“The psalter brought me here,” I continued. “If it can carry someone through time once, surely it can do so again. Theoretically.” I rested my arms against the cold stone wall. “Assuming I understood how any of this works, which I absolutely do not.”
“And if you discover it?”
I looked out across the river instead of at him.
“I should want to go home immediately,” I admitted. “My entire life is there.”
“But?”
I hesitated.
It was difficult to explain. A week ago this place had been a nightmare. Now I found myself noticing the torchlight on the stone walls, the sound of horses in the courtyard before dawn, the strange comfort of voices echoing through the hall below my chambers. I was fascinated by everything from the tapestries, to the kitchen cooking implements. The castle no longer felt entirely alien. And Geoffrey himself had become dangerously easy to speak to.
“I think,” I said carefully, “it’s becoming harder to remember this time isn’t mine.”
Geoffrey studied me for a long moment. “That sounds dangerous,” he said quietly.
“Yes,” I admitted. “Probably.”
Neither of us said anything after that.
The river moved darkly below the walls while somewhere behind us the castle settled into sleep around the night watch and dying fires.
And for the first time since arriving in in the past, going home no longer felt like the only thing I wanted.
Six
HARPER
Aldwin came back.I had assumed, after his exit from the war room, that I’d seen the last of him for a while, that he’d file me under inconclusive and return to whatever practical violence occupied his days. Instead he reappeared the following morning while I was in the great hall attempting to decipher a household account roll Geoffrey had left for my Latin practice.
He sat down across from me without invitation and said, “How does it work?”
I looked up from the roll. “How does what work?”
“The psalter.” He said it the way he said most things, bluntly, without preliminary courtesy. “The mechanism. How does a book move a person through time?”
“I don’t know.”
“Guess.”
“I genuinely don’t know, Aldwin. I’m a curator, not a physicist. I was cataloguing it and it started glowing and then I was here. There was no instruction manual.” I frowned at him. “Don’t you think if I knew how it worked, I would have already gone home?”
“Perhaps.” He drummed his fingers on the table. One, two, three, four. Again. He was thinking hard about something he clearly didn’t want to say directly, which I was beginning to understand was how Aldwin operated whenever the subject made him uncomfortable.
“Could it work in reverse?” he asked finally.
I set down the account roll. “You mean could it send me back?”
“No.” He met my eyes for the first time since sitting down. “I mean forward. No, backward. Further back.”
I stared at him as it clicked into place. “You want to travel through time?”
“I want to understand whether it’s possible,” he corrected, which was not remotely the same thing and we both knew it.
“Aldwin,” I said carefully, “where would you go back to?”
The drumming stopped.
