If I’d fainted, I should be on the floor of the booth with security saying my name and the EMTs unfolding their kit. I should not be on a straw pallet in a stone tower I’d never seen, alone with a wool blanket that smelled like something a sheep had recently been wearing.
I pushed myself up on my elbows, which turned out to be a mistake because the room tilted in three directions simultaneously and my headache developed a new rhythm that felt like someone using my skull as a drum.
“It’s not possible,” I muttered, and waited for the spinning to stop. “Time travel isn’t real.” Where had that thought come from?
The pallet was in a tower room. That was clear from the window placement and the curved walls. The window itself was narrow, the kind of opening you’d build for defense rather than light. When I finally managed to stagger over to it and look out, I saw a landscape that made my legs start to buckle as I placed a hand on the wall.
This was not Boston. Where was my beloved city? Green hills rolled toward a river. The river was wide and slow, the color of old pewter. And along the bank, maybe a quarter mile away, stood a castle, a real, honest-to-God medieval castle, with towers and crenellations and a moat.
I gripped the cold stone of the window frame.
“Okay,” I said, my voice rough. “Okay. So this is…what, Cinerama? Am I on a set?”
But I knew the answer before I’d finished asking. The museum partnered with film productions sometimes. I’d been on sets. Sets had tells. Tape lines on the floor. Crew radios crackling somewhere. Cables under the doorways. The hum of distant generators or air conditioning or, at the very least, the low grumble of Boston traffic six blocks down.
Here there was no hum at all. The silence was absolute in a way silence in modern Boston never was. No cars. No planes. No city noise. Beyond the river, woodland ran unbroken to the horizon. The kind of woodland that hadn’t existed in hundreds of years. No fields divided by hedgerows. No farmhouses. No road. No power lines. No contrails. The city had vanished. Wait. Had I stumbled through a forest? Asked for help? It was all a bit hazy around the edges.
And then I spotted the banner. It flew from the highest tower of the castle, snapping in the wind. Gold and blue, divided ina grid of checks.Chequy or and azure, my brain supplied the heraldic term, the arms of an English noble house I had spent the morning cross-referencing in my pre-cataloging research, before I’d ever opened the psalter.
Two hours ago, I had photographed that exact banner in the gold-leaf illumination of a castle in the manuscript on my conservation booth’s table. I had noted it specifically. Painted with a precision the rest of the work didn’t match, as if the illuminator had been working from life.
Because they had. Whoever painted that psalter had stood somewhere very close to where I was standing now and looked at this castle and banner, painting what was in front of him.
The psalter that was dated to 1215.
I turned away from the window.
My eyes caught on the wall opposite the pallet, where a small wooden cross hung above an iron sconce. I crossed to it without deciding to.
The wood was new. Not freshly cut. It had been carved and finished and hung, was probably a year or two old. But newly made. The grain was bright. The cut surfaces were clean. There was no chemical darkening, no candle-smoke patina, no surface change of any kind from age.
I had spent eight years working with medieval objects. Every single one, every cross, every spoon, every hairpin, every fragment of vellum, carried hundreds years of accumulated wear. Surfaces darkened by candle smoke. Edges rubbed soft by use. They were always, always old.
This cross was bright.
I sat down on the stone floor underneath it. The panic was real. I was wearing modern jeans in a stone tower in what looked very much like the 13th century, and people would not understand my attire. I was going to die here. Hysterical laughter escaped before I could stop it.
But underneath the panic, and heaven help me, I knew exactly how stupid it was, there was a second feeling. Because if this was real, if I had actually fallen through that psalter and landed in another time, in a world I’d spent my entire career studying, I was about to see things no medievalist had ever seen. The Magna Carta. Not just the document, but the room, and the men.
The terror and the excitement arrived in the same heartbeat. Then my hands started shaking.
My stomach lurched. I made it to the ceramic pitcher on the chest and was grateful to find water, probably not the hygiene choice of a woman from the twenty-first century, but I was desperate as I splashed my face, which accomplished exactly nothing except making my headache worse.
A sound came from beyond the door. Footsteps, heavy and booted. More than one person.
I stood very still, suddenly aware that I was wearing the same clothes I’d put on that morning in my Boston apartment. Jeans, a fitted blouse, modern shoes with actual rubber soles, and that these items would raise questions in any genuine medieval setting. Or reenactment. Or wherever I was.
The footsteps stopped outside the door.
I heard the sound of a key turning in a lock, an actual key, maybe made of heavy iron, and then the door swung open.
Two men stood in the doorway. Both wore mail hauberks over what looked like linen undergarments. Both had swords and were staring at me with expressions that suggested I’d just done something catastrophically wrong.
“You,” the one on the left said. He was older, maybe fifty, with iron-gray hair and the kind of bearing that suggested he was used to people listening when he talked. “You’re awake.”
“I…” I started, and stopped. My throat was dry. Everything felt simultaneously too real and fundamentally impossible. “Where am I?”
The two men exchanged a look that made my skin prickle.
