He inclined his head once, as if gratitude made him uncomfortable and he wished to be done with it quickly.
“Come inside. Edith will have food. You will eat before you drink anything else.”
She wanted to argue but the stable tilted as she found herself looking past him to the tower.
The words formed inside her, clear and terrible.
I fell through time.
She didn’t say them, nor would she. Not yet. Maybe not ever.
But she knew. Heaven help her, she knew. Somehow that old sword and the storm had carried her out of every plan she’d ever made and dropped her over seven centuries in the wrong direction.
The worst part, the part that would trouble her later when she lay awake beneath a sheep-smelling blanket listening to a castle older than her country breathe around her, wasn’t the terror. The terror made sense. The grief made sense. Even the ridiculous, fizzing urge to laugh at the thought of Bree trying to explain to her mom made sense in a cracked sort of way.
The worst part was when Thomas stepped beside her and guided her back toward the hall, his body angled between her and the yard, his voice gruff and low as he told a gawking boy to get back to his work, the floor that had dropped out from beneath Amelia did not feel, for one treacherous heartbeat, entirely like falling.
It felt the smallest bit like being caught.
THOMAS
By his reckoning, Thomas had until Michaelmas before the whole of Ashcombe came down around his ears.
Amelia had been beneath his roof for three days before he understood she might be the very thing that kept the stones standing.
He hadn’t meant to keep her. That had been the truth of it from the first moment he found her in the stables, sprawled in the hay with her wild red hair escaping its pins, her strange gown torn and muddied, and three stable lads shrieking as if the Devil himself had dropped through the thatch.
Thomas had meant to hand her over to someone else as soon as she was steady enough to stand without swaying. The nuns at Evesham, mayhap. A respectable widow in the village. Anyone but him.
A lone woman with no kin, coin, and a habit of odd speech was precisely the sort of trouble a baron under the king’s suspicion could not afford.
He had said as much to Edith.
Twice.
He had also suggested, with what he considered admirable restraint, that someone ought to keep Mistress Quinn busybefore she wandered back to the tower, asked another witless question in the bailey, or drank small beer on an empty stomach and told half his household about dentists again.
Edith had looked at him in that way she had perfected when he was seven years old and had come into her kitchen with a split lip, a stolen honey cake, and the absolute conviction that he had been wronged by everyone living.
“And where will you send her, then?” Edith had said, her hands deep in dough, flour dusting the brown skin at her wrists.
“A lone woman with a cruel husband most likely looking for her.” She scowled. “Will ye put her outside your gates, my lord? Then you may as well cut her throat here and save her the journey. It would be kinder.”
Thomas hadn’t appreciated the image. He had appreciated it even less because she was right.
“She is not my concern,” he had said, which was the sort of thing a man said when he already knew it was a lie.
Edith had snorted. “Saints preserve us from foolish men. Everything inside your walls is your concern. That is what being lord means, though you’ve been trying not to for all those years you spent away soldiering.”
He had scowled at her.
“Folk are saying she ran,” Edith said after a time. “From a husband. A cruel one, by the look of her when you found her, half-dressed, frightened out of her wits, and no one to speak for her. Let them say it. ’Tis a tale that holds water better than the one the stableboys are telling.”
The one the lads were telling involved the fair folk, a bolt of lightning, and Thomas’s best grey horse being chosen as some manner of messenger between worlds. It had already cost him half a morning of Perkin refusing to enter the stable without a sprig of rowan tucked behind each ear and another tied around his belt for good measure.
So. A runaway wife she was.
It was not a perfect tale, but ’twas a tale people understood. Women ran from cruel husbands often enough, though few made it far, and fewer still landed in a lord’s stable wearing silks the color of a summer sky and odd shoes with heels like weapons. The tale stopped the worst of the talk, and gave the household something ordinary to talk about instead of the fae folk.