The creaking grew louder. Peering around the trunk, I caught flashes of movement.
Humans.
Easing forward, I hunched, staying low to the ground. Portia and Albie pressed close behind me. A break in the foliage showed a path that was more mud than road. A horse pulled a wagon along it, the wheels squelching through the muck. Villagers walked on either side. A wooden cage sat in the wagonbed, the contraption creaking and swaying as the wagon bumped over branches and ruts.
In the center of the cage, a female prisoner in a dirty gray shift sat on a crude bench. It was tough to guess her age, but her blond hair was untouched by gray, and I put her at perhaps twenty-five. Her shift had been a fine piece of clothing once, but the dirt-streaked fabric was in tatters around her bare calves. She stared straight ahead, her head high and her red-rimmed eyes focused on a spot in the distance.
The men and women keeping pace with the wagon jeered and shouted. Wimples covered the women’s hair. The men wore tunics and loose trews made of coarse linen. A man in a leather cap stooped and collected a clod of mud from the ground. He lobbed it at the cage, and it struck the bars and broke apart, splattering muck over the prisoner’s shift and face. She winced but recovered quickly, her back stiff and straight.
I caught Albie’s eye, and grim understanding passed between us. We hadn’t just traveled to England. We’d traveled back in time.
“How far back did we go?” Portia whispered.
It didn’t surprise me that she’d figured it out. She was intelligent and observant, her mind as sharp as her tongue. And she wasn’t exactly a stranger to time travel.
“A fair bit,” I said under my breath. “Five or six hundred years.”
“Fuck,” she said.
The wagon moved into a clearing, and the driver pulled the horse to a stop next to a wooden post. Bundles of sticks were heaped around its base.
Portia tensed.
“We should go,” I said, taking her arm.
“No.”
The wagon driver climbed down. Men yanked the woman from the cage. She came alive, her listless expression giving way to wide-eyed terror. The crowd surged around her, but several men splayed their arms, holding them back as the men dragged the thrashing woman to the stake.
Albie took Portia’s other arm. “Princess, we can’t linger?—”
“I’m not leaving,” she said, yanking free of his grip. “They’re going to burn her!”
The woman screamed, scratching and clawing as the men slammed her against the post and wrapped ropes around her body.
I met Albie’s gaze over Portia’s head.
Let’s go, I mouthed.
I’m trying, he mouthed back, a harried look on his face.
A man in a dark robe stepped forward. His voice boomed over the crowd. “This woman has been found guilty of witchcraft! She stands accused of stealing the life force from those she was meant to heal!”
“No!” the woman sobbed. A rope cinched tight under her breasts. Several more lengths lashed her to the post. Her hands were bound behind her back, the strain on her shoulders obvious. “Please, I didn’t?—”
“Silence, witch!” the robed man barked.
The crowd roared its approval.
Beside me, Portia stiffened. “We have to stop this.”
“No,” I said flatly.
“They’re going to burn her alive!”
“Aye, and we can’t interfere.”
Her green eyes blazed. “It’s barbaric!”
