Chapter 2
Two
GEOFFREY
England
I was twelve years old when my father decided I was better suited for strategy rather than swords, and a score and three when I discovered that no amount of tactical brilliance could compensate for a body that refused to act decisively in a crisis.
That was the thought running through my head as I stood in the tower chamber, staring at the woman who’d been locked in my family’s best holding tower for three days.
She was going mad. Obviously. The London merchants who’d found her stumbling through the Thames forests, and had the good sense to bring her directly to the castle rather than let her wander about, had said she spoke in tongues, of impossible things.
And I had thought, reasonably enough, that she was either a spy, infected with some fever-madness, or both.
But spies didn’t ask to see psalters. And fever-dreams didn’t manifest in people whose eyes were clear and direct though her clothing was most odd indeed.
“Show her the manuscript,” I said, even as my older brother Aldwin, who was supposed to inherit, and who should be making these decisions, looked at me like I’d suggested burning the keep down.
“Absolutely not,” Aldwin snapped. “She’s a prisoner.”
“She’s a woman in a tower who’s asked for one thing in three days,” I replied, keeping my tone level. “If she’s a spy, the psalter will prove it. If she’s not—”
“Then we’ve indulged madness.”
“Better to indulge it than to leave her untested.”
I pushed past my brother, moving down the spiral stairs before he could countermand me.
The manuscript was kept in the family chapel, a treasure our grandfather had acquired on crusade.
Worthless in terms of monetary value, too damaged by damp to sell, but precious in the way old objects were precious.
I found her standing at the window when I returned, her back to the door, her shoulders held in a posture that suggested she was trying very hard not to break down. She turned as I entered, and I saw the calculation in her eyes shift.
“The psalter,” she said, stepping toward me.
I wasn’t prepared for her to move so quickly, with that combination of purpose and desperation. I stepped back without thinking about it, which meant I looked cowardly in front of a woman I’d had locked in a tower. I regretted the movement immediately.
“Don’t touch it,” I said, extending the manuscript at arm’s length while keeping it firmly in my own hands. “Just look.”
Her eyes widened as she saw the binding. Some emotion crossed her face, recognition perhaps, or grief, and she extended one hand before stopping herself, curling her fingers into a fist.
“Open it,” she whispered. “Open to the psalm pages. The ones with the margins.”
I opened the manuscript to the illuminated psalm pages.
The gold leaf caught the tower’s light, throwing fragments of brightness across the stone walls.
I’d never paid much attention to this particular treasure.
It was old, yes, and the illustrations were fine, but it was also damp-spotted and faded.
Not, in my estimation, worth much of anything except inherited obligation.
The woman stared at it like it contained the secrets of the known world.
“There,” she said, pointing to one of the margin sketches, the one of the woman in strange dress that I’d never quite been able to make sense of. “That’s the only one that… there’s only one that shows the way back, and I don’t know which detail, and I can’t…”
She stopped, pressing her palm to her forehead.
“Woman,” I said carefully, “what is your name?”
“Harper,” she said. “Harper Ainsley. And before you ask, I’m not local, I’m not a spy for any faction, and I have no idea how to explain what’s happened to me in a way that won’t convince you I’m completely insane.”
“You’re already making a fine case for insanity,” I observed. “Speak plainly. Who sent you? What intelligence are you trying to gather?”
Harper laughed, bitter and entirely without humor.
“No one sent me. I’m a museum curator from Boston, Massachusetts. I was cataloging this exact psalter about twelve hours ago, before it started glowing and transported me here through what I can only describe as some kind of magical temporal rift.”
She looked at me, her eyes bright with unshed tears.
“And I know how that sounds. I’ve had three days to think about how it sounds. But the psalter is real, your castle is real, and there’s probably some explanation involving medieval witchcraft or quantum physics that I don’t have enough information to articulate properly.”
I stood very still. Museum Curator? Boston?
In any other circumstance, I would have assumed this was fever-talking, or madness. But she’d asked for the psalter specifically. She’d recognized the margin sketch. And something in the absolute certainty of her voice suggested this wasn’t deception so much as desperation.
“Massachusetts?” I repeated carefully. “I have never heard of such a place.”
“America. Won’t be discovered for hundreds of years.” She took a deep breath. “I’m from the future,” she said, her eyes widening as if she’d planned to say something else instead. “From the year 2026.”
Merde. I took the matter directly to my father.
This was partly because protocol demanded it, and partly because I’d learned some years ago that letting other people make decisions was occasionally the only way to survive their poor judgment.
My father, the Baron of Thames, listened to the entire account with the expression of a man eating particularly bad fish, then rendered his verdict.
“She’s a spy. Possibly a mad spy, but a spy nonetheless.”
“She asked to see the psalter by name,” I argued. “She knew about the margin sketches. She recognized—”
“She’s clever. That’s what makes her a good spy.” My father settled back in his chair, a heavy oak monstrosity that had held the weight of Thames leadership for three decades. “The question is who she’s working for. King John? The barons? A French faction?”
“What if she’s telling the truth?” I heard myself say, which was monumentally stupid, but my mind had gotten stuck on the image of Harper in the tower, her shoulders curled inward, her strange glorious hair coming loose from whatever arrangement she’d had it in that morning.
My father laughed, a short harsh sound that echoed off the stone walls.
“The truth? What truth could possibly be worse than a spy? We’re two weeks from Runnymede, boy.
The king is barely holding onto power. The northern barons are circling.
And you’re suggesting that a woman who appeared in our forests speaking madness is some magical accident rather than a calculated insertion? ”
“She couldn’t have known about the psalter unless—”
“Unless someone in this castle told her. Unless she’s been planning this for months. Unless she’s smarter than you are, which, given some of your recent tactical suggestions, wouldn’t be difficult.”
He leaned forward.
“The woman stays locked up until we understand what she wants. If she’s genuine, and she isn’t, she can prove it by providing us with information that helps our position at Runnymede.”
I opened my mouth to protest, then closed it again. We both knew how this would play out. My father had made a decision, which meant the matter was decided. My role was to accept it and find ways to survive it.
“And if she’s not willing to provide information?” I asked.
“Then she hangs as a spy, and we’re done with her.”
I left my father’s chamber with that thought heavy in my chest, and did something I would later recognize as the first truly foolish decision of the day.
I went back to the tower to talk to her again, telling myself it was strategic. I was still telling myself that when I reached the door.
Harper was pacing when I entered. Three steps in one direction, three steps back, her arms wrapped around herself like she was holding something together. She stopped when she saw me.
“You’re going to kill me,” she said.
Not a question.
“Not yet,” I replied, which was probably not as reassuring as I’d intended. “My father believes you’re a spy.”
“I’m not.”
“So you’ve said. The problem is that saying it doesn’t make it true.”
“The psalter makes it true,” Harper said desperately. “If I was working for someone, if I’d been planted here, why would I ask to see the psalter? Why wouldn’t I just pretend to be a local woman, claim I was lost from a nearby village?”
“Because you’re clever,” I said, which was unkind, but I was tired and she was probably going to be executed and my head hurt from trying to force logic into an impossible problem. “Because you recognized an opportunity to make your cover seem more genuine.”
“My cover is that I fell through time via a magical medieval manuscript,” Harper said flatly. “How is that a genuine cover for anything?”
“I don’t know,” I admitted. “That’s the problem.”
I left her locked in the tower and went to find Father William. If anyone in the castle might understand theology well enough to recognize whether falling through time was even theoretically possible, it would be him.
Father William listened to the story with the patient expression of a man who’d heard stranger claims at confession, then asked for a moment alone with the psalter.
When he emerged from the chapel an hour later, he was pale.
“The woman is telling the truth,” he said quietly.
“Or she believes she is, which may amount to the same thing. But I’ve read that text before, Geoffrey.
Not in this psalter, but in doctrinal manuscripts from Rome.
It discusses the nature of time, God’s ability to move souls across moments.
And there are marks in the margins of that psalter that suggest someone has been working on something. Some kind of incantation or prayer.”
“A prayer to travel through time,” I said slowly.
“A prayer for someone to travel through time,” Father William corrected. “To be called. To be brought forward. I think, boy, that someone inscribed that psalter hoping someone would find it. Hoping someone would read those words at the right moment.”
I thought about the beautiful woman in the tower with her strange clothes and stranger accent and absolute certainty that she’d been cataloging this exact object in a place and time that didn’t exist yet.
“She’s not a spy,” I said.
“No,” Father William agreed. “But that might be worse. That makes her a miracle. And miracles, in my experience, rarely end the way anyone expects.” He frowned. “We must keep this quiet. Tell no one. If your father asks again, say she’s addled her wits while we decide on her story.”
I had that to think about for the rest of the day, which was somehow more complicated than any spy plot.