I left my father’s chamber with that thought heavy in my chest, and did something I would later recognize as the first truly foolish decision of the day.
I went back to the tower to talk to her again, telling myself it was strategic. I was still telling myself that when I reached the door.
Harper was pacing when I entered. Three steps in one direction, three steps back, her arms wrapped around herselflike she was holding something together. She stopped when she saw me.
“You’re going to kill me,” she said.
Not a question.
“Not yet,” I replied, which was probably not as reassuring as I’d intended. “My father believes you’re a spy.”
“I’m not.”
“So you’ve said. The problem is that saying it doesn’t make it true.”
“The psalter makes it true,” Harper said desperately. “If I was working for someone, if I’d been planted here, why would I ask to see the psalter? Why wouldn’t I just pretend to be a local woman, claim I was lost from a nearby village?”
“Because you’re clever,” I said, which was unkind, but I was tired and she was probably going to be executed and my head hurt from trying to force logic into an impossible problem. “Because you recognized an opportunity to make your cover seem more genuine.”
“My cover is that I fell through time via a magical medieval manuscript,” Harper said flatly. “How is that a genuine cover for anything?”
“I don’t know,” I admitted. “That’s the problem.”
I left her locked in the tower and went to find Father William. If anyone in the castle might understand theology well enough to recognize whether falling through time was even theoretically possible, it would be him.
Father William listened to the story with the patient expression of a man who’d heard stranger claims at confession, then asked for a moment alone with the psalter.
When he emerged from the chapel an hour later, he was pale.
“The woman is telling the truth,” he said quietly. “Or she believes she is, which may amount to the same thing. But I’ve read that text before, Geoffrey. Not in this psalter, but indoctrinal manuscripts from Rome. It discusses the nature of time, God’s ability to move souls across moments. And there are marks in the margins of that psalter that suggest someone has been working on something. Some kind of incantation or prayer.”
“A prayer to travel through time,” I said slowly.
“A prayer for someone to travel through time,” Father William corrected. “To be called. To be brought forward. I think, boy, that someone inscribed that psalter hoping someone would find it. Hoping someone would read those words at the right moment.”
I thought about the beautiful woman in the tower with her strange clothes and stranger accent and absolute certainty that she’d been cataloging this exact object in a place and time that didn’t exist yet.
“She’s not a spy,” I said.
“No,” Father William agreed. “But that might be worse. That makes her a miracle. And miracles, in my experience, rarely end the way anyone expects.” He frowned. “We must keep this quiet. Tell no one. If your father asks again, say she’s addled her wits while we decide on her story.”
I had that to think about for the rest of the day, which was somehow more complicated than any spy plot.
Three
HARPER
On the fourthmorning of my imprisonment they brought me to the great hall. I’d been expecting it, had seen it coming the way you saw thunderstorms approach across open ground, but I still wasn’t sure exactly what to expect.
The great hall of Thames Castle was the size of a small cathedral and roughly as welcoming. Rough stone walls rose toward a ceiling lost in shadow. A long table dominated the center of the room, and at the head of it sat the Baron, flanked by men who oozed authority.
And then, despite everything, despite the guards on either side of me and the genuine possibility of execution, my brain staged a small mutiny.
The hall wasreal.
Not a museum replica. Not a film set. Not a careful reconstruction from architectural drawings.
Real.