Chapter 2
CHAPTER 2
The mountains outside Mule Stop, Wyoming
August, 1897
Nineteen-year-old Cally James, mounted on her big black stallion Apollo, raced along the old Lakota trail to the south, the tall lodgepole pine on either side casting shadows in the hot morning sun. Outrage beat in her heart. Just back in Wyoming from two months in Denver, she’d heard that the new owner of the Walford spread, some prince from some country in Europe called Zalgravia, was building a dam.
According to her sister-in-law Livie, who’d stayed home at their ranch while the rest of the family was in Denver, the prince had built a big house—bigger than one body needed—right in the meadow where the elk bugled and mated each year. He’d cut a road through the migration path of the sole remaining herd of wild buffalo in a five-hundred-mile radius.
And now he was damning up the Elkhorn River.
The outrage burned deeper in Cally’s chest.
Livie had called him a horrible man.
Cally had stronger words, words her ma wouldn’t allow her to say in public, but she said them now, urging Apollo faster, a thunderstorm brewing to the west among the distant peaks of the Wind Dance Mountains. Heat beat down on her dark-brown cowgirl hat, her navy-blue split skirt flapping against the tops of her brown cowgirl boots as Apollo ran like the wind.
They started up the northeast side of a gentle hill at the edge of the former Walford ranch, which had been named in her absence by its new owner as the Crown of the West, Cally curbing her burning impatience. It wasn’t the shortest route to where she was headed, but word was the new prince was even meaner than Mean Horace Walford, who’d formerly owned the place, and she didn’t want to court trouble—not yet, at least.
Most of the hill was covered with buffalo grass, but there was a large stand of pine mixed with aspen at the top, and it was here she aimed Apollo, the long grass shooshing against his strong legs. His hooves danced as she urged him to slow, Cally unsure whether the land around here had been closed off with the new prince’s rumored barbed wire.
Grass gave way to trees, and they entered the cool shade of the tall, skinny pine.
A small redheaded bird flew out from the branches overhead. The sound of the Elkhorn River came on the quiet air.
A clump of boulders stood among the trees at the crest, and it was here she stopped, the trees and boulders protecting her from view, and gazed out at the small valley on the hill’s other side.
The Elkhorn glittered in the sun as it wove through the small, lush, narrow valley stretched out before her. Gentle grassy hills rose up from each side of the riverbed. A herd of white-tailed deer grazed on a distant upper slope.
At the valley’s far end, the river disappeared among a patch of steeper hills, the Wind Dance Mountain range far beyond in the distance.
Everything looked the way it should. Everything looked the way she remembered.
Everything but the half-finished dam a quarter mile away, near the foot of her hill.
A low rock base had been built all the way across the river, except for an open space in the center, the water rushing through that open space with great force. More water drove over the top of the rocks.
A trench had been cut into the riverbank on the south side, extending the dam into the hill, large stones lining the bottom of the trench. More stones lay beside it, a large pile of timber beside the stones, the source of each being a wagon parked on a low, flat, grassy rise forty feet above the river. A second wagonload stood waiting at the top of the hillside beside four mules tethered in the shade of a patch of pine, the second wagon straight up the hill from the first, a faint new trail linking the two.
Anger boiled up inside her at the thought of the prince flooding the whole valley. Of his keeping the water for himself, away from all the animals that depended on that river.
Away from all the neighbors and ranches downstream.
Thunder rumbled, startling her, and she realized the storm that had been gathering over the Wind Dance range had moved toward her faster than she’d expected, the dark clouds now just a mile beyond the far end of the valley, seemingly snagged on the high ridges of the Walford Peaks. In the distance, sheets of rain fell in dark-gray streaks.
Closer by, ten men by her count were lifting heavy stones from the wagon on the low, flat rise above the river and lugging them down to the water, adding them to the big pile next to the trench, a breeze ruffling through the grass higher up on their hill, the breeze flapping against their heavy cotton shirts.
Her mind working furiously, she watched them carrying the large stones, the men ones she likely knew—according to Livie, the prince was paying wages that some families in the area couldn’t afford to turn down. The riverbank and gentle slope between the water and the wagon were treacherous with mud from the heavy rain last night, and the men slipped and slid with each downhill step.
The breeze gusted around her, cool against the hot morning and laden with the scent of new rain. Over to the west, the storm had moved again, stalling out two miles away among the hills at the other end of the valley, the rain unceasing, the dark clouds changing character as they dropped low above the hilltops, roiling and churning.
Cally caught her breath. She’d seen clouds like those before. Rare clouds.
Dangerous clouds.
The wind picked up down by the dam, gathering bits of grass and dirt from the riverbank and sending them swirling in a dust devil over the water. An abrupt cold wind hit her and Apollo, making her shiver.
Thunder boomed, sounding right overhead, though the blue sky was clear, the booming reverberating in the chilly air, reverberating through Cally’s trees.
Reverberating through her very bones.
Tossing his head, Apollo sidled.
A shout down by the river crossed the fading thunder. A man standing by the trench dropped the stone he’d carried downhill and ran back up toward the wagon on the low rise, away from the river, joined by the four men who’d been standing on the dam itself.
A wall of water from upriver drove through the small, narrow valley.
Cally’s breath caught. “ Flood ,” she shouted, then lightning cracked from out of nowhere, hitting the dam an instant before the water did.
Max came to on his belly in a dizzy daze, freezing water swirling in his thoughts, freezing water cold in his mouth, mixed with an earthy sludge of mud, and he spit it all out, his lungs heaving, chest coughing. Quiet filled his frozen ears, the churning roar of the flash flood gone, leaving only the gentle sound of water lapping at his feet.
Feeling as if every inch of his chilled skin had been abraded and bruised, he pulled his new cowboy boots toward his chest and rolled away from the water fast, stopping on his back, his whole body covered with more mud.
Damn. He’d heard of flash floods, but…damn.
Thank God he was alive.
His coughing easing, he wiped the mud from his closed eyelids, then from the rest of his face, then he patted his body, each sore spot reminding him of each boulder and tree branch he’d struck as he’d been washed downstream. Nothing broken, he thought, testing one shoulder, then another, though he bet he’d have some beauties of a bruise. His knees worked, too, his hips, his back, his sopping-wet clothing squelching with water and mud with every movement.
A river stink rose around him that made him tighten his nostrils.
Damn.
Levering himself up on one elbow, he opened his eyes, raising his hand to shade them from the bright sun that abruptly struck his face, his hat lost in the flood. Patches of skin on his fingers showed bright red through the mud that coated them, and he furrowed his brow for a moment in confusion, then the dizziness in his head jerked into memory, memory breaking through the immense ache that was his body, memory coming back in a rush. The lightning. The trophy cup.
The dedication.
The crowds of people, young and old, along the river. With a groan, he turned his head, more mud squelching beneath him, his gaze following the path of the raging water that churned just a foot away, following it back along the valley to where the bridge…
He blinked. Wiped his eyes again.
Narrowed them against the sun. No bridge. Not even the steel and concrete supports had survived.
He turned his upper body toward the grandstand.
No grandstand. No stage.
No crowds. He ran his gaze up the slope to the parking lot.
No parking lot. No cars. Not a single protester left.
Only a handful of men, coming warily out of the trees where the parking lot should be, and working their way down to an old-fashioned wagon where the grandstand had stood.
For one horrifying moment, he thought that everything—spectators, mayor, grandstand—had been washed away. One moment later, he knew that was impossible. The water hadn’t come high enough to wipe everything out, only twenty feet at the most above the riverbank, judging by the high-water mark of mud and debris left behind. Nor were there other survivors like himself strewn along the hillside.
He must have been washed downstream farther than he’d thought, all the way out of the wildlife sanctuary’s valley and into an adjoining?—
A rumble of thunder reverberated through the soggy ground beneath him.
Max’s lungs froze, his body reliving the painful jolt of the lightning strike. His gaze jerked toward the sky.
Blue sky, just as it had been when the lightning had struck, which did not reassure him. Putting a hand on the soggy, mud-slick grass beneath him, he pushed up to sitting with another groan and turned toward the far end of the valley, keeping his eyes on the sky, concerned the dark, roiling clouds that had caused the flood might be coming his way.
The dark, roiling clouds, still stalled and dumping rain at the other end of the valley, rose swiftly up off the distant hilltops, making him catch a wary breath. The sheets of driving rain abruptly turned off, as with a spigot.
As if sped along by a mighty wind, the storm clouds rushed back toward the tall mountain peaks over which they’d first gathered.
The tension in Max’s shoulders dropped. The river, still at its high point over its banks, began to recede, first one inch, then another.
But the thunder continued to thud in the ground.
Not thunder, he realized as the reverberations neared. Horse hooves.
He turned in their direction, the movement sending his head spinning again.
A young woman approached on horseback from the top of the hill, coming down the long, gentle, grassy slope.
A beautiful young woman, he realized as his head cleared, a beautiful young woman riding a magnificent black stallion.
A galloping black stallion.
He felt his forehead. Perhaps he needed to lie back down. He clearly was having a?—
“Howdy,” the beautiful young woman called out, stopping her stallion twenty yards away, above him and the muddy flood line in the grass, as if she didn’t trust him.
Perhaps she’d read the latest post on the Royalty Watch blog.
A pity. She was even more beautiful up close, with the fit build of an athlete beneath her blue riding skirt and striped Western blouse, and the lush curves of a young woman, her dark hair pulled back in a low braid beneath a dark-brown cowgirl hat.
An old-fashioned rifle with a wood stock was secured in a tooled-leather scabbard attached to her big Western saddle, the saddle embellished with more tooled leather and engraved rounds of silver, the whole thing looking expensive and sturdy.
Her pretty blue eyes looked him up and down with a wary interest. “Are you this here new prince who owns the Crown of the West, stranger?” she said with a great deal of skepticism, her voice—one he found charming—accented with the tones of the American West.
He pushed up onto his feet, all of him squelching again, and realized with a disconcerting jar he hadn’t passed her scrutiny. “I am,” he said in his haughtiest of voices, wobbling a bit once he was standing. Mud dropped in splats from his T-shirt and the American jeans he’d worn in deference to Prairie Days, landing on the soggy mess of his boots.
“Oh.” Her dark braid, lying over the front of her shapely shoulder, glinted in the scorching hot Wyoming sun. The magnificent stallion pranced beneath her, her slender hands holding the powerful horse in steely check. “I thought you’d be…”
“Wearing a crown? I get that a lot.” With the edge of his dirty hand, he scraped what was left of the mud from the front of his wet shirt.
Her pretty face went pale. “Prairie Days?”
He glanced down. The green T-shirt provided by the Mule Stop mayor was torn on one short sleeve, and the cotton fabric was drenched and muddy from the flash flood, but the white lettering on the front was moderately legible. “Perhaps you could point me in the direction of the festivities.” He sent a glance around the nearly empty countryside again. “I seem to have lost my way.”
Those pretty eyes narrowed. “What year is this, prince?”
He glanced up at her, his body tensing. Was she a reporter, come to get a scoop on ‘prince disoriented in flash flood’? Some paparazzi come to dazzle him with her beauty before she took a photo of his bedraggled state?
But her expression was deadly serious.
“2019,” he said, as grave as she.
Cally’s eyes widened at the man’s words. Her throat swallowed hard. Gracious, could it be? Had this handsome dark-haired stranger come here from the future?
For he was surely handsome. Like them princes one found in the storybooks. Enough mud had fallen from his face to show masculine features, something she’d been paying attention to these past two months in Denver when fellers had come courting—serious courting, the kind that led to marriage. His hair was plastered to his head, his clothing plastered to the rest of him, showing her a strong chest and broad shoulders beneath his skimpy shirt. Long, muscled legs stretched his wet trousers, all of him the kind of handsome that made her heart beat a little faster.
Which made Cally wary. Most handsome fellers, excluding her two brothers, tended to be full of themselves. “That’s what I thought,” she said, her fast-beating heart going even faster at the thought of the year 2019. “Somewhere about there.”
A flock of meadowlarks flapped in the sky, returning to the tall, skinny lodgepole pine they’d left at the top of the hill when the flood had roared through the valley. The river itself continued to recede toward its normal banks, leavin’ the hillsides ripped up by the water and marked with mud and rocks, including the large stones and boulders used in the dam, the large stones and boulders strewn every which way, the dam—she was glad to see—destroyed.
Squinting at the feller in the bright sun from beneath her hat brim, she wondered how to break the news he’d traveled to the past. “You didn’t happen to be in a thunderstorm a moment or two ago?” she asked.
He glanced at the retreating storm clouds that were dissipating over the Wind Dance range, then at the overflowing banks of the river. “I seem to have been caught in their aftermath,” he said in his odd accent, saying his words with self-important, high-and-mighty vowels, just like she’d expect a prince to do.
Cally frowned. The last person she’d seen travel to her time from the future had arrived in a storm full of thunder and lightning, and a dust devil that left them covered with dust. But this feller was wet as an otter and muddy as a frog. She leaned closer over the saddle horn. “Did you get hit with lightning?” she said in a low tone.
“Not I. However” —he looked around at the soggy, torn-up ground beside him, as if searchin’ for something— “the silver trophy I had with me was struck.”
“And you were holding onto it,” she said, staring at his reddened hand—the part not covered by mud drying in the hot sun.
Those handsome blue eyes gave her a pointed look, then he sighed. “Look, take your photo and go.”
“Photo?”
“You’re here for a photograph, right? Royalty Watch , maybe?”
Cally calmed a sidling Apollo, who’d become impatient standing idle in the sun. “What would I want with a photograph of a stranger?”
The prince gave her a long look, straight in the eyes, and Cally’s heart began to beat a little faster again. “I say,” he said, sending another glance around, “is this one of those American television shows where you punk people?”
Cally caught her breath. She’d heard one person speak of television shows—the one person of her acquaintance who’d come to Mule Stop from the future. “Where are you from?” she asked the handsome stranger, marveling that a prince had arrived from the far-off year of 2019 within a month or two of a prince from the current year of 1897 showin’ up, both claiming to be the new owner of the Crown of the West.
“Zalgravia,” this prince said.
“And you’re a real prince?” she asked.
There was that pointed look again, his eyebrow raised this time. “Prince Maximilian Alphonse Frederick George of the House of Balmont.”
“Well, I’m Miss Calliope Victoria James, of the House of Sky Top,” Cally said in her formal voice, the one where she spoke with proper grammar, the one which made her ma smile, Cally sitting up straighter on Apollo, mimicking the man’s pride, something he didn’t seem to notice. Most folks called her Cally, but now that her ma had gotten serious about marrying her off, Cally was introduced to new folks as Calliope.
“Enchanted,” said the prince with a low bow.
Cally grinned. No one had ever bowed to her before, not deep like that.
Shouts sounded in the distance, farther up the river.
Cally turned her head fast toward the hullabaloo, remembering the stories she’d heard of the new owner of the Crown late last night when she and her ma and her brother Bart had arrived home from Denver. Stories that showed him to be a mean, unfriendly sort, who didn’t take kindly to trespassers—something she was doing at the moment on his land.
But it was only the local folks who’d been working on the dam shoutin’ at each other, coming back down the hill to survey the damage.
Ten of them, Cally saw, making a quick count, and exhaled with relief. None of them had been caught up in the flood.
No one but this man from the future.
She turned Apollo uphill on the grassy slope. “I’ve got to skedaddle,” she called out to the prince over her shoulder. She wasn’t about to let a stranger ride behind her on Apollo. No telling what a stranger—even a prince—might do, to her or her horse. She nodded toward the top of the hill, at the large stand of pine and aspen. “You go hide in them trees. I’ll be back real soon.”
Dizziness struck Max again as he watched Miss Calliope Victoria James of the House of Sky Top ride away up the hill, the young woman like a vision from an old Western movie, so authentically Western was she.
She’d turned away and left so abruptly after their introductions that he suspected she was one of the many James family members who’d refused to meet with him to discuss the water rights deal he’d wanted to propose, which made him suspect her offer to return was not perhaps genuine.
Breathing in the whiff of leather and rose scent she’d left behind, he reached into his jeans pocket for his phone to call his assistant Nelson, more with hope than any expectation the phone might work after the soaking he and it had received.
The phone wasn’t there. He patted his other pockets, finding them empty, except for the waterproof topographical map he’d brought in anticipation of a tour of the ranch with its caretaker after the dedication ceremony.
Experiencing a moment of panic, he assured himself the royal signet ring was still on his finger—thank God, it was, and fortunately on the hand not struck by lightning. Taking a deep breath, he searched the ground around him again with a clearer eye.
The receding water was dropping swiftly, the edge of it a good six feet farther down the slope than when he’d come to. Mud, boulders, logs, and tree branches coated what had been a grassy slope between him and the waterline.
Hopeless to find his phone among all that. Hopeless to find the silver trophy.
He glanced at the men a quarter mile away.
Dressed in rough work clothes, they had descended the gentle slope and now stood beside the old-fashioned wood wagon on the low, flat rise above the river. Strong, strapping men, some with their hands on their hips, arguing with each other, others pointing at the debris of large muddy stones, logs, and boulders being revealed as the water below them receded. Two of them were trying to fish out a log from the fast-moving water.
His gaze moved on to the hills at the far end of the valley, hills that must be hiding the small valley the grandstand was in. His eyes narrowed, squinting against the hot sun. Could he really have been washed all that distance?
He would have sworn he was still in the same area he’d been when the flood had hit. There was the same gentle-sloped hill above the wagon, with the tall, skinny pine trees at the top, where there should have been a parking lot, but instead held four horses or mules that were sidling in the long grass in a jittery way, as if distraught from the flood. There was the same flat section of ground the wagon was parked on, which looked eerily like the spot where the grandstand had stood.
There was the same view of the distant Wind Dance Mountains.
Turning away, he wiped the drying mud from the gold face of his digital smartwatch with his thumb. Not only would its map app show him precisely where he was, it would pinpoint his location for Nelson and his security team. He tapped the screen.
The screen lit up.
He exhaled a sigh of relief. Good. He’d been worried it would be as out of commission from the flood as his missing phone likely was. He tapped the message icon.
The message app came up.
Excellent. Alive and well downstream , he texted Nelson. Send chopper, next valley over.
He pressed send.
Nothing happened.
He pressed it again.
Nothing happened.
He glanced at the reception bars.
Nothing there. ‘Out of service range,’ the screen flashed.
He sighed again and turned toward the men in the distance.
He debated tramping through the debris to them, but the ground looked unsteady, or perhaps that was him. Swearing at himself for agreeing to come to the dedication ceremony—though not even Nelson, who’d opposed his attending the ceremony, could have known there’d be a flash flood—and kicking himself for losing the silver trophy cup the people of Mule Stop had set such store by, he started instead up the rest of the hill in search of better cell reception.
The ground beneath him squelched.
His clothes squelched. His wet, mud-soaked clothes. The long grass covering the upper hillside came up to his shins as he trudged, the sun growing hotter on his bare head, his thoughts on the young woman.
Something about her name nagged at him, beyond her being a James.
He hoped she didn’t plan on siccing the paparazzi on him.
At the top of the hill, he found the large stand of tall, skinny pine trees the young woman had pointed out, Max wondering what she’d thought he would need to hide from. Pine scent hung heavy and drowsy in the hot air. Birds chirped in the high branches.
The rushing sound behind him of the river no longer made his lungs tighten.
Beyond the trees, more hills rolled straight ahead and to his right, wooded hills without end. To his left—north, the direction in which the Sky Top Ranch lay—a high, sharp ridge stood miles away like an immense wall that said ‘keep out,’ and he wondered how Miss Calliope Victoria James would navigate it on her way home, no roads that he could see cutting through the ridge.
No sign of roads or civilization in any direction, except for a barbed wire fence.
Damn, the flood must have carried him quite a distance.
Except he remembered the series of hogback ridges over there to his right a few miles distant, on what should be Crown of the West land. He’d studied the satellite photos of his family’s ranch for months in preparation for this trip out to Wyoming to get started on his work plans. Had studied the digital photographs his local caretaker had sent.
Plus his tour guide that morning, the mayor, had been voluble about the local attractions. Off to the northeast, just visible before the start of the wall-like ridge, there was a tiny glimpse of the immense lake the mayor had pointed out from the highway before they’d descended down to the wildlife sanctuary—Miner’s Lake, the mayor had told him.
Frowning, he turned back to the river and scanned the hillside again along its length, his head feeling steadier than when he’d first come to. He would have sworn this was the valley he’d been in for the dedication. But there was no sign of anything he was certain should have been there.
No bridge. No crowd.
No Nelson.
Standing on the highest point of the hill he could find away from the trees—a tall boulder among the grass—he checked his watch again. Still no reception. No map app coming up, no text messages.
He rubbed at the back of his head. Had he struck it on something as he’d been churning head over feet in the flood? Had some tree branch or massive boulder momentarily knocked him out?
A low, nearly inaudible rumble of thunder crossed the air, driving Max’s heartbeat faster. This time, he knew to look around, not up, the sound coming from the opposite direction from which the young woman had ridden away.
Horse hooves, he realized. And more than one horse.
Feeling that foreboding in his chest again, Max listened to it this time and slipped among the tall, skinny pine.
He’d just found additional shelter behind a cluster of tall boulders when a group of three men on horseback came into view around a low ridge to the south, not a quarter mile from him and headed straight for his trees.
They didn’t look friendly as they neared.
Max made a note to get better acquainted with his forebodings.
The men stopped not thirty feet away from his hiding place, right on the grassy spot where he’d been standing when his latest foreboding hit.
“She was here, Your Highness,” one gruff-voiced, stocky man said. Dressed in old-fashioned livery consisting of black trousers topped with a black tunic-like coat with gold buttons down the front and gold trim on the cuffs and collar, he pointed to the ground, where Miss Calliope Victoria James had started down the hill to speak to Max, and where she had ridden back up to leave.
Your Highness?
“She will have left the Crown of the West by this time, Your Highness,” a second man said, this one younger, this one leaner in his livery outfit. His accent, like the first man’s, was Zalgravian, and Max’s still-dazed head realized with a start that the men were speaking in Zalgravian, not English—albeit an old-fashioned Zalgravian, similar to what his great-grandmother spoke. “We are near your northeast border. She perhaps saw us in the distance.”
“I want her captured,” the third man said, the one who was supposedly ‘Your Highness.’ His face was hidden by the other two men and a tree which Max’s foreboding told him to not peek around, a foreboding strengthened by the third man’s imperious voice, imperious and more similar to Max’s than Max would have thought possible. “Damn her, trespassing on my land. These local peasants must be taught their place.” He gestured to the first two with a sharp, preemptory hand. “Get her.”
The other men gave him a sharp, obedient nod that looked a lot like a small bow, then they rode fast to the north, in the direction the young woman had gone.
But Max’s eyes were on the man with the imperious voice, the man’s face visible now in the bright sunlight as his high-spirited gray horse shifted, moving into Max’s line of view, Max’s heart pounding up fast.
It was his ancestor, Evil Prince Hugo, his great-great-, damn it, too many greats to count grandfather. Tall and lean, broad-shouldered and muscled, the dark-haired man with the handsome, chiseled face was dressed in the navy-blue dress uniform of Zalgravia’s military generals, the medals on his chest glinting in the sun.
Unearned medals—Hugo had never served in the military for a second. The red silk sash he had affected—and which, along with the unearned medals, were a great joke among later generations of the family—cut diagonally across the chest of the ornate, gold-trimmed uniform, departing from what the actual Zalgravian generals wore. The swashbuckling peaked hat and intricate gold-hilted sword had also been uniquely the Evil Prince’s, as was the long, puckered scar that crossed from the center of his ear through his sideburn and jaw down to the side of his neck.
He looked exactly like the portraits and photographs of Max’s ancestor from the 1890s.
Take away the muttonchop sideburns, bushy mustache, scar, and uniform, and he looked exactly like Max.