The word passed through the camp like wind through dry leaves as my hand tightened around the hilt of my sword. “And the king?”
The rider looked down. “The king is dead.”
A woman cried out, someone began to pray, Godwin crossed himself, and I closed my eyes for a long moment.
Harold dead. The Saxon army broken. England without its king.
For years men would make songs of this day, but standing beneath the trees, I heard only weeping, a horse breathing hard, and the faint rattle of the goat’s tether.
I did not know what made me look for Darcy as I turned, but perhaps some part of me had already begun to understand.
She stood where I had left her, her face white as the moon. And what I saw upon her visage made me hold my breath, for she was not surprised. There was no disbelief after hearing such news. Nay, she looked like a woman watching the sea for a ship she had always known would come. One terrible truth remained. Darcy had known King Harold would die.
Fourteen
DARCY
The worst conversationsof my life had always begun quietly, without alarms or shattered glass or anyone shouting for help, because disaster didn’t need theatrics when it meant to do real damage. Sometimes all it required was a closed door, a man who wouldn’t quite meet your eyes, or your own name spoken in a voice that made your stomach drop before the bad news had even reached you.
Wulfric didn’t say my name. He waited until the riders who’d brought word of Harold’s death had eaten, until Godwin had taken them aside to hear the details again and the children had been driven from the fire after asking enough gruesome questions to make even hardened men uncomfortable.
Around us, the camp slowly settled beneath the darkness, the cooking fires banked low, the smoke trapped near the ground beneath the heavy air, while somewhere beyond the shelters Gilda informed Wystan that if he asked one more time how exactly the king had died, she would demonstrate the matter with the nearest blade.
“Walk with me.”
There were several answers available, most of them involving sudden illness or an urgent need to inspect something far away, but since Wulfric possessed the expression of a man who had spent the last hour taking apart everything I’d ever told him, and arranging the pieces neatly inside his head, I followed him without a word.
That alone should have warned him something was terribly wrong.
We walked beyond the shelters and sleeping places, beneath trees that still shed the remains of the afternoon rain whenever the wind stirred their branches. My wool gown dragged damp around my ankles, and the cloak carried the faint, stubborn perfume of horse no matter how often I aired it, while my boots, now scratched and caked with mud, sank into the dark leaf mold with every step.
Neither one of us said a word. At last, he stopped beside a narrow stream that cut through the trees, black water moving between stones furred with moss, and although the camp remained close enough for us to hear the occasional burst of laughter or the murmur of voices, anyone who wished to eavesdrop would have needed to crawl through a holly thicket.
Wulfric turned to face me.
“Tell me.”
That was it. There was no accusation or anger, and somehow, that made it worse.
I folded my arms beneath my cloak, dreading what was coming. The mist had darkened his hair at the temples, and there was a nick along his jaw he hadn’t bothered tending. Dried mud streaked one boot almost to the knee, yet he stood with the same stillness I’d seen before the battle, shoulders broad beneath the dark wool of his cloak as patience settled across his face in a way that told me I could either speak now or stand beside the freezing stream until Christmas.
Assuming Christmas still happened after the country had been conquered.
“You knew Harold would die,” he said.
“Yes.” I shivered as the wind blew across the water. The stream moved between us with cheerful little splashing noises, unconcerned that England had just fallen to pieces.
“This is going to sound insane.”
“I have known you some weeks.”
For the smallest moment his mouth shifted, though whether from humor or exhaustion I couldn’t tell.
There was no graceful beginning, because there is no graceful way to inform an eleventh-century Saxon lord that you were born almost a thousand years after his death and arrived in his world by touching cursed jewelry at an antiques fair.
“I’m from London,” I said.
“I know this.”
