Chapter 14
Fourteen
DARCY
The worst conversations of my life had always begun quietly, without alarms or shattered glass or anyone shouting for help, because disaster didn’t need theatrics when it meant to do real damage.
Sometimes all it required was a closed door, a man who wouldn’t quite meet your eyes, or your own name spoken in a voice that made your stomach drop before the bad news had even reached you.
Wulfric didn’t say my name. He waited until the riders who’d brought word of Harold’s death had eaten, until Godwin had taken them aside to hear the details again and the children had been driven from the fire after asking enough gruesome questions to make even hardened men uncomfortable.
Around us, the camp slowly settled beneath the darkness, the cooking fires banked low, the smoke trapped near the ground beneath the heavy air, while somewhere beyond the shelters Gilda informed Wystan that if he asked one more time how exactly the king had died, she would demonstrate the matter with the nearest blade.
“Walk with me.”
There were several answers available, most of them involving sudden illness or an urgent need to inspect something far away, but since Wulfric possessed the expression of a man who had spent the last hour taking apart everything I’d ever told him, and arranging the pieces neatly inside his head, I followed him without a word.
That alone should have warned him something was terribly wrong.
We walked beyond the shelters and sleeping places, beneath trees that still shed the remains of the afternoon rain whenever the wind stirred their branches.
My wool gown dragged damp around my ankles, and the cloak carried the faint, stubborn perfume of horse no matter how often I aired it, while my boots, now scratched and caked with mud, sank into the dark leaf mold with every step.
Neither one of us said a word. At last, he stopped beside a narrow stream that cut through the trees, black water moving between stones furred with moss, and although the camp remained close enough for us to hear the occasional burst of laughter or the murmur of voices, anyone who wished to eavesdrop would have needed to crawl through a holly thicket.
Wulfric turned to face me.
“Tell me.”
That was it. There was no accusation or anger, and somehow, that made it worse.
I folded my arms beneath my cloak, dreading what was coming.
The mist had darkened his hair at the temples, and there was a nick along his jaw he hadn’t bothered tending.
Dried mud streaked one boot almost to the knee, yet he stood with the same stillness I’d seen before the battle, shoulders broad beneath the dark wool of his cloak as patience settled across his face in a way that told me I could either speak now or stand beside the freezing stream until Christmas.
Assuming Christmas still happened after the country had been conquered.
“You knew Harold would die,” he said.
“Yes.” I shivered as the wind blew across the water. The stream moved between us with cheerful little splashing noises, unconcerned that England had just fallen to pieces.
“This is going to sound insane.”
“I have known you some weeks.”
For the smallest moment his mouth shifted, though whether from humor or exhaustion I couldn’t tell.
There was no graceful beginning, because there is no graceful way to inform an eleventh-century Saxon lord that you were born almost a thousand years after his death and arrived in his world by touching cursed jewelry at an antiques fair.
“I’m from London,” I said.
“I know this.”
“No. You know the name, but not my London.”
His eyes narrowed slightly, and because he was Wulfric, I found myself taking a breath and trying again.
“The London I come from has millions of people. Houses and buildings everywhere, some so tall you’d have to lean back to see the top, and roads crossing the whole country. At night there are lights in every street and every house, except when people forget to pay the bill.”
His brow furrowed. “What bill?”
“Not important.”
“It sounds important.”
“It’s deeply irritating but not relevant.”
His face suggested otherwise, but he let it go.
“We have machines that carry people faster than horses, and others that fly.”
“Fly.”
“Through the air.”
“Aye, I understood the word.”
“Just checking.”
He wasn’t finding me particularly charming, which under the circumstances was fair enough.
“We can speak to people hundreds of miles away and hear them as clearly as I hear you now, and we have medicines that can stop infections like Gilda’s before they become deadly. Water runs through pipes into houses, hot or cold, whenever you want it.”
Wulfric stared at me for a long moment. “Whenever you want it.”
“Yes.”
“That seems wasteful.”
“Honestly, sometimes it is.”
None of this was helping, but the ridiculous bits were easier than the rest, and Wulfric seemed to understand that, because he didn’t hurry me.
“I worked for the fire brigade,” I said after a moment. “That part was true. Everything I told you about my work was true.”
I had to look down at my hand, at the round burn from the brooch that had faded until only the faintest mark remained.
His hand moved halfway toward mine before he seemed to realize what he was doing, and that tiny, absurd gesture nearly broke me more thoroughly than his anger would have.
I stared at the dark water instead.
“My partner at work, Brian, died eight months before I came here. There was a warehouse fire, we went inside, and he didn’t come back out.”
Wulfric’s expression changed so completely that for a moment I saw not the lord or the warrior but the man who had once sat beside Aelfwyn while fever took her beyond anything he could do.
“I couldn’t save him,” I said, keeping my voice steady through long practice. “Afterward, I kept working because I didn’t know what else to do, and eventually my watch manager told me to leave for a few days before I got myself killed trying to prove I was fine. So I drove south.”
“To Hastings.”
“Yes.”
His gaze shifted instinctively toward the south, though trees and darkness hid the battlefield from us.
“There was a fair beside the sea, with people selling old things. Furniture, jewelry, bits of silver and other things, and there was an old woman there with pale blue eyes and a brooch.”
My voice caught on the last word.
“It was Saxon, or at least she said it was. Round, nearly as large as my palm, with silver darkened almost black by age and animals worked around the edge. There were red stones in the center. The woman warned me to be careful.”
“You were not.”
“She told me to hold it only if I meant to, which in retrospect was a very dramatic thing to say when she could simply have refused to hand over the cursed jewelry, but I took it. The stone lit up, and everything disappeared.”
Wulfric went still.
“I heard the old woman say two words before the world turned upside down.”
“What words?”
“Find him.”
His gaze sharpened.
“Find whom?”
“I didn’t know.”
The answer sat between us, suddenly much larger than it had sounded inside my own head, and although Wulfric’s face revealed very little, something moved behind his eyes.
“I woke on the beach,” I continued before I lost my nerve. “Your beach. Except the pavilion was gone, the road was gone, and instead of tourists there were ships and soldiers and smoke. The brooch had disappeared.”
He looked at my hands. “And you came from…”
“The year 2026.”
There was only silence as he continued staring at me.
“Nine hundred and sixty years from now,” I added.
“I can count.”
Rain whispered through the leaves above us, and somewhere far off a night bird called while Wulfric looked at me as though the answer to every question he’d asked since the day we met had finally arrived and was considerably worse than expected.
At last he said, “Show me.”
I frowned. “Show you what?”
“The thing that carried you here.”
“I told you, it’s gone.”
His jaw tightened. “You hid it.”
“No.”
“Lost it in the sea?”
“I searched the beach until men with swords became the more urgent problem.”
He turned away, pacing several steps along the stream with one hand at the back of his neck, and there was something so ordinary about the movement that my chest tightened.
“My clothing,” I said quietly. “The way I speak. The things I know.”
When he faced me again, disbelief remained in his eyes, but it had been joined by the fierce, relentless calculation I knew so well.
“You knew Harold would come south.”
“Yes.”
“You knew where William had landed.”
“Yes.”
His voice roughened. “You knew England would fall.”
There it was, not the magic or the future, but that my country would fall.
“Yes.”
Wulfric looked away. For several breaths he didn’t say anything, and I understood that no matter how much of this story concerned me, the part that mattered most to him was the one where his country had become a memory in someone else’s history.
“I didn’t know everything,” I said. “History remembers kings and battles. It remembers who won, who died, where armies marched, but it doesn’t remember villages like Ashford.
It doesn’t remember Gilda or Tova or whether Wystan survives long enough to become as irritating an old man as he clearly intends to. ”
Then Wulfric asked, “Why did you not tell me?”
I closed my eyes briefly.
“I tried.”
“Nay.”
“I did. In my head. Several times. They all went badly.”
“Why?”
The single word stripped away every joke I had left as I rubbed my thumb over the faded mark in my palm.
“Because I barely believed it myself. Because I didn’t know you, and because people in my time would think I was ill if I told them this story, and they have psychiatrists and electricity and documentaries about things that can’t possibly happen.”
I looked at him then, standing there in a dark blue tunic and hose, like an old god come down to earth to walk among mortals.
“Because I thought you couldn’t bear it.”
For the first time since we’d left the camp, something in his face broke.
“You believed I could face William’s army, abandon my home, bury my dead, and lead my people through war, yet I could not bear the truth from you?”
“I could hardly bear it myself.”
The words came out louder than I intended, breaking across the stream and the wet trees.
“I woke up and everyone I knew was gone,” I said, and once the words began, I couldn’t stop them.
“Not dead. Worse, perhaps, because they haven’t even been born.
London is fields and mud. My firehouse doesn’t exist. Brian’s grave doesn’t exist. Every person who ever knew me is nearly a thousand years away, and I had no idea whether I’d wake up back on that beach the next morning in my own time or whether I’d lost them forever. ”
My eyes burned, which was unacceptable. I wasn’t crying beside a stream because a Saxon lord had hurt feelings about time travel.
“I didn’t sit down calmly and decide you were too delicate for the truth,” I finished. “I was trying not to lose my bloody mind.”
Wulfric was quiet for so long that I wished he would get angry simply to end the quiet.
Then he said, very softly, “I would have believed you.”
A laugh escaped me, sharp and miserable. “No, you wouldn’t.”
“Mayhap not at first, but you did not give me the chance.”
The words struck harder because he had said them before. Weeks ago, when he’d asked where I came from and I had refused, he’d told me I had not given him the chance to believe me, and standing there now I understood that his hurt had never truly been about secrets.
It was about trust. About whether I believed him strong enough to hold the truth.
“I’m sorry,” I said.
Beyond the trees, someone began singing near one of the fires, a low tune I didn’t know, and a child laughed before Gilda’s unmistakable voice told somebody to stop being a fool.
Ordinary sounds. Living sounds. The sounds of people who had survived one more day.
Wulfric listened to them for a moment before looking back at me.
“I believe you.”
I blinked at him through the mist.
“That was fast.”
“Nay.” His eyes held mine. “It has taken weeks. I have sought another answer since the day I found you,” he continued. “For your speech. Your garments. Your odd ways. None fit.”
I wanted to laugh with relief, to step into him and feel his arms close around me. Instead I remained where I was, because the truth had not erased the distance between us. It had revealed it.
Wulfric’s gaze lowered to my empty hand.
For one foolish second, I wished I could show him the brooch, give him proof of something I could hold and understand.
The cold had worked its way through my cloak and into my bones, yet that wasn’t what made me shiver, because for all I knew, the brooch was gone forever. Or maybe it would appear at some random time and drag me back to my own time. And for the first time since I’d arrived, I didn’t want to go back,