Sent

by Margaret Peterson Haddix

  Suddenly there was a thundering of hooves, drowning out whatever Alex had planned to say. A man on a white horse sped toward them, leaning forward in the saddle, intent on his goal.

  It was King Richard III.

  Jonah stiffened. Our cue! He wanted to scream at Katherine, “Remember? We can pull them out after Richard sees them!”

  But he and Katherine had to step out of the way, because Richard galloped right up in front of Chip and Alex. Both boys had completely rejoined their tracers and were staring up at their uncle. Around them the other soldiers had their hands on their swords, but Jonah couldn’t tell if they were prepared to attack Richard or defend him.

  Richard slid off his horse. His eyes flicked from Chip to Alex and back again.

  “My nephews,” he said, sounding stunned, as if he couldn’t quite believe the sight before him. “So it is true. … You live?”

  “Aye,” Chip said, a challenge in his voice. “Against your wishes.”

  He stood bold and strong, his hand tight on the hilt of his sword.

  Would he try to kill Richard? Jonah wondered. Right here? Right now? What could we do about that?

  “And yet, you’ve been betrayed,” Richard said mockingly. “Spies told me you were here.”

  “Spies told us not all of your subjects are loyal,” Alex countered, stepping up beside Chip. “Some of your noblemen refused to fight for you.”

  Jonah remembered Lord Stanley, refusing to fight for Richard even if it meant his own son’s death. Richard grimaced, every bit as pained as if Alex had struck him with a sword. Jonah expected Richard to lash out, maybe grab for his own sword at the insult. Jonah put his arm protectively on Alex’s shoulder, ready to snatch him away at the first thrust of a sword. Out of the corner of his eye Jonah saw Katherine do the same thing to Chip.

  But Richard didn’t reach for his sword. He dropped to his knee and bowed his head before Chip.

  “My nephew,” Richard murmured. “I have sinned before God and man, but I have been granted a second chance. When the battle is over … when we have vanquished Henry Tudor …” He looked up, his eyes boring into Chip’s. “As soon as this battle ends, I will give you back your crown.”

  THIRTY-FOUR

  Jonah’s jaw dropped. This was a complication he’d never expected, one he’d never even dreamed was possible.

  Why didn’t JB warn us about this? Jonah wondered. Maybe it was just Jonah, but it seemed like it would have made a lot more sense for JB to tell him and Katherine they could yank Chip and Alex out of time “after Richard offers the crown back,” rather than “after Richard sees them.”

  Before Chip could answer, an overwhelming wave of cheers and screams and gasps flew through the crowd, seeming to drown out all other sound. How could all those people have heard what Richard said? Jonah wondered. But they weren’t reacting to Richard’s proclamation. They were reacting to something that had happened out on the battlefield.

  “That’s Norfolk. …”

  “Norfolk is down. …”

  “Norfolk is dead. …”

  The news flew through the crowd, one update instantaneously replaced by the next.

  Jonah remembered how it was Norfolk’s men that Richard had said he could count on; it was Norfolk’s men that Chip had said were fighting the hardest.

  Richard looked stricken.

  He scrambled up from his bent knee and back onto his horse. High above the crowd, he could probably see straight out to the battlefield now.

  “My friend Norfolk, fallen,” he murmured, a quiver in his voice. “But now his son will take charge. …”

  Even Jonah, who knew nothing about medieval battle tactics, could see that Norfolk’s men were disorganized and scattered, unable to forge on without their original leader. A group of soldiers behind yellow banners swept against them, pushing Norfolk’s army back and back and back.

  Richard looked down at Chip.

  “I must defend the crown I would give you,” he said. “This will be my last act as king. …” He spun his horse around and galloped off.

  For a long moment Jonah lost sight of Richard in the chaos. Then the king reappeared in the center of the battle. He was leading a charge all the way across the field, through the thick of the fighting. It was easy to follow his progress because he’d crammed his crown on top of his helmet, and it gleamed in the sunlight. He was the only man on the battlefield wearing a crown.

  Richard passed the yellow-bannered troops that had swept away Norfolk’s men; he passed deep into the heart of Henry Tudor’s men. It was an amazing breakaway—no one seemed able to touch him.

  And then Richard reached the man carrying Henry Tudor’s dragon banner. The dragon banner plummeted to the ground.

  “He killed Henry’s standard-bearer?” Chip murmured in amazement. “He’s that close to killing Henry?”

  But a second later it was Richard tumbling to the ground. No, wait, Jonah thought. It’s not Richard who’s hurt. It’s his horse. The horse’s white coat seemed to have turned red. He lay on the ground, unmoving. But Richard was up on his feet, fighting back as Henry Tudor’s men surrounded him.

  “That’s the line I remember from the Shakespeare play!” Alex said suddenly. “He’s supposed to say, ‘A horse! A horse! My kingdom for a horse!’”

  “Then what happens in Shakespeare?” Jonah asked.

  Alex frowned, a contrast to the hopeful face of his tracer.

  “Don’t know,” Alex said, but he was distracted, watching the battle.

  Richard really did need a horse. He was fighting valiantly, but more and more of his enemies surrounded him, and he couldn’t escape. After a few moments Jonah could no longer see Richard’s helmet or crown or sword because of all the other helmets and swords flashing around him. And then a circlet of gold rolled out of the center of the fighting. Men just stepped back and let it roll.

  It was Richard’s crown.

  Richard was dead.

  THIRTY-FIVE

  An eerie silence hung over the battlefield, as if everyone was holding his breath. Then Jonah realized it was only his mind that had blanked out the noise temporarily. Swordsmen were still waving their swords; archers were still launching their arrows. In the thick of the fight they couldn’t see what had happened to the king.

  But Chip had.

  “My crown!” he screamed. “That’s my crown!”

  He dashed forward, dragging Katherine along with him.

  “My brother!” Alex yelled behind him, and took off running as well.

  “No, stop!” Jonah shrieked. “We’ve got to get you out of here!”

  Nobody seemed to hear Jonah, because all of the soldiers around them were surging forward alongside Chip and Alex, battle cries ringing from their throats. Jonah wasn’t sure if the soldiers really wanted to help Chip regain the Crown, or if they were just tired of standing around. But they were all rushing into battle, toward Henry Tudor’s men.

  How soon will Chip reach his first opponent? Jonah wondered. JB’s words “You have a very narrow window of opportunity” echoed in Jonah’s mind. Chip and Alex had already been seen by Richard. Richard had had time to ride off into the battle and die. How much time did Chip and Alex have left?

  Alex, running, tried to shake Jonah’s arm off his shoulder, the action momentarily separating him from his tracer. Stubbornly Jonah leaped forward, wrapping his arms tighter around Alex’s neck.

  “You can talk to him,” Jonah whispered in Alex’s ear. “You can tell him he has to leave.”

  “I’ll do what my brother wants me to do,” Alex said, and Jonah couldn’t tell which version of Alex was speaking. Jonah saw no flash of tracer light, but his eyes didn’t seem to be working properly as he jolted along, arrows whizzing past him, swords flying around him. Jonah didn’t think Alex could have progressed very far, weighed down by Jonah on his back; evidently the battle had come to them.

  “Chip!” Jonah screamed. “Katherine!”

  This was his wors
t nightmare: He’d lost sight of both his sister and his friend.

  What am I going to tell Mom and Dad? he wondered.

  Sunlight flashed off a sword several yards ahead of him, blinding him temporarily. The sword slashed the air—and crashed into a sword held by Chip.

  “Go help your brother!” Jonah screamed in Alex’s ear.

  Alex raced forward, as if he’d had the same thought. The old, whiskery soldier whose turning head had first led to Chip and Alex raced alongside them, like a guardian fending off attacks. Jonah wondered if the man was a particular friend of theirs—a relative, a servant?—but there wasn’t time to ask.

  Chip was fighting furiously now, whipping his sword this way and that, countering his opponent’s every blow. Katherine stood behind him, ducking when he ducked, dodging every parry and thrust.

  “Look out!” she shrieked. “On your right!”

  But Chip was already reacting, pulling his sword back to block another opponent’s swing of a battle-ax.

  “That one’s mine!” the whiskery soldier shouted, spinning his sword forward so Chip could go back to focusing on the first opponent.

  It would be impossible to capture Chip’s attention while he was engaged in battle. Jonah took a risk: He leaped off Alex’s back and landed on top of the swordsman who was attacking Chip. This worked better than Jonah had hoped, as the swordsman crumpled to the ground.

  Bafflement spread over Chip’s face; it seemed to be a mixture of the tracer not understanding why his opponent had suddenly fallen down, and Chip not understanding how Jonah had appeared out of nowhere.

  “Jonah?” Chip whispered.

  “We’ve—got—to—leave—now!” Jonah screamed.

  The swordsman was squirming out from underneath him. Any minute now he’d spring back into action.

  “I’m king again,” Chip said. “I’m getting my crown back.”

  “It’s not going to work that way,” Jonah argued. “If you don’t leave, you’re going to die!”

  Chip’s face seemed to bubble back and forth, tragic medieval king one moment, uncertain twenty-first-century teen the next. It was like Chip was having trouble making up his mind. And then his face hardened with the strong jawline, the mustache, the wise-beyond-his-years eyes. He was the medieval king.

  “Sometimes you have to fight for what you want,” Chip said, his expression set. “Sometimes the fight is all you get.”

  “Is this really what you want?” Jonah asked. “Death on a battlefield?”

  The swordsman sprang up from behind Jonah, swinging his weapon at Chip. Jonah ducked down out of the way; Chip’s sword rang out against his opponent’s.

  “My crown!” Chip cried. “My throne! My glory!”

  Jonah jumped up, too angry now for caution.

  “You’re just like your father,” he snarled. “Back home. Remember? Remember how selfish he was, how he never thought about anyone but himself? Katherine just told you she wanted you to be her boyfriend, and you don’t even care. You don’t care that we came all the way back here, risking our own lives to save you. When you die—for so-called glory, but for no reason really, accomplishing absolutely nothing—when that happens, Katherine’s going to spend the next five hundred years crying over you.”

  Chip stopped in the middle of a sword thrust, though his tracer’s arms continued forward. At the last possible second the whiskery soldier blocked Chip’s opponent, swinging for him again.

  Chip turned to face Katherine, his body twisted almost completely backward from his tracer’s. Jonah saw Chip’s opponent blink in astonishment, a burst of tracer light in his face—as far as Jonah could tell, the opponent probably thought Chip had disappeared entirely.

  “Would you really cry for five hundred years if I die?” Chip asked Katherine.

  Katherine peered up at him.

  “I’d rather not,” she said. “I’d rather save your life instead.”

  Chip looked around wonderingly, as if he were only now really seeing the battle around him, only now hearing the clash of swords and the zing of arrows and the cries of dying men. Fear and awe battled in his face.

  “Let’s get out of here, then,” he whispered.

  “Get Alex!” Jonah screamed.

  Chip stepped back toward his brother, and Jonah thought it would be good for him to get completely away from his tracer. But the tracer was striding back toward Alex too, practically running.

  Alex was in danger: A soldier stood over him, a battle-ax raised high.

  “Get him now!” Katherine screamed.

  Chip scooped up Alex’s shoulders and yanked him backward. As soon as he was away from his tracer, Alex turned invisible again, like Chip and Jonah and Katherine.

  Behind them, Chip’s and Alex’s tracers gleamed with a ghostly light. The soldier with the battle-ax hesitated, confused, separating from a tracer of his own.

  “JB!” Jonah hollered. “We’re ready!”

  “I’ve got you covered,” the whiskery soldier said, taking something that resembled a plain, flat rock out of his pocket and pushing a button on its surface.

  He has an Elucidator, Jonah thought. He’s on our side. He’s from the future too. How come he’s allowed to have an Elucidator and we’re not?

  And then Jonah and the others were spinning through time, away from the fifteenth century.

  The last thing Jonah saw, before everything disappeared, was a ghostly tracer battle-ax slamming down on two ghostly tracer boys.

  THIRTY-SIX

  They landed on their backs on solid rock, with a view of a solid rock ceiling arcing above them.

  They were back in the cave.

  Jonah could hear screaming and wailing, and for a moment he thought they’d brought the battle with them. But these screams were high pitched, like at a middle school pep rally: the voices of teenage girls and boys who could still sing in the treble clef if they needed to.

  Dizzily Jonah sat up. He checked to see that Katherine and Chip and Alex—and the whiskery soldier—were all on the floor beside him. Then he faced forward, looking for the source of all those screams. A group of kids were clustered nearby: all the other kids who were missing children plucked from history. He recognized Andrea Crowell, with her long braids; Ming Reynolds, though she was missing her name tag; Emily Quinn, who’d been so calm before (and in fact, she was one of the few kids not screaming now). And behind them, Anthony Solbers and Sarah Puchini and Josh Hart and Denton Price …

  A statuesque African-American woman rushed forward—it was their friend Angela, the only adult from the twenty-first century who knew about time travel.

  “Are you all right?” she demanded.

  Jonah realized she was peering only at him and Katherine. Chip and Alex, incredibly enough, were wearing the same clothes they’d had on in the beginning: the Ohio State sweatshirt and jeans and Nikes for Chip; the Einstein T-shirt and jeans for Alex. They looked clean and tidy, perfectly normal.

  Jonah and Katherine, on the other hand, were still wearing dented, battered, muddy armor, which, strangely, now also seemed a bit rusty.

  “We’re fine,” Jonah said. “We just look awful.”

  “Speak for yourself,” Katherine corrected him. Then she looked down at the clumps of mud clinging to her hair, the leather straps on her armor that seemed to be worn almost all the way through. “Oh, well,” she said. “Sometimes you can’t help getting a little messy.”

  Jonah was glad that at least the whiskery soldier looked muddy and battered too. The soldier stood up, creakily, and stuck out his hand to Angela.

  “Hadley Correo, ma’am,” he said politely. “I’m very glad to meet you.”

  “You too,” Angela said, equally politely. “Angela DuPre. I take it you’re a friend of JB’s?”

  Jonah didn’t have the patience for stupid grown-up chitchat.

  “Where’s JB?” he demanded. “Did everything work out? Chip and Alex are safe, but what happened to history?”

  JB stepped ou
t from behind the screaming kids, who were finally beginning to settle down a little. Jonah wasn’t sure if he’d been there all along, or if he’d just arrived from some foreign time as well.

  “We have an expression in this business,” JB said. “Time will tell. It will take a while to be sure of the outcomes—”

  “Oh, come on,” Jonah said, annoyed again. “I know how time travel works now. You probably zoomed up to the future before coming back here—you probably already spent years studying how the changes rippled through history!”

  JB laughed, unoffended.

  “It’s true that I could have,” he admitted. “But I didn’t. My first priority was making sure all of you were all right.”

  Jonah watched JB’s eyes and decided he was telling the truth. Maybe JB wasn’t concerned solely about time after all.

  “These kids are troopers,” Hadley Correo said, patting Jonah and Katherine on the back. “I’d put them up against some of the best time agents I’ve ever worked with.”

  “Thanks a lot!” JB said, rolling his eyes. “Remind me of that the next time I nearly kill myself getting recertified! I still won’t be as good as thirteen-year-old amateurs!”

  Despite his words, he didn’t seem truly offended. Jonah guessed that Hadley and JB had probably worked together before.

  “Why didn’t you tell us somebody else was there on the battlefield to help us?” Katherine demanded.

  “All our projections showed that wouldn’t work,” JB said. “You had to feel responsible. And … you were. Hadley wouldn’t have known to talk about Chip’s dad. He wouldn’t have known to talk about Katherine’s variety of boyfriend choices.”

  Jonah noticed that Katherine was blushing under her coating of mud.

  “Um,” Emily said hesitantly now that the other kids had stopped screaming. “I don’t get it. Those kids were only gone an instant. How’d they get so beat up? Why are you talking about battlefields and boyfriends and time agents, like a lot of stuff happened while they were away?”

  “An instant?” Chip asked. “Are you crazy? We were gone for two years!” His voice shot up an octave and squeaked on the word “years,” and he looked stunned and embarrassed. “Two years,” he tried again, only marginally deeper. He clamped his mouth shut, his face turning as red as Katherine’s.