Chapter 5
AMELIA
Amelia woke at dawn with a crick in her neck, a wool blanket that smelled of sheep, and the absolute certainty that she could fix everything if she approached the problem in the correct order.
It was, she thought, the first sensible thought she’d had since falling through the floor of the world.
For one breathless moment she lay very still in the dim room, listening to the castle wake beneath her. Someone was coughing near the hearth. A dog scratched, shook itself, and let out a sigh as dramatic as any bride’s mother after too much champagne.
Far below, a woman’s voice snapped at someone to stir the embers, and another voice answered in words Amelia understood only in pieces.
Smoke threaded up through the rafters, thin and bitter, catching in her throat.
The wool beneath her cheek prickled. Somewhere outside, something that sounded like a goose declared war on the morning.
None of it was normal.
But normal had apparently taken a sabbatical without submitting the proper paperwork, and Amelia had survived years of impossible schedules, drunk tech bros, three hundred corporate attendees with dietary restrictions, and one outdoor fundraiser where the ice sculpture had melted into the shrimp tower.
She could do this. First she’d get up, then she’d gather facts.
She could locate the point at which reality had wandered off the agenda and drag it back by the collar.
Step one: find the wedding.
Step two: find Bree.
Step three: find a phone, a car, a person with a laminated badge, a Marriott, a police officer, a single blessed electrical outlet. Anything normal would do.
The night before had been a smear of smoke, candlelight, and too many staring faces.
There had been a cup of something that was not quite beer and not quite safe, a woman named Edith unzipping her ruined silk dress with the brisk practicality of someone field-dressing a deer, and Mr. Dark and Broody standing in the doorway like a wall that had learned to scowl.
Amelia remembered him saying merde at the ceiling when one of the serving girls asked if she was faery-touched. She remembered laughing, which had been a mistake, because the little bit of drink had gone straight to her head and made the hall tilt at the edges.
Morning was different. Morning was for solutions.
She pushed herself upright and found that every part of her body objected.
Her knees were sore. Her palms still carried the tender sting of the fall in the tower, and when she flexed her fingers, the tiny cut on her knuckle gave a sharp little throb, as if reminding her that the sword had been real.
“Nope,” she whispered. “Not starting there.”
She wrapped the wool blanket tighter around her borrowed kirtle, though it did little against the damp that seemed to have settled into the stone and into her bones.
Someone had left a pair of battered slippers near the ladder, ugly things that looked as if they had been designed by a person who hated feet.
Amelia slid her feet into them anyway, because her beautiful heels had been tossed in the fire unless one of the stableboys rescued them and then, most likely, they were currently being worshipped as faery relics.
She went down the narrow steep stairs, stepped over a sleeping dog the size of a coffee table, and paused at the edge of the hall.
The place looked different in daylight, though not better.
The rushes on the floor were flattened and sour beneath her borrowed shoes.
Smoke curled up from the hearth, where two women were prodding life back into a sulky bed of coals.
Men slept on benches and against walls, wrapped in cloaks, boots still on, as if falling asleep wherever one stopped moving was a perfectly reasonable household arrangement.
A boy carried an armload of wood past her, blinked at the sight of her and her hastily braided hair, and nearly walked into a post.
Amelia gave him a weak smile.
He crossed himself.
“Super,” she muttered, and let herself out into the gray.
The morning smelled of wet earth, horse, and some kind of soap that made her eyes sting.
Rain had left the yard a churned mess of mud and puddles, hoofprints filled with cloudy water, cart tracks cut deep enough to swallow the slippers if she wasn’t careful.
The air held the soft warmth of a summer day after rain, damp pressing against her skin, while geese picked their way along a wall.
She ignored them and headed for the gate.
Beyond the bailey, the land rose gently, and surely, surely, once she climbed high enough, she would see the remnants of the wedding.
The marquee had to be there, sagging a little after the storm, the white canvas streaked with mud.
The fairy lights would still be strung between the posts.
Someone would be folding chairs while someone else shouted into a headset.
Bree, who had married a footballer she’d known for eight entire days because apparently that was the sort of decision people made when they were pretty and chaotic and had never once created a spreadsheet for emotional stability, would be somewhere nearby getting ready to leave on her honeymoon.
Amelia climbed the rise, skirt gathered in both hands. Mud sucked at her slippers with every step. Once, she nearly lost a shoe and had to hop on one foot while yanking it free, which did nothing for her dignity or her mood.
At the top, she stopped.
There was no marquee.
She stood very still, breath caught halfway in her chest, and looked over the land where yesterday had been tents, rented chairs, tasteful floral arrangements, an outdoor bar, a path of crushed gravel, and two footballers arguing over who had last seen the groom’s missing cufflinks.
There were fields.
Long strips of them, gold and brown and stubbled, ran down toward the river, divided by hedges and rough tracks and places where the earth lay dark from recent rain.
She knew the river. That was the part that made her stomach turn cold.
It was the same brown ribbon of water she had seen from the old path yesterday, the same curve below the ruins, except there was no neat arched bridge, no low rail, no sign asking visitors not to climb down the bank.
There was only water, wide and muddy, where a man in a patched tunic was trying to convince three pigs to cross while the pigs, showing excellent judgment, refused.
Beyond the river, where Ashcombe village should have been with a pub with hanging baskets, a postbox, a church noticeboard, and a row of honey-colored cottages made expensive by proximity to history, there was a village. But not the village she was staying in. Not the village from the brochure.
Low thatched roofs crouched along a track of mud. Smoke crawled out of holes in roofs and drifted across the fields. A woman bent over a bucket near a well. A skinny cow nosed at a fence. No cars. No signs. No tidy lane. No telephone wires. No distant hum of traffic.
Her planner’s list went silent. For years, the list had been there before she opened her eyes.
Check the calendar. Confirm the vendor. Email the client.
Pay the deposit. Return the call. Make the plan.
Fix the problem. The list had walked beside her through every ugly surprise life threw at her, neat little boxes waiting to be ticked, because if a thing could be listed, it could be managed.
There was no box for this.
“Okay,” Amelia said, and her voice came out so small the damp air swallowed it. “Okay. That’s…not ideal.”
She would return to the hall, find Edith, and find the Lord Ashcombe, who looked as if he had personally intimidated three wars into behaving and ask him why everything looked so different?
She would ask plain questions and receive plain answers and then decide what sort of breakdown was appropriate.
That was when she caught sight of the tower.
The sight stopped her like a hand pressed hard to the center of her chest.
It was the same tower that Amelia had stood inside a day ago in pale blue silk and skyscraper heels, soaked at the hem, complaining to a brass plaque because the storm had ruined her hair, and because the old tower had seemed like the perfect escape from a footballer who didn’t understand why she wasn’t throwing herself at him.
She remembered the sign. The oldest surviving structure on the site, c.
thirteenth century. She remembered rain falling through because the roof had been gone for centuries.
And of course, she remembered the red cord, the rusted sword, the silly little notice asking guests not to climb on the stonework, as if Amelia had ever been the sort of woman to climb on anything in heels.
It wasn’t a ruin now.
The tower stood whole at the corner of the bailey, squat and gray and solid beneath the pale morning, with a roof on it, a door set deep into the stone, and shuttered openings like dark eyes.
It was not moss-furred and broken. It was not a charming backdrop for photographs and champagne. It was simply there.
Her mouth went dry. The ground seemed to shift beneath her.
Amelia reached for something, anything, but there was only air and wet wool and the tower standing where a ruin should have been.
Her slipper caught on a stone. She stumbled, fought for balance, and went down hard on one knee in the cold mud.
For a moment she stayed there, one hand braced in the muck, breath coming too fast.
“It’s a set,” she whispered. “It’s a very good set.”
The words fell flat. Even she didn’t believe them.
No set smelled like this. No reenactment was this thorough.
No historical wedding experience included hungry children, frightened stable boys, handmade hinges, mud under her fingernails, and a lord with scarred knuckles who looked at her as if she were a riddle he hadn’t decided whether to solve or kick out.
She pressed her muddy hand to her mouth. The small, cold voice inside her, the one she’d been stuffing into a mental closet since she’d opened her eyes in the hay, spoke very clearly.
You know.
Amelia closed her eyes.
She did know.
Somehow, she didn’t fall apart. Later, she might consider that the greatest achievement of her day, ahead of not throwing up and not screaming at the pigs.
She wanted to sink down into the wet grass and stay there until someone found her, wrapped her in a silver emergency blanket, and said words like concussion and shock and perfectly understandable.
But falling apart was not a step, and if she gave in to it now, she might never find the edges of herself again.
So she got up.
Mud clung to her knee. Her palm was slick with it. She wiped both hands uselessly on the wool blanket, then regretted that, because the blanket already smelled, and now it looked as if she had wrestled the sheep and lost.
“Fine,” she said to the tower. “Fine. You win round one.”
The tower didn’t respond, which was rude, but probably for the best.
She made her way back down the slope and into the bailey.
A pair of women hauled buckets from the well.
A boy carried a basket of onions almost as large as his chest. Chickens darted through the yard with the lawless confidence of creatures who knew no one had the energy to stop them.
Near the stables, a cart stood half-sunk in the mud, one wheel crooked, while three men argued over it in the grim, unhelpful manner of men everywhere confronted with a repair.
Thomas was there with his sleeves shoved up over his forearms, dark hair still damp from the morning mist, mud on his boots and a smear of something dark along one wrist. The scar at his jaw looked pale against the roughness of his stubble, and the lines of his face were set in that stern expression that seemed to have been carved there by weather, war, and other people’s foolishness.
He was listening to one of the men explain something with both hands while looking as if he had already lost patience three sentences ago.
Amelia stopped walking.
It was a deeply unfair thing, she thought, to be hurled into a nightmare and find the nightmare supervised by a man who looked like that.
“Do not say that out loud,” she muttered to herself.
Thomas turned his head as if he had heard her. His gaze found her across the yard, moved over the blanket around her shoulders, the mud on her skirt, her face, and sharpened.
He said something to the men, then strode toward her.
“Where have you been?”
The words were abrupt even though his voice was not. There was a rough edge to it, yes, but beneath that was something else, something that didn’t fit neatly with scowls and scars and the large sword at his hip.
“Looking for the wedding,” Amelia said.