. Craigh na dun remained hidden, a secret part of the Highlands people kept to themselves if they wanted to keep enjoying it. No, there were no ropes cordoning off the area, no ticket-booths extorting people, no coach-loads piling into a car-park flattened from an area once heavily-wooded with ancient pines and chestnuts.

She climbed over a stile set into the old wall erected on one side of the narrow road, and started walking. She'd know this place anywhere. The Scottish Highlands had always filled her with a sense of awe; she had never been anywhere where the very stone of the mountains seemed to be holding its breath in anticipation – ageless and drenched in the mystery of time, Gaelic tradition and fairy-stories, she had always felt the sense, that prickling awareness of the fine hairs at the back of her neck rising, that an adventure was about to unfold. Whether she wanted it to or not.

After the premature deaths of her father, her French mother had moved them from the gentle hills and picturesque meadows and creeks of Hampshire to Scotland. On better terms with her father-in-law than her husband with his own father, Lillian and her flighty younger-sister Bridie had grown up down the lane from crackpot Granddad Fergus. When Lillian was fifteen, Maman had been diagnosed with cervical cancer – Lillian and her sister had both had the cervical jabs – and died within three months. It had been Lillian's first exposure to nursing, and Maman had been supportive if not a little fearful for her eldest daughter when Lillian had announced she would be joining the Army to train as a Combat Medical Technician when she finished her GCSEs.

Granddad had been supportive too, insisting Lillian, a steady introvert, a compartmentaliser with a no-nonsense attitude and a bedside manner that seemed to transcend everything around her, was perfectly suited to the vocation. It was in part due to Granddad that Lillian had had such an interest in medicine, and soldiers. A passionate historian of eighteenth-century Scotland, Granddad had helped raise Lillian and her sister on stories of fairies and kilted clansmen, witch-trials and failed uprisings, the songs of ancient Welsh bards, and being the recalcitrant old codger he was, had insisted on not only researching but living his subject: Lillian, always steadier and more intuitive than Bridie, had indulged Granddad his leg-killing hikes collecting herbs and flowers, roots and berries for natural – read, antiquated and suspect – medicinal remedies. Holidays had been camping trips throughout the Highlands (Bridie being left behind with Maman to bake chouquette and watch Casablanca) and almost survivalist, teaching her to navigate by the stars, light a fire with nothing but flint or sticks, to track and hunt. Tickle trout.

They had toured every eighteenth-century battlefield, Jacobean manor-house, ruins of once-ominous castles now inhabited by ivy and owls. She couldn't remember the names of the children in her primary-school class, or anything she had taken GCSEs in beyond the History of Medicine module when she was fourteen, but the names and histories of notorious English captains in the Eighth Dragoon stationed at Fort William; the family-trees and medical ailments of particularly important lairds; early Hanoverian medical techniques and herbal remedies; the children of King George II; rural witch-trials and court etiquette of 1740s Versailles under Louis XV – Louis the Beloved – she remembered it all, Granddad's fascination becoming her own as she gazed at old paintings, kicked thistles through Culloden moor. During his bouts of extreme adherence to historical accuracy, she and Bridie had learned – with much sighing and exasperated 'How long is this phase going to last?' how to cook the 1740s way. Lillian and her sister had never got along, never – even as children they used to fight tooth and nail, stubborn and vicious as vixens, Maman used to say; but the one thing that had bonded them was elicit Indian takeaways full of spice and flavour, when hand-kneaded bannocks and kippers and oatcakes started to stick in their throats. But she would say her GCSE History coursework mark had been exceptional purely due to Granddad's influence in her researching efforts; she had focused on early eighteenth-century medicine.

Before computers had become widespread, Granddad had traced their family-tree back centuries to the 1720s, when King George I had granted an ancestor – by the same name as Granddad himself, Fergus Argyle Ewan Roy MacEwan – titles to legitimise his holding on a large swathe of land. A great house had been built, and their family had lived there until the 1920s – like Downton Abbey, their family had come out of the Great War feeling the crunch, and the beautiful house had been partially vacated but turned into a museum of Scottish history. Granddad – who had served out his National Service in Singapore and Malaya in the 1950s (Lillian could imagine little more incongruous than her burly redheaded granddad, a fiery Scotsman to his core, amongst tanned Malaysians, eating foreign food; he was a salted cold-porridge and kipper man) – had taken up the cause, refurbishing the great house, petitioning the Scottish National Trust for landmark and Listed status, aligning with top universities to really turn their ancestral home into something spectacular. Something for Scotland itself, glorifying their failed rebellions – Granddad said it was to honour their courage, their sacrifice; most of the Jacobite uprisings had been funded by the tenant-farmers and cottars scattered throughout the Highlands being victimised by the Redcoats and the Black Watch alike.

Well into his eighties, Lillian had believed Granddad would truly live forever. In a way, he would, in his books, in what he had left for others, in her. If not for him, she would never have fought her way through the immediate aftermath of sitting her GCSEs, losing her mother and joining the Army within the space of a few months – nor the depression following her husband's death, or the PTSD that had followed her second, worst tour of the Middle-East. Every time she had come home from the front-lines, after patching up men and women who had taken bullets, lost limbs, barely survived devastating bomb-blasts, and the odd everyday injuries like sprained joints, broken limbs, breakouts of venereal diseases and panic attacks, she had returned to Granddad. Her own husband Tommy had loved the charming – and eccentric – old man, despite the kippers and oatcakes. And his being, well, Scottish: Six Nations was always a tense affair, though she regretted Tommy never got to watch Japan slaughter the South African team in the Rugby World Cup last year. He would have laughed as uproariously as Granddad had; they'd had a fry-up for dinner complete with black pudding and fried bread, watching the game. It was one of the last memories she had of Granddad that didn't make her chest ache as if someone had clawed her heart out of it.

She had left the Army barely three months ago – after ten years, her late adolescence and most of her Twenties spent in the service of Her Majesty's Royal Army – and spent Christmas with Granddad for the first time in years. Bridie – Bridget, as she had been christened by their Parisian mother – had brought along her six children, Granddad's favourite people in the world to tease into a fever-pitch, playing pranks and telling the same jokes and stories he had kept Lillian enraptured by at the same age, tales full of ghosts and beautiful women and fairies and querulous kilted clansmen engaged in Highland ceremonies long lost to time. Granddad had always told the best stories – a talent he had expounded when he became one of the most eminent historians of eighteenth-century Scottish culture. All history was, he said, was stories. Flourishing with detail, full of evil villains and glorious heroes, gut-wrenching escapes and terrible executions – all told by the winning sides. Granddad's second-to-last book had researched The Forty-Five – the deciding defeat of the Jacobite cause – from the perspective of the losing side; the Highland clans. Difficult work, but Granddad's mind had showed no signs of frailty – no dementia, Alzheimer's, just the usual eccentricity she had loved him for all her life.

Spending time with her nieces and nephews before Bridie carted the entire lot of them off to New Zealand where her husband was being relocated for work, watching the Six Nations with Granddad and starting to proofread his latest book on the Frasers of Lallybroch for publishing, he had told her some stories he hadn't repeated since she was little, sometimes singing her favourite lullaby under his breath, to himself. Unlike so many of his generation, Granddad had not died ill, not festering with cancer or broken hips; he'd been a great bear of a man all Lillian's life, strong as an ox, sharp as the katana his uncle had brought back from Burma after being released from a prison after the war, a cheerful, great-hearted man with a serious streak, patient and even-tempered. After telling him his final book was going into production, Granddad had gone to bed, and passed away peacefully in his sleep.

Before he had died, Granddad had insisted that before she dash off to apply to work for Help for Heroes, helping to rehabilitate servicemen, she take a break. And without Granddad, well, what else could she do but drift aimlessly: Granddad had always been a constant in a life marked by loss. Daddy, then Maman, Tommy three years ago; but there was Granddad. Despite it being winter, Granddad had insisted that they drive around Scotland visiting old kirk-yards, battlegrounds, very early Georgian farmhouses famed for housing outlaws and fabulous paintings. While researching the Frasers of Lallybroch, Granddad had discovered a connection to their own family, and was determined to tell her story. Over much Glen Garioch at Christmas, Granddad had told the premise of his last book, and the only one he wouldn't let her proofread. He'd called it his swansong.

Some might think she'd had her arm twisted into spending time with her Granddad, that he had used guilt and a ticking clock to get her to stay, set aside her own life to cater to his. Lillian hadn't minded; she loved her granddad, adored the ease and companionability they shared, and knew that all he had ever truly wanted was to share the adventure with her. They had headed out onto the dual carriageway or motorways early, hand clapped over her eyes because Granddad insisted on driving, bombing down the right-hand lane closer to ninety miles-per-hour, overtaking obnoxious sports-cars and glossy Range Rovers while he crooned along to the Gaelic folk-songs she regretted having given him for Christmas, volume turned right up, taking his eyes off the road to point out landmarks and give brief histories of the area. That was the adventure, spending time with Granddad, risking life and limb on the Scottish motorways – as if surviving four tours in the Middle East unscathed wasn't enough – eating bacon and eggs for breakfast and whisky for dinner. It was the adventure of delving into the past, researching a very colourful man and his staggering wife captured forever in three spectacular paintings in the listed Georgian farmhouse of Lallybroch in eastern Scotland. She had to confess, the portrait of James Fraser in full Scottish dress haunted her dreams.

"Bloody hell, it's cold!" she shivered, teeth chattering.

"Doona swear!" The voice chiding in her head sounded remarkably like Granddad, and her lips twitched as she imagined him reaching over to flick her ear with his strong fingernail. He'd never liked hearing his granddaughters swear, and she couldn't help feel a little miffed that he was never around to catch Bridie swear – and she used the C-word, a word Lillian loathed. "You'll work up a good sweat climbing up this hill." In fact, she was; perhaps she hadn't needed the tartan after all.

Though his written English had been typical of his Oxford education, Granddad had had a quaint turn-of-phrase that was distinctly Scottish. Half the time, Tommy hadn't been able to differentiate between the English accent and Granddad speaking Gaelic (as he often did when he'd shared a bit too much Glen Fiddich). And in truth, after spending so much time away from him during service in the Army, Lillian always had to get used to Granddad's broad accent again. Now she wanted nothing more than to hear the broad Scottish rumble echoing cheerfully around Granddad's small house.

Through bracken and thorny bushes, picking her way through gnarled roots and listening to the soft crunch of the three inches of snow that still covered this part of the countryside, she smiled vaguely at the bright purple crocuses sprouting up through the pillowy, glittering whiteness, snowdrops all but carpeting thick swathes of the forest undergrowth, a few solitary daffodils bright in the starkness of the wintry forest, listening to the dainty chirps and flashes of crimson from tiny robins – her favourite – as they plucked at the earth with tiny beaks, sometimes lucky in finding a worm.

Finally, she came to it, breaking through the snaggly bushes and crunching snow and dead branches. The trees seemed to open up, a clearing almost perfectly circular, stopping at the juncture where the earth seemed to sweep upward, as if the trees wanted to stay away. The ageless stones were exactly as she remembered from childhood hikes with Granddad, pockets full of blackberries, legs covered in midge-bites, thirsty but exhilarated, and awed by the stones, listening cross-legged on the grass to Granddad tell stories so vividly she could believe she was in them, sighing over the incomprehensible beauty of Gaelic songs, especially the one about Craigh na dun.

Sighing with relief, she tumbled to the base of one of the outer stones, uncaring of the snow beneath her bum, giving a shuddering yawn and wrapping her tartan closer around her. The stone guarded her from the wind but had its own chill, and she was glad of the thick wool. She had been determined to hike to Craigh na dun since Granddad's funeral – which she had attended alone but for a few of his old friends and those in his academic circle and publishing company. He had, after all, made them a bit of money when the BBC had picked up three of his historical books to turn into high-budget television series that aired after the Christmas season, prime spots on BBC1. The production company probably hadn't thought through inviting him as an expert; he had been hyper-critical of any historical inaccuracy, though the producers and actors she had met told her how much they had all respected and loved him for his devotion to authenticity, to Scotland.

She had wanted to come here because it was Granddad's place. Not his favourite place; that was Achmelvich Beach, or 'Achadh Mhealbhaich' as he called it. But this was where Granddad had started their adventures together, so many years ago when Daddy had died and Maman had seen fit to move them all closer to Granddad – she'd felt that it would do all of them some good, Granddad having lost wife and estranged son, his granddaughters would grow up without a strong paternal figure. A few weeks after they had moved, Granddad had packed her and Bridie into his Ford Anglia (it wasn't powder-blue, nor did it fly, to Bridie's disappointment) and bombed down the dual-carriageway. They had camped, and taken a long hike to reach this place. It was the first time Granddad had told them ancient Gaelic stories – Bridie, only four, had picked up the Gaelic quite easily, something Maman hadn't realised until one day, she had seen Bridie chasing a schoolmate round the garden with an axe, screaming in Gaelic – but this was a place almost holy to Lillian. Granddad's place, the place where he had carefully sown the seeds of their mutual love of history, carefully nurtured over the years by fairy-stories and hand-kneaded bannocks.

She had hoped that by coming here, she might hear Granddad's voice echoing off the stones, telling her stories, giving her advice. A way to banish the feeling of…of being utterly and irrevocably disconnected from the world around her. Tommy's death had been bad. But Granddad had helped her through it; work had helped her through it. Dedicating herself to saving lives on the front-lines – or to the cadets when she was rotated home. Now she had left the Army, she had no home but the occasional B Granddad was gone; and Bridie, whom she had never gotten along with until this past Christmas, had moved to the other side of the world.

Should she follow? She possessed basically what was in her rucksack. Granddad used to say, rather approvingly, that she was the least acquisitive person he had ever met; what she did own were sentimental things to her – her share of Maman's jewellery, the tartan-lined fur blanket Granddad had given her, his wedding-ring and the early Georgian pocket-watch he had insisted on bequeathing to her rather than the museum that was their ancestral home, the large, battered brown-leather book Granddad had given her at fourteen when, for part of her History GCSE coursework, he had started to help her consolidate all her knowledge of historical medicinal uses for herbs, fungi, tubers and flowers. The book, tucked in the bottom of her rucksack, was full of hand-painted illustrations and notes, some in Granddad's elegant handwriting, pressed flowers and herbs, preparation methods of tinctures and ointments, teas and cleansers. She carried her treasures with her, few that they were, and her memories. She didn't particularly care to hang on to stuff, and would much rather wear her wedding-ring on a chain than dig a laminated photograph out of her pocket.

So did she take her rucksack, buy a ticket to Auckland and start afresh? She had heard New Zealand and Australia were desperate for trained nurses – she had the experience and qualifications, if not the conventional training. She was twenty-six years old, had already had a career and a marriage – rare, it hadn't ended by divorce. Lillian was still very much in love with her husband – felt his absence keenly, in a way she rarely had when they were married but separated by Army orders. Granddad had supported her decision to join the Army at sixteen; to get married at twenty; he had supported her whenever she announced she was being rotated out to the Middle-East. All he asked was that she not tell him the harrowing details of what she got up to out there, until she was safely at home drinking whisky with him.

What was she supposed to do? With absolutely nothing but her skills, and no-one – no Granddad, not even Bridie whom she thought…she thought she might miss – what was she supposed to do? It was a disconcerting, hollow feeling, realising that she was the proverbial tree falling in a distant forest.

She sat there for she didn't know how long – her wristwatch had run out of battery and she had left it at Granddad's, aiming to take it to a jeweller's on her return; but Granddad's pocket-watch was inside her rucksack, nestled carefully in folds of suede and cotton. He'd kill her if she damaged the antique, but be happy she wasn't leaving it to collect dust in a cabinet. She had always loved his pocket-watch. Again, she ached for his advice, hollowed out and upset by his absence. She didn't think it was possible to miss anyone more than she did Tommy; but Granddad had been the greatest part of her life since she was nearly seven years old – in fact, it was her seventh birthday that Granddad had first promised to pass on his pocket-watch to her.

Lillian was a trained combat medic. She had served on the front lines in the Middle East for six of the last ten years; she wasn't unused to death, of horrifying injuries and the gut-wrenching realisation there was nothing to be done when soldiers were brought in, mortally wounded. When the only thing to be done was give a soldier a gentle, fearless death. But that was her career, her vocation; she was dedicated to saving lives. Losing them, sometimes, came with the territory, especially when you were in the Army. But this was different; Granddad hadn't been a soldier – for a long time, at least – he hadn't been fighting Jihadists; he'd been Granddad, her eccentric, burly, unquenchably cheerful (and flirtatious) Gaelic grandfather, an historian and lover of rugby, whisky and women. He had died peacefully in his sleep, leaving her world off-kilter ever since. He had been, and she had not realised it until after his death, the great gravitational pull that kept her from spinning out of orbit. After Maman had died, she had bonded even more strongly with Granddad; it was Bridie who went off the deep-end, only twelve when Maman had died. She had blamed Lillian for abandoning her when she joined the Army; she hadn't tolerated Granddad's eccentricities the way Lillian had indulged him.

But Lillian was always glad she had. He had been the most wonderful man she had ever known. She missed him like an amputated limb. She remembered the look of it, how it made her feel whole, but there was no way to grow it back, and no prosthetic replica could ever properly take its place. She sniffed, wiping her nose on her handkerchief, and pushed the tears away before they could fall. Chapped cheeks from saltwater and wind wasn't a good way to go.

Finding no answers on the wind, she sighed, glancing around. The henge seemed frozen in time, without the noise-pollution of modern-day Scotland, the nearest road set several miles away, it was picturesque, ageless and, to her, fragile because of it. Marked with mystery, but marking what? A great Highland king's burial mound? Some ancient gathering-place? Granddad hadn't known, but he'd told stories, and as she climbed to her feet, dusting snow off her gloves, she tilted her head, watching the largest, strangely fractured stone, set as it was in the perfect central point amongst the ring of smaller, foreign stones – foreign, in that the glistening stone they were made of wasn't native to this part of Scotland, or even the island of Britain.

Granddad used to tell stories about Craigh na dun. Fairy-stories and disappearances, people displaced in time. She couldn't remember the words of the ancient Gaelic songs, or even hum the tune, but she remembered the spine-tingling sense of anticipation, of magic, that she would forever associate with Granddad's stories about it.

She gave a wan smile, approaching the largest stone. A giant, perhaps, had eons ago broken the stone lengthways in two, and set both halves atop this tiny hidden dune until they nearly touched. It was through this fissure the wind whistled, seeming to scream. She sighed, thinking of Granddad, and pressed her palm to the stone in goodbye.

A.N.: Please review.