“Just like that?” she whispered. “No questions? No demands for proof? No attempts to burn me as a witch?”
I believe you.The rest...
He spread his hands, encompassing the whole impossible situation—the time-lost woman, the stolen voice, the enemy watching from distant towers.
The rest we will discover together.
She laughed—a real laugh this time, startled and bright and warm.
“You’re completely mad,” she said. “You know that, right? A strange woman falls out of the sky, tells you she’s from another century, and you just accept it. That’s not normal behaviour. That’s... that’s...”
Odd?
“Utterly barking.” But she was smiling now, and something in his chest unknotted at the sight. “I suppose we’re well matched, then. A man who doesn’t speak and a woman who can’t stop talking. A medieval lord and a time-travelling archaeologist.” She shook her head, wonder and disbelief warring in her expression. “My doctoral supervisor would have an absolute fit.”
Gareth didn’t know what a doctoral supervisor was. He found he didn’t care. What he cared about was standing before him, still slightly tearstained, still babbling, still the most incredible woman he’d ever met. He reached out and took her hand. Her fingers were cold, trembling, but they curled around his without hesitation.
Tomorrow,he signed with his free hand.More lessons. You will teach me your future words.
“All of them?”
Start with the important ones.
Her smile turned mischievous—another of her mercurial shifts that he was learning to treasure. “Alright. First word. Chocolate. C-H-O-C-O-L-A-T-E. You’ll need to know it for when we figure out how to import cacao beans four hundred years early.”
She was already babbling again, already filling the space between them with words and plans and impossible dreams. Gareth listened with his whole body, the way he’d learned to do in his years of silence.
He understood now why he couldn’t stop watching her. Why her voice had become the sound he listened for in the morning, the absence he felt when she wasn’t near.
She was lost. Stranded in a world not her own, clinging to fragments of her former life like driftwood in a storm.
Just like him.
And perhaps—perhaps—they could be lost together.
The early summer sun continued its slow journey across the solar floor. Beyond the walls, the household moved through their daily rhythms, unaware that the world had shifted.
It was, Gareth reflected, a good day not to die. There was always a battle to be fought. An enemy to vanquish. But today, the battle could wait. Today, there was only this. Her hand in his, her voice in his ears, and the fragile, terrifying possibility of trust.
CHAPTER 11
Sleep wouldn’t come. Elodie had tried everything—counting backward from a thousand, reciting the periodic table, mentally cataloging every artifact she’d ever documented. Nothing worked. Her mind kept circling back to the same impossible questions.How long would she remain here in the past? Why her? Was anyone looking for her in the world she’d left behind?
She’d been here almost three weeks now. In archaeological terms, that was nothing—a blink, a heartbeat. In personal terms, it felt like a lifetime.
The fire had burned down to embers, and the chamber was chilly. She wrapped herself in a blanket and padded to the window, pushing open the heavy shutter to let in the night air.
The moon hung full and bright over the moors, casting long shadows across the battlements. In the distance, she could see the dark mass of the forest where she’d first appeared, and beyond that, barely visible on the horizon, the silhouette of another castle.
Dunharrow Keep. Alaric’s stronghold.
She’d asked Bertram about it yesterday, and the old steward’s face had gone carefully blank. “Best not to speak ofsuch things, my lady,” he’d said. “Some wounds don’t heal from talk.”
But wounds that never got air didn’t heal either. They just festered. She knew that better than most.
Elodie pulled the blanket tighter around her shoulders and made a decision. She was tired of lying awake with her own thoughts for company. Perhaps a walk would clear her head. Or at least give her something new to worry about, like tripping down a spiral staircase in the dark.
“Right then,” she muttered to herself. “Midnight wandering through a medieval castle. What could possibly go wrong?”
