“Perhaps.” All of a sudden I was exhausted.
“Or because the question was wrong.”
“Perhaps.”
“Or because it is not meant to be commanded.”
I looked at him. “Or because it can’t send me back.”
He didn’t deny it. That was worse than comfort would have been. For a long moment neither of us spoke.
The chapel was beginning to warm as the sun climbed higher, thin light slipping through the narrow windows and touching the painted saints along the walls. They looked down at me withsolemn, smoke-darkened eyes, as though they knew something I didn’t and had no intention of explaining it.
“I spent years touching old things,” I said at last. “As if enough patience could keep them from disappearing.”
Father William listened.
“I think I assumed the psalter brought me here because I knew how to attend to it. Because I cared about it properly. That made the whole thing feel less random somehow.”
“And now?”
I looked down at the manuscript. “Now I don’t know if I mattered at all.”
The words sat between us, small and terrible.
Father William’s face softened. “I think,” he said, “that being called without understanding why is still being called.”
“That sounds like something a priest would say.”
“It is one of our chief occupations.”
Despite everything, my mouth twitched. Then the smile faded. “What if I can’t go home?”
Father William didn’t answer quickly or try to placate me.
I appreciated that more than I wanted to.
“Then,” he said at last, “you will grieve what you lost. And eventually, God willing, you will build something with what remains.”
I looked toward the psalter again. Build something. Here. In 1215. In a castle where I was still part prisoner, part guest, and part threat.
“I’m not ready for that,” I said.
“No,” Father William agreed. “I wouldn’t expect you to be.”
The chapel had grown quiet again, but not peaceful. Nothing about the silence felt holy now. It felt like an answer withheld.
I stayed there after Father William left, standing before the psalter long enough for my hands to grow cold and my thoughts to become strangely clear around the edges.
The manuscript had brought me here or called me. But today it hadn’t answered. Not Aldwin. Not me.
For the first time since waking in the past, I had no proof that the road behind me still existed. And that frightened me more than anything I had faced since arriving. Because survival was one thing when you believed rescue might eventually come.
It was another thing entirely when the locked door behind you turned into a wall.
Nine
GEOFFREY
