That surprised them. Good. The truth often did.
“You know the land, the roads, the men coming against you, and where you can fight them. I don’t. But I know frightened people. I know what happens when smoke gets thick, fire comes, and everyone decides to move at once.”
Wulfric stared at me.
The older man’s expression had shifted from suspicion to something more thoughtful.
“Who are you?” he asked.
Difficult question. At the moment, damp, hungry, and possibly, if I was right, which I still desperately hoped I wasn’t, hundreds of years from home.
“I’m someone who goes into burning buildings. It’s how I...” I hesitated. “Make my trade.”
The boy blinked as woman crossed herself again, and little girl stared at me, eyes huge.
I sighed.
“That sounded less alarming in my head.”
A large man stepped from behind Wulfric. I hadn’t noticed him until then, which told me exactly how rattled I was.
He was built like a barn door, with iron-gray threaded through a plaited beard and one ear notched as though something had once tried to take more than his manners.
“Bind her,” he said. “She walks out of the wood in sorcerer’s cloth and speaks of fire and death. Mayhap she leads the Normans to us.”
“I do not.”
His eyes snapped to me.
“You understand our speech well enough.”
“Enough to know I don’t care for being called a spy this early in the day.”
Wulfric looked like he wanted to smile but held it back. I saw it, and because I was exhausted, wet, terrified, and possibly trapped in another century, that tiny almost-smile annoyed me more than the spear.
“You find this amusing?”
“No. Only odd.”
“Join the club.”
His brows drew together. “What club?”
“Never mind.”
The gray-bearded man glanced toward the village. “My lord, the bell has rung. The council gathers.”
“Then she comes before them,” Wulfric said.
The barn-door man snorted. “And if she curses us all before sunset?”
“If she means to curse us, Leofric, she has shown poor timing. We are already beset by the Normans.”
A murmur went through the growing crowd.
Some of it was laughter. Dark and rough, but laughter all the same. People needed it. Fear with nowhere to go was like smoke with no opening. It found a way out eventually, and never a good one.
Leofric scowled. “I do not trust her.”
