Page 11 of Beds and Blades

The work continued.

This was a garrison that had been on alert so long that alertness had become the baseline.

The interior smelled of horses and smoke. The stone underfoot was worn smooth along the high-traffic lines between the gate, the keep, and the eastern wall. A physical record of years of people moving between the same three points with purpose.

The outpost was alive with work. The roaring flames of a forge. The low exchange of soldiers rotating off the wall. The clank of armor being set down by someone who had been wearing it for hours and was not sorry to put it down.

Once we were through the gates, the knight dismounted from the horse. There was no wasted motion, no performance, just the action completed because it needed completing.

He turned to me, assessed the situation—me, on a horse, without an obvious means of descent—and reached up.

His hands found my waist, and he set me down, and what struck me wasn’t the gesture itself but the absence of strain. He lifted me as if weight were irrelevant. As if I belonged to the category of things that offer no resistance. The ease of it was almost disorienting; I’d seen that same casual effortlessness in my own hands when I reached for something like a ketchup bottle.

Both hands spanned my waist, and then I was off the horse and on the ground. Practical, efficient, the problem resolved.

I had spent a long time thinking carefully about what I wanted from a man. I had done a thorough and honest inventory in the privacy of my own mind and arrived at conclusions.

One of those conclusions was that I wanted to be picked up like I weighed nothing by a man for whom I actually weighed nothing.

He had done it the way he probably did everything: without drama, without performance, because it was simply the most direct solution to the immediate problem.

He had already turned to give instructions to a soldier about the horse.

He began to remove his armor with the assistance of one of his men. The armor came off piece by piece, and what was underneath it was the body of a lifelong warrior.

He was tall, even by the standards of someone accustomed to conducting most conversations at an upward angle.

Dark hair, slightly disordered in the way of someone who had been wearing a helmet until recently and had not thought about what came after.

Dark eyes that landed on things with full attention.

Dark stubble shadowed his square jaw—the consequence of more important work while his face proceeded without him.

He was broad through the shoulders in a way that suggested the armor had been fitted to accommodate rather than create that width.

Muscle sat on him with quiet density, not exaggerated but undeniable, as if it had been built through repetition rather than intent. It showed most when he moved: in the slow flex of his arms, the pull across his shoulders, and the power of a back shaped by work. He wore it carelessly, as though he had no idea how good it looked.

Nothing about him looked ornamental. It was all function. Strength built for use.

He had a scar along his left forearm that had healed cleanly a long time ago, which told me he had been doing this long enough that his scars were no longer fresh.

The more I thought about his body, the more my mind turned to Conference Materials 2023.

Meanwhile, the man—my rescuer—was already across the yard giving orders. He turned and looked at me, and I realized no one had ever looked at me quite like that before.

He looked at me like he had stopped everything else to focus on me, like nothing else in the courtyard required his attention. His eyes moved over my face with an intensity he made no effort to conceal.

I had no framework for this. My entire academic career had been built in rooms that forgot I was there. I was not the woman men looked at like that. I was the woman men looked through on their way to looking at someone else.

I decided the most productive use of this moment was to ask his name.

“Scipio,” he said.

I stared at him in disbelief.

I had spent years studying Scipio Africanus. I had devoted my doctoral work to arguing that he was the most consequential military commander in Western history. And I had woken up in a field in another world and ridden to a military outpost on a horse with a man whose name was Scipio.

The universe had a sense of humor.