The blade came back up, silver-blue moonlight glinting off the beaten metal. “Why not?”
“Simon?” Anne strained to see her superior’s face. He moved closer, ignoring the threat implied in James’s blade. She caught a glimpse of his expression, the pinch of worry between his dark brows. “Am I in trouble for being late, and not alone?”
“No more so than Rachael was,” Simon murmured.
Comprehension dawned, relieving Anne of much of her worry. She hadn’t black-marked herself in the rulebook by making love with the man at her side.
“You both speak in riddles. Make yourselves clear,” James demanded.
“Peace, brother . . . and put your hosen on. Both of you. We have time for you to dress before we must go.”
“Anne?”
“I trust Simon with my life, James. You can, too. More than you yet know.” Stooping, Anne rummaged through the clothing scattered on the ground, separating out which garment belonged to whom by touch, since James’s clothes were of a higher quality than her own.
He hesitated only a moment before accepting his hosen, undershirt and cote-hardie. Setting down his sword, he dressed as quickly as she did, shaking out his boots and strapping on his belt. After sheathing the blade at his hip, he waited while she fastened the last of the buttons on her over-gown, then faced the shadowed silhouette of their visitor.
“We are dressed, as requested. Now, tell me what you mean. Why should I not return to the others?”
“If you had been with them, instead of having followed Anne here, you would have suffered the same fate they just did. A short while ago, a group of Castilian bandits came upon the pilgrims’ camp, ambushed the farmer on watch, and slaughtered the rest in their sleep. Even as we speak, their bodies and belongings are being looted.”
Anne heard James half-draw his sword and quickly put her hand on his wrist. “We are not what you think. Neither of us is in league with the robbers.”
“How do I know that?” James hissed. “You urged me to go back there, then lured me into staying here! How do I know you didn’t decide they would be more vulnerable and thus easier to kill without my protection?”
“Because I didn’t tell her what the fate of the pilgrims would be. Nor could I interfere to save their lives, even indirectly, without it causing irreparable harm to the future. Which, if you continued to live in this time frame, your own presence would also do.”
James struggled to draw his sword. Anne forced it back into its sheath by pinching one of the nerves in his wrist; from his startled hiss, she guessed he wasn’t expecting so much strength from her, nor the sudden pain shooting up his arm. “James, Simon and I are scholars of the past. Literally, we come from the far-distant future. We, and others like us, travel through time by a special means. We immerse ourselves in a time period, in a culture, in a situation, and observe.
“Just like you do,” she stressed. “You chose to travel as a pilgrimage escort so that you could be a student of humanity, to observe people from all stations of life. We do that, too. But because we do it in the past, which cannot be changed overtly . . . sometimes we cannot stop what happens, because it is vital that it should happen.”
“From the future . . . you’re not actually from northern England, are you?” James accused. “Just how much of what you have told me has been a lie?”
“My place of origin, my inheritance, my brother-in-law . . .”
“Your late husband?” he demanded. “Was even that a lie?”
“Only in part,” Anne confessed. “I was married, and my husband did die. It was in May, in the city of Abbeville in France, not at home in northern England as I claimed. And it was in the Year of Our Lord 1940, in an era when what you know of as the many states of the German kingdom was at war with France. I was an anthropology student – someone who studies societies and cultures and the ways how people live. My husband was also a scholar; he was giving a lecture on mathematics at a school in northern France when there was an unexpected, rapid advance of the German army. He died in the attack. I saw him cut down, and ran. I probably would have perished, too, if I hadn’t seen an exchange student sneaking for the basement of the university building, and followed her instead.
“I wanted to warn her to get out of there, to follow me in making a run for safety. But instead of being trapped and killed as washappening to the others elsewhere . . . she told me she was going to rescue me. She did it by transporting me even further into the future, offering me sanctuary and a new way of life.” Anne hesitated, then continued. “I honestly did not know what fate would befall the others tonight. All I knew was that I had to leave the rest by the middle of the night, so that I could be picked up and returned to the future, where my observations could be reported for posterity. I swear, I did not know.”
“Most field agents aren’t told,” Simon confirmed. “Compassion is wonderful, but if it interferes with the path of history, it can cause complications.”
“I don’t understand,” James murmured. “I think I can believe Anne when she says she didn’t know, but . . . how could not saving their lives be the right thing to do?”
“If your grandfather was the sort to beat his serfs and tax them into starvation, if his actions had blackened your family name from long before you were born, would you want to go back in time to kill him when he was young, to stop him from harming so many people over all those years?” Simon countered. “I know I would . . . but if you went back in time and killed him before he had sired your father . . . you would no longer exist, because your father would not have existed.”
“For another example,” Anne offered, “if he was a good man, one who had intended to marry one woman, who died by, oh, falling off a cliff, and instead married another after her death, a woman who became your grandmother . . . if you went back in time to save the first maiden’s life . . . wouldn’t your grandfather marryherinstead? Wouldn’t they have different children? Perhaps a daughter instead of a son that year . . . meaning yet again thatyouwould not have been born?”
“Time is tricky. We are sent back to observe and learn, not to interfere,” Simon stated. “Anne has saved your life, and it is not our policy to kill those whose lives are accidentally saved . . . but your life now comes at a cost. You cannot return to your family without irrevocably altering the future . . . or risking circumstances arranging themselves so that you are slaughtered in some other way, and soon. You can, of course, leave us and take your chances . . . but the future is changeable only in tiny degrees, while death versus life is a major change. I do not know the exact pathway toyour death, but it is out there waiting for you, and it will come very soon. The pressure of history will ensure it.”
“So . . . what am I to do? I willnotend my life willingly; such things are a sin,” James said. “But even I know that the world has changed greatly over the last thousand years. If I am to go a thousand years into the future, how much more will it have changed? How would I live? Unless you have need for a guard on yet more pilgrimages . . .”
Anne smiled and tucked her hands around his elbow. “I think I know why Simon is so willing to take you with us . . . and why Rachael was so willing to save me from the Germans, despite what fate might have otherwise decreed. You are as much an anthropologist at heart as I am, James. A true student of humanity. The rest is just catching up on a thousand years of history and all the many advances people have made in the ways that they live.”
“You might not ever come back to this moment in time, of course, but some of our best field agents have come from centuries past,” Simon added. “You know far better than we how to behave and blend in . . . though as you have seen, some of our anthropologists are more adept at blending than others, even outside their natural time frame.”
James considered their offer. Anne could sense him thinking, in the tensing and relaxing of his muscles, in the quiet, deep way he breathed. After a long, quiet moment, he turned to her.
