“There was a fair beside the sea, with people selling old things. Furniture, jewelry, bits of silver and other things, and there was an old woman there with pale blue eyes and a brooch.”
My voice caught on the last word.
“It was Saxon, or at least she said it was. Round, nearly as large as my palm, with silver darkened almost black by age and animals worked around the edge. There were red stones in the center. The woman warned me to be careful.”
“You were not.”
“She told me to hold it only if I meant to, which in retrospect was a very dramatic thing to say when she could simply have refused to hand over the cursed jewelry, but I took it. The stone lit up, and everything disappeared.”
Wulfric went still.
“I heard the old woman say two words before the world turned upside down.”
“What words?”
“Find him.”
His gaze sharpened.
“Find whom?”
“I didn’t know.”
The answer sat between us, suddenly much larger than it had sounded inside my own head, and although Wulfric’s face revealed very little, something moved behind his eyes.
“I woke on the beach,” I continued before I lost my nerve. “Your beach. Except the pavilion was gone, the road was gone, and instead of tourists there were ships and soldiers and smoke. The brooch had disappeared.”
He looked at my hands. “And you came from…”
“The year 2026.”
There was only silence as he continued staring at me.
“Nine hundred and sixty years from now,” I added.
“I can count.”
Rain whispered through the leaves above us, and somewhere far off a night bird called while Wulfric looked at me as though the answer to every question he’d asked since the day we met had finally arrived and was considerably worse than expected.
At last he said, “Show me.”
I frowned. “Show you what?”
“The thing that carried you here.”
“I told you, it’s gone.”
His jaw tightened. “You hid it.”
“No.”
“Lost it in the sea?”
“I searched the beach until men with swords became the more urgent problem.”
He turned away, pacing several steps along the stream with one hand at the back of his neck, and there was something so ordinary about the movement that my chest tightened.
“My clothing,” I said quietly. “The way I speak. The things I know.”
