When he faced me again, disbelief remained in his eyes, but it had been joined by the fierce, relentless calculation I knew so well.
“You knew Harold would come south.”
“Yes.”
“You knew where William had landed.”
“Yes.”
His voice roughened. “You knew England would fall.”
There it was, not the magic or the future, but that my country would fall.
“Yes.”
Wulfric looked away. For several breaths he didn’t say anything, and I understood that no matter how much of this story concerned me, the part that mattered most to him was the one where his country had become a memory in someone else’s history.
“I didn’t know everything,” I said. “History remembers kings and battles. It remembers who won, who died, where armies marched, but it doesn’t remember villages like Ashford. It doesn’t remember Gilda or Tova or whether Wystan survives long enough to become as irritating an old man as he clearly intends to.”
Then Wulfric asked, “Why did you not tell me?”
I closed my eyes briefly.
“I tried.”
“Nay.”
“I did. In my head. Several times. They all went badly.”
“Why?”
The single word stripped away every joke I had left as I rubbed my thumb over the faded mark in my palm.
“Because I barely believed it myself. Because I didn’t know you, and because people in my time would think I was ill if I told them this story, and they have psychiatrists and electricity and documentaries about things that can’t possibly happen.”
I looked at him then, standing there in a dark blue tunic and hose, like an old god come down to earth to walk among mortals.
“Because I thought you couldn’t bear it.”
For the first time since we’d left the camp, something in his face broke.
“You believed I could face William’s army, abandon my home, bury my dead, and lead my people through war, yet I could not bear the truth from you?”
“I could hardly bear it myself.”
The words came out louder than I intended, breaking across the stream and the wet trees.
“I woke up and everyone I knew was gone,” I said, and once the words began, I couldn’t stop them. “Not dead. Worse, perhaps, because they haven’t even been born. London is fields and mud. My firehouse doesn’t exist. Brian’s grave doesn’t exist. Every person who ever knew me is nearly a thousand years away, and I had no idea whether I’d wake up back on that beach the next morning in my own time or whether I’d lost them forever.”
My eyes burned, which was unacceptable. I wasn’t crying beside a stream because a Saxon lord had hurt feelings about time travel.
“I didn’t sit down calmly and decide you were too delicate for the truth,” I finished. “I was trying not to lose my bloody mind.”
Wulfric was quiet for so long that I wished he would get angry simply to end the quiet.
Then he said, very softly, “I would have believed you.”
A laugh escaped me, sharp and miserable. “No, you wouldn’t.”
