Chapter 5
Five
HARPER
The great hall had effectively become a war room over the next several days, though I doubted that had been the Baron’s original intention.
A large table dominated the center of the chamber, and across it Geoffrey had spread maps of England, Scotland, and Wales marked with colored inks and careful notations.
I stopped walking the moment I saw them.
They were wrong. Not badly wrong. Not incompetently wrong.
Wonderfully, gloriously wrong in the way maps became when they were drawn before the world understood accurate spatial representation.
Scotland sat at a peculiar angle and appeared slightly too large.
Wales curved toward England in ways no coastline actually did.
East Anglia looked more imagined than surveyed.
And the entire thing was oriented eastward because these maps weren’t truly about geography.
They were about theology, hierarchy, meaning.
Jerusalem mattered more than north.
I had taught university seminars on medieval cartography once.
I had spent entire afternoons explaining symbolic orientation to bored undergraduates armed with overpriced coffees and questionable attention spans.
But I had never stood over an actual working map from 1215 while the men using it discussed real political strategy. The ink was barely dry.
Geoffrey stood bent over the maps in dark green wool trimmed at the collar with understated embroidery that probably represented several tenant farms’ worth of income.
Unlike his father, whose clothing announced power openly, Geoffrey dressed like a man expecting to work in his garments.
His sleeves had been pushed carelessly toward his forearms, revealing strong hands stained faintly with ink.
A sword rested at his hip almost as an afterthought.
“Something wrong?” Aldwin asked, watching me closely.
“No,” I managed. “No, I just…” I looked down at the map again. “It’s an extremely good map.”
Aldwin looked built for violence in a way the rest of the family somehow didn’t.
His tunic was finer than anything most men in England would ever touch, dyed a deep iron-grey and fastened with polished silver at the throat, but he wore it carelessly, one sleeve dusted with dirt from the training yard and his leather sword belt scarred from actual use.
Unlike Geoffrey, who carried nobility like responsibility, Aldwin wore it like ownership.
Geoffrey glanced up from the parchment he’d been studying, caught my expression, and something in his eyes shifted suspiciously close to amusement.
He didn’t say a word which somehow made it worse.
I forced myself back into the present.
“Here,” I said, pointing toward the northern territories. “The conflict with Scotland won’t resolve decisively for decades. But in the short term, what matters is that King John is too weak to maintain effective control over the north. There will be skirmishes. Territorial disputes. Border shifts.”
“How much territory?” Aldwin asked.
He’d stopped openly threatening to execute me every five minutes, which I chose to interpret as progress.
“Enough that future treaties acknowledge losses,” I said. “Eventually the borders stabilize roughly along the Tweed and Solway, but not until long after John’s death.”
Geoffrey made notes as I spoke, his handwriting precise and methodical.
Over the last few days he’d become my unofficial translator for surviving medieval politics.
He taught me how to frame future knowledge as educated analysis rather than prophecy, how to sound useful without sounding supernatural.
“What about internal conflicts?” Geoffrey asked. “The barons won’t remain unified after Runnymede.”
“No,” I agreed. “The charter gets revoked and reissued repeatedly. There’s an entire civil war afterward, the First Barons’ War. Royalist forces against the barons attempting to enforce the charter.”
I paused.
If I couldn’t get home, I was apparently going to live through that war personally. Comforting thought.
“Who wins?” Aldwin asked.
I forced myself back to the table.
“It’s complicated,” I said. “King John dies during the conflict. His heir, Henry, is still a child, and eventually both sides negotiate some version of compromise. Officially everyone claims victory. In reality the balance of power shifts away from absolute monarchy.”
“That sounds remarkably like the barons won,” Aldwin observed.
“They did,” I said. “They just didn’t entirely realize it at the time.”
Geoffrey looked up from his writing.
“You speak about these events like a historian rather than a prophet,” he said slowly. “How certain are you actually? You avoid specifics whenever possible.”
The question tightened something unpleasant in my stomach because the truthful answer was complicated.
“Less certain than I’d like,” I admitted.
“I was a curator. I studied surviving records and scholarship. The Magna Carta is one of the most documented political events in history where I come from, but scholarship isn’t the same thing as certainty.
The broad shape is reliable. The details become murkier. ”
“So you could be wrong,” Aldwin said flatly.
“Yes.” I nodded. “About specifics. About dates. About individuals. But not about the major historical movements.”
Aldwin folded his arms.
“So we’re gambling on patterns.”
“You’re gambling on eight centuries of accumulated historical scholarship,” I corrected. “Which is honestly a better information network than anything currently available to you.”
“Why should we trust any of it?” Aldwin pressed. “You’re one woman repeating books written by men who weren’t present either.”
The irritating thing was that it was actually an intelligent question.
I’d spent so much time trying to survive the time-travel problem that I hadn’t fully confronted the historical-methodology problem.
“Because the scholars I’m drawing from had access to sources that no longer exist,” I said slowly, thinking through it even as I spoke.
“Records destroyed by time. Accounts lost in wars and fires. The historical record surviving into my century is incomplete, but it represents the combined preservation efforts of hundreds of generations.”
I looked toward Geoffrey.
“I’m useful for strategy,” I said. “Not tactics. I can explain long-term patterns. I can’t predict individual battles.”
Geoffrey set down his pen. “That may be more useful than you realize,” he said quietly. “Most men can anticipate the next few months. Very few can recognize which families or alliances matter ten years later.”
“That’s exactly what I mean.”
“Speaking of useful,” Geoffrey said, sliding another parchment toward me, “my father wants the household accounts reviewed before Runnymede. The steward’s Latin is…” He paused delicately. “Interpretive.”
I looked down at the account roll. This should have been easy, after all, I had spent eight years cataloguing medieval documents.
I had graduate-level Latin, had literally taught paleography workshops. None of that prepared me for the reality of actual medieval bookkeeping.
The abbreviations looked like someone had attempted to invent shorthand while actively fighting the alphabet. Entire words collapsed into symbols I’d never seen before. Numerals wandered freely between systems. Scribes apparently treated consistency as a personal insult.
I stared at the parchment for a very long time. “This says…” I began uncertainly.
“Fifteen bushels of rye,” Geoffrey supplied without looking up.
“I was going to say fifty.”
“The mark over the numeral indicates fraction.”
I squinted at it.
In retrospect the mark was obvious.
“Right,” I said with dignity. “Naturally.”
“Of course.” His tone suggested he believed me approximately as much as I believed myself.
I managed three more lines before failing spectacularly again.
“This one says…” I frowned harder. “Salt?”
“It says candles.”
“Wonderful.”
“The next one is salt.”
“How are these entirely different symbols?”
“The steward created personal shorthand twenty years ago and apparently sees no reason to stop now.”
I set down the parchment with the quiet despair of a woman discovering her expensive education had betrayed her completely.
“I spent years studying medieval manuscripts,” I informed him. “And I cannot read your grocery list.”
“I can write you a key.”
The offer came without mockery. Without condescension. Just simple practicality. Which somehow made it more embarrassing.
“A key would be appreciated,” I admitted.
Geoffrey wrote one immediately, neat explanatory notes in the margins translating the steward’s chaotic abbreviations into something approaching civilization.
I returned to the accounts afterward with slightly improved success.
Probably.
Aldwin abruptly shoved back from the table, his chair scraping loudly against the floor.
“I’m done with this,” he announced. “Geoffrey, she’s either useful or she isn’t. Sitting around discussing historical theory won’t change that.”
Then he stalked out of the hall looking very much like a man resisting the urge to punch masonry.
“He doesn’t trust me,” I observed.
“No,” Geoffrey agreed mildly. “But he’s beginning to believe you’re not a spy, which is improvement. Aldwin prefers things he can quantify. You are difficult to quantify.”
“That sounds suspiciously like liability.”
His mouth twitched slightly.
“Come with me.”
“Where?”
“You’ve spent three days inside this hall. Another day and you’ll begin blending into the stonework.”
I looked reluctantly at the accounts still waiting for me, then at Geoffrey. Then back at the accounts.
“Fine,” I sighed.
The stables occupied the far side of the bailey, warm and low-roofed and smelling overwhelmingly of hay and horse. Four enormous animals occupied the stalls with the serene confidence of creatures fully aware humanity existed primarily to feed them.
I stopped in the doorway.
I knew horses existed.