The village lay beneath a moon half hidden by cloud. Fires glowed through cracks in shutters. Somewhere a cow lowed.
I stood near the meeting house and looked south as Wulfric came beside me.
“You keep looking toward the coast.”
“I keep expecting them to move faster.”
“They will move when they are ready.”
We stood together in the dark as I touched my palm. The mark had faded from an angry red to a dull pink. With the brooch gone there was no way home. I didn’t have an explanation as to why I’d been sent back in time or what I was supposed to do here.
Wulfric stood close enough that I could feel the heat of him through the cold. There was work to do. Work was safe, it was the one thing I’d always understood.
“You should sleep.”
“Yes, my lord.”
His eyes narrowed as I walked away before he could decide whether I was mocking him. I absolutely was.
For the first time since I’d awoken on the beach, I went to sleep without wondering whether I would wake in my own century.
Six
DARCY
The morning came far too quickly,though I suspected that was partly because I’d slept maybe five hours out of the last seventy-two and had reached that stage of exhaustion where the body carried on through habit while the brain wandered off somewhere quieter.
What I wouldn’t have given for a pot of strong tea. From what I vaguely remembered, tea wouldn’t reach England for another few centuries, give or take, which was depressing this early in the day.
I stood in the middle of Ashford with a wooden tally board in one hand and a piece of charcoal in the other while Wystan tried, with the stubborn confidence of a young man who had recently acquired both a spear and an opinion, to convince me that thirty-eight people had returned from the forest.
“There are thirty-seven.”
“There are thirty-eight.”
“Excellent. Count them again.”
His expression suggested I’d asked him to number every blade of grass between Ashford and Scotland, but he turnedtoward the cluster of villagers waiting beside the lane and started over.
Around us, Ashford had changed. It wasn’t quiet, because I was beginning to suspect medieval villages were incapable of anything resembling silence, but the sounds had taken on a sharper edge. Axes struck wood near the edge of the fields, hens clucked, men shouted to one another from the storehouses, and somewhere the blacksmith hammered iron. Yet beneath all those ordinary noises lay something new. Everyone listened between them.
A horse whinnied, and three people looked toward the southern road. A dog barked beyond the last cottages, and a woman carrying a basket slowed long enough to search the tree line before moving on. Fear hadn’t stopped Ashford, but it had changed the rhythm of the place, slipping into every silence and waiting there.
The morning rain had turned the lane to brown muck, and the hem of my gown was wet nearly to the knee. The dress itched, the cloak weighed approximately as much as a six-year-old child, and the leather shoes Anya had forced upon me had already begun to rub against my heels through the woolen socks.
I missed my waterproof jacket with a depth of feeling I hadn’t known clothing could inspire.
“Thirty-seven,” Wystan admitted at last.
I looked up from the board.
He frowned at the villagers as though one of them had deliberately vanished to embarrass him. “Who is missing?”
“That,” I said, tapping the charcoal against the wood, “is why we count people instead of assuming everyone is where they should be.”
Within moments, half a dozen people were calling names while the others checked their groups.
We found Osric Reeveson behind his mother’s house, arguing with his brother about a spear.
