“I’m from there,” she said. “Not the shire. Not France. Not anywhere you know. I’m from seven hundred years from now in a country called America. I was in England for my cousin’s wedding.”
Hob’s axe lowered by an inch.
Huck stopped praying.
Thomas dared not breathe.
Amelia’s words poured out fast now, impossible things tumbling over each other.
“I was at my cousin’s wedding in the ruins of Ashcombe, and it started to storm so I went into the tower because a footballer wouldn’t leave me alone, and I found the sword. This sword, but it was old. Rusted. The sapphire was still there. I cut my hand, my blood hit the blade, lightning struck, and I woke up in your stables.”
She dragged in a breath.
“My name really is Amelia Quinn. But I’m not a widow and I’m not married. I don’t have kin here because they haven’t been born yet, which sounds insane, I know it does, but it’s true. I had a job. I planned events. I had an apartment in Chicago. Ihad a return flight and a dentist appointment and a mother who probably thought I’d been murdered in a castle tower because I vanished with no purse, no phone, nothing.”
Thunder shook the solar.
Amelia wiped her face with both hands. “Please say something.”
Thomas looked through the doorway again.
Seven hundred years.
He could not fathom it. The ruin. The strange lights. The woman on her knees. The grief that did not need translation. The pale blue thing clutched in her hand as if it were a relic.
He looked down at Amelia’s bleeding knuckle, at the sapphire light pulsing beneath her blood, at the woman he loved standing with one foot in his world and one in a place no prayer, horse, ship, or army could ever reach.
“You told me,” he said slowly, “that you had misplaced your entire life.”
She laughed through a sob. “That’s what you’re starting with?”
“And the dentist, whatever that is, was real?”
“Very real.”
His brows drew faintly together. “And the canned wine.”
“In my defense, that also sounds fake in my century.”
Hob made a choked noise that might have been terror or amusement.
Huck looked heavenward as if asking whether canned wine required doctrine.
Thomas stepped closer to Amelia. “You should have told me.”
The gentleness of his own voice surprised him.
“I know.”
“Not because I would have understood,” he said. “I don’t understand. I doubt I’ll understand if I live to be as old as Walter pretends he isn’t. But you carried this alone.”
Amelia’s face crumpled.
Thomas took her hand.
“Seven hundred years,” he said.
“Yes.”