“Thank you.” She wiped rain from her eyes with her free hand. “I’m sorry, I don’t—I don’t know what’s happening. I was at a party, and there was a storm, and I fell, and now I’m here and my phone is gone and, I’m going to be fired for sure for losing a priceless necklace, and I think I’m losing my mind—” She took a great, heaving breath.
A crash of thunder swallowed her next words. She yelped and pressed closer to him, instinctively seeking shelter. Gareth looked over his shoulder at his men, still hovering at the treeline, still watching with wide eyes.
He made a sharp gesture.
Miles recovered first, barking orders. Within minutes, a mare was brought forward—a steady creature, good temperament—and Gareth lifted the strange woman onto her back before she could protest. She gasped and clutched at the horse’s mane, clearly unfamiliar with the animal.
“Wait, where—where are you taking me?”
He swung up onto his own mount, taking the reins of her mare, and urged the horses forward. His men fell in behind them, a silent escort through the forest.
The woman twisted to look at him, rain streaming down her face. “You haven’t said anything. Why won’t you talk to me?”
Gareth met her eyes. Hers were green as forest moss, wide with confusion and fear—but not, he noticed, empty of courage. A flicker passed through his chest. Recognition, perhaps, though he couldn’t have said of what. He touched his throat briefly, then shook his head.
Her brow furrowed. “You can’t speak?”
He didn’t confirm or deny. Just nudged the horse to a faster pace.
Behind them, the clearing was already disappearing into the rain and the dark. The woman looked back once, searching for something?—
But there was nothing to see. Just rain and trees and the fading rumble of thunder. Whatever had brought her here had vanished without a trace.
CHAPTER 6
They rode in silence, the men forming a loose escort around her and the lord whose name she still didn’t know. Elodie kept her eyes moving, scanning the treeline, the road ahead, peering through the darkness—looking for anything that would anchor her in reality.
A car, she thought desperately.Just one car. A distant headlight. A bus or a paved road. Anything.
But the road beneath them was packed earth, rutted from cart wheels and rain. The trees pressed close on either side, ancient oaks and ash that had never known a chainsaw. No power lines or cell towers. No distant hum of traffic or airplanes.
We’re in the countryside, she reasoned.Baldridge Manor is remote. Lady Baldridge owns hundreds of acres. This is just... an exceptionally dedicated immersive experience. Medieval cosplay on steroids.
Except the men around her weren’t actors.
She’d worked on enough film sets to know the difference. Actors in costume moved like people wearing costumes—adjusting their cloaks, fidgeting with their sword belts, checking their phones between takes. These men moved as if their armor were part of their bodies. The mail shirts they worehad been repaired in multiple places, she noticed—not costume department patches, but actual metalwork, rings rewoven where blades had torn through. The leather of their sword grips worn smooth in the patterns real-world use would create.
And the swords themselves?—
Oh, cheese and crackers, those are real swords.
Not prop swords, not dulled edges for safety, but weapons with the gleam that came from being sharpened and resharpened and used. The man to her left had a nick in his blade about three inches from the crossguard. The kind of damage that happened when steel met steel.
Her brain cataloged the details even as her survival instincts screamed at her to stop noticing things and start panicking properly. The construction of the mail was consistent with late 12th century patterns—riveted rings, not butted, the links sized appropriately for combat rather than display. The helmets were simple nasals, again period-appropriate. The horses wore no ceremonial barding, just practical leather and iron.
This isn’t a costume. This is real. Functional, maintained, battle-tested kit.
One of the men muttered something to his companion in what sounded like Latin—or no, not Latin, some kind of prayer in a dialect she couldn’t quite place. The cadence was wrong for modern Latin, the vowels shaped differently, the rhythm ancient in a way she’d only ever read about in linguistic studies.
The silent lord’s arm reached out and steadied her, and she realized she’d been swaying. Her body was starting to process what her mind still refused to accept. Then, the castle rose from the moors.
She saw it first as a dark mass against the gray sky—and immediately twisted in the saddle, craning to see better. The movement nearly unseated her completely as she grabbed for the horse’s mane, missed, and would have tumbled to theground if the lord hadn’t caught her with that arm of iron, hauling her back on her horse like she weighed nothing.
“Sorry—sorry, I just?—”
But she couldn’t stop looking. Curtain walls of weathered stone, a central tower standing stark and sentinel, the flutter of a banner she couldn’t identify in the darkness. Torches burned at the gatehouse, their flames fighting the lingering rain. And people—not tour guides or docents, but guards on the walls, their silhouettes sharp against the firelight, crossbows in their hands.
She twisted again, more carefully this time, as they clattered across the drawbridge. The wood was old and solid beneath the horses’ hooves, the chains real iron, the murder holes above her head genuinely threatening. The gatehouse wasn’t a reconstruction or a renovation. It wasn’t a “historically inspired” building for wealthy tourists.
