Chapter 6
They rode in silence, the men forming a loose escort around her and the lord whose name she still didn’t know. Elodie kept her eyes moving, scanning the treeline, the road ahead, peering through the darkness—looking for anything that would anchor her in reality.
A car, she thought desperately. Just one car. A distant headlight. A bus or a paved road. Anything.
But the road beneath them was packed earth, rutted from cart wheels and rain. The trees pressed close on either side, ancient oaks and ash that had never known a chainsaw. No power lines or cell towers. No distant hum of traffic or airplanes.
We’re in the countryside, she reasoned. Baldridge Manor is remote. Lady Baldridge owns hundreds of acres. This is just... an exceptionally dedicated immersive experience. Medieval cosplay on steroids.
Except the men around her weren’t actors.
She’d worked on enough film sets to know the difference.
Actors in costume moved like people wearing costumes—adjusting their cloaks, fidgeting with their sword belts, checking their phones between takes.
These men moved as if their armor were part of their bodies.
The mail shirts they wore had been repaired in multiple places, she noticed—not costume department patches, but actual metalwork, rings rewoven where blades had torn through.
The leather of their sword grips worn smooth in the patterns real-world use would create.
And the swords themselves—
Oh, cheese and crackers, those are real swords.
Not prop swords, not dulled edges for safety, but weapons with the gleam that came from being sharpened and resharpened and used. The man to her left had a nick in his blade about three inches from the crossguard. The kind of damage that happened when steel met steel.
Her brain cataloged the details even as her survival instincts screamed at her to stop noticing things and start panicking properly.
The construction of the mail was consistent with late 12th century patterns—riveted rings, not butted, the links sized appropriately for combat rather than display.
The helmets were simple nasals, again period-appropriate.
The horses wore no ceremonial barding, just practical leather and iron.
This isn’t a costume. This is real. Functional, maintained, battle-tested kit.
One of the men muttered something to his companion in what sounded like Latin—or no, not Latin, some kind of prayer in a dialect she couldn’t quite place.
The cadence was wrong for modern Latin, the vowels shaped differently, the rhythm ancient in a way she’d only ever read about in linguistic studies.
The silent lord’s arm reached out and steadied her, and she realized she’d been swaying. Her body was starting to process what her mind still refused to accept. Then, the castle rose from the moors.
She saw it first as a dark mass against the gray sky—and immediately twisted in the saddle, craning to see better.
The movement nearly unseated her completely as she grabbed for the horse’s mane, missed, and would have tumbled to the ground if the lord hadn’t caught her with that arm of iron, hauling her back on her horse like she weighed nothing.
“Sorry—sorry, I just—”
But she couldn’t stop looking. Curtain walls of weathered stone, a central tower standing stark and sentinel, the flutter of a banner she couldn’t identify in the darkness.
Torches burned at the gatehouse, their flames fighting the lingering rain.
And people—not tour guides or docents, but guards on the walls, their silhouettes sharp against the firelight, crossbows in their hands.
She twisted again, more carefully this time, as they clattered across the drawbridge.
The wood was old and solid beneath the horses’ hooves, the chains real iron, the murder holes above her head genuinely threatening.
The gatehouse wasn’t a reconstruction or a renovation.
It wasn’t a “historically inspired” building for wealthy tourists.
It was a real working medieval fortress.
The mortar between the stones was original, centuries of weather showing in the variation of the joints.
The arrow loops were positioned at practical angles, not decorative ones.
Someone had patched a section of wall recently—she could see where the new stone met the old, the repair competent but not matching, exactly as medieval masons would have done it.
Quick. Efficient. Built for defense, not aesthetics.
And the men on the walls were watching her with expressions that held no tourist-attraction friendliness.
No customer-service smiles. Just wariness, and weapons, and the calculating attention of soldiers assessing a potential threat.
These are men carved from violence, she thought, and the phrase felt true in a way academic language rarely did. Not actors playing soldiers. Soldiers. Real soldiers who have killed people with those really sharp swords.
She should be terrified. She was terrified—her hands shaking, heart hammering against her ribs. But beneath the fear, something else stirred. Something that felt almost like hunger.
Because she was an archaeologist who had spent her entire career studying this period through fragments. Pottery shards and burial goods and the bones of people she would never meet. And now—
Now she was inside it. Breathing the same air they breathed. Hearing the creak of the same leather, the ring of the same iron, the specific quality of hoofbeats on a wooden drawbridge that no sound recording had ever quite captured.
This is real, she thought, and for the first time, she didn’t try to argue herself out of it. This is all real. And I’m here. However it happened, whatever madness brought me here—I’m elsewhere.
The smell hit her next. Smoke and livestock, cooking meat and something else beneath it all, something organic and old.
Then the sounds of dogs barking, men calling to each other, and the ring of metal from somewhere she couldn’t see.
And under it all, the rhythm of hooves on packed earth as their party entered the courtyard proper.
Real. It was all real. The horse beneath her, the man at her back, the medieval fortress pressing in from every side—all of it real in a way she couldn’t deny.
This isn’t a reenactment. This isn’t a movie set. And yet, she couldn’t voice what had happened because if she did, it meant that magic was real, after all. And if magic were real, did that mean the fae existed? Would one of them find her, punish her for impersonating them?
She’d told herself that for the past hour, clinging to rational explanations even as each one crumbled.
But she knew film sets. Knew the seams, the artifice, the places where the illusion broke down.
There were no seams here. No cameras hiding behind trees, no crew members checking their phones between takes.
Just rain-soaked stone and firelight and the weight of centuries pressing down.
They passed through the gatehouse, and Elodie found herself in a courtyard full of people who stopped to stare. Servants in rough-spun wool. Soldiers in mail and leather. A woman carrying a basket of bread dropped it in shock, loaves tumbling across the mud.
Every eye found her. Every mouth went slack.
She heard the whispers start. Words she couldn’t quite catch, but the tone was unmistakable.
Full of fear, wonder, suspicion. She was still wearing the costume from the party, though rather bedraggled, the wings crushed and dragging, her crown of flowers reduced to a few sad stems tangled in her hair—she knew exactly what she looked like.
A faerie queen, the men in the forest had whispered.
The silent man dismounted smoothly and then stepped over to her, reached up to lift her down.
She tried to protest—she could manage herself, thank you—but her legs gave out the moment her feet touched the ground.
He caught her without hesitation, one arm around her waist, and steadied her against his side.
Strong. He was strong in a way that felt natural, as if carrying wounded women through castle courtyards was simply something he did. Up close, with the torchlight flickering across his face, she could see him clearly for the first time.
Beautiful. And terrible.
The scar started beneath his left ear and carved a brutal path across his throat to his collarbone—pale tissue, puckered and old, the kind of wound that should have killed.
His face was all hard angles with sharp cheekbones, a strong jaw, a mouth pressed into a thin line that looked like it had forgotten how to smile.
Dark hair hung past his shoulders, wet from the rain, and his eyes—
His eyes were the gray of forged steel, cool and assessing. Watching her. Seeing everything.
“My lord!”
An older man hurried toward them, weathered face creased with concern. He wore finer clothes than the servants, and he moved with the authority of someone used to managing chaos. “We heard there was trouble with bandits—” He stopped short when he saw Elodie. “What in God’s name—”
The words started translating in her head and sounded different than she’d expected. The silent man—my lord, she noted—made a series of quick gestures. Not sign language as she knew it, but clearly communication. The older man’s eyebrows climbed toward his hairline.
“You found her in the forest? Dressed like that?”
More gestures. The older man looked at Elodie with something caught between wonder and fear.
“Come inside,” he said finally. “Both of you. Before the whole castle sees.”