Mirrors (Curse of Lanval Book 1)

by Dodson, Rebekah

  I answered her in the best French I could. “We will be quick.”

  She nodded, handed us a few brochures, and let us in.

  Jules tried to juggle her phone and the brochures, giving up and pocketing her phone, before spreading out the tri-folded glossy paper. “To answer your earlier question,” she told me, “the only thing that was here in the eleventh century was the hall, the chapel, and a small room for the Lord. It was Carolingian in origin, and Juhrel II of Mayenne…”

  “Probably built more, like I said,” I cut her off.

  “Actually, left it to Guillaume in 1075,” she finished. “A gift upon…”

  I was too busy taking it in to listen to her as she continued on about the background of the castle. The worn cobblestone clicked under her heels as we entered the vast circular gates into the central courtyard. Two and three-story buildings surrounded us, clearly a modern update from the last few centuries, I guessed. At the far end, a small, squat chapel sat, a large rounded archway beckoning us just below the arched steeples and plain, empty window frames. “Let’s start with the chapel,” I told Jules.

  “But the Grand Hall is right there…” she trailed off, pointing to her right. “We only have thirty minutes, Gill.”

  I ignored her and started for the chapel. She jogged lightly to keep up with my long strides. “I supposed we can come back tomorrow,” she said under her breath.

  I don’t know why I wanted to see the chapel. Hadn’t we just sat in one for two hours, in front of the coffin of my father-figure? Yet something inside me called me in that direction; I couldn’t explain it. It hit me suddenly that my ancestors walked these very paths, between the chapel and the front gate. It was an ample experience.

  I slowed as we reached the entrance to the chapel. Two tourists ducked out of the low doorway before we could enter, chattering in something that sounded like German. This late in the day, only a few people were milling around the castle. In the distance and behind us, towards the great hall, a child cried, and someone chided them in a language I didn’t recognize.

  The chapel was small on the outside, but the inside was like walking through a closet door to another world, frozen in time. Only eight pews, clearly newer, with four on each side, greeted us. Five stained glass windows, with vibrant depictions of various saints, glistened in the afternoon sun over the altar. Electric candles adorned the path between the pews and across the tiers of the altar, which showed more womanly saints dressed in various lace and gowns, etched with bronze and silver. The altar itself was draped with lace and a silver cross sitting on top, in front of a grand statue of Christ himself, stretched on a cross. Before we could even get close to the altar, a red cord attached to the golden posts stopped us from going further.

  “I guess it’s fragile up there,” Jules said, “that’s why we can’t get very close.” She tucked the brochure into her back pocket and pulled out her phone, snapping a few pictures of the stain glass windows.

  Guillaume.

  “Did you hear that?” I turned to Jules.

  “What?”

  “That whisper, did you hear that?”

  “Are you feeling okay, Gill?” Jules eyed me, her phone frozen above her.

  Guillaume.

  The whisper floated to me again, and at first, I wasn’t sure it was real. Jules hadn’t heard it, clearly. Was I so stressed I was hearing things?

  The chapel dropped out of my vision, and the only thing I could see was the altar before me. Vaulting over the rope and ignoring my sister’s protests, I knelt between the glowing candles, my head resting against the altar.

  Guillaume, save me.

  I looked up at the cross figure and saw a glint of metal from the corner of my eye, reflected from the stained glass above me.

  “What’s this?” Jules said, right beside me. Obviously, ropes meant nothing to her, either. She reached out towards the same metal I had seen. I watched as her fingers closed around a handle, and she yanked, hard.

  “Jules…” I reached out to stop her, my hand closing over hers.

  She pulled a small rusted mirror, about the size of her hand, from between the tiers of the altar. She yanked so hard that she tumbled backward, and I fell with her.

  I thought we would crash into the rope behind us, and scatter the candles everywhere. The French lady at the front gate would come in screaming at us to leave immediately for destroying a French Historical site. They’d haul us off to French jail. My mother would be upset, my aunt would likely yell at us in her loud voice. Andre would have a snide comment about our strange American ways.

  But never in a million years did I imagine what actually happened.

  We landed hard, without the rope behind us, and my head bounced hard on the stone floor of the chapel, sending stars exploding across my vision. I shook my head, reaching out for Jules, but coming up empty. I struggled to clear my head, but black spots erupted, and everything was blurry. The stained glass disappeared, taking the sun with it. Everything plunged into darkness, and I passed out.

  My last thought: What in the world had my sister done now?

  Chapter Six: Not My Mother’s France

  You’re not in love with me, are you?

  It’s strange that it would be Becci’s voice I would hear in my moment of need. Why her? She was eight thousand miles away, and she had made it clear we didn’t have a future. Who cares about a future anyway, when there are so many women to be explored?

  Man, jet lag is a bitch, I thought as I struggled to clear my head. I had slept plenty yesterday, my body adjusting quickly to the time change after our flight, but I knew from experience that sometimes jet lag was a sleeping lion that reared its head when you least expected. Why was my head so fuzzy?

  Jules.

  Where was she?

  I shook my head and my vision cleared finally, and I saw Jules laying next to me, crumpled against one of the pews, unconscious. I started to panic, but my training kicked in, and I moved her gently, checked her breathing and pulse. Her heart was still beating strong, but as I lifted her head to clear her airway, my fingers came back smeared with blood. I looked up and saw her head must have hit the pew. How was that even possible? They were a good five feet behind us.

  Working quickly, I ripped the sleeve off my white shirt, wincing slightly when I realized my mother would be upset I ruined my funeral clothes. Too bad, Jules was more important. The gash in Jules' head wasn’t bleeding profusely and wasn’t anything a few stitches couldn’t fix. I had my kit back at my aunt’s house so I could fix her up easily. I wrapped the sleeve around her head and tied it firmly above her brow to staunch the slight flow of blood.

  “Jules,” I whispered. “Jules, wake up.”

  She started to stir. “Wha… Gill? Where are we?”

  “What do you mean? We are in the chapel…”

  I realized she wasn’t looking directly at me, but somewhere behind me. I turned towards the stain glass windows, and they were … gone.

  Not the windows, exactly, but the vivid portraits of saints, the glass entirely, was gone. The gaping smooth stone of the chapel windows was rugged and narrow, with only a tiny bit of the dusk light shining through. I turned back to Jules and saw the pew she’d smashed against. Gone were the modern-day, varnished pieces we had seen previously, these were rough-hewn, pieced together primitively, and leaning at a slight angle. I was no woodworker, but these pews looked like a child had put them together.

  Jesus, how long was I out? Who would have taken the stained glass out and replaced the pews, without waking us up?

  “What is going on?” I said to Jules.

  Her eyes were wide with panic as she scooted against the pew into a sitting position. “Gill … Gill, listen.”

  Outside the chapel, there were clear signs of battle. The clash of swords, the faint ping of arrows, the screams of men. It sounded faintly like a Civil War reenactment I’d seen when I was a kid, except those screams of agony…

  “We must have wande
red into one of those living history things,” I said, standing and brushing off my knees. The cobblestone floor beneath me was shiny and new, unlike the dusty, worn stones when we first came in. I offered my hand. “The kind where they fully immerse you in…”

  With a whoosh, an arrow flung through the open window and landed at my feet, mere inches from Jules. I stared down at it in disbelief. I’d seen arrows before, at summer camp, but this one was huge. And it was deadly. The point buried in the soft stone. What the hell?

  Jules started gasping, panicking. She leapt to her feet, knocking over a pew and stumbling backward. “Gill! Watch out!”

  As the battle clamor increased outside, a few more arrows pinged through the window, the deadly steel tips clanging and landing wildly about the room. One stuck into the top of the altar behind us at an angle.

  “What the fuck?” I said, moving towards the arrows. They had to be foam, fake somehow, but my God, they looked so real…

  Jules grabbed my arm and pulled me against the wall. “This is no reenactment.” she whispered in my ear. “Did World War three happen while we were passed out? What the hell is going on?”

  “I don’t know!” I turned and grabbed her upper arms. “Calm down, Jules. It’s like a burning building. You just have to figure out what…”

  “This is nothing like a burning building!” she yelled at me. “This isn’t even the same building we walked into a few minutes ago!”

  I looked around, no stained glass, different pews, newer floor, the altar was even smaller. No ornate cross with Christ on it. “Well, maybe they moved us?”

  Before Jules could answer, she pointed to the enormous reinforced doors we had left open behind us. They were closed, and they were… different. The steel spikes and studs I had remembered were gone, replaced by a simple wooden entry that looked cut from the same splintering wood of the pews. As I stared at the doorway, they suddenly burst open, and a twelfth-century French soldier appeared.

  Or so my brain interpreted it. Professor Jones was in my head from class last week. Despite popular belief, many soldiers could not afford heavy plate mail, nor could they move around in it. Many of them instead wore chain mail shirts that covered the soldier to the knees and protected his upper extremities.

  Oh shit, I realized, there was no way this was a reenactment.

  The soldier was dressed in a chain mail shirt, the coat of arms fabric over his head and buckled around his waist with what was barely a belt – a leather thong with two rings on the end. Very real blood, not the fake stuff they sell around Halloween, stained the white and blue fabric. His helmet, a matching striped blue, and white, was severely dented, cracked on one side, revealing, even more, chain mail on the right side of this face. He held a bloodied broadsword up briefly as he locked eyes with us, and then it tumbled from his grasp, clinging is it scattered across the stone floor. Then he grabbed his side and stumbled forward. As he turned, I saw the same type of arrow that littered the chapel pierced his left side from front to back.

  It didn’t take my training to see he was wounded. This definitely did not happen in reenactments.

  “Oh fuck me,” I muttered as my sister screamed my name. I rushed forward and caught him, careful of the arrow in his side, and laid him down close to the wall. Blood was everywhere. Despite my two years on the scene of accidents, heart attacks, and stab victims, this was more blood than I had ever seen.

  “What do we do? Oh God, what do we do?”

  My sister, the calm, composed firefighter who rescued kittens and kids and a plethora of elderly women, was in full breakdown mode. I did the only thing I could think of, something I would never have done in real life. But considering this was some kind of fucked up nightmare, I reached up and slapped her. Hard.

  “Calm the fuck down!” I shouted at her. She looked at me, shocked, rubbing her cheek. “Help me get his helmet off, he can’t breathe!”

  I think it was enough to get her moving. She removed the soldier’s helmet, and I gently peeled back the bloody chain mail hood. Seeing his face, even dotted with a spray of blood, was a shock. He looked like… me. There weren’t many French people with freckles and a shock of red hair, that’s for sure. Most of my life people hadn’t believed me when I said I was French, and assumed I had Scottish roots, instead.

  “Oh my God,” Jules gasped, “it’s like looking in a mirror.”

  I shook my head. No time to think about that, now. After all, my aunt and uncle had relatives all around France. The similarity was striking, but there were other, more important, things to consider. “No head injury,” I murmured, “that’s good.”

  “Um, Gill? Arrow?”

  I wanted to slap her again. “I know,” I barked at her, never mind how harsh it was. This man’s life was clearly in my hands. “Hold his head!”

  She moved to cradle his head as his eyes rolled back into their sockets. “Shit, Gill, he’s unconscious.”

  “Good, because this will suck for him,” I said, moving to his side. I pulled off the remnants of my white shirt, which not even my mother could clean at this point, and wadded it into a ball. “Hang on, buddy,” I whispered, even though I knew he couldn’t hear me. I felt around the edges of the arrow to see if it had penetrated any vital organs. Based on the amount of blood and his steady breathing, I felt confident it didn’t pierce anything. I nodded at Jules and mouthed, hold him. Working quickly, I broke off the tip of the deadly arrow and pulled it through the back, shoving my shirt behind to staunch the blood. Still fully unconscious, the soldier only groaned softly.

  “We have to get him out of here,” I said to Jules, exhaling heavily. “He needs stitches and a doctor.”

  “Is this a reenactment gone wrong?” Jules said. She reached over and touched the bloody arrow. “I mean, they don’t shoot people with real arrows, right?”

  “It’s a real arrow,” I whispered. “Foam arrows don’t puncture people.”

  “What are we going to do?”

  I looked at her, at a loss for words. The battle clamor outside had died down, the army moving away, it seemed. Before I could answer Jules, the door burst open again, a team of four or five soldiers all pushing their way in. These young men weren’t battle-hardened like our soldier, all young men barely high school age, dressed in what I could only describe as peasant-clothing; ripped and stained cloths draped over leggings with ancient – but new looking – belts fastened around their waist. One pushed to the front, wearing puffy sleeves of padded, studded leather. His cry was loud and distraught:

  “Prince!”

  His accent and pronunciation in French was so thick it shocked me, but I focused on the matter at hand.

  Jules almost dropped his head but held firm. “Help us!” she cried at them.

  Three of them gathered around us, one stayed by the door, and the one in leather dropped to his knees beside us. “What are you? What have you done to the Crown Prince?”

  “I…” At first, I struggled to understand the translation of their odd French. When I was eight, my uncle had taken us out to Lake Geneva in Northern France, and their dialect was just as difficult to understand. My uncle had explained then that the people of that region spoke a “bastard” form of French that was mixed with German and Swiss elements. I remember trying to order gelato at a small stand in the marketplace, and I couldn’t understand what they were saying. As my French improved, I always remembered that foreign dialect. But we were in Western France, and more importantly, almost everyone knew English. Why use such an archaic and foreign form of the language? I dismissed it as a slip of the tongue in this emergency situation.

  Then, I was confused by his first statement: What are you? Jules was in a short summer dress and heels, I was shirtless in slacks and shiny dress shoes. But why would he say ‘what’? We had just come from a funeral for God’s sake. I shook my head. I must have translated it wrong. The man stared from us to the prince, waiting. I had questions for him: Where, and more importantly, when were we? Why had s
o much changed in the short time we had been out? What the hell was going on? As many questions as I had, there were more important things … like the life of this “Prince,” who looked so much like me, whoever he was.

  “We have to get him stabilized,” I said, and the leather soldier looked confused. “Take one of the pews, and cut off the sides and legs to form a board,” I said.

  Leather nodded at me and motioned to the others standing around. It was then I realized none of them were armed, except one with a dagger tied to his waist.

  “His sword, just there!” Jules called, pointing to the forgotten broadsword just beside the doorway. Four sets of eyes focused on me, and I translated in French. They seemed confused until I concentrated on the Medieval name for sword: Chevalier, literally horseman’s blade. That word seemed to work, and the tallest boy and most physically fit, I imagined, grabbed up the sword and set to chopping up the pew closest to us. Splintered wood showered us for several minutes as he carved out a flat wooden plank.

  “Help me lift him!” I shouted to the group. “Slowly! You, slide the board under him!”

  The tall boy did as I asked, and between Jules, myself, and three others, we gently lifted him steadily and slowly. “Give me your belts,” I said, aiding my faltering French with a motion around my waist.

  They all looked at each other, but quickly did as I asked. I fashioned the remains of his helmet to hold his neck in place, then wrapped the belts around is arms, waist, and legs. It was a primitive patient transfer board, but it would do, at least for now, until we could get him to a hospital.

  The group of young men still stayed in character, acting with a precision that even I didn’t have after years of professional and academic training. They stood looking down at the prince, wholly confused.

  “Do any of you have a phone?” I asked in their native language, adding, “it’s okay, this is real life, there’s been an accident. You don’t have to stay in character anymore.”

  “Phone?” One of the shorter lads repeated my French word. “Qu’est ce?”