Epilogue
DARCY
Three months later, on a cold morning washed clean by snow, I discovered there were few things more difficult than organizing your own wedding when half the settlement considered itself part of the planning committee and the other half had begun drinking before noon.
“I only moved the benches six feet.”
Anya stood in the doorway of the new hall with her arms folded over a blue wool gown, the color deep enough to make her dark hair look almost black, and regarded me with the tired patience of a woman who had already heard this argument more than once.
“You moved them three times.”
Behind her, Gilda snorted so loudly that a child carrying a basket of winter apples turned to look.
She had recovered from the infected wound with the same stubbornness she brought to everything else, although the story of her near death had grown steadily more heroic with each telling and now apparently involved three Normans, a wolf, and an angel who had personally refused to let her into heaven because she would only rearrange the furniture.
Her arm remained stiff when the weather turned cold, but that hadn’t stopped her from appearing at sunrise in a mulberry gown, her gray hair braided beneath a fresh linen covering, announcing that no bride should be trusted to make sensible decisions on her wedding day.
I pointed out that I had organized evacuations through fire. Gilda had informed me that was easier than planning a wedding.
The hall itself stood where the forest opened toward the eastern stream, larger than the shelters we had built after fleeing Ashford, although calling it a hall suggested considerably more grandeur than it possessed.
Timber walls had been packed with clay and straw, the roof pitched sharply enough to shed the winter snow, while fresh rushes covered the floor and smoke from the central hearth continued to discover inventive ways of avoiding the roof opening and settling into everyone’s clothes instead.
Still, it was warm and mostly dry, and large enough for nearly half the settlement to eat together, provided nobody objected to being elbowed, stepped on, or seated beside one of the Reeveson brothers while they argued about livestock.
Outside, the settlement had changed so completely that there were moments I stood at the edge of it and forgot how temporary everything had once seemed.
Roofs rose between the trees now, proper ones made of thatch or turf instead of cloaks stretched over branches, while animal pens, workshops, and a larger storehouse had gone up along the paths worn solid by months of feet going back and forth.
Beyond the stream, men had cleared fields that would be planted when spring came, and the repaired southern road brought enough traders that I had started keeping careful records of what we exchanged, what we owed, and which merchants needed watching because they had a suspicious habit of counting the same sack of barley twice.
We still paid grain to the Normans, that part hadn’t changed.
England hadn’t healed because I decided to stay, and William hadn’t returned to Normandy in defeat because Wulfric and I kissed beneath an oak tree.
Norman patrols used the road now. Saxon land farther north and east had already changed hands.
News arrived of oaths, seizures, rebellions, punishments, and men discovering that conquest looked considerably less glorious when winter mud reached your knees.
Yet the settlement lived and thrived. Perhaps survival was not victory, at least not the kind men wrote songs about, but more and more I thought the songs had been wrong all along.
Sometimes victory was the child who lived through winter, the roof repaired before the next storm, the field cleared in time for planting, or the stubborn little place built by people who had every reason to disappear and chose not to.
“Darcy.”
I turned.
Wulfric stood behind me wearing the expression of a man who had asked a question more than once and hadn’t enjoyed being ignored.
His wedding tunic was dark blue, almost black where the winter shadows touched it, with embroidery at the neck and cuffs, while a leather belt sat low across his hips beneath the sword he’d refused to remove because, according to him, a man did not stop being lord merely because he married.
I’d informed him that if he wore a sword to the ceremony and accidentally cut anyone, I would consider the marriage cursed.
He asked whether injured wedding guests were a particular custom in my time.
“Yes,” I had told him. “We try not to have them.”
His hair had been combed back from his face and the sight of him standing in the light made me wish for my phone so I could capture his face in this moment, and as Gilda said, his very fine backside.
Before I finished thinking about his backside, he bent, slid one arm behind my knees and the other around my back, and lifted me from the ground as I yelped.
“This is abuse of lordly power.”
“I have only lately discovered its benefits.”
“Put me down.”
“Nay.”
“People are watching.”
“Aye.”
“That doesn’t bother you?”
“Not greatly.”
Over his shoulder, I could see Gilda wiping tears from her eyes, Wystan cheering as though Wulfric had won a tournament, and Godwin drinking from a wooden cup despite the fact that it was barely past midday.
“Wonderful,” I muttered.
Wulfric carried me three yards away from the offending benches and set me down beside Anya.
“There.”
“I can always move them later.”
Anya took my arm before I could make good on the threat.
“You are coming with me.”
“Where?”
“To dress.”
“I am dressed.”
Gilda appeared on my other side. “You are wearing boots.”
“They’ve grown on me.”
“You have wedding shoes.”
“They have soles thinner than pastry.”
“You will survive.”
“That’s easy for you to say. You’re wearing proper shoes.”
Without a word, Gilda lifted the hem of her mulberry gown.
She was barefoot. In winter.
As I stared, she grinned.
Between them, they steered me toward the smaller shelter beside the hall, where my wedding clothes waited on a wooden chest.
I had never imagined myself in a medieval wedding gown, largely because until a few months ago I had considered time travel something that happened in films where sensible people spent half the plot pointing out inconsistencies, but the dress Anya and Hild had made for me was beautiful.
Deep green wool, fitted close through the body before falling in long folds to my ankles, while red and gold embroidery curled around the neckline and cuffs in small interlaced patterns.
Gilda claimed they represented eternity, although Wystan had studied one and announced that it looked more like a worm eating its own tail.
A narrow woven belt fastened at my waist, and over the gown went a warm blue cloak lined with rabbit fur.
I touched the embroidery.
“Who did this?”
Anya smiled.
“Everyone.”
That nearly made me cry before the wedding had even begun.
“Well,” I said, clearing my throat. “That was very kind.”
Gilda adjusted the fall of my cloak.
“Wulfric will enjoy removing it.”
Anya made a strangled sound as I closed my eyes.
“What?” Gilda asked innocently.
“You with the filthy jokes.”
“I said nothing filthy.”
“You were heading there.”
“I still am.”
Thankfully, the bells began ringing.
We had no stone church, only a small wooden chapel and a priest who came once a month from a village farther inland, but someone had hung iron handbells near the hall, and the children now rang them with enthusiasm entirely unrelated to rhythm.
Outside, everyone waited. There were people from Ashford, people from villages I had never known before the war scattered them into ours, traders, farmers, widows, craftsmen, and even two Norman men who had arrived that morning to collect grain and stayed because apparently free food could bridge certain political differences.
Tables stretched beneath rough awnings, loaded with roasted pork, coarse loaves of bread, hard cheese, stewed apples, onions, oat cakes, honey, and enough pottage to drown a modest army. Two barrels of ale stood near the hall.
One contained ale made by Anya. The other belonged to Godwin, and no one had labeled them.
The wedding itself proved shockingly brief after everything required to reach it.
There were prayers, hands joined before witnesses, vows spoken in a mixture of English and Latin, and enough solemn words from the priest to suggest he had been paid according to quantity.
Then Wulfric looked at me and everything else seemed to recede.
For one suspended moment, the winter light, the people, the smoke from the hearth, and even Wystan whispering loudly disappeared, leaving only the man who had found me on a beach while his world burned.
The man who trusted me with his people before he trusted me with his heart, who had placed the road home in my hand and then stepped back, refusing to use love as another kind of chain.
His eyes moved over my face. “You are thinking too much.”
“I’m getting married. It seems appropriate.”
The priest cleared his throat, then Wulfric kissed me. Not scandalously, unfortunately.
By dark, the feast had become everything a wedding feast should be and several things no sensible person would have planned. Wystan cheated at dice while continuing to deny it with the extra die still in his hand, the goat ate part of the priest’s cloak, and even the Normans enjoyed themselves.
The fires had burned low by the time I slipped away to the edge of the settlement, where frost silvered the grass beyond the awnings and voices drifted through the cold in broken pieces of song and laughter.
Wulfric found me there. Without speaking, he came to stand beside me, his shoulder warm against mine beneath our cloaks while the settlement glowed between the trees.
“Do you regret it?”
The question surprised me enough that I turned.
“Marrying you?”
“Aye.”
“Never.”
His fingers closed around mine. After a moment, his gaze returned to the firelight.
“Aelfwyn would have liked you.”
The words came quietly, but there was no guilt in them now, nor the old belief that loving me somehow betrayed the woman he had lost. Once, I might have been jealous of a dead woman, now I understood better.
“I think I would have liked her too.”
“She would have moved the benches.”
“I knew she was clever.”
Wulfric laughed, and I leaned against him while noise from the feast rolled gently through the dark.
I still missed home. There were mornings when I would have traded half a barrel of ale for a hot shower, and days when I would have happily fought a Norman army for antibiotics, a proper cup of tea, or a bra that did not require medieval engineering.
At other times, the loss went deeper, arriving without warning when someone laughed like Brian or when I dreamed of streets lit at night and woke beneath a roof built by men who had never heard an engine.
I missed the people I would never see again.
That would always be true. Yet missing a life was not the same as regretting the one you had chosen, and love, I had finally learned, didn’t erase everything that came before it.
It simply made room beside the grief, beside the memory, until the heart became large enough to carry both.
From the feast came a crash, followed by Wystan shouting that the goat had done it.
Wulfric sighed. With his hand wrapped around mine, we walked back toward the firelight and the people waiting there, toward roofs that still leaked and fields that still needed planting, toward Norman taxes, winter stores, spring mud, future arguments over benches, and every ordinary difficulty that came with building a life instead of escaping one.
For the first time in longer than I could remember, I wasn’t watching for smoke, listening for the alarm, or measuring the distance to the nearest exit.
There was nowhere else I needed to be. Home, I had finally discovered, wasn’t the place you returned to. It was the place you chose to stay.
* * *