Chapter 6
AMELIA
It wasn’t the answer she meant to give. It simply slipped out.
His brows drew together. “The wedding?”
“Never mind.” She pressed her hand against the blanket, leaving another muddy streak. “You need help with the cart?”
His gaze lingered on her face a moment longer, and she had the strangest feeling he knew she was using the cart the way a drowning person used a plank. He merely looked back at the crooked wheel and jerked his chin.
“Hold where I tell you, and do not put your fingers near the iron.”
“That sounds ominous.”
One corner of his mouth twitched.
Amelia followed him to the cart because she needed something to do with her hands, and because standing still made the whole world crowd close.
Thomas put her where he wanted her with a few words and a brief touch to her elbow.
The touch was gone before she could decide whether to be offended by being positioned like a chair or grateful that someone seemed to know what came next.
She braced the cart when he told her, held the heavy iron pin when he put it in her palm. She watched.
Really watched.
The small, cold voice began filing evidence with the awful efficiency of an auditor.
No planes crossed the sky. Not one. No white contrails, no distant engines, no hum of something moving too high to see, no cars slowly driving down a non-existent lane. Only birds wheeling over the fields and the wet slap of boots in mud.
The cart was rough, worn, patched where wood had split, its iron fittings dark and uneven from a smith’s hammer.
The rope was real rope, coarse enough to sting her fingers.
The axle smelled of old grease. The men beside Thomas wore wool and linen and leather, all of it stained by work instead of designed to look stained by a costume department.
One of them had three teeth and didn’t seem troubled by the lack.
A boy holding a horse by the bridle had a scar cutting through his upper lip that no neat modern stitch had ever touched.
Everyone was thin in a way that made her think, uneasily, of hunger rather than those weight loss shots that were all the rage.
A woman crossed the yard carrying bread on a board. A child darted after her, barefoot in the mud. Somewhere, a hammer rang against metal, uneven and sharp. Smoke drifted low from the kitchens, mingling with the stench of animals, people, and wet hay.
There wasn’t one machine-made edge anywhere. No cell phones, sneakers, zippers, or glasses.
“Push,” Thomas said.
The men heaved. Amelia pushed where he told her to push. The cart lurched, the wheel settled with a heavy thunk, and Thomas slid the pin into place with a quick, competent motion that made all three men fall silent in relief.
He straightened and wiped his hand on a rag. “There.”
“You…know how to do everything?” Amelia said, because her nerves had apparently chosen that moment to speak without permission.
His brow lifted. “It’s a wheel.”
“Right. Of course. Everyone knows wheels. Basic wheel knowledge.”
The man with three teeth stared at her.
Thomas looked at the man. “Go see if Walter needs the second cart.”
The man went at once, and the others followed with the eagerness of people released from a strange conversation. Thomas waited until they were several steps away before turning back to her.
“You are staring again.”
“Am I?”
“Aye. It unsettles the men.”
“Sorry. I’m trying to decide whether I’m unsettled enough for all of us, or if I should let them have some too.”
He studied her face, and whatever he saw there made him give a brief nod. Thomas didn’t seem like a man given to large public demonstrations. But the scowl gentled at the edges, and his voice lowered.
“What did you see that troubles you?”
Amelia looked past him at the tower, whole and not in ruins, then at the muddy yard, the thatched roofs beyond the wall, the men leading horses, the smoke, the river, and the endless fields pressing in on all sides.
She could ask him. She could ask and have the answer. Once she did, the thin paper wall she had built between suspicion and fact would tear clean down the middle.
“Lord Ashcombe,” she said, and was proud of how steady her voice sounded. It belonged to someone very capable, someone who didn’t have mud on her knee and terror clawing against her ribs. “Can I ask you something, and you’ll just answer?”
“Aye, and Thomas is fine. No need to call me Lord Ashcombe, not in this ruin.” He ran a hand through his hair.
Now or never. She took a breath. “What’s the date?”
He frowned, as if this was not the question he had expected. “The feast of Saint Bartholomew is in a fortnight, I think. Ask Edith if you want the saints kept properly. She knows such things better than I.”
“No, I mean…” Amelia swallowed. Her throat felt lined with ash. “The year. What year is it?”
For a long moment, he simply looked at her.
She watched him decide again what everyone here seemed to be deciding about her. Madwoman. Liar. Faery. Runaway wife. Some poor creature who had hit her head and lost her wits.
The choices moved behind his eyes, and then he did what he’d done since he found her in the hay. He answered her as if she were a person deserving of the truth.
“The Year of Our Lord twelve hundred and sixty-five,” he said carefully.
Twelve hundred and sixty-five.
The words didn’t strike her all at once. They traveled through her slowly, from ear to mind to blood, shutting doors as they went.
Seven hundred years and change between her and Bree’s ridiculous wedding.
Between Amelia and her apartment with its labeled bins and good sheets bought on sale after Christmas, her calendar app, inbox, dry cleaner, her standing coffee order, her favorite black flats, the emergency sewing kit, her passport, driver’s license, and her return flight.
Seat fourteen-C. Aisle. Chosen deliberately because she liked to get up without climbing over strangers.
At some point, a very bored airline employee was going to say her name into a little speaker three times and then give her seat away.
Bree probably thought Amelia had hooked up with Gaz and wouldn’t check on her until she returned from her fabulous honeymoon.
At some point, someone would realize she was gone and likely decide she’d gone home early. The world would continue on without her, bright and loud and plugged in, while Amelia stood in the mud in the year twelve hundred and sixty-five trying to remember how to breathe.
“What year did you think it was?” Thomas frowned at her.
She looked at him.
There was a cup sitting on the cart, one of the men’s cups, filled with the weak breakfast beer everyone here drank as if water were a dare issued by Satan. Small beer, Edith had called it. Safe enough for children, apparently, though Amelia had some questions in regards to medieval childcare.
Amelia picked it up and drained half of it in one long pull.
Thomas’s expression changed at once. “Mistress.”
“It’s fine.” The words came out too bright. “It’s small beer. Practically water you all said. Responsible, even. I’m being very responsible.”
“You have not eaten.”
“I had a canapé yesterday.”
His frown deepened. “I do not know this word.”
“No, of course you don’t, because canapés are seven hundred years away, along with dental floss and deodorant and the little pens hotels leave on the nightstand.”
The yard had gone soft at the edges. That was ridiculous. She had consumed half a cup of medieval breakfast water. She wasn’t drunk. She was…chemically inconvenienced.
“I have a dentist appointment on Tuesday.”
Thomas went still.
“I have a deposit down on a venue in October,” she continued, because apparently her mouth had filed for independence.
“Not for me. For work. Obviously not for me. I don’t even have a plus one, which Bree mentioned three times before marrying a man she met eight days ago, because that makes perfect sense but me falling through time into the thirteenth century does not. ”
“Mistress Amelia,” Thomas said, very quietly.
“And I have a return flight. Seat fourteen-C. Aisle, because I am not an animal. And there will be a gate agent with very flat hair and dead eyes saying, ‘Passenger Amelia Quinn, please report to the desk,’ and I won’t report to the desk because I’m here, where everyone drinks beer before breakfast and the tower has a roof and you are… ”
She pointed at him, then stopped, because pointing felt unwise when the person in question was large, armed with various daggers and swords, and who knew what else, and staring at her as if she had begun speaking in tongues.
“I am what?” he asked.
“Smoking hot,” Amelia said.
There was silence.
Then a goose honked somewhere behind her, which didn’t help.
Thomas blinked once. “Smoking hot?”
Amelia’s soul left her body, circled the yard, saw the lack of viable transportation, and came reluctantly back.
“I said…not,” she said. “You are not…helping.”
“That is not what you said.”
“It was heavily implied.”
His mouth did the almost-moving thing again. This time it was much worse, because she could tell he was trying not to smile.
“You are pink,” he said.
“Because I’m having a completely normal reaction to a normal piece of information, which is that it is twelve hundred and sixty-five and I have misplaced my entire life.”
She set the cup down carefully on the cart because if she kept holding it, she might throw it at the tower. “Also, I would like to file a complaint with a sword.”
At that, all trace of humor left his face.
“What sword?”
Every instinct she owned slammed both hands over her mouth, metaphorically and several seconds too late.
Amelia stared at him. The sword. The fat sapphire. The blood on her knuckle. The storm splitting the air apart. The tower whole behind him. The year.
She could tell him.
She could stand in the muddy yard and tell this hard-eyed medieval lord that yesterday she had attended a wedding in the ruins of his home, cut her hand on a sword that she hadn’t yet found, and fallen through time like Alice down the worst rabbit hole in recorded history.