“Aye.”
“You personally threatened to have me tied up.”
“You were strange.”
I snorted. “Still am.”
He led me away from the fires, beyond the newest shelters and the timber frames that would become houses if the weather gave us enough time before winter. The rain had darkened his hair, turning the lighter strands near his temples the color of old gold, while droplets clung to his short beard and the shoulders of his cloak. He still wore his sword, because successfully negotiating a future for several hundred people did not mean one could relax and wander about unarmed.
The ground softened beneath my boots as we reached the edge of the clearing. There, the settlement noise faded until I could hear the rain ticking through dead leaves and the stream moving somewhere beyond the trees.
“Wulfric?”
He stopped beneath an old oak whose branches spread black against the clouded sky.
“Aye?”
“If this is about another problem, I’d rather you just tell me. The last time someone asked me to take a walk after dark, we discovered half the flour was wet.”
“There is no problem.”
“That is exactly what someone says before introducing a problem.”
His eyes warmed. “Will you cease speaking for the space of one breath?”
“Probably not, but you’re welcome to try.”
He reached into the leather pouch at his belt as a bolt of fear spiked through me. I watched his hand close around whatever lay inside, watched the subtle shift in his face as he looked down at it, and saw the odd satisfaction that had brought him to find me.
“Wystan found this near the stream,” he said. “The earth there was churned badly during the fighting, and he thought it silver.”
My heart skipped a beat.
“I nearly told him to give it to Godwin for the stores, but when I cleaned away the mud, I thought…”
He hesitated.
“You thought what?”
His gaze met mine. “I thought of you.”
When he opened his hand, the world stopped spinning. For one suspended moment, everything went silent. I couldn’t hear the rain moving through the oak or the stream beyond the trees, nor the distant laughter from camp, or even my pulse beating against the inside of my skull.
The brooch lay across Wulfric’s palm. Not the brooch I had touched at the antique fair. The silver shone in the dim light, bright enough to catch every curve of the interlaced beasts circling its rim, while the garnets at its center burned a deep, dark red. The hinge was whole. The pin on the back was straight and wickedly sharp.
It was new.
I had held this brooch in my palm nearly a thousand years from now, had seen those same dragons blackened with age,their silver worn smooth. I had seen the hinge corroded, the garnets dulled beneath centuries of dirt, the pin bent by time.
Lost. Found, and lost again. My breath left me as I forced myself to breathe.
“Darcy?” Wulfric’s pleasure disappeared. “What is it?”
“That’s the brooch.”
His brow furrowed.
“The one that brought me here.”
