Chapter 15
Fifteen
DARCY
By morning, everyone in camp knew something had changed between Wulfric and me, which was irritating, since neither of us had actually done anything except tell the truth beside a stream and then spend the rest of the night avoiding each other.
Gilda noticed first. She sat near the largest fire with her injured arm tucked beneath a thick wool cloak, the color finally returning to her face after several frightening days, and watched me ladle pottage into a wooden bowl as though I were a particularly disappointing entertainment.
“You’ve put barley in that twice.”
I looked down to see that she was right. The pottage, which had begun the morning as a reasonable mixture of oats, barley, leeks, onions, and something Anya insisted was turnip, now contained enough grain to repair a section of Roman road.
“I’m improving it.”
“By making mortar?”
“People need strength.”
I handed the bowl to Wystan, who eyed it suspiciously.
“Can I have one without the improvement?”
“No.”
He sighed with the deep suffering of a boy who had recently survived Norman soldiers, fire, hunger, displacement, and now, worst of all, breakfast.
Beyond the cooking fires, the camp stirred beneath a pale autumn sky, the ground silvered with frost where the trees allowed the cold to settle.
Smoke rose through bare branches, straight at first and then bending toward the east as the wind strengthened, carrying with it the smells of wet wool, wood ash, horses, and bread baking beneath an overturned iron pot.
Wulfric stood with Godwin near the edge of the clearing, listening to one of the scouts.
He wore a dark green tunic beneath his cloak, the wool fitted close across shoulders that had been occupying far too much of my attention recently, and his hair, damp from washing, curled slightly at the ends where it brushed his shoulders.
There was nothing unusual about the sight of him standing among his people with a sword at his hip and worry carved between his brows.
Except now he knew. The future. London. Brian. The fire brigade. The brooch. The impossible distance between the year I had left and the year where he stood. And somehow, he believed me. That thought had kept me awake for most of the night.
“Darcy?”
I jumped, sloshing pottage over my hand.
Gilda smiled. “Very graceful.”
Her smile widened, but before she could make whatever filthy observation about Wulfric that was clearly preparing to leave her mouth, a shout came from beyond the western edge of camp.
“Fire!”
Every part of me changed. One moment I was standing beside a pot, irritated with Gilda and trying not to watch Wulfric from across the clearing, and the next the world narrowed into wind, fuel, distance, and people.
I dropped the ladle.
“Where?”
A boy came running between the shelters, face white. “The western wood. Smoke beyond the ridge.”
Wulfric was already moving. Whatever lay between us could wait, the fire couldn’t.
We climbed the western ridge at a run, Godwin and six others following with axes, hooks, blankets, and leather buckets.
Frost cracked beneath our boots where the ground remained shaded, but the air changed before we reached the top, losing the clean bite of morning as smoke settled against my tongue and I stopped.
Wulfric turned sharply. “What is it?”
I lifted one hand. “Wait.”
The wind came from behind us, cold against my damp hair, while beyond the ridge a gray-brown column of smoke rose above the trees and flattened eastward.
Toward camp.
My stomach dropped.
“How far?” Wulfric asked.
“Not far enough.”
We reached the crest, and the forest below us came into view. Flames crawled through bracken and dead leaves, not high yet, except where they caught fallen branches and climbed in sudden bright bursts. Men moved beyond the smoke, small figures among the trees, running toward the north.
“Soldiers,” Godwin said.
“Normans?” one of the men asked.
“Mayhap,” Wulfric said. “Mayhap Saxons fleeing them.”
The ground had been wet for days, but the wind was rising, and beneath the living trees lay weeks of fallen leaves, dry twigs sheltered from the rain, dead bracken, and branches that would burn once enough heat reached them.
Fire didn’t care who won England, it only cared what would feed it.
“We need everyone moving,” I said. “Now.”
Wulfric looked down the slope, reading the land.
“The stream bends south of camp.”
“Good.”
“There is another beyond the eastern ridge, deeper and wider.”
“How far?”
“Less than a mile.”
“Can everyone manage it?”
His jaw tightened. “Not quickly.”
“We don’t take the direct path,” I said, seeing it as I spoke. “The smoke will cut across it before the people get through. We move north first, then east along the lower ground.”
Wulfric studied the wind-bent smoke. “There is a deer path.”
“Wide enough?”
“For one cart. Mayhap two abreast on foot.”
“Then that’s our route.”
Godwin was already turning.
Wulfric caught his arm. “Send runners. No carts except food, the injured, and children too small to walk. Leave the rest.”
I looked at him. Months ago, he might have tried to save everything, now he didn’t hesitate.
“Tell them what matters,” he said.
I nodded. “People first.”
He held my gaze for the space of one breath.
The camp was controlled chaos as children cried, goats objected, chickens escaped with the supernatural talent poultry possessed for making emergencies worse, and somewhere near the shelters a man was trying to load a wooden chest onto a cart already filled with sacks of grain.
I grabbed one end.
“What’s in this?”
“My wife’s cups.”
I stared at him.
“Are they magic?”
“What?”
“Do they stop fire?”
“No.”
“Then leave them.”
His wife appeared, shoved the chest off the cart, and said, “I never liked them, anyway.”
We moved people in groups so no one vanished in the smoke. Wystan counted children twice, because his first count included the goat, while Gilda, despite her wounded arm, stood near the path and struck anyone who tried to turn back with a walking stick she had somehow acquired.
“You should be on a cart,” I told her.
“You should be less tiresome.”
A gust of wind pushed smoke through the trees. It wasn’t thick, not yet, but close.
“Move!” I shouted.
The column stretched along the deer path, Wulfric at the front with men clearing fallen branches while I moved up and down the line, checking the old, the injured, the frightened, the ones whose breathing changed before panic had a chance to become contagious.
By the time we reached the eastern slope, the smoke had darkened the sky behind us.
Then someone screamed.
I turned to see Tova standing alone beside the path.
“Where’s Anya?”
The girl’s face crumpled. “The baby.”
Every muscle in my body went cold. “What baby?”
“Edith’s. She was sleeping.”
Anya had gone back.
I looked toward the smoke as Wulfric caught my arm before I took one step.
“No.”
“Anya went back. There’s a baby.”
His hand tightened.
“Darcy.”
The way he said my name should have stopped me.
It didn’t.
“I know fire.”
“Aye, but you know not the forest.”
“And you’ve got two hundred people moving because you know the forest. Keep them moving.”
His face changed. “Do not do this.”
Something in the words almost reached me. Almost. Then the wind shifted, bringing with it the sharp crack of burning timber as I pulled free.
“I’m sorry.”
The path back vanished and reappeared through smoke as I ran, familiar landmarks changing by the second as the light turned strange and orange beneath the trees.
I wrapped part of my cloak across my mouth, staying low where I could, reading flame movement, listening for the deeper roar that meant the fire was finding heavier fuel.
“Anya!”
No answer. I found her near the edge of camp, stumbling from Edith’s shelter with the baby wrapped beneath her cloak.
“I couldn’t leave her.”
I took the baby because Anya was coughing too hard to carry her safely, and together we started back.
The fire had moved faster than I expected. A burning branch crashed across the path behind us, sparks exploding into the air, and Anya screamed.
“Forward!” I shouted. “Don’t look back.”
We reached the ridge coughing, filthy, and alive, to find Wulfric waiting.
He took the baby from me, handed her to Edith without looking away from my face, then seized my shoulders.
I had never seen him that angry.
“You went back.”
“I had to.”
“Nay.”
The word came out rough enough to cut. Behind him, everyone had gone very quiet. Wulfric pulled me farther from the others, though not nearly far enough for privacy.
“There was a child.”
“There is always someone.”
His hands were still on my shoulders.
“You think I don’t know that?” I wiped the soot from my face.
“You think that means you must be the one to go.”
“I was the one who could,” I yelled.
“And if you had not returned?”
I opened my mouth, but nothing came out.
Wulfric’s voice dropped. “What then, Darcy?”
I thought of Brian’s radio going silent, of standing outside the warehouse while men went in looking for him, and of every second stretching until hope became knowledge.
For the first time, I understood the story from the other side.
Someone waiting, listening, not knowing whether the person they loved would come back.
Wulfric’s face blurred.
“You are not only the hands that save them,” he said. “Do you understand me?”
Before I could answer, Godwin came running up the slope.
“My lord.”
Wulfric turned but didn’t release me.
Godwin’s face was grim.
“Riders on the south road. Normans.”
The forest burned behind us. Ahead, somewhere beyond the eastern ridge, our people waited beside the stream with nothing but what they could carry.
Wulfric said, “We have no more ground to surrender.”
And for the first time since I’d fallen into 1066, the question was no longer how to escape what was coming. It was how to build something strong enough to survive it.