No more waiting for another glow or wondering whether I would leave or be sent back. No more pretending this life was temporary. I had chosen. Geoffrey crossed the chapel toward me then. Not quickly but with quiet certainty. He stopped directly in front of me close enough that I could feel warmth radiating from him in the cold chapel air.
“You stayed,” he said softly.
Wonder filled the words as relief moved briefly across his face so raw it nearly undid me.
My eyes burned unexpectedly.
“Yes.”
Geoffrey looked at me for a long moment as though he still couldn’t entirely believe I remained standing before him.
“Marry me properly,” he said quietly. “Before God and every saint in England. Not because fate carried you here. Because you chose me.”
My throat tightened painfully.
“Yes,” I whispered again.
His hand lifted slowly, carefully, like he still couldn’t entirely believe he was permitted to touch me. His fingers brushed against mine. The smallest contact imaginable. It felt enormous.
And somewhere beneath the fear and uncertainty and impossible complexity of loving someone eight centuries outside my own lifetime, I recognized something simple and startling.
I had chosen Geoffrey long before this moment. Not in the proposal or the kiss. Earlier than that. In trust and daily conversation. In the thousand tiny moments that had quietly become attachment while neither of us was paying attention.
Love, apparently, was less lightning strike and more medieval tapestry restoration. Slow. Intentional. Held together thread by thread until one day you looked up and realized the thing had become invaluable.
Father William crossed himself firmly toward the now-silent manuscript.
“I dislike that object immensely,” he informed the chapel.
“Reasonable position,” I said faintly.
Father William looked between the two of us with the exhausted resignation of a man realizing divine mysteries had become personally inconvenient. He sighed heavily toward the ceiling.
“I preferred matters when I believed she was merely peculiar.”
Despite everything, laughter escaped me then. Breathless and shaky and real.
Geoffrey’s mouth curved slightly at the sound as he drew me against him then, there in the quiet chapel while candlelight flickered across ancient stone and the psalter rested dark at last upon the altar.
Outside, Thames Castle carried on around us. Fires burned in the kitchens. Snow gathered softly along the battlements. Somewhere below, servants laughed over Christmastide wine.
Life continuing, thread by thread, choice by choice. And for the first time since falling through time, I was no longer standing between two worlds.
I was finally home.
Nineteen
HARPER
Fall
1217
The First Barons’War ended the way most wars seemed to end. Expensively, bitterly, and with everyone insisting they had won.
The Peace of Kingston also called the Treaty of Lambeth, settled the worst of it at last, though not quietly.
The final months had been brutal. One last violent push from the baronial coalition before young Henry’s regents consolidated enough support to force negotiation instead of continued bloodshed. But in the end, history unfolded almost exactly as I had told the Baron it would two years earlier. Neither side truly victorious, the charter reaffirmed, the regency committed to enforcement, and the alliance itself fracturing apart once the single cause holding it together ceased to matter more than individual ambition.
