“Piers won’t,” said the king. “And I was the idiot who kept calling him back. I kept wanting him. Needing him. You know how that feels? It’s unabating.”
“It’s love,” I said.
“I remember hating my father for keeping us apart, sending Piers away at every opportunity. But now the worst of all this is I realize he was only doing it to protect me. To protect both me and Piers. He knew what these people would do to us. They get more fearful every day.”
“I think it’s more about what they see as unfairness, rather than you and Piers being together.” I chose my words carefully. “This world constantly surprises me with its openness. I think they taught us the opposite of that in schools where I came from so we wouldn’t get any ideas.”
Edward looked me in the eyes. “How did you do it?” he asked. “How did you time travel? If you didn’t do it with the dragon, how did you get here?”
“It was accidental,” I said. I recounted that night at the park, walking the dogs, fighting over the phone with inner—interned—what was the word?—internetproviders, that’s it. “It was a moment of pure undiluted stress—that’s the best I can describe it. Being pulled in multiple impossible directions at once.” I thought about how Simon must have felt the day of the dragon’s final attack, falling into the well, wanting to protect me, but then seeing my ultimate betrayal. The same compounding fractals of terror I had once felt were what had caused him to vanish, sending him God knows where. God knows when. Out the other side, he would have felt shock, then anger, then I hope, some level of forgiveness and understanding. I felt immense sorrow.
“But why here?” asked Edward. “Why this time?”
“I don’t know,” I said. “Just destiny, I think.”
“Destiny to sit in the dirt and do nothing? To spend your life slaving away on smallholdings, being no use?”
I laughed. “Honestly, I think so. I think the only thing that can pull someone through time like that is another person—I think it’s love. And I think Simon was the great love of my life, just like Piers is yours, we just happened to be centuries apart. And there’s no grand plan there. Sometimes it’s just two people pulled together, sitting in the dirt. I don’t know.”
Edward and I looked at each other and for a moment, he took on a wholly modern visage. We could have been two salarymen sharing a table on our lunch break, inching together toward devious self-fulfillment, lust, the opposite of prophecy and hope. I saw in him what I had once been—a whole other life played out so poorly, ending in annihilation.
“I think there are things happening around us that are just beyond our understanding,” I said. “And I think more often than not there’s nothing we can do about it.” I thought about the angel Simon said he saw. I thought about all his silent prayers. Maybe he had been tapped into goodness to the exact same degree I had been tapped into despair and it had snapped us together like magnets. An angel had appeared to him. An angel.
Edward wiped his face. The thrum of grasshoppers began again after being startled by our scuffle. A bumblebee squiggled through the air. Wind moved the grass, the wildflowers, the brambles. You could never have guessed what had once occurred here.
“Is that another one of your bottles?” asked Edward, nodding over to the strange glass sphere that had rolled away from us.
“No,” I said. I went over and picked it up. The glass had remained sturdy and clear. “It’s a helmet.”
“What foolish soldier wears a helmet made of glass?” said Edward.
“It’s not for a soldier,” I said. I turned the helmet in my hands, inspecting the strange technology attached to it. The spark of an idea whizzed around in my mind, afraid to grow into anything more substantial. My breathing remained steady. “I think I’m going to stay here a while longer,” I said, looking around the crater.
“Well,” Edward scoffed. “I’m certainly not.” He stood up and brushed dirt from his clothes.
“You’re not worried about the dragon your men said they saw?”
“They told me what I wanted to hear. They defected right after I paid them. Plus if you’re staying here, I think we’ll be OK.” The king sighed, then extended a hand to me. “Thank you, George,” he said. I shook his hand and he pulled me into an embrace. “And I apologize for what I said earlier. Your destiny was more than to just sit in the dirt, I’m sorry. My father spoke very highly of you before he died—he thought you should be made a saint. You slayed the dragon and saved us all. I think I just needed to come out here and see the bones for myself. Something I needed... to better understand—I don’t know. Him. My dad. He knew how to do all of this much better than me.”
“I think you’re doing all right,” I said. “And I wish you luck, Your Majesty.” I truly did.
We let this temporary peace settle over us and went our separate ways. The king would go to Scarborough to play out the long path of destiny that awaited him. I remained on the edge of the wildflower meadow, clutching the glass helmet, my reflection curving around it. The king turned back around as he walked away. “Hey, I’m letting you keep that helmet as payment for dragging you out here.”
“Oh, how generous of you,” I said with a gleeful, old-timey sarcasm. I put my head through the hole at the bottom of the sphere and tried it on. There was no visual distortion, the glass was perfectly clear.
Edward gave a thumbs-up. “Ready for war. It looks good on you. You look like an angel.”
“A what?” My heart skipped a beat involuntarily.
Edward yelled back, “An angel. Or a saint. It looks like a halo around your head.” He drew a circle in the air. “There you go—Saint George.”
He turned around and kept walking, leaving the crater and disappearing into the thicket of brambles and trees. But I stayed where I was, on the periphery of something much grander than myself.
I took off the helmet and inspected it again. At the top of the helmet, inside, there were tiny electric lights. It’s true, if you saw someone wearing this out here all lit up, it would seem otherworldly, an angel would be your only reference. And judging by the way I had found it—not exactly buried underground so much as intentionally hidden and with care—I wondered if whoever had worn it was still here. An angel falling through time.
19
It took me hours to find the old smallholding. The forest surrounding the crater had grown denser and wilder. Our old paths had been wiped away, and more than once did I get helplessly lost, guided only by the ground’s meager incline and the sound of running water—the canal that had eroded back into the creek it was always meant to be. Then the faint yet sudden smell of smoke.
