2. Chapter 2 - Kaitlyn

When Magnus walked up I pulled Jack from the sling and passed him over. Magnus held him and nuzzled into his neck, making his ‘horse noises': neigh, neigh, spluttering and blustering. Jack giggled, his little pudgy hands holding onto Magnus's ears, his baby way of saying, "More!"

Magnus said, "Och ye feel much better, wee Jack, ye are not ablaze as ye were. Noah is good?"

I said, "Yep, their baby-fevers broke about the same time. And Sophie never got it, which is good."

"Aye, tis too close tae her time. She'll be deliverin' the bairn soon."

"We are going to have so many babies."

Magnus tucked Jack into the crook of his arm and said, "Och, Jack inna a bairn anymore, look at him, a big boy!"

Jack giggled again.

Our days had settled into ordinary. We lived in Florida. Lady Mairead ran the kingdom in our absence. Magnus went there periodically, only missing a few days here and there. He had some pressing issues in Riaghalbane, but nothing like a challenge for the throne — he had frightened off all the usurpers.

He was strong, surrounded by good men. He wouldn't accept a challenge, he didn't need to. He had no need to prove himself.

He was a powerful king.

Quentin and James had tested the timeline again and discovered that, during the recent time shifts, it had contracted to its original length. We could not time travel further back than November 1, 1557.

This was a relief. There was less time to contend with, a lot less history that we might screw up.

I still remembered with clarity the year Magnus and I spent stranded in 1551 through 1552, but the shifts had made other memories of long ago centuries vague figments of our imagination.

Part of Magnus's strength was that the kingdom's succession was orderly: we had met the original king of Riaghalbane, Nor. Magnus, Fraoch, Quentin, and James had gone tae Nor's time and helped found and establish the kingdom. Quentin had overseen the building of its military might, and had organized the coronation of the king, Normond I.

James had contracted the hell out of that castle compound.

We had been wary about helping, not wanting to screw anything up, but we had been successful and brought peace and prosperity to the kingdom.

Magnus didn't expect anything from Normond in return for his help, but... we knew he was an ally. We assumed that therefore his son would be an ally, his grandson, and on and on.

There was a list of kings, the master list, the kings that mattered, a direct line from Normond to Magnus, with nary a deviation. As I ran my finger down that list of kings we were confident that another ancestor we had met, Artair, was also an ally if needed.

But there was a second list, the footnotes of the throne's history that cataloged all the arena battles; the cousin-usurpers; the kings for a short time; the time travelers who had disrupted the line of succession; me, who had murdered a king; and men who had tried to overthrow the royal bloodline. This inventory was three times as big as the other.

In Magnus's lifetime, alone, there had been Ian and Agnes, Samuel and Roderick, Ormr and Domnall, and...

But history was written by the victors. We were victorious. We wrote the list of kings.

We ignored the rest.

Except I kept my eye on the footnotes, mulling it over, wondering: Was this master list of kings the end of the story? Was history settled?

We rarely changed the big things, and kings were big, after all, about as big as it got.

But… it was in this time that a kingdom from history began to infiltrate Magnus's dreams.