“Okay,” she said quickly. “Hi. Hello. This is not the tower. Before anyone does anything dramatic, I’m going to need somebody to tell me where I am.”
The stableboys exchanged alarmed looks.
The woman took a breath. “And maybe why everyone appears to be attending the world's most committed medieval reenactment. Because that was not on the list of wedding festivities.”
Thomas blinked.
“Pardon?”
She stared back. “You know. Costumes?”
The silence stretched. Perkin looked terrified. The woman looked confused.
Thomas, who had survived Evesham, buried friends, rebuilt walls, settled disputes, and somehow become responsible for an entire manor, found himself completely defeated by one small red-haired woman in a blue gown.
Saints preserve him. Trouble had arrived at Ashcombe, and, God help him, it was wearing freckles.
AMELIA
There was a perfectly reasonable explanation for all of this, and Amelia was going to figure out what it was if it killed her.
While she considered, she pulled rather smelly straw from her hair and person. The silk dress and shoes were ruined, destined for the trash as soon as she made it back to her delightful room in the inn.
Whispers in an odd accent came from the boys as she narrowed her situation down to three possibilities.
One: this was an extremely committed historical reenactment, the kind men with podcasts traveled hundreds of miles for, and was somehow happening at a castle near the wedding venue.
Two: she had hit her head in the tower and was, at this very moment, being loaded into an ambulance while her brain produced a costume drama.
Three—and she did not love three—the venue was running some sort of immersive experience nobody had told her about, and any second now a cheerful guide in a polo shirt would appear and ask if she was enjoyingYe Olde Ashcombe.
What none of the possibilities explained was the smell.
The reenactment theory had a smell problem. Reenactors went home at night to showers and toothpaste. This place smelled like animals and cooking fires, unwashed wool and, underneath it, something green, rotting and old. The smell didn’t get any better, not when they walked her across the muddy yard, not when they brought her through a low stone doorway into a hall the size of a basketball court with an actual hole in the actual roof, and not when a woman roughly the shape and of a kitchen island took one look at her and said, “Sweet Mary, what’s this, then?”
“This,” said the enormous, scowling man—Thomas, one of the men had called him, as the rest saidmy lord—“is a difficulty. Sort it, Edith.”
And then he left. Pivoted on one mud-caked boot and strode back out into the grey, the way men left meetings the second a problem could be handed to someone else, and that was how Amelia found herself abandoned to a woman called Edith. A woman who reminded her of a mean teacher she’d had in third grade who made her attend recess every day instead of letting her sit under a tree and read.
Edith looked her up and down with small shrewd eyes and made a noise in her throat that managed to convey, all at once, that she had seen everything, expected nothing, and was not going to be paid enough for whatever this was.
“Hello,” Amelia said. “I love your—everything. The commitment is incredible. So I’m going to be honest with you, I think I hit my head, and I really need to find my way back, or possibly a first-aid station, or a guy named Gaz, who I cannot believe I’m asking about, but he has my cousin’s number, and I seem to have lost my purse and phone, not to mention?—”
“You’re shaking,” Edith said.
“I’m fine.”
“You’re shaking, your gown’s near to nothing, and you’ve blood on your hand.”
Edith took Amelia’s wrist, turned it over, and frowned at the little cut on her knuckle.
“You’re cold, child. Through and through. Whatever fool dropped you here did it without a cloak.”
She raised her voice without turning her head. “Mald! The fire. And the brown wool from the chest, the old kirtle, it’ll swim on her but it’s dry.”
“I really can’t stay,” Amelia said.
“You can’t go,” Edith said, not unkindly, “in that, looking like that. Sit.”
