Chapter 10
The afternoon sun slanted through the solar’s narrow windows, painting bars of gold across the stone floor. Gareth sat in his customary chair by the fire—cold now, unnecessary in the warming late May weather—and listened to Elodie talking.
She was always talking.
In the weeks since she’d stumbled into his life, he’d grown accustomed to the constant flow of words.
She filled silences the way water filled empty vessels—naturally, inevitably, as if she couldn’t help herself.
He’d found it grating at first. Now he found it.
.. something else. Something he wasn’t ready to name.
“—and so the concept of zero, right, it seems obvious to us now, but medieval mathematicians were genuinely confused by it. How do you count nothing? How do you—” She caught herself, cheeks pinking.
“Sorry. I’m doing the thing again. The rambling thing.
You’re trying to learn food and I’m over here nattering on about mathematical philosophy. ”
Gareth’s mouth twitched. He signed. I do not mind.
“You’re very patient. Suspiciously patient, actually.
Most people start glazing over around the five-minute mark.
” She tucked a strand of hair behind her ear—a nervous gesture he’d catalogued along with her habit of touching her throat when she was thinking, her tendency to pace when excited, the way her hands moved even when she wasn’t signing, as if words alone couldn’t contain everything she needed to express.
You are interesting, he signed. Continue.
Her face did something complicated—pleased and embarrassed and oddly vulnerable all at once as her cheeks turned pink.
“Right. Yes. Where were we? Murderer.” She demonstrated the sign—a sharp, violent gesture, one hand striking down against the other.
“And traitor.” A twisting motion near the heart, as if something were being torn out.
He copied both, his large hands surprisingly nimble after all the practice. She’d been a good teacher. Patient. Clear. And she never looked at him with pity when he struggled with a gesture, never made him feel diminished by his silence.
’Twas a gift, that. Rarer than gold.
“Perfect,” she said, beaming. “Jennifer always said I was too impatient to teach properly, but apparently I just needed the right student.” She paused, her expression flickering.
“She’d love this, actually. She’s always going on about how sign language should be more widely taught, how it’s this incredible tool for communication that most hearing people completely ignore.
She’d be absolutely chuffed to see a whole castle learning it. ”
Gareth’s eyes narrowed, just slightly. There it was again—that odd note in her voice when she mentioned her friend. The way she spoke of this Jennifer, as if they’d been parted by more than mere distance.
Your friend, he signed slowly. You miss her.
“I—yes.” Elodie’s hands stilled in her lap. “Yes, I miss her terribly. She’s... she’s very far away.”
How far?
Something shifted in her expression. A flash of something that might have been panic, quickly suppressed. “Quite far. Very far, actually. Impossibly far.”
The words hung between them. Gareth studied her face—the tight set of her jaw, the way her eyes wouldn’t quite meet his. He’d learned to read people in his years of silence. Learned that the words people spoke were often less honest than the ones they didn’t.
And Elodie Hart, for all her ceaseless chatter, had been hiding something from the moment she’d appeared on his lands.
He’d known it, of course. No woman simply appeared in the middle of a storm, dressed in gossamer and moonlight, babbling about archaeology and lost necklaces.
The servants whispered about faeries and hollow hills.
Father Aldric muttered about demons. Gareth had dismissed both explanations as superstitious nonsense.
But that left the question. If she wasn’t fae and she wasn’t a demon, what was she?
Tell me more about her, he signed. Your friend.
Elodie’s laugh was too bright, too quick. “Oh, Jennifer’s brilliant. Absolutely brilliant. She designs things—visual things, pictures and layouts and...” She trailed off, her brow furrowing. “Hang on, how do I even explain graphic design to a medieval—”
She stopped.
Gareth went very still.
The color drained from her face. She pressed her hand to her mouth, her eyes wide above her fingers, and for a long moment neither of them moved. The silence stretched between them like a held blade.
“I didn’t mean, that is to say—I wasn’t—” She was babbling now, words tumbling over each other in her haste to take back what she’d said. “Medieval as in, you know, the aesthetic. The medieval aesthetic. Very popular where I’m from. All those tapestries and pointed arches and—”
Stop.
She stopped. Her hands were trembling.
Gareth rose from his chair. He moved slowly, deliberately, giving her time to retreat if she wished. She didn’t. She stood rooted to the floor, watching him approach with the expression of a woman awaiting judgment.
He stopped an arm’s length away. Close enough to see the rapid flutter of her pulse at her throat, the shine of unshed tears in her eyes. Close enough to see she was terrified—and not of him.
You are not from here, he signed.
It wasn’t a question.
Elodie’s breath came out in a shuddering rush. “No.”
Not from England.
“No. Yes. It’s—it’s complicated.”
Then explain. His hands moved with quiet precision. I will listen.
She laughed—a wild, slightly unhinged sound. “You’ll think I’m mad. Completely barking. Utterly mental. I think I’m mental, and I’m the one living it.”
Gareth waited. Patience was a weapon he’d learned to wield in three years of silence. He could outwait armies. He could certainly outwait one woman.
“Right.” She pressed her palms flat against her skirts, visibly gathering herself.
“Right. Okay. Here’s the thing.” A deep breath.
“I’m not from far away. I’m from—” Another breath.
“The future. Eight hundred and thirty-three years in the future, to be exact. I’m from the year 2025, and I fell through time during a storm, and I know how absolutely insane that sounds, believe me, I’ve had weeks to think about how insane it sounds, but it’s the truth. ”
The words hung in the air between them.
Gareth blinked.
“See?” Her voice pitched higher, faster.
“This is why I didn’t tell you. This is why I’ve been letting everyone think I’m some faerie creature or a madwoman or whatever explanation makes them comfortable, because the truth is so much stranger than any of those things.
I’m an archaeologist—that means I study old things, old buildings and artifacts and bones—and I was at a party, a fancy dress party, and there was this priceless ancient opal necklace, and a storm, and I fell and skinned my knee, lightning actually hit me, and then I was here. In 1192. In bleeding medieval England.”
She was properly crying now, tears streaking down her cheeks, her words tumbling over each other in a flood she couldn’t seem to stop.
“And the worst part—the absolutely worst part—is that I don’t know how to get back.
The necklace vanished when I arrived, and I don’t know if the magic works both ways, and I might be stuck here forever, and I’ve been trying so hard not to think about that because if I think about it too much I’ll completely lose the plot.
My flat. My job—well, my former job, they probably think I’ve gone missing.
My mum’s going to be so worried. She always said I’d wander into trouble one day, and now I’ve literally wandered into another time—”
Gareth reached out and placed his hand on her shoulder.
She stopped. Stared up at him, her face blotched and wet, her carefully maintained composure shattered into a thousand pieces.
He didn’t know what to say. Couldn’t have said it even if he did. But the warmth of his palm seemed to steady her, and after a moment she drew a ragged breath.
“You don’t believe me,” she whispered. “I wouldn’t believe me. It sounds like the ravings of a madwoman. Holy cannoli, it sounds insane even to my own ears, and I’m the one who lived through it.”
Gareth considered her words. More than eight hundred years. A world so far removed from his own that he couldn’t fathom it. She spoke of studying old things, as if his world—his castles and his king and his whole existence—was nothing but dust and bones and curiosities to be examined by scholars.
And yet.
And yet something in her words rang true.
The odd phrases she used without thinking.
The knowledge she possessed about matters no woman of his time should know.
The way she looked at everything—the castle, the servants, the very stones beneath her feet—with a wonder that spoke of seeing miracles where he saw only ordinary life.
That is why you know so much about my world, he signed finally. You have studied it.
“Yes.” Her voice was hoarse. “I’ve spent my whole life studying medieval England.
It’s my specialty—was my specialty. I wrote papers about it.
Taught classes. And now I’m living in it, and it’s nothing like the books said it would be, because books can’t capture the smell of rushes or the weight of wool or the way firelight looks dancing on stone walls.
They can’t capture—” She gestured helplessly at him.
“They can’t capture people. Real people who breathe and hurt and hope and fear.
You’re not supposed to be real. None of this is supposed to be real. ”
Gareth absorbed this. The woman before him had studied his time the way monks studied scripture—from a distance, with reverence and detachment. And then she’d tumbled into the midst of it, all her careful knowledge rendered useless by the simple, chaotic fact of living.
He understood something of that. The difference between knowing and experiencing. The way preparations could shatter against the rock of reality.