He had a war to prepare for. An enemy to vanquish. Villages to protect and alliances to forge.
But tonight, the only battle that mattered was the one in his chest—the terrifying, exhilarating certainty that he was lost, completely and irrevocably lost, to a woman who might vanish with the next storm.
Please, he thought, the word a prayer to any god listening.Let her stay.
Down the hall, Elodie was showing a young mother how to swaddle her infant, her voice soft and sure, her hands impossibly gentle. She didn’t look up. But somehow, Gareth knew she was thinking of him too.
CHAPTER 17
The dream came for her again, as it had every night for the past two weeks. Lightning split the sky above Baldridge Manor’s gardens. Rain lashed her gossamer gown, plastered the silk flowers to her skin, turned her ridiculous faerie wings into sodden weights dragging at her shoulders. The necklace burned against her throat—fire opals and emeralds blazing with heat, and when the lightning struck the earth, she felt herself falling, not down butthrough, as if the world had opened beneath her like a trapdoor and swallowed her whole.
She woke gasping, her hand pressed to her collarbone where the necklace had rested. Nothing. Just the linen of her shift, the wild flutter of her pulse, and the grey light of early morning seeping through the narrow window of her chamber.
It was the beginning of August. She’d been here three months now, trapped in the past, living a life that shouldn’t be possible, falling for a man who shouldn’t?—
Elodie pressed the heels of her hands against her eyes until she saw stars.
Stop it. Just stop.
She’d made a life here. A good life, even. Teaching sign language to everyone at the castle willing to learn, helping Bertram organize the castle’s meager library, tending herbs in the kitchen garden with Old Wynne, who’d stopped calling her “the faerie woman” and started calling her “the lass with clever hands.” She ate meals in the great hall surrounded by people who no longer flinched when she passed, who smiled when she entered a room, who signedgood morningwith varying degrees of accuracy but unfailing enthusiasm.
The moors had surrendered to high summer, heather blooming purple across the hills in waves that reminded her, painfully, of the lavender fields in Provence she’d visited during her gap year. The bracken stood tall and lush, and sheep grazed fat and content in the distant pastures, their spring lambs now nearly grown. The days had begun their slow retreat toward autumn, though the air remained thick and warm, heavy with the scent of sun-baked grass and something sweeter—wildflowers, perhaps, or the honeysuckle that had claimed the south-facing wall of the kitchen garden.
And Gareth.
Gareth.
He occupied her thoughts in ways that felt dangerous. The quiet intensity of his gaze across the hall. The brush of his fingers against hers when he handed her a cup. The way his mouth softened—just slightly, barely perceptible—when she made him almost smile. She’d caught him watching her yesterday while she taught young Thomas to sign bloody hell, and something in his expression had made her stomach flip like a startled fish.
She’d fallen in love with him. She knew it with the same certainty she knew the sun would rise, and the knowledge terrified her more than the lightning ever had.
Because she didn’t belong here. She had a life—a real life, with obligations and responsibilities and a flat that probably still had her houseplants dying on the windowsill. There were conferences to present at, colleagues to prove wrong, and a career to salvage from the wreckage of the Fae Paper. She had people depending on her, even if those people were mostly her mother, who’d remarried and moved to Cornwall and barely remembered to text on holidays.
She had to go back. She had to. If she could.
Who knew what kind of ripples in time she might be causing by remaining in the past?
The thought had gnawed at her for weeks, growing sharper even as the days grew hotter. What if she were truly trapped? What if the magic that had brought her here was a one-way door, slammed shut behind her with no key to unlock it?
What if she never saw electric lights again? Never tasted coffee or heard music streaming through earbuds or complained about the tube being delayed? What if she lived the rest of her life in a castle that had running water only in the literal sense of the stream that ran beneath the walls, and died in a world where her existence would become nothing more than a footnote in some historian’s research—curious report of a woman appearing during a storm, 1192, likely apocryphal—if anyone remembered her at all?
A distant rumble of thunder made her sit up straight.
Through the window, she watched clouds gathering on the horizon. Dark clouds. Angry clouds. The kind of clouds that had filled the sky above Baldridge Manor’s gardens when everything changed.
Her heart began to pound.
The storm. The necklace, and she’d sworn that skinning her knee, that the blood was a component. After all, all rituals called for blood.
She didn’t have the necklace. It had vanished when she arrived, evaporated into nothing, leaving only the phantom warmth against her skin. But maybe—maybe—if she went to the clearing where she’d appeared, if she stood in the same spot during another storm, pricked her finger, if she wished hard enough?—
It was ridiculous, desperate, and it was the sort of magical thinking that had earned her the Fae Paper and five years of professional ridicule.
She’d avoided the clearing, had walked past the treeline and not let herself look too closely. She’d felt its pull—of course she had—but she’d refused to give in to it. Going there felt like tempting fate. Like admitting she might need an escape route.
Or admitting she wasn’t sure she wanted to stay. But tonight, with the storm screaming toward the castle and lightning splitting the sky, she couldn’t stay away.
“Cheese and crackers,” she muttered to herself. “This is insane.”
