Betrothed.
The word landed in his mind, perfectly crisp, as though underlined in red on a page. His engineer's brain, which had calmly catalogued his own death a short while ago, now scrambled like a dropped file box.
"I…" He ran a hand through his hair—someone else's hair. "And we are in Dublin. But not the Dublin I know."
Aisling watched him carefully. "You speak queerly, Cormac mac Domnall. As if you are half here and half…" She lifted a hand, fingers twisting in the air. "Elsewhere."
He almost laughed. "You've no idea."
He searched his memory—his old one. Dates, dynasties, invasions, the blur of secondary school history classes. Vikings. Norse-Gaels. High Kings. The English—Normans first—arriving in the twelfth century. A city that grew and grew.
But here, the air felt younger. Raw. The smoke smelled different. The shouts outside had the rough cadence of Old Irish, with the occasional Norse word sliding through. His brain kept translating unconsciously, as if someone had installed a language pack while he was unconscious.
"Tell me," he said slowly. "Who rules Áth Cliath?"
"Your father," Aisling replied, as if it were obvious. "Though the Norse in the east quarter answer to Sigurd the Red, for now." A faint smirk touched her lips. "You've been arguing with him about it for the last three summers."
Okay, Cormac thought. So I died in a blown bridge in Lebanon and woke up in early medieval Dublin as the son of a chieftain. Fantastic.
His mind did what it always did in a crisis: started organising.
He catalogued the room, mapping exits, distances, materials—oak, stone, thatch, wool. Counted heartbeats between horn calls outside. Listened for the river—the Liffey, but not quite the one he knew—murmuring beyond the palisade.
He looked back at Aisling.
"Come outside," she said, as if she could see his thoughts twisting into knots. "You'll remember more when you see the land."
Outside, the world hit him like a wave.
Áth Cliath lay sprawled along a bend in a narrower, faster Liffey. No quays, no concrete, no traffic—just timber docks and boats with dragon-headed prows, coracles pulled up on muddy banks, buildings of wattle and daub, some with slate roofs, some with thatch. Smoke curled from every dwelling, mixing with the smell of fish, peat, and unwashed humanity.
Instead of cars, cattle.
Instead of sirens, war horns and hammers.
Instead of bridges of steel and stone, a long, low structure of timber and rope stretched over a shallow part of the river—the ford of hurdles that had given the place its name.
Cormac stared at the bridge, mind automatically running through load distribution and failure modes.
"You built it," Aisling said beside him, following his gaze.
He turned to her. "I did?"
"Three summers past," she said. "After seeing how the Norse lay their boardwalks. You found a better way to bind the posts so they would not wash away in the spring floods. You remember none of this?"
"No," he said slowly. "But I… understand it."
He saw how the support posts had been driven in at a slight inward angle to resist outward thrust. How the bindings had been doubled below the waterline where they were hardest to replace. How planks had been staggered to distribute weight.
Whoever Cormac mac Domnall had been, he'd thought a lot like Cormac O'Callaghan.
As they walked, people bowed or nodded, eyes following him with a mix of fear, respect, and curiosity. Children scampered out of the way, whispering.
"He looks different," one girl hissed.
"Shh, gobshite, that's the chieftain's son," another replied.
Different. Aisling had seen it too; he could tell. Her eyes were too sharp to miss anything.
They reached a rise overlooking the settlement. From here, Cormac could see how the palisade encircled the houses, how the river curved like an arm. Beyond, hills rolled away, dotted with woods and farms. Further still, the faint gleam of the sea.
He memorised it in a heartbeat. Angles, distances, weak points in the wall. Lines of approach an enemy might use. Places he would fortify.
"You're doing it again," Aisling murmured.
"Doing what?"
"Drawing maps in your head." She smiled, and the whole world seemed to shift around that expression, brightening. "You were always doing that since you were a boy. Remembering where everyone's fields lay. Knowing which paths flooded in winter before the rest of us could see a single cloud."
"I… have a good memory," he said helplessly.
She laughed softly. "Cormac, you have the memory of the old poets. The fili. They say you could recite a hundred genealogies without pause, and every cattle count from here to Tailtiu."
That sounded right. His ability had followed him, then—not just across years, but across lifetimes.
He turned the problem over in his mind with the same curiosity he once saved for a new piece of equipment. Somehow, whatever passed for a soul had ferried his gift from one life into another.
He glanced at Aisling. "And you?"
"What of me?" she asked.
"You speak as if you keep everyone's fields in your head as well."
Her eyes flashed with challenge. "I've a good memory. But not like yours. I keep what's necessary. And I learn what no one else bothers to know."
"Such as?"
She pointed east, toward a line of low hills. "Those stones there, the standing ones—have you noticed the way the shadows fall at midsummer?"
"Yes," he answered automatically. He could see it in his mind's eye, though he hadn't yet lived a midsummer here. "The tallest casts a shadow that touches the oak at the far end, but only when the sun is highest."
Her brows lifted. "So you do remember some things."
"No," he admitted, a little shaken. "I just… see it. In my head."
"You and your damned visions," she said, but there was no heat in it. "Those stones mark not only the turning of the sun, but the exact day when the river is lowest. We plan our crossings and raids by them."
Genius, he thought. She'd seen a pattern and turned it into strategy. Just like an engineer.
He studied her more closely.
"What else do you know?" he asked.
She squinted at him slightly, suspicious. "Why do you ask like that, as though you are testing me?"
"Humour me," he said. "Pretend I'm… not myself."
Her expression softened, empathy flickering through those dark eyes. "You've taken a harsh blow to the head. You need not test anything, Cormac. But if it eases your mind…"
She gestured to the north. "Up there—see the grove? The oaks and ash? The soil is different there. Darker. The barley grows higher. I've been watching the fields since I was small. I think it would yield twice if we planted there instead of on the steep slopes where our fathers insist."
Crop yield, soil quality. Cormac nodded, impressed.
"And the sickness that took the children last winter," she went on quietly. "I noticed it spread first along the lower huts, near the midden ditch. I told your father to move the worst heaps further away from the water." She shrugged. "He listened. Fewer died after."
Sanitation. Epidemiology, in rough form. Genius and compassion in one package.
He suddenly understood why the other Cormac had agreed to marry her.
"You think in patterns," he said.
"I think in what keeps people from dying," she replied. "It seems no one else wants that job."
"You're remarkable," he said before he could stop himself.
Colour touched her cheeks, but she didn't look away. "You've never said it like that before."
"Maybe I should have."
They stood in silence for a moment, the wind tugging at her braids, his borrowed hair. Down in the settlement, a smith's hammer rang out. A dog barked. Somewhere, someone started a song in a language half-familiar and half-strange.
"Your father will call council tonight," Aisling said at last. "The men of Leinster grow restless. There are rumours of foreigners landing on the eastern shores, with strange banners and longbows longer than a man is tall."
Cormac went still.
Foreigners. Longbows.
The English.
The timeline slotted into place, a terrifyingly familiar sequence of events. The Normans had first come to Ireland in the late twelfth century, invited by Irish kings as allies, then staying as conquerors. Castles. Siege. Centuries of struggle and colonisation.
Unless someone changed it.
Unless someone with a head full of battle maps and modern engineering stood in the way.
Unless, he thought, looking out over the young, raw city of Áth Cliath, I do