Chapter 2
AMELIA
Present Day—England
There were exactly four things on Amelia Quinn’s itinerary for Saturday afternoon, and getting cornered by a drunk footballer named Gaz was not one of them.
She’d built the itinerary herself. Color-coded it on the flight over, because Bree had talked her into flying across the pond to England for a wedding to a man she had known for eight whole days, and when one’s beloved, ridiculous, slightly ditzy cousin decided to marry a professional footballer before the jet lag had finished unpacking, someone in the family needed a plan.
Amelia was very, very good at plans.
Plans were sensible. Plans kept the floor from dropping out from under you. Plans made sure the hotel reservation existed, the return flight had not been accidentally booked for March, and the bride remembered that legally marrying a man required more than champagne, cheekbones, and a feeling.
The schedule said the ceremony ran until one-thirty, drinks on the lawn until three, dinner under the marquee at four.
Nowhere did it say Gaz will breathe prosecco into your face and ask if you’ve ever dated a man with a testimonial.
“A what?” Amelia said.
“A testimonial.” Gaz swayed.
He was very large, very golden, and very much married, just last week, in fact, to one of the bridesmaids, though apparently none of that was relevant.
“It’s a match they put on for you. For your service to the club. Big honor.”
“Congratulations,” Amelia said. “That sounds structurally significant.”
That delighted him.
It was the wrong thing to say.
Everything she said to Gaz turned out to be the wrong thing, because the right thing, please go away, was not something a maid-of-honor-adjacent cousin could say at the wedding of Bree Quinn to Declan “Deck” Donnelly, midfielder, twenty-three, owner of four sports cars and, as of eight days ago, a fiancé.
Now husband.
A husband Bree had apparently acquired the way other women acquired vacation sandals. Brightly, impulsively, and with no thought at all to whether they would still fit by winter.
Amelia loved Bree. She did. Bree had been sunshine in human form since they were children, all blonde hair, big feelings, and the absolute certainty that the universe liked her personally.
When Bree called from England and said she’d met the love of her life while on vacation, Amelia had assumed she meant a pastry chef, a rescue dog, or possibly a pair of boots.
Not a footballer with a fantastic jawline and an enormous signing bonus.
“You have to come,” Bree had said. “Please. I can’t get married without you.”
“You’ve known him eight days.”
“Almost nine.”
“That doesn’t make it better.”
“It does if you’re romantic.”
And somehow, that had been that. Amelia had rearranged two client meetings, paid far too much for a last-minute flight, packed three emergency phone chargers, and come to England alone because the invitation had said plus one, and Amelia had stared at that blank space for a full minute before clicking no.
Not because she was sad about it. She was busy. That was different.
Besides, bringing someone to a wedding required having someone to bring, and Amelia’s most consistent relationship over the last two years had been with her calendar app. It never forgot her birthday, but only because she had programmed it not to.
Bree, meanwhile, had known Deck for eight days and was glowing like a woman in a perfume commercial. Deck kept looking at her as if she’d invented beer. Every time his hand settled at the small of her back, Bree smiled without even turning around, as if some part of her already knew where he was.
Eight days.
Completely insane.
And, somehow, a little bit lovely.
Amelia hated that thought.
The venue, at least, was doing a great deal of the heavy lifting.
Ashcombe Castle sat on a green rise above a river the color of weak tea, and it was a ruin, properly, gorgeously ruined, the kind of place the English seemed to grow like other countries grew corn.
Half the curtain wall still stood, grey stone furred with moss, and at the far end, away from the marquee, the string quartet, and the small herd of footballers, a single round tower reached up against a sky that had been making promises about rain all afternoon.
Someone had strung the whole thing with fairy lights and white roses. It looked like a magazine cover. It probably looked like the inside of Bree’s head, which had always been a more romantic place than Amelia’s.
“So anyway,” Gaz said, leaning in, “do you want to—”
“I would love to,” Amelia said, “get a drink. I’ll be right back.”
She was not coming right back. She was a planner, and she had identified an exit.
Amelia left her champagne flute on the corner of a flower arrangement and walked with purpose, the way she walked through airports, and into rooms full of vendors who were about to tell her the linens hadn’t arrived.
Past the quartet. Past Bree, mid-laugh, one hand on Deck’s lapel.
Past her aunt, who was crying into a napkin and telling everyone she had always known Bree would marry nobility, which was apparently what they were calling midfielders now.
Across the wet grass that was eating her ridiculous skyscraper pale blue satin heels one careful inch at a time, all the way to the far tower, where the fairy lights blinked, the roses smelled heavenly, and there was, blessedly, no one at all.
The tower had a doorway but no door, an arch of cool dark stone, and a little brass plaque bolted to the wall beside it.
THE KEEP TOWER, it said. The oldest surviving structure on the site, c. 13th century.
Below that, a smaller line read: Please do not climb on the stonework.
“I’m in heels,” Amelia told the plaque. “Of course there will be no climbing.”
Inside, it was a single round room, open to the sky three floors up, the floor worn smooth and scattered with the kind of fine grit that gets everywhere.
It smelled of stone and rain-about-to-happen and, faintly, of the centuries, which wasn’t a real smell, she knew that, but she’d have sworn to it anyway.
It was quiet in a way the lawn hadn’t been quiet all day.
No Gaz. No quartet sawing through Ed Sheeran for the fourth time. No well-meaning aunt asking whether Amelia was seeing anyone special, which was family code for please explain why you are nearly thirty and still arriving places alone.
Just her own breathing and the hush of old walls.
“Okay,” she said softly, to nobody. “Okay. This is better.”
That was when the sky made good on its promises.
One moment the doorway showed pale afternoon sunlight, and the next the rain came down like someone had upended a bath, fat and loud and instantly soaking the six feet of grass between her and any other shelter.
The marquee was a hundred yards away. Her beautiful shoes would be ruined.
Going out there meant arriving at dinner looking like a drowned cat in borrowed satin, and Gaz was probably wandering around out there, and frankly the tower was dry.
Amelia did the math and stayed put.
“Smart,” she said, to keep herself company. “Sensible. We wait it out.”
She turned a slow circle, hugging her elbows against the chill, and that was when she noticed the sword.
It lay along a waist-high ledge of stone that might once have been a window seat, on a bracket of black iron, behind a single loop of red cord that didn’t so much guard it as suggest, politely, that one might think about not touching it.
It was old. Not movie-old. Really old. The blade had gone the dark grey-brown of river mud, pitted and dull, nicked along one edge like a much-loved bread knife.
But the hilt. Set into the crosspiece, where the grip met the blade, was a stone. A blue stone, fat as a robin’s egg, and even in the rain-dimmed light it caught what little there was and held it, deep and clean and strangely alive. A sapphire.
It had to be glass. Nobody left a real gemstone out behind a length of cord in an open tower at a wedding venue where half the guests had been drinking since ten. But it didn’t look like glass. It sparkled like a perfect afternoon sky.
There was a plaque for this too, smaller, foxed with damp.
THE ASHCOMBE SWORD.
Said to choose its bearer.
Per local legend, the lord who carried it could not be parted from what he loved.
Several attempts to remove the sword from Ashcombe ended in failure. The blade was said to return before dawn.
“That’s a terrible business model,” Amelia murmured.
She leaned in for a closer look at the stone, because it really was extraordinary, and because there was no one to tell her not to.
Also because Bree would absolutely want a picture of it later, and Amelia’s phone was in the tiny satin clutch currently tucked under her arm, along with lipstick, tissues, and the emergency safety pins Bree had already needed twice.
The sapphire seemed brighter the closer she got. Not glowing, of course not glowing. That would be ridiculous.
Still, it held the light oddly, as if the blue went deeper, like the bottom of the ocean.
Amelia could see herself reflected in it, distorted and small.
Red hair pinned up with more determination than grace.
Freckles standing out because she had forgotten to reapply concealer.
Green eyes narrowed in suspicion at a piece of antique weaponry.
“You are not special,” she told the sword.
Thunder rolled overhead, low and long enough to make the old stones seem to answer.
Amelia took half a step back.
“Fine. You’re a little special.”
She didn’t mean to touch it. That was what she told herself later. She only bent close, one hand braced on the cold ledge, the other drifting up to hover over the fat sapphire, when the tower floor, slick under one heel, somehow shifted half an inch.
Her hand came down to catch herself.
The edge of the blade, dull as it was everywhere else, had kept one mean little burr of metal near the hilt. It caught the knuckle of her first finger and opened it neat as a paper cut.
“Ow. Damn.”
A single bead of blood welled up, bright and round.
She watched it fall before she could stop it, the way you watch a glass go off the edge of a counter, unable to catch it. It landed on the flat of the old blade.
A second drop followed, onto the stone of the ledge, dark against the pale grit.
The sapphire blazed. There was no other word for it.
The blue caught fire from the inside, filling the room with light, and outside the storm folded itself into one enormous white crack of lightning that didn’t stop, didn’t flicker, just held.
The tower vanished.
The rain vanished.
The faint distant sound of a string quartet murdering Ed Sheeran vanished.
For one impossible second, Amelia thought of Bree laughing under the marquee, Deck looking at her as if the whole mad world had finally made sense, and the empty space beside Amelia’s own name on the wedding reply card.
Then the floor, the sensible, color-coded floor she had stood on her whole careful life, finally, completely, dropped out from under her.