The sapphire seemed brighter the closer she got. Not glowing, of course not glowing. That would be ridiculous.
Still, it held the light oddly, as if the blue went deeper, like the bottom of the ocean. Amelia could see herself reflected in it, distorted and small. Red hair pinned up with more determination than grace. Freckles standing out because she had forgotten to reapply concealer. Green eyes narrowed in suspicion at a piece of antique weaponry.
“You are not special,” she told the sword.
Thunder rolled overhead, low and long enough to make the old stones seem to answer.
Amelia took half a step back.
“Fine. You’re a little special.”
She didn’t mean to touch it. That was what she told herself later. She only bent close, one hand braced on the cold ledge, the other drifting up to hover over the fat sapphire, when the tower floor, slick under one heel, somehow shifted half an inch.
Her hand came down to catch herself.
The edge of the blade, dull as it was everywhere else, had kept one mean little burr of metal near the hilt. It caught the knuckle of her first finger and opened it neat as a paper cut.
“Ow. Damn.”
A single bead of blood welled up, bright and round.
She watched it fall before she could stop it, the way you watch a glass go off the edge of a counter, unable to catch it. It landed on the flat of the old blade.
A second drop followed, onto the stone of the ledge, dark against the pale grit.
The sapphire blazed. There was no other word for it.
The blue caught fire from the inside, filling the room with light, and outside the storm folded itself into one enormous white crack of lightning that didn’t stop, didn’t flicker, just held.
The tower vanished.
The rain vanished.
The faint distant sound of a string quartet murdering Ed Sheeran vanished.
For one impossible second, Amelia thought of Bree laughing under the marquee, Deck looking at her as if the whole mad world had finally made sense, and the empty space beside Amelia’s own name on the wedding reply card.
Then the floor, the sensible, color-coded floor she had stood on her whole careful life, finally, completely, dropped out from under her.
THOMAS
August 1265—Ashcombe Castle, England
Thomas Ashcombe wanted three things that morning, and the sound of screaming was not among them.
More than anything, he wanted his horse and the green track that followed the Avon south of the village, where a man could ride for an hour without anyone asking him to decide something.
Since Evesham, every conversation seemed to begin with a problem and end with Thomas being expected to solve it. Walter wanted decisions. Hob wanted men. Edith wanted flour. The villagers wanted roofs, fences, seed grain, justice, answers, and occasionally miracles, and while Thomas had managed one victory on a battlefield, he had yet to discover how that qualified him to mend every broken thing within ten miles of Ashcombe.
And he wanted, though he would sooner have admitted to dancing naked in the chapel than spoken the thought aloud, for the inside of his skull to be quiet. Just for an hour.
The dead had a way of following him these days. Not ghosts. Thomas did not believe in ghosts.
Memories were burden enough.
A strip of red cloth hanging from a washing line became a fallen banner. A shout from the yard became a man screaming beneath a horse. Some mornings he woke reaching for a sword before he remembered he was home and not standing ankle-deep in mud while men died around him.
Home.