Chapter 8
Eight
HARPER
Aldwin tried to use the psalter. I found out because Father William came to find me at first light, moving with the speed of a man who had discovered something alarming and had to tell someone else.
I was still pulling my veil into place when he said, “Aldwin is in the chapel.”
By the look on his face, I knew immediately what was happening.
The chapel was cold and pale in the early light. Aldwin stood in front of the psalter’s lectern with his hands pressed flat against the manuscript, his eyes closed, his entire body rigid with concentration.
Thankfully, the psalter wasn’t glowing when Father William and I stopped in the doorway. Afraid to get too close, we simply watched for a long moment.
Aldwin’s shoulders dropped. He opened his eyes and looked at the manuscript with an expression I had never seen on his face before.
Unguarded grief. Then he turned and saw me.
I’d expected anger. Or the defensive hostility he deployed when caught doing something he knew was wrong. Instead he just looked tired.
“It didn’t work,” he said.
“No.” I came into the chapel. Father William remained in the doorway. “What did you intend?”
“Fifteen years back.” Aldwin turned to look at the psalter again. “I stood here for an hour. I thought about it. The specific time. The specific moment. I thought about what I’d tell my father. Which alliances to pursue. Which to avoid. Everything I’d do differently.”
His shoulders slumped. “Nothing happened.”
“Aldwin.” I came to stand beside him. “I told you—”
“I know what you told me.” His voice was flat. “I wasn’t ready to believe it. I thought perhaps I simply wasn’t trying correctly. That if I concentrated on the specific destination—”
“The psalter isn’t a navigation tool,” I said gently. “I told you that.”
“You told me you didn’t know if it was a navigation tool,” Aldwin said. “That’s different from knowing it isn’t.”
“What did it feel like?” I asked. “When you were standing here.”
“Cold,” Aldwin said. “And quiet. Just pages under my hands. Ordinary.”
Ordinary. The word unsettled me more than it should have.
I thought about the morning the psalter had glowed in the archive. The warmth. The pull. The sense of something vast pressing against the edge of my consciousness. I thought about the way the manuscript had reacted to me before, as though some part of it recognized me.
“It called me because of how I was with it,” I said slowly. “Eight years of caring for objects like this one. When I touched it, I wasn’t trying to use it. I was reading it. Attending to it.”
I thought for a moment. “You came here with an agenda.”
He shook his head. “I came here with a need.”
“Yes,” I said. “But the psalter, if it works the way I think it might work, doesn’t respond to need. It responds to…” I searched for the word. “Openness. Attention without demand.”
Aldwin looked at me with the expression of a man who was about to say prove it.
I stepped to the lectern, didn’t think about backward or forward or what I wanted the psalter to do.
I just looked at it the way I’d looked at manuscripts my whole career, with the patient attention of someone who understood that old things revealed themselves on their own schedule, not yours as I placed my hand lightly against the manuscript.
Nothing happened. There was no warmth. No pulse beneath the vellum and no shimmer of gold light. Just cool parchment beneath my palm and the faint smell of candle wax drifting through the chapel. The silence settled slowly around us.
Aldwin watched my face carefully. “Well?” he asked.
I swallowed. “I don’t know.”
The psalter had once dragged me through eight hundred years of history with impossible violence. It had glowed in my presence. I had felt it react to me. Now it sat motionless beneath my hand like nothing more than an old book.
And the sudden possibility that I might never go home again hit me hard enough to make breathing briefly difficult as my left knee almost gave way.
Aldwin exhaled slowly. “So it will not answer me.”
I looked down at the silent manuscript. I wasn’t sure that was the problem.
“Could you teach me? How you were with it?”
I looked at him. The tiredness in his face. The stripped-back grief I’d seen for just a moment when he turned from the manuscript.
“Aldwin,” I said carefully. “What happened fifteen years ago?”
He didn’t answer right away. I waited, which I’d learned was the only way to get him to say something he didn’t want to say.
“My father chose the wrong allies,” he said at last. “In a border dispute. The consequences took three years to fully damage us, but the damage was significant. We lost land, standing. We lost…”
He stopped.
“A member of the family. Not to violence. To the cascading effects of a decision made in ignorance that didn’t have to be made in ignorance.”
“Who?” I asked.
“My wife,” Aldwin said. “My first wife. She died in the third winter after the dispute. Not from violence. From the poverty that followed the lost land. From the cold, and poor food, and a castle that couldn’t be properly maintained.”
He said it plainly, like reporting troop movements. “If my father had known which alliance to choose, if someone had told him, she might have lived.”
I was quiet as I listened to him.
“She was twenty-three,” Aldwin said.
“I’m sorry.”
“Your sorrow doesn’t fix anything.”
But he said it without cruelty. Just tiredness.
“No,” I agreed. “It doesn’t.”
I looked at the psalter again. I thought I’d understood the mystery. Not the mechanism, not the rules, but at least the presence of them. The psalter responded to care. To attention. To me. Except now it hadn’t. And that changed everything.
“I can’t promise the psalter would take you there,” I said.
“I can’t promise it would work at all in that direction.
And I need you to hear me when I tell you that even if you went back, even if you told your father which alliance to choose, you can’t know that would save her.
History shifts. Other things change. You might save her from one danger and put her in the path of another. ”
“I know that,” Aldwin said. “I’ve thought about it constantly since the moment you arrived.”
“And?”
“And I don’t care,” he said simply. “I’d take the chance. I’d rather know I tried than spend the rest of my life knowing I had a door and didn’t walk through it.”
I thought about that for a long time, thought about Boston, about my apartment with its uneven floors and overstuffed bookshelves. About coffee shops, my work, electric lights, hot showers, familiar streets. About the life I had assumed was waiting somewhere on the other side of this mistake.
A door.
I had been thinking of the psalter that way too, whether I admitted it or not. A door left half-open. Now I wasn’t sure there was a door at all.
“I understand that,” I said finally.
Aldwin looked at me with something like surprise.
“I thought you’d argue.”
“I’m not arguing. I’m telling you it can’t be forced.” I looked at the psalter. “And I’m telling you I may have been wrong about why it worked. Maybe it wasn’t care or openness. Maybe it wasn’t me at all.”
Father William shifted near the doorway.
“Harper,” he said quietly.
I ignored him because if I looked at anyone and saw sympathy on their face, I might unravel.
Aldwin studied me more closely now. “You thought it would answer you.”
“I thought it might.”
“But it didn’t.”
“No.”
The chapel seemed colder than it had a moment ago.
Aldwin’s gaze moved to the manuscript. “Then perhaps it was made to only open once.”
The words landed with brutal simplicity.
Only once.
I hated him a little for saying it aloud. Mostly because I had already thought it.
“Perhaps,” I said.
He absorbed that silently for a moment.
“That means you may be trapped here.”
“Yes.”
The word came out steadier than I felt.
Father William made a soft sound behind me. Not quite a prayer. Not quite pity.
I kept looking at the psalter. An old book. That was all it looked like now. Vellum. Ink. Gold leaf. Binding. A thing I would once have known how to describe in a catalog entry.
Condition: stable.
Decoration: illuminated.
Provenance: uncertain.
Function: unknown.
Cruel, I thought suddenly.
Then immediately felt ridiculous for resenting an object.
“You cannot teach me,” Aldwin said at last.
“No.”
“And there is no proof it can be used again.”
I took a deep breath. “No.”
He nodded once, as though a decision had been made somewhere inside him.
“For now,” he said, “I’ll stop trying.”
“For now?”
His expression hardened slightly, grief tucking itself back behind armor. “I said what I can honestly give.”
That was probably the best I was going to get. “Then for now,” I said, “thank you.”
He looked at the psalter one final time. Whatever hope had brought him into the chapel before dawn was gone from his face now, replaced by something heavier and older as he turned and left without another word, his boots echoing sharply against the stone floor.
Father William watched him go. When the sound faded, he stepped fully into the chapel.
“You handled that better than I expected,” he said.
“I didn’t handle it well at all.” My voice sounded strange to my ears.
He came to stand beside me at the lectern. The psalter remained still between us. Ordinary,
“I’m sorry,” he said quietly.
That almost undid me. “For which part?”
“For the uncertainty.”
I laughed once, but there was no humor in it.
Father William folded his hands inside his sleeves. “Perhaps it did not answer because the hour was wrong.”
“Perhaps.” All of a sudden I was exhausted.
“Or because the question was wrong.”
“Perhaps.”
“Or because it is not meant to be commanded.”
I looked at him. “Or because it can’t send me back.”
He didn’t deny it. That was worse than comfort would have been. For a long moment neither of us spoke.
The chapel was beginning to warm as the sun climbed higher, thin light slipping through the narrow windows and touching the painted saints along the walls. They looked down at me with solemn, smoke-darkened eyes, as though they knew something I didn’t and had no intention of explaining it.
“I spent years touching old things,” I said at last. “As if enough patience could keep them from disappearing.”
Father William listened.
“I think I assumed the psalter brought me here because I knew how to attend to it. Because I cared about it properly. That made the whole thing feel less random somehow.”
“And now?”
I looked down at the manuscript. “Now I don’t know if I mattered at all.”
The words sat between us, small and terrible.
Father William’s face softened. “I think,” he said, “that being called without understanding why is still being called.”
“That sounds like something a priest would say.”
“It is one of our chief occupations.”
Despite everything, my mouth twitched. Then the smile faded. “What if I can’t go home?”
Father William didn’t answer quickly or try to placate me.
I appreciated that more than I wanted to.
“Then,” he said at last, “you will grieve what you lost. And eventually, God willing, you will build something with what remains.”
I looked toward the psalter again. Build something. Here. In 1215. In a castle where I was still part prisoner, part guest, and part threat.
“I’m not ready for that,” I said.
“No,” Father William agreed. “I wouldn’t expect you to be.”
The chapel had grown quiet again, but not peaceful. Nothing about the silence felt holy now. It felt like an answer withheld.
I stayed there after Father William left, standing before the psalter long enough for my hands to grow cold and my thoughts to become strangely clear around the edges.
The manuscript had brought me here or called me. But today it hadn’t answered. Not Aldwin. Not me.
For the first time since waking in the past, I had no proof that the road behind me still existed. And that frightened me more than anything I had faced since arriving. Because survival was one thing when you believed rescue might eventually come.
It was another thing entirely when the locked door behind you turned into a wall.