“Fifteen years,” he said. “Before my father made certain alliance decisions. Before my brother was sent away for his education and came back thinking like a clerk instead of a soldier. Before…” He stopped. “Before certain things were set in motion.”
I thought about every time travel story I’d ever read. Every warning about changing the past. Every catastrophe born from good intentions.
I also thought about the way he’d saidmy brother, with irritation layered over something much more complicated.
“The psalter didn’t give me any control over where or when I landed,” I said. “I didn’t choose 1215. I didn’t choose Thames Castle. Whatever mechanism exists inside that manuscript, it’s not a navigation device. It’s more like…” I searched for the right comparison. “A door that opens under specific conditions to a specific time.” I blew out a frustrated breath. “At least that’s what I think, but I don’t know for sure.”
“But you weren’t trying to use it,” Aldwin pointed out. “You said yourself you were only cataloguing it.”
“That’s true.”
“So perhaps lack of intention is the problem.” He leaned forward slightly. “Perhaps if someone touched it with a destination in mind, a particular place or year?—”
“Perhaps,” I interrupted carefully. “But even if that worked, changing the past would have consequences you can’t predict. You alter one alliance fifteen years ago and everything after it shifts. Maybe Thames becomes stronger. Maybe it collapses entirely. Maybe Geoffrey never leaves for his education and never becomes the strategist your father needs now.”
Aldwin was silent for a long moment.
“You sound like Geoffrey,” he said eventually. “He thinks in consequences.”
“Someone in this family should.”
Something in his expression shifted slightly. Not a smile exactly, but less hostility than usual.
“Show me the psalter,” he said. “Not to touch it. Just to see it.”
As we crossed the bailey toward the chapel, he glanced sideways at me with the same expression he usually reserved for battlefield problems.
“Why is your hair short?”
I blinked at him. “It isn’t short.”
“It barely reaches the middle of your back.”
“That is not short where I’m from.”
He looked deeply unconvinced.
Most noblewomen at Thames wore their hair braided nearly to the waist beneath veils and linen coverings. Mine reached just past my shoulder blades, practical by modern standards and apparently alarming by thirteenth-century expectations.
“You’re unmarried,” Aldwin said. “I assumed maidens in your century would wear it longer.”
I stared at him. “Did you just call me a maiden?”
“You object to the word?”
“I object to the conversation.”
Something suspiciously close to amusement flickered across his face before vanishing again.
“Long hair signals health,” he said with a shrug. “Fertility. Family wealth. Women here do not cut it without reason.”
“Well, women where I’m from occasionally prioritize convenience over broadcasting reproductive viability.”
Aldwin made a thoughtful noise at that, as though modern civilization had just become even more incomprehensible.
The family chapel was smaller than I expected and infinitely richer.
Painted saints watched from the plaster walls in faded reds and lapis blues, their solemn faces darkened by decades of candle smoke. Beeswax candles burned before the altar, filling the air with warm honey and incense thick enough to cling to the back of my throat. Gold leaf caught the autumn light filtering through the narrow windows and turned the entire room amber.
