“You are pink,” he said.
“Because I’m having a completely normal reaction to a normal piece of information, which is that it is twelve hundred and sixty-five and I have misplaced my entire life.”
She set the cup down carefully on the cart because if she kept holding it, she might throw it at the tower. “Also, I would like to file a complaint with a sword.”
At that, all trace of humor left his face.
“What sword?”
Every instinct she owned slammed both hands over her mouth, metaphorically and several seconds too late.
Amelia stared at him. The sword. The fat sapphire. The blood on her knuckle. The storm splitting the air apart. The tower whole behind him. The year.
She could tell him.
She could stand in the muddy yard and tell this hard-eyed medieval lord that yesterday she had attended a wedding in the ruins of his home, cut her hand on a sword that she hadn’t yet found, and fallen through time like Alice down the worst rabbit hole in recorded history.
A woman who said such things here in medieval England likely did not last long.
She knew it as surely as she knew there were no planes in the sky.
Thomas seemed to understood enough to move. He took the cup from the cart and handed it to a passing boy without looking away from her.
“Walk with me,” he said.
“I don’t think my legs can move.”
She laughed once, a small cracked sound that frightened her more than tears would have. Thomas stepped closer, not touching her, but near enough. He placed himself between herand the busiest part of the bailey with such quiet certainty that it took her a moment to understand what he was doing.
Shielding her.
Not from swords or weather or runaway carts. From eyes, from questions, and from herself
“Walk with me,” he said again, lower this time. “Before you tell everyone about your teeth.”
“My dentist,” she said faintly.
“Aye. Him as well.”
She shouldn’t have found that funny. Nothing about any of this was funny. But the small beer was making the edges of the morning shimmer, and terror had a strange way of opening little trapdoors in the mind. A giggle rose in her throat. She swallowed it. It came out anyway, shaky and mortifying.
Thomas gave her a look that said he had now addedunpredictable laughterto his growing list of concerns.
“I’m fine,” she said.
“You are not.”
“No, but I’m saying it because it feels like I should.”
He simply offered her his arm. Not his hand. His arm. Courtly, awkward, stiff with restraint, as if he had never once in his life considered escorting a woman who had just accused him of being hot in a muddy yard before breakfast. Amelia looked at that arm, at the worn leather bracer, the strong forearm, the scar across two knuckles, and knew in a distant, inconvenient part of herself that she would remember this moment for as long as she lived.
However long that turned out to be.
She put her hand on his arm. The linen of his sleeve was damp beneath her fingers, rough and warm from his skin. He walked slowly, matching his stride to hers, and said nothing as he led her away from the cart, away from the staring men, and away from the tower that had broken the last of her denial.
The bailey opened toward a quieter corner near the stables, where the smell of hay and horse was stronger than the smoke. A chestnut warhorse lifted its head over the half-door and watched them with dark, thoughtful eyes.
“Your horse is judging me,” Amelia said.
