Chapter 17
Seventeen
DARCY
Wulfric came looking for me after dark with the expression of a man who had either solved a difficult problem or was about to create one.
I was sitting on a low stool near the stores shelter, my cloak wrapped tightly around me while I scraped the last of the evening pottage from a wooden bowl.
The stuff had started out months ago as a grayish insult involving barley, onions, and something Gilda claimed was pork, though the evidence had been inconclusive.
Now, either the cooks had improved or my standards had collapsed so thoroughly they were lying facedown in the mud.
Around us, the settlement was settling for the night.
Rain whispered through the trees, light enough to cling to the branches without driving everyone indoors, while smoke from the cooking fires drifted low beneath the damp leaves.
Somewhere beyond the shelters, a baby protested bedtime with remarkable stamina, two men argued over a missing axe, and the goat was attempting to eat a boot.
“I have something for you,” Wulfric said.
I lowered my spoon, staring as Wulfric folded his arms across his chest, which only made the dark wool of his tunic pull more tightly over his shoulders and biceps.
“Something good, like a present, or another task?”
He smiled and held out his hand. “Walk with me.”
I set the bowl aside. “That is considerably more ominous.”
“You have spent too long amongst suspicious men.”
“I arrived in your century surrounded by spears.”
“Aye.”
“You personally threatened to have me tied up.”
“You were strange.”
I snorted. “Still am.”
He led me away from the fires, beyond the newest shelters and the timber frames that would become houses if the weather gave us enough time before winter.
The rain had darkened his hair, turning the lighter strands near his temples the color of old gold, while droplets clung to his short beard and the shoulders of his cloak.
He still wore his sword, because successfully negotiating a future for several hundred people did not mean one could relax and wander about unarmed.
The ground softened beneath my boots as we reached the edge of the clearing. There, the settlement noise faded until I could hear the rain ticking through dead leaves and the stream moving somewhere beyond the trees.
“Wulfric?”
He stopped beneath an old oak whose branches spread black against the clouded sky.
“Aye?”
“If this is about another problem, I’d rather you just tell me. The last time someone asked me to take a walk after dark, we discovered half the flour was wet.”
“There is no problem.”
“That is exactly what someone says before introducing a problem.”
His eyes warmed. “Will you cease speaking for the space of one breath?”
“Probably not, but you’re welcome to try.”
He reached into the leather pouch at his belt as a bolt of fear spiked through me. I watched his hand close around whatever lay inside, watched the subtle shift in his face as he looked down at it, and saw the odd satisfaction that had brought him to find me.
“Wystan found this near the stream,” he said. “The earth there was churned badly during the fighting, and he thought it silver.”
My heart skipped a beat.
“I nearly told him to give it to Godwin for the stores, but when I cleaned away the mud, I thought…”
He hesitated.
“You thought what?”
His gaze met mine. “I thought of you.”
When he opened his hand, the world stopped spinning. For one suspended moment, everything went silent. I couldn’t hear the rain moving through the oak or the stream beyond the trees, nor the distant laughter from camp, or even my pulse beating against the inside of my skull.
The brooch lay across Wulfric’s palm. Not the brooch I had touched at the antique fair.
The silver shone in the dim light, bright enough to catch every curve of the interlaced beasts circling its rim, while the garnets at its center burned a deep, dark red.
The hinge was whole. The pin on the back was straight and wickedly sharp.
It was new.
I had held this brooch in my palm nearly a thousand years from now, had seen those same dragons blackened with age, their silver worn smooth. I had seen the hinge corroded, the garnets dulled beneath centuries of dirt, the pin bent by time.
Lost. Found, and lost again. My breath left me as I forced myself to breathe.
“Darcy?” Wulfric’s pleasure disappeared. “What is it?”
“That’s the brooch.”
His brow furrowed.
“The one that brought me here.”
The rain seemed suddenly louder as he looked down at the silver in his hand, then back at me, and I watched understanding move slowly across his face.
“This? But you said it was old.”
“It was.”
He glanced again at the shining metal. “This is not old.”
Wulfric took one step closer. “How can it be the same? You said it was lost.”
“I don’t know.”
And I didn’t. I’d spent months making peace with impossible things, yet somehow this was worse, because I could see the whole circle now, the terrible, beautiful shape of it.
This brooch would survive me. Survive Wulfric, Norman kings and plagues and wars, survive cities rising and falling, survive until one wet afternoon in Hastings when an old woman put it into my hand.
Find him.
My hands began to shake.
“Do not touch it.” The fear in his voice nearly undid me. But the brooch had already brought me here once, and perhaps courage was only terror that had finally run out of room to retreat.
I held out my hand. “I have to know.”
His jaw tightened so hard I saw the muscle move, but after everything we’d survived, after every truth I’d hidden and every impossible thing he’d chosen to believe, he didn’t decide for me. Slowly, Wulfric placed the brooch in my palm.
The silver warmed in my hand as the garnets glowed and the world tore open. Light burst between the trees with such force that I cried out, going down on my knees, my fingers closing around the brooch as the forest vanished beneath fluorescent lights and glass and polished floors.
The Hastings pavilion. The antique fair.
Real, not a memory. Rows of crowded tables stretched before me beneath electric lights, silver fish knives gleaming beside chipped porcelain and framed paintings.
A woman in a red waterproof coat walked past carrying a paper cup, while somewhere close by a child whined for chips.
The sounds came next. Traffic, a horn, the hiss of tyres over wet pavement. Voices layered one over another, hundreds of them, speaking the English of my century. Then a siren rose beyond the pavilion, faint at first, then louder as I swayed.
Wulfric shouted my name.
I looked over my shoulder to see him on one knee in the wet leaves, one hand braced against the oak, his face pale as the impossible roar of my world crashed through the quiet forest. He couldn’t see it clearly.
I knew that from the way his eyes searched the light without finding anything to hold on to, but he heard it.
The engines, brakes, and sirens. All the things I had tried to explain with words that had never been enough.
Now he knew. Not believed, knew. I reached for him, but he pushed himself upright before I could touch him.
“Go.”
For one stupid second, I thought I had misheard.
“What?”
His face looked carved from stone except for his eyes.
“You said you had no road home.”
The siren wailed behind me. “I didn’t.”
“You do now. Go, Darcy.”
Everything I had lost came rushing back so quickly it hurt. Hot water, electric lights, medicine that could have saved Gilda without three nights of terror. Tea bags, toilets, my own bed and takeout. The firehouse with Hassan, Ellis, and Brian’s empty locker.
London in the rain. A world where I knew the rules. I could step forward and have all of it again.
Wulfric stood on the other side of nearly a thousand years and didn’t ask me to stay, didn’t speak of the settlement or the children, didn’t tell me they needed me. He didn’t offer duty as a chain because he understood, better than anyone, exactly how tightly I had bound myself with it.
“I love you.” He cleared his throat. “I love you enough to know I cannot make your world smaller so mine may keep you.”
My eyes burned.
“Wulfric…”
“Go home, my heart.”
And there it was, the open exit I had spent my whole life searching for.
I’d always known where the doors were, how many people stood between me and safety, how long a stairwell would remain passable and what route to take when the first one failed. Even before Brian died, some part of me had lived that way, measuring risk and keeping myself ready to move.
Afterward, I had made a whole life of it. Run toward the fire. Get everyone out. Never stand still long enough to admit what I wanted. The strange thing was, now that the exit stood open, I finally understood I hadn’t been trapped here at all.
I looked at the electric lights, at people who didn’t know England had fallen while they browsed old spoons and toast racks.
Then I looked at Wulfric. The grumpy Saxon lord who knew when I hadn’t eaten, who taught me that some things were worth standing still to defend. The man who had lost everything and still found the courage to build again.
I threw the brooch into the light as the pavilion vanished. Sound collapsed inward, the siren cutting off abruptly.
Wulfric stared at the empty darkness behind me.
“You did not go.”
“No.”
“Why?”
Honestly, men. I crossed the space between us, caught the front of his tunic in both hands, and looked up at him.
“Because I love you, you impossible man.”
Something broke open in his face.
“I love you,” I said again. “Not because I’m trapped here. Not because your people need me. Not because an old woman with terrible customer service told me to find you.”
His laugh escaped rough and startled.
“I choose you,” I said.
Then he kissed me. There was nothing careful about it, nothing hesitant left between us, only his hands in my hair and rain on my face and the fierce relief of being held and cherished by a man I had crossed centuries to find.