Five
HARPER
The great hallhad effectively become a war room over the next several days, though I doubted that had been the Baron’s original intention. A large table dominated the center of the chamber, and across it Geoffrey had spread maps of England, Scotland, and Wales marked with colored inks and careful notations.
I stopped walking the moment I saw them. They were wrong. Not badly wrong. Not incompetently wrong. Wonderfully, gloriously wrong in the way maps became when they were drawn before the world understood accurate spatial representation. Scotland sat at a peculiar angle and appeared slightly too large. Wales curved toward England in ways no coastline actually did. East Anglia looked more imagined than surveyed. And the entire thing was oriented eastward because these maps weren’t truly about geography. They were about theology, hierarchy, meaning.
Jerusalem mattered more than north.
I had taught university seminars on medieval cartography once. I had spent entire afternoons explaining symbolic orientation to bored undergraduates armed with overpricedcoffees and questionable attention spans. But I had never stood over an actual working map from 1215 while the men using it discussed real political strategy. The ink was barely dry.
Geoffrey stood bent over the maps in dark green wool trimmed at the collar with understated embroidery that probably represented several tenant farms’ worth of income. Unlike his father, whose clothing announced power openly, Geoffrey dressed like a man expecting to work in his garments. His sleeves had been pushed carelessly toward his forearms, revealing strong hands stained faintly with ink.
A sword rested at his hip almost as an afterthought.
“Something wrong?” Aldwin asked, watching me closely.
“No,” I managed. “No, I just…” I looked down at the map again. “It’s an extremely good map.”
Aldwin looked built for violence in a way the rest of the family somehow didn’t. His tunic was finer than anything most men in England would ever touch, dyed a deep iron-grey and fastened with polished silver at the throat, but he wore it carelessly, one sleeve dusted with dirt from the training yard and his leather sword belt scarred from actual use.
Unlike Geoffrey, who carried nobility like responsibility, Aldwin wore it like ownership.
Geoffrey glanced up from the parchment he’d been studying, caught my expression, and something in his eyes shifted suspiciously close to amusement.
He didn’t say a word which somehow made it worse.
I forced myself back into the present.
“Here,” I said, pointing toward the northern territories. “The conflict with Scotland won’t resolve decisively for decades. But in the short term, what matters is that King John is too weak to maintain effective control over the north. There will be skirmishes. Territorial disputes. Border shifts.”
“How much territory?” Aldwin asked.
He’d stopped openly threatening to execute me every five minutes, which I chose to interpret as progress.
“Enough that future treaties acknowledge losses,” I said. “Eventually the borders stabilize roughly along the Tweed and Solway, but not until long after John’s death.”
Geoffrey made notes as I spoke, his handwriting precise and methodical. Over the last few days he’d become my unofficial translator for surviving medieval politics. He taught me how to frame future knowledge as educated analysis rather than prophecy, how to sound useful without sounding supernatural.
“What about internal conflicts?” Geoffrey asked. “The barons won’t remain unified after Runnymede.”
“No,” I agreed. “The charter gets revoked and reissued repeatedly. There’s an entire civil war afterward, the First Barons’ War. Royalist forces against the barons attempting to enforce the charter.”
I paused.
If I couldn’t get home, I was apparently going to live through that war personally. Comforting thought.
“Who wins?” Aldwin asked.
I forced myself back to the table.
“It’s complicated,” I said. “King John dies during the conflict. His heir, Henry, is still a child, and eventually both sides negotiate some version of compromise. Officially everyone claims victory. In reality the balance of power shifts away from absolute monarchy.”
“That sounds remarkably like the barons won,” Aldwin observed.
“They did,” I said. “They just didn’t entirely realize it at the time.”
Geoffrey looked up from his writing.
