No Good Deed

by Kara Connolly

  I followed the tunnel blindly for what felt like an eon, but was probably more like an age. Finally, the tunnel angled upward. Ahead I saw a spot of less-black. Monk or no monk, I picked up my pace, incredibly relieved to see an exit. I had no idea where the tunnel would put me—back in the castle somewhere, or maybe outside the walls. I only knew I saw daylight.

  The passageway widened and the floor became a ramp. I sprinted out of an opening framed by a brick arch and a wide open wood door. Inertia carried me about three more steps before I came up against a solid wall of what the hell.

  I’d emerged into a stable yard. The horses plus the sweet and pungent mix of hay and manure were a dead giveaway. A stable wasn’t totally weird, but the geography felt wrong, like I was in my house but someone had rearranged all the furniture while I slept.

  I should be at the bottom of the cliff, but behind me was only a high stone wall. A wooden roof jutted out from it, sheltering a paddock full of short, sturdy horses. They gave me the side-eye but didn’t stop munching the oats in their trough. Dogs ran free and a fat tomcat stalked mice in the straw that littered the ground. Nearby, a hammer banged on an anvil. That wasn’t a sound I heard a lot in Indiana.

  With relief, I realized where I was—the tunnel had led to another part of the castle and I was in the middle of a living history demonstration. What else could explain the sound of iron striking iron, the man in a peasant costume hauling buckets across the yard, and the woman feeding chickens with grain from her gathered apron? No sign of the white friar, but a historical re-creation would explain him, too.

  Maybe.

  The relief didn’t stick. The longer I looked, the eerier the feeling that everything was just too right.

  Where were the tourists? Where were the baby strollers and iPhones? Where was that one reenactor who wore blue jeans with his puffy shirt and knee boots because he thought no one would notice? I’d been to enough Ye Olde Medieval Faires with Mom to know there was always that one guy.

  Across the yard, the woman had disappeared and the chickens were now feasting on the pile of grain she’d dropped. I heard the jingle of metal and the thud of heavy feet. I swung around and saw a group of men dressed in roughly woven tunics under jerkins of padded leather, with coifs of mail covering their heads. They carried pikes and wore conical helmets with nosepieces. This operation must have a huge costume budget.

  “Halt!” shouted the one with the fanciest tunic, which clearly made him the guy in charge. His troops halted all right, and lowered their pikes toward me.

  “I’m sorry,” I said, as if it made perfect sense for me to be apologizing to a group of overenthusiastic cosplayers accosting tourists with their deadly-looking weapons and way-too-authentic smell.

  “How came you to trespass in the caverns of the castle?” The squad’s leader—I didn’t know what he’d be called in MedievLand, but I was going to call him the sergeant—was burly and jowly like a pit bull, and he held his pack of soldiers in check with a raised hand. For a re-creation, the sergeant had the worst accent I’d ever heard. It hardly sounded like he was speaking English.

  “There was a monk?” It came out like a question, because I was sure about the monk but absolutely nothing else. The man stared at me without any change in expression. “He must have been one of your reenactors?” Another question and still nothing. I adjusted my satchel across my chest and began inching back toward the tunnel. “You know what? I just realized I didn’t pay for this part of the tour, so I’ll return to the gift shop and…”

  I turned quickly back the way I came, but the way I came wasn’t there anymore. The tunnel was there, but it was wider and lined with casks and crates. It didn’t lead to the bottomed-out darkness through which I’d stumbled. There was a cross-breeze and a light at the end of the tunnel, but not in a good way. More in a that-wasn’t-there-when-I-came-in way.

  I froze, not just because there were two men with pikes and padding and helmets blocking the passage. How had they gotten behind me? And more important—where was the way back? I mean, it had to be there, right? A side tunnel I hadn’t noticed that merged into this one. That was logical—not like this weird feeling of a one-way door whooshing closed with me on the wrong side.

  “Answer the question, knave,” barked the sergeant, and I whirled around to face him.

  What? I didn’t even know what a knave was, and I couldn’t remember the question anyway. I just knew I couldn’t stand there like a nitwit. And apparently, I couldn’t go back. I couldn’t go left, and to my right was the horse stall. The sergeant saw me eyeing the only open path and gestured for his men to close it off. “Stand where you are!”

  I did what any sensible person would do when confronted with a wall of armor, muscle, and pointy metal telling her to stand still.

  I ran like hell.

  Maybe no one expected me to actually make a break for it, or maybe no one expected me to ruin my shoes by going through the horse manure. But instinct said I was already in deep shit, so what did a little more of it matter?

  I vaulted over the feeding trough, startling several ponies, and jumped into the bed of a wagon on the other side. The tongue of the wagon—where the horses would be hitched—was flipped up for storage, and as the closest guards came for me, I kicked the hinged timber down. It hit their helmets with a satisfying double clang.

  Ordered and calculating Ellie said it was so rude to crash this reenactment party and start a brawl. The deeper part of me, the part that didn’t aim, the part that just felt…that part said run, run, run.

  I jumped over the side of the wagon and landed in a crouch. My only advantage was agility and surprise. The heavily padded men moved to block me, but I changed direction. I wasn’t sure where I was headed other than away from their pointy sticks.

  “Stop that boy!” shouted the sergeant, meaning me, I guessed. “Stop him or answer to the reeve!”

  More men poured from a low building. A barracks. Memory helpfully supplied the right words, even if some had dust on them. I was in the bailey, the walled courtyard surrounding a medieval keep that has a tower in its middle. The encircling wall was the parapet, where the archers would be, which meant the way out should be downhill.

  I sprinted toward the only thing that looked familiar—the two round towers flanking the gate. Except when I came in, there’d been a turnstile instead of an iron portcullis, and no giant oak capstan where the museum shop had been.

  But that was unquestionably the same stone gate tower, unblemished by weather or time. I was in Nottingham Castle. That parapet wall marked the drop of the cliff, and beyond that was the same Midlands countryside, only without the soccer stadium or the train tracks or water towers. Without any of the landmarks I recognized.

  Without any landmarks at all.

  Just land.

  I was dreaming. I’d fallen asleep under the Robin Hood statue and was having a nightmare. Or I’d tripped in the tunnel and hit my head and this was an incredibly detailed hallucination full of ponies pulling carts, women with muddy clogs and tied-up skirts, and people staring and—

  “Shut the gate, you imbeciles!” bellowed someone with authority. “Stop that boy or take his place in the dungeon!”

  The groan of rope and wood torqued fresh knots of panic inside me. The iron gate was coming down, and whether I was lost or dreaming or quite possibly delusional, every instinct said escape now and figure it out later.

  The stones were muddy and wet. I threw myself onto them and rolled under the portcullis like Indiana Jones escaping the Temple of Doom, except that my satchel tried to strangle me. I sprawled there for a second, stunned that I had not gotten skewered by the spikes on the bottom of the gate as they crashed down next to me.

  The courtyard through which I’d entered was gone. I was crouched on a bridge that spanned a river that hadn’t been there on my walk from the inn. I could hear shouting coming from behind me, and the creak of wood and rope as the men in the guard tower reversed the capstan to reo
pen the gate.

  I scrambled away but hadn’t even gained my feet when an arrow whistled by to my right. I yelped and dove left, and another shot clattered to the stones beside me.

  Like hell was I going to be killed by an arrow, dammit. That was more irony than I could handle.

  I grabbed the loose arrow—I felt better with it in my hand—and fell back until I was too close to the tower for the archers to shoot down at me. But the portcullis was climbing and the guards were like big angry dogs barking behind a chain-link fence. I got my feet under me, ready to take my chances with the archers, when I made the mistake of looking over my shoulder.

  Above the gate was a series of spikes, and on one of the spikes was a head.

  A head. On a spike.

  I screamed. There was no pretending I didn’t. I stumbled over my own feet to get away from the awful thing, and then I saw there was more and it was worse. On the other side of the gate, two corpses hung by their necks and I yelped again, as if they might pull themselves free and come after me. The whole place smelled awful, but now all I could smell was death. All I could see was the slack skin and open mouth and sightless eyes of the head, the rotting flesh of the hanged men.

  A noise behind me jolted me out of my paralyzing horror. I whirled to see a man on horseback blocking the other end of the bridge.

  “Hold!” he ordered, and everyone froze. The riders behind him, the archers, the guards at my back. For all I know the river stopped running under the bridge. It was that kind of voice.

  He didn’t wear a helmet or any kind of uniform. He had dark hair, tanned skin, an aquiline nose, and an angled jaw covered by a close-cropped beard. He was all hard lines and slashes, this guy. And his horse…if the ponies in the stable were Hondas, this beast was a freaking Porsche.

  “What is happening here?” the man demanded.

  I wasn’t sure what I meant to say. But what came out was “There is a head on a spike.”

  The horseman looked up at the thing without any visible change in expression, and then back at me. “That was there when I left. You were not.”

  I jumped as a guard grabbed the strap of my messenger bag where it crossed my back, his knuckles grinding into my spine as he tightened his grip. The sergeant had pushed his way through the guards blocking the gate and shot me a look like I’d gotten him in trouble on purpose. “We found this lad mucking about in the caverns under the castle, Sir Henry.”

  “I was lost!” I protested to the guy on the horse. It was the truth, but the way I said it sounded like a lie, so I blathered on and made it worse. “There was a man. A friar. I was looking for him.”

  Sir Henry raised one brow, questioning my story, then glanced over my shoulder. “Did you lose something, Your Honor?” he asked in a wry tone that only a guy with a horse and an accent and the ability to lift one eyebrow could pull off.

  As I turned to see whom he was talking to, the guards fell away to let another man pass. He was older than the horseman, and his knee-length tunic was belted with leather and silver and trimmed in velvet. A fur-lined cloak made his shoulders look broad, but his calves were skinny. His face would have been unremarkable, except for the expression of clear and cold disdain on it.

  The robed man drew himself up to his full height and dignity. “Excellent, Captain Guilbert,” he said, as if things had gone totally according to plan. “You’ve caught our trespasser.”

  I recognized his voice as the one yelling for my capture. I swung my gaze back to Sir Henry–slash–Captain Guilbert. It was clear from the tension vibrating between the two men that they were at odds. For a moment, I had a hope that the guy on horseback would take my side just to piss off Tunic Man. But he just flicked a finger in my direction, and gave orders to the men behind him. “Take this intruder to the dungeon.”

  Well, crap.

  I had kept my grip on the shaft of the arrow, just under the barbed tip, but the guard still held me by the strap on my bag, and men from both sides of the bridge were about to converge on me like fifty medieval linemen in chain mail.

  The only way out was by river. Iron Ellie, international archery champion, calculated the distance down to the water, the swiftness of the flow as an indicator of depth, the windage, and the air temperature—all in a heartbeat.

  But the other Ellie? The one who loosed her arrows when it felt right?

  She just jumped. I jerked free of the guard and left the soldiers, the overdressed civil servant, and Captain Sir Whoever tracking my arc into the muddy river below.

  In that instant before I jumped, I’d done a lot of calculations, but I’d forgotten one very important thing: There was no waste disposal service in the Middle Ages. There was only the river.

  The smell was awful. It was also offal and rotted vegetables and I didn’t know what else, nor did I want to.

  The river was high and running fast, and it carried me quickly out of range of the castle’s archers. When I dove from the bridge, I’d felt the strap of my satchel tighten across my chest and then jerk free, and now I didn’t feel it at all—no strap, no bag, no passport, no phone. Before I could do more than panic about it, the current gave me a hard yank, dragging me under. I was a good swimmer, but the flow snagged my sodden clothes and pulled me to the rocky bottom. I banged along the shallows like a sneaker in a washing machine, smacking my head hard enough to turn up into down.

  Then a hand grabbed the back of my sweater and hoisted me out of the log-flume ride from hell. I coughed and choked and opened my eyes, despite the filthy water running down my face. All I could make out were the flanks of a horse and the boot and stirrup belonging to the rider who had hauled me up like a kitten by the scruff of its neck.

  I’d lost track of what was the frying pan and what was the fire. This rider might drag me right back up to the castle, or into some new attraction in this Dante’s Inferno theme park, but at least I wasn’t going to drown in three feet of water. Especially three feet of that water.

  The horse waded to shore and climbed the riverbank, where the rider set me on my feet. Or at least tried to. My legs gave out and I dropped to my hands and knees, spewing up any river water the horse hadn’t already jostled out.

  My fingers were cramped around something familiar. I’d kept hold of the arrow but lost my satchel on the bridge. Nice priorities, Ellie. They were welcome to the Moleskine and Lärabars and travel umbrella. But my passport and iPhone were in there, too.

  That was a problem, but was it my most immediate one? I needed to look up, get my bearings, see what dangers surrounded me, but breathing and not puking were the best I could manage for a long moment. Maybe more than a few long moments.

  Something nudged me—the horse. It snuffled my hair, then snorted in disgust. I didn’t blame it.

  The rider swung out of the saddle in a motion as fluid as a gymnast’s dismount but somehow even more badass. “Can you stand?” he asked, in an accent so thick I wanted subtitles. When I didn’t respond immediately, he repeated, in French, “Pouvez-vous vous lever?”

  “Donnez-moi une minute,” I managed.

  The language wasn’t the problem. The problem was that I’d finally gotten a look at who had pulled me out of River Le Pew.

  A knight. Not a figurative one, a literal knight in armor looking like an illustration out of a book on chivalry, while I dripped water and sewage into a foul-smelling puddle at his feet.

  His horse was the color of polished oak, big enough to carry a man draped in a hundred pounds or more of chain mail. The knight looked like he came from the Crusades, gauging not only by his outfit and weapons but mostly from the crimson cross emblazoned on his whitish surcoat.

  I didn’t have to be a history nerd—or the daughter of one—to recognize that. I’d watched The Da Vinci Code. I knew a Knight Templar when I saw one.

  That was the reason I couldn’t speak.

  Well, that on top of everything else.

  Frowning, the knight dropped to a crouch in front of me. I still didn’t
know whose side he was on, the frying pan’s or the fire’s, but there was concern mixed with his impatience. “Nous n’avons pas beaucoup de temps. Êtes-vous gravement blessée?”

  We don’t have much time. Are you badly injured? His gaze went to my temple, which throbbed almost worse than it stung. I reached under my dripping hair and found a big lump and an impressive trickle of blood.

  I had hit my head. That would explain everything. I was lying in the tunnel under Nottingham Castle and any minute now a tour group was going to stumble over my unconscious body.

  Except I’d hit my head after I jumped into the hell river, not before.

  What if I really had slipped my gears? What if I’d run out of Nottingham Castle in the middle of a psychotic break, and the guards were really the paramedics or something and I’d escaped them by jumping into the river?

  Except the river wasn’t there in the twenty-first century.

  What if I wasn’t in the twenty-first century?

  I stared numbly at the blood on my fingers. My head didn’t hurt anymore because it was floating away from my body.

  What if I really was in the Middle Ages?

  “Oh. My. God,” I wheezed. “I’m going to die of some horrible medieval disease.”

  The knight blinked in confusion. “Qu’est-ce que c’est que ça?”

  “The bubonic plague. Oh, wait. That’s from fleas.” Random bits of history slipped uselessly through my brain.

  His concern was turning into a grim sort of alarm. “Êtes-vous folle? Ou êtes-vous désorientée de votre chute?”

  Was I mad? One thing I did know—I should not appear crazy in the Middle Ages. Whether delusional or sane, the safest thing was to stay calm and go with it. Eventually I’d wake up…or die of the Black Death.

  I took a steadying breath and told him, “Je vais bien. And I speak English.”

  He gave me a doubtful look that needed no translation. “You speak something vaguely like English.”