Chapter 38 #2
Amelia’s whole body went rigid. Through the portal, figures moved in the rain, blurred by light and storm.
A woman stumbled through the arched doorway with one hand pressed to her mouth.
She was smaller than Amelia and older, brown hair shot through with silver, raincoat flapping open, face pale and ravaged by grief.
In one hand, she clutched a pale blue thing Thomas did not know, mud-streaked and ruined.
Amelia made a sound he had never heard from her.
“Mom.”
The woman on the other side looked about wildly, as if some part of her had heard. A man beside her, dressed in dark, strange clothing, tried to steer her back, but she shook him off with the fury of any mother whose child had vanished and whose world had offered no answer but dread.
Another woman appeared behind her, lovely even in ruin, her fair hair scraped back beneath a hood, dark tracks of tears beneath her eyes. A tall man held her upright with one arm.
Thomas looked from the impossible ruin to Amelia. “That woman.”
“My mother.”
The word hurt her. He heard it in her voice.
“And the other?”
“My cousin. Bree.”
Hob had gone pale beneath his beard. “Bloody hell.”
Huck whispered, “Mercy.”
The woman Amelia had named as her mother dropped to her knees near the ledge. Her mouth moved.
Thomas could not hear the words, but he knew the shape of a name.
Amelia.
Again and again.
She took one step forward.
Thomas caught her hand, and this time he did not release it.
She looked back at him, tears spilling down her cheeks.
“I’m from there,” she said. “Not the shire. Not France. Not anywhere you know. I’m from seven hundred years from now in a country called America. I was in England for my cousin’s wedding.”
Hob’s axe lowered by an inch.
Huck stopped praying.
Thomas dared not breathe.
Amelia’s words poured out fast now, impossible things tumbling over each other.
“I was at my cousin’s wedding in the ruins of Ashcombe, and it started to storm so I went into the tower because a footballer wouldn’t leave me alone, and I found the sword.
This sword, but it was old. Rusted. The sapphire was still there.
I cut my hand, my blood hit the blade, lightning struck, and I woke up in your stables. ”
She dragged in a breath.
“My name really is Amelia Quinn. But I’m not a widow and I’m not married.
I don’t have kin here because they haven’t been born yet, which sounds insane, I know it does, but it’s true.
I had a job. I planned events. I had an apartment in Chicago.
I had a return flight and a dentist appointment and a mother who probably thought I’d been murdered in a castle tower because I vanished with no purse, no phone, nothing. ”
Thunder shook the solar.
Amelia wiped her face with both hands. “Please say something.”
Thomas looked through the doorway again.
Seven hundred years.
He could not fathom it. The ruin. The strange lights. The woman on her knees. The grief that did not need translation. The pale blue thing clutched in her hand as if it were a relic.
He looked down at Amelia’s bleeding knuckle, at the sapphire light pulsing beneath her blood, at the woman he loved standing with one foot in his world and one in a place no prayer, horse, ship, or army could ever reach.
“You told me,” he said slowly, “that you had misplaced your entire life.”
She laughed through a sob. “That’s what you’re starting with?”
“And the dentist, whatever that is, was real?”
“Very real.”
His brows drew faintly together. “And the canned wine.”
“In my defense, that also sounds fake in my century.”
Hob made a choked noise that might have been terror or amusement.
Huck looked heavenward as if asking whether canned wine required doctrine.
Thomas stepped closer to Amelia. “You should have told me.”
The gentleness of his own voice surprised him.
“I know.”
“Not because I would have understood,” he said. “I don’t understand. I doubt I’ll understand if I live to be as old as Walter pretends he isn’t. But you carried this alone.”
Amelia’s face crumpled.
Thomas took her hand.
“Seven hundred years,” he said.
“Yes.”
“And that is the door back to your time. To the future.”
“Yes.”
He looked past her to the woman kneeling in the ruin. His jaw tightened with a pain so sharp it nearly drove him to his knees.
“They love you.”
The words nearly finished her.
“Yes.”
The portal pulsed, and the future sharpened. Rain glittered on broken stone. The little false stars trembled. Amelia’s mother stood suddenly, her head turning as if somewhere in her bones she had heard her daughter’s voice.
Amelia took another half step.
Thomas’s hand closed around hers.
“Nay,” he said.
She turned, startled.
His face felt carved from iron, but his heart was anything but. His heart had become a battlefield, and every army upon it bore her name.
“Nay?” she echoed.
“I will not shove you through that door to soothe my honor.”
Her mouth parted.
“I would not keep you from your mother.” His voice roughened. “I would cut off my own hand before I held you here by force. But I am no saint carved in stone, Amelia. I am yours, if you’ll have me, I love you past all reason, with all of my heart and soul.”
The portal roared. Rain lashed through the broken tower beyond, turning the little false stars into blurred smears of light. Her mother’s voice came again, thin and broken and impossibly near.
“Amelia!”
Thomas flinched as if the call had struck him.
Then he stepped closer, his boots grinding against the rushes, his face pale beneath the blue fire and his eyes fierce enough to hold back armies.
“So hear me well, because I’m done speaking in pieces and expecting you to gather them like dropped grain.
I love you. I love your sharp tongue and your lists and the way you look at my accounts as if they’ve personally offended you.
I love that you made a home here. I love that you taught my people to hope before I remembered how. ”
His hand closed around hers, rough and warm and trembling.
“I love you when you argue,” he said. “I love you when you laugh. I love you when you look at me as if I am more than a sword with a man wrapped round it. I love you in my hall and in my yard and in every cursed breath I take when you are not beside me.”
Hob made a sound behind them that might have been a cough but was not.
Huck whispered, “Saints preserve us.”
Thomas did not look away from her.
“I have no clever words of wooing. I have a rundown castle, a questionable temper, a horse who likes you better than he likes me, and a household that has already decided you belong to them. I cannot give you your mother. I cannot give you the future world beyond that door. But I can give you all that I am and all that I have, and I will spend the rest of my life making certain you never regret choosing me.”
A tear slid down her cheek.
“Thomas.”
“I am asking.” His voice broke on the word, and he did not care at all that Hob and Huck heard it.
“Not commanding. Not deciding. Asking. Stay with me. Stay at Ashcombe. Stay and plague Walter with the accounts. Stay and teach Wat curses I am pretending not to hear. Stay and drink water like a woman determined to offend every brewer in England. Stay and tell me all of your future world until my head aches.”
He lifted her hand and pressed his mouth to her blood-marked knuckles.
“Stay and marry me, be my lady, the lady of Ashcombe.”
The portal brightened until it painted her hair in blue fire.
Amelia looked through the portal.
“I love my mother,” she said, and her voice shook so hard the words broke apart. “I will love her every day for the rest of my life. I’ll miss Bree. I’ll miss coffee and indoor plumbing with a passion that would scandalize Huck.”
“It would not,” Huck said, though his voice was thick. “I am difficult to scandalize.”
Hob snorted.
“But the life I built was empty,” she said. “This is the life that found me.”
The portal flared. Wind tore through the solar, whipping her hair free of its braid. Red curls spun around her like flame.
Amelia turned toward the sword. Thomas felt the movement before he saw it, the pull of that bright future world.
“It needs an answer,” she said.
The sapphire blazed. She reached down. Before Thomas could stop her, both hands closed around the hilt, her bloodied knuckle brushing the stone. “I love you, Thomas.”
Blue fire rushed up her arms.
Hob crossed himself again. “Saints.”
Huck’s prayer rose, deep and fierce.
Thomas lunged and caught Amelia from behind, wrapping one arm around her waist and covering her hand with his where it gripped the sword.
“If it takes you,” he growled into her hair, “it takes me too.”
“No,” she gasped.
“Aye.”