“No. You know the name, but not my London.”
His eyes narrowed slightly, and because he was Wulfric, I found myself taking a breath and trying again.
“The London I come from has millions of people. Houses and buildings everywhere, some so tall you’d have to lean back to see the top, and roads crossing the whole country. At night there are lights in every street and every house, except when people forget to pay the bill.”
His brow furrowed. “What bill?”
“Not important.”
“It sounds important.”
“It’s deeply irritating but not relevant.”
His face suggested otherwise, but he let it go.
“We have machines that carry people faster than horses, and others that fly.”
“Fly.”
“Through the air.”
“Aye, I understood the word.”
“Just checking.”
He wasn’t finding me particularly charming, which under the circumstances was fair enough.
“We can speak to people hundreds of miles away and hear them as clearly as I hear you now, and we have medicines that can stop infections like Gilda’s before they become deadly. Water runs through pipes into houses, hot or cold, whenever you want it.”
Wulfric stared at me for a long moment. “Whenever you want it.”
“Yes.”
“That seems wasteful.”
“Honestly, sometimes it is.”
None of this was helping, but the ridiculous bits were easier than the rest, and Wulfric seemed to understand that, because he didn’t hurry me.
“I worked for the fire brigade,” I said after a moment. “That part was true. Everything I told you about my work was true.”
I had to look down at my hand, at the round burn from the brooch that had faded until only the faintest mark remained.
His hand moved halfway toward mine before he seemed to realize what he was doing, and that tiny, absurd gesture nearly broke me more thoroughly than his anger would have.
I stared at the dark water instead.
“My partner at work, Brian, died eight months before I came here. There was a warehouse fire, we went inside, and he didn’t come back out.”
Wulfric’s expression changed so completely that for a moment I saw not the lord or the warrior but the man who had once sat beside Aelfwyn while fever took her beyond anything he could do.
“I couldn’t save him,” I said, keeping my voice steady through long practice. “Afterward, I kept working because I didn’t know what else to do, and eventually my watch manager told me to leave for a few days before I got myself killed trying to prove I was fine. So I drove south.”
“To Hastings.”
“Yes.”
His gaze shifted instinctively toward the south, though trees and darkness hid the battlefield from us.
