“That’s just my natural glow.”
“Sit.”
Amelia sat on an overturned basket in the shade of the hedgerow and drank water because if she fainted, Edith would never let her forget it. Alyson leaned against her side. “Your hair is coming undone.”
“I know.”
“You look like fire.”
“That sounds dangerous.”
“It’s pretty.” Alyson touched one curl with the reverence of someone approaching a relic.
“My mama had brown hair. Wat says he doesn’t remember, but I do. A little.”
Amelia’s heart folded in on itself as she tucked an arm around the girl before she thought better of it.
“I bet your mama’s hair was beautiful,” she said, because if she said anything else, she would cry.
Alyson nodded. “She sang when she kneaded bread.”
“She did?”
“Mmm. Wat says he doesn’t remember, but he does. He just doesn’t like remembering.”
Changing the subject, Wat asked, “Did we win?”
Amelia looked out over the field. The last sheaves stood upright in golden bundles leaning together against whatever weather came. Men moved like shadows between them. Women gathered any remaining stray stalks. Hob’s voice rumbled somewhere to the left, telling Hugh that if he died from honest labor, Hob would carve the wordsnever stopped talkingon his grave.
Thomas stood at the far edge of the field, dark against gold, scythe resting against his shoulder as he surveyed the work. Walter stood beside him, tablet in hand, and for once did not look displeased.
“We didn’t lose,” Amelia said softly.
Wat considered that with the solemnity of a statesman. “That’s almost winning.”
“Yes,” Amelia said, watching Thomas turn toward them as the first cool wind brushed across the field. “It is.”
A drop of rain struck her hand, then another.
No one shrieked or scattered like they had at her cousin’s wedding. They simply lifted baskets, gathered tools, collected children, and turned toward the manor with the weary satisfaction of people who had done as much as they could before the storm.
The walk back to Ashcombe was slower than the walk out had been. The first rain darkened the shoulders of tunics and dotted the linen of women’s veils. The children splashed through ruts despite half-hearted warnings. Someone began to sing, low at first, then louder, an old harvest song with a tune Amelia didn’t know and words she couldn’t quite make out, but the sound wound through the damp air and made something inside her ache.
Her mother sang, badly and with great confidence, usually Motown while burning pancakes on Saturday mornings. When Amelia was ten, she had thought every mother danced barefoot in the kitchen with a spatula in her hand and bills hidden beneath the fruit bowl until payday. Linda Quinn had never been tidy or punctual, never once remembered to buy the correct size trash bags, but she had loved Amelia with a fierceness that could make a school principal retreat behind a desk.
And now that same woman was somewhere seven hundred years away, facing the worst thing Amelia could imagine.
Not knowing what had happened to her daughter.
The castle came into view, smoky and weathered, its stone walls standing strong. It didn’t look like the ruins she’d seen in her own time. It didn’t look like a tourist stop, or a wedding venue, or the sort of place printed on brochures beside words likeheritageandrestoration.
It looked alive. Threadbare, stubborn, hungry, and alive.
By the time they reached the yard, the rain fell in earnest. Edith herded the children toward the kitchens. Walter guarded his tablet beneath his cloak as if it held the Gospel. Hob carried three scythes over one shoulder and shouted for someone to fetch a dry cloth before rust ruined them all.
Thomas came last, pausing under the gate, rain glistening in his dark hair. Amelia stood near the kitchen door with Alyson’s damp hand tucked into hers, too tired to move and too full of feeling to trust herself to speak.
Thomas looked at the children first, then the baskets, then the tools, then the people moving toward warmth and food.