Chapter 6
Six
HARPER
Aldwin came back. I had assumed, after his exit from the war room, that I’d seen the last of him for a while, that he’d file me under inconclusive and return to whatever practical violence occupied his days.
Instead he reappeared the following morning while I was in the great hall attempting to decipher a household account roll Geoffrey had left for my Latin practice.
He sat down across from me without invitation and said, “How does it work?”
I looked up from the roll. “How does what work?”
“The psalter.” He said it the way he said most things, bluntly, without preliminary courtesy. “The mechanism. How does a book move a person through time?”
“I don’t know.”
“Guess.”
“I genuinely don’t know, Aldwin. I’m a curator, not a physicist. I was cataloguing it and it started glowing and then I was here. There was no instruction manual.” I frowned at him. “Don’t you think if I knew how it worked, I would have already gone home?”
“Perhaps.” He drummed his fingers on the table. One, two, three, four. Again. He was thinking hard about something he clearly didn’t want to say directly, which I was beginning to understand was how Aldwin operated whenever the subject made him uncomfortable.
“Could it work in reverse?” he asked finally.
I set down the account roll. “You mean could it send me back?”
“No.” He met my eyes for the first time since sitting down. “I mean forward. No, backward. Further back.”
I stared at him as it clicked into place. “You want to travel through time?”
“I want to understand whether it’s possible,” he corrected, which was not remotely the same thing and we both knew it.
“Aldwin,” I said carefully, “where would you go back to?”
The drumming stopped.
“Fifteen years,” he said. “Before my father made certain alliance decisions. Before my brother was sent away for his education and came back thinking like a clerk instead of a soldier. Before…” He stopped. “Before certain things were set in motion.”
I thought about every time travel story I’d ever read. Every warning about changing the past. Every catastrophe born from good intentions.
I also thought about the way he’d said my brother, with irritation layered over something much more complicated.
“The psalter didn’t give me any control over where or when I landed,” I said.
“I didn’t choose 1215. I didn’t choose Thames Castle.
Whatever mechanism exists inside that manuscript, it’s not a navigation device.
It’s more like…” I searched for the right comparison.
“A door that opens under specific conditions to a specific time.” I blew out a frustrated breath.
“At least that’s what I think, but I don’t know for sure. ”
“But you weren’t trying to use it,” Aldwin pointed out. “You said yourself you were only cataloguing it.”
“That’s true.”
“So perhaps lack of intention is the problem.” He leaned forward slightly. “Perhaps if someone touched it with a destination in mind, a particular place or year—”
“Perhaps,” I interrupted carefully. “But even if that worked, changing the past would have consequences you can’t predict.
You alter one alliance fifteen years ago and everything after it shifts.
Maybe Thames becomes stronger. Maybe it collapses entirely.
Maybe Geoffrey never leaves for his education and never becomes the strategist your father needs now. ”
Aldwin was silent for a long moment.
“You sound like Geoffrey,” he said eventually. “He thinks in consequences.”
“Someone in this family should.”
Something in his expression shifted slightly. Not a smile exactly, but less hostility than usual.
“Show me the psalter,” he said. “Not to touch it. Just to see it.”
As we crossed the bailey toward the chapel, he glanced sideways at me with the same expression he usually reserved for battlefield problems.
“Why is your hair short?”
I blinked at him. “It isn’t short.”
“It barely reaches the middle of your back.”
“That is not short where I’m from.”
He looked deeply unconvinced.
Most noblewomen at Thames wore their hair braided nearly to the waist beneath veils and linen coverings. Mine reached just past my shoulder blades, practical by modern standards and apparently alarming by thirteenth-century expectations.
“You’re unmarried,” Aldwin said. “I assumed maidens in your century would wear it longer.”
I stared at him. “Did you just call me a maiden?”
“You object to the word?”
“I object to the conversation.”
Something suspiciously close to amusement flickered across his face before vanishing again.
“Long hair signals health,” he said with a shrug. “Fertility. Family wealth. Women here do not cut it without reason.”
“Well, women where I’m from occasionally prioritize convenience over broadcasting reproductive viability.”
Aldwin made a thoughtful noise at that, as though modern civilization had just become even more incomprehensible.
The family chapel was smaller than I expected and infinitely richer.
Painted saints watched from the plaster walls in faded reds and lapis blues, their solemn faces darkened by decades of candle smoke.
Beeswax candles burned before the altar, filling the air with warm honey and incense thick enough to cling to the back of my throat.
Gold leaf caught the autumn light filtering through the narrow windows and turned the entire room amber.
I stopped just inside the doorway.
In my world, medieval chapels survived as fragments. Cracked pigments beneath museum glass. Smoke-blackened carvings displayed under careful conservation lighting. Historians spent entire careers trying to reconstruct how these places originally looked.
But here nothing had faded yet. The colors were still alive.
Father William kept the psalter in the family chapel behind the altar, accessible but not displayed publicly.
He looked deeply unhappy when Aldwin and I arrived together, and more unhappy still when Aldwin explained why we were there, but he produced the manuscript with the weary resignation of a man who understood that the Baron’s eldest son rarely accepted refusal gracefully.
Aldwin stared at the psalter for a very long time without speaking.
Autumn light slanted through the narrow windows and caught dust in the air above the manuscript pages. Watching it, I found myself wondering again, why me?
“It looks ordinary,” Aldwin said finally.
“Most extraordinary things do,” I replied, pulled back to the moment. “That’s part of how they survive.”
He glanced at me. There was actual curiosity in his face now rather than suspicion.
“Is that true where you come from?”
“Usually. The things that survive centuries tend to look unimpressive. Worn. Fragile. Ordinary.” I looked down at the manuscript. “The extraordinary parts hide inside them.”
Aldwin looked back at the psalter.
“And you think trying to use it would be dangerous.”
“I think trying to use something we don’t understand is dangerous.” I folded my arms. “And I think wanting to go backward and fix things is a very human impulse.”
He looked at me again.
“Why?”
Because the things we most want to change are usually the things that shaped us. Because grief rewrites memory until it starts resembling regret. Because people rarely understand the cost of removing pain from their own lives.
Instead I said, “I don’t know whether the past can be changed,” I said carefully. “But even if it can, the things you’d try to erase would alter everything afterward, including yourself.”
The silence stretched long enough that Father William cleared his throat pointedly near the doorway.
Aldwin stepped back from the altar.
“I’m not finished thinking about this,” he said.
“I know.”
“But for now it remains a question rather than a plan.”
“Yes,” I agreed. “Please keep it that way.”
He studied me for another moment, his expression unreadable, then turned and left the chapel, his boots echoing sharply against the stone floor.
Father William exhaled heavily once he was gone.
“He’s going to become a problem,” he muttered.
“He already is one,” I said. “But that doesn’t necessarily mean he can’t become an ally.”
“Those are not always different things,” Father William observed dryly.
* * *
Geoffrey found me on the castle wall that evening, which had become a habit for both of us without formal acknowledgment. The sun was setting over the river in shades of amber and rose, and I was leaning against the crenellation watching a heron stand motionless in the shallows below.
I recognized Geoffrey by his footsteps before he spoke. That realization felt dangerous in ways I preferred not to examine too closely.
“My brother spoke with me,” Geoffrey said as he came to stand beside me. Not close enough to touch, but close enough that I was aware of his warmth.
“About the psalter?”
“About you.” He paused. “He said you were more reasonable than expected.”
“High praise from your brother.”
“The highest available.”
I heard the dry humor in his voice and felt it settle somewhere inconveniently warm beneath my ribs.
“He also said you told him wanting to go backward and fix things was usually a mistake.”
“I did.”
“Do you believe that?”
I watched the heron standing below us.
“Both,” I admitted. “I believe it and I was managing him.”
“You do that often,” Geoffrey observed. “Hold two truths simultaneously.”
“It’s a survival skill where I come from.”
“It’s one here as well.”
His voice had changed slightly, less formal now.
“Do you regret it?” he asked suddenly. “Coming here.”
“I didn’t choose to come here.”
“I know. But now that you are here.”
The heron lifted abruptly from the water, wings spreading silently against the fading light.
I watched it disappear upriver. “Ask me something easier.”
“I’m serious.”
“So am I.”
I turned toward him then, which immediately felt like a tactical error.
He was watching me with that focused attention he brought to everything, and in the evening light his eyes looked impossibly grey, like winter clouds over water.
“I don’t know if I regret it,” I admitted quietly. “I’m terrified most of the time. I miss things from my own world that I can’t properly explain to you. And I know this…”
I gestured vaguely toward the castle, the river, the fading sky.
“This is the most extraordinary thing that has ever happened to anyone, and half the time I’m too frightened to appreciate it.”
“Half?”
“Most,” I corrected reluctantly.
“And the rest of the time?”
I shouldn’t answer that honestly. The honest answers were already becoming dangerous.
“The rest of the time,” I said slowly, “I find it remarkable.”
“Remarkable,” Geoffrey repeated.
“The history,” I clarified quickly. “All of it. I keep catching myself thinking I’m going to write the most extraordinary academic paper in existence, and then I remember peer reviewers tend to ask difficult questions like how exactly I obtained firsthand observations from 1215.”
I stopped abruptly. I was rambling again.
Geoffrey studied me for a moment. “You’re describing my family castle as a research opportunity.”
“I realize that sounds terrible.”
“It may be the most uniquely charming thing anyone has ever said to me.” He smiled and it lit up his whole face.
Warmth threaded quietly through his voice, genuine and unguarded.
My brain stopped functioning for several deeply inconvenient seconds as I looked at him.
He was already looking at me.
And suddenly the space between us felt dangerously small.