“I see you’ve got a new shirt,” she called as she changed.
“Yeah, a boy named Piers gave it to me.”
“You can’t go giving them names, Gill,” Jules said, “We can’t take them home. That’s the first step to taking them home.”
I turned and glared at the throne, completely hiding my sister. I stuck my tongue out and shook my head, just because she couldn’t see me. “Fuck you,” I muttered. “This is your fault anyway.”
“Fuck me?” she said a bit loudly, even knowing not a single person in the room could understand her. At least, I thought so. This was a world of cursing against God, where the “F” word hadn’t even been developed yet. I had some fuzzy memory of the Germans being the ones that invented it, or something.
Jules appeared from behind the throne, clad in a pale blue dress that dragged on the dusty floor. Even her heeled ankle-breakers were replaced by the tips of brown boots.
“You dragged me into the chapel…” she started.
Oh, she was still yelling at me.
“Jules,” I said, stifling a giggle.
“What?”
“You’re in a dress.”
“I wear dresses all the time, stupid.”
I thought about what passed for dresses in our time – the ones that barely left anything to the imagination. “It’s still weird.”
“A firefighter lesbian can’t wear a dress? Did you hit your head back there, Gill?”
“Well, actually…”
“Shut up!” She glared at me, her hands about to wring my neck. I ducked sideways.
“You touched the mirror!” I yelled back at her. “You dragged me to this castle in the first place!”
“You… argh!” she screamed in frustration, advancing on me again. I stepped to the side of the throne.
Heads were starting to turn in the room by now. I could guess the soldiers were thinking something like, By God, that healer is very strange, fighting with his sister and using strange words like “lesbian” and “firefighter.”
I realized I didn’t know the French word for lesbian. Shit. Did they have those back here? Of course, they did. But, oh, uh. Shit. I looked at Jules and shook my head. “Not now. We need a plan.”
“Well, what the fuck,” she said, running bloodstained hands through her blond hair, giving her even deeper “red” highlights. “We can just tell them we are aliens. It makes about as much sense.”
“I have no idea what to say.” It was the honest truth. I was making this up as I went, and I told her as much.
“How did you introduce yourself to the queen?” she asked.
“How did I -” I smiled, finally. “I called myself, Sir Guillaume, and you my sister, Julia.”
“Goddamn it, Gill, Julia is my slave name.”
“You mean your straight name.”
“Shut the fuck up,” she glared at me. “Sir? You just gave yourself knighthood? You can’t even really speak Medieval French, and you want them to believe that?”
“My German is worse,” I joked, draining the mug of the awful liquid and setting it down next to me.
“Ugh!” Frustrated, she turned her back to me. “Let me think.”
I sat back down and waited. The room was almost entirely dark, save a few candles here and there. I didn’t think I could pick my way back between the soldiers now, at least without stepping on someone or tripping a few times. The clamor had died down to the shifting and tossing as sleep overtook the wounded soldiers.
“We could say we’re English,” Jules suggested. “Our accents are about strange enough.”
“They hate the English,” I supplied.
“Well, fuck me, Gill….”
“No, thank you,” I responded quickly. I shrugged. “We’re from Illinois, Jules, they won’t believe we are English, anyway.”
“What do you want us to say?”
I almost heard the audible ding of an idea in my head. Shit, I’m smart. “Dad’s side is German, isn’t he? I mean, that’s where he always said you got that blond hair, even though I got Mother’s…”
“German? I can’t speak a word of German.”
“I took it in high school about four years ago,” I said, lowering my voice and leaning towards her. “But you’re right, I barely remember much besides Auf Wiedersehen…”
“Shh,” she said suddenly, nodding her head to the right.
I turned to look where she motioned. Piers and another boy were dragging some of the motionless, unfortunate souls out by their mats. I sighed, running my hand down my face. They were the ones that didn’t make it; someone’s son, or husband, or father. My paramedic side wanted to mourn, but my history major side seemed to accept it. The queen was nowhere to be seen, but I assumed she was with the prince. Could I have saved more than just the prince? Did I even save the prince? Why didn’t I do more? Why did I rush to save the prince, when more could have been nursed back to health? To impress the queen?
My head hurt as I held it in my hands.
Jules plopped down beside me.
“You might work on those lady skills,” I whispered to her. “If they are going to believe you really are a maiden.”
“Shit, I haven’t been a maiden since I was sixteen.”
“Only sixteen?” I smirked at her.
She scoffed. “Well, I’m sorry, we can’t all be Guillaume Lanval, expertise womanizer since fifteen.”
“Hey, hey, watch it,” I said, “We can’t give that away. Plus, I was an early bloomer, what can I say?”
“Maybe that’s not the best thing to announce in the year 1154,” she said even quieter this time.
“Fine. Did you come up with a plan?”
“Why am I the one always coming up with a plan?”
“But you just -”
“Shut up, Gill. Of course, I have a plan. You’re escorting me to a convent. In England, or something. That would explain our strange accents.”
“That’s it? I can’t be a goddamn dragon fighter or something?”
“Gill…” she warned, and I knew that tone.
“Convent, they’ll never believe it. What about a wedding?”
“Gross,” she said immediately.
“Okay,” I threw up my hands. “Convent it is, then. You sure you can play a nun?”
She pressed her hands together as if she was praying and closed her eyes. “I played one once, didn’t I?”
“In The Sound of Music. In eighth grade. This is real life, Jules.”
“Whatever,” she rolled her eyes. “It’s only for tonight and only if someone asks. Tomorrow morning at dawn we sneak back to the chapel and retrieve the mirror.”
“And get back home,” I said, relieved. I caught sight of Piers and beckoned him towards us.
“I hope you didn’t just change the course of history somehow,” Jules mused.
“How?”
“By saving that prince.”
“Hush,” I told her. “Piers,” I said, turning to the boy. “Can you rustle up a mat and blanket for the lady and I?”
“Oui, sir knight,” he answered, bowing slightly and running off.
A few minutes later he returned with two scratchy gray blankets. “Was all I could find,” he said, averting his eyes.
“Merci beaucoup,” I thanked him. “They will be all right.”
“These castles are drafty,” Jules said, wrapping the blanket around her shoulders.
“Wouldn’t be with a fire,” I mumbled, doing the same.
“I’m not putting my head on this floor,” she said, looking at me.
I stared. “You pick now to be high maintenance?” I actually laughed, which startled a few of the pages like Piers running around. “You spent seventy-two hours out on a wildfire, and now the floor is too dirty?”
“I pick now to not get the plague,” she said, her voice stone cold.
“That’s not really how it works,” I said, shaking my head. But, I realized she was right … the list of infectious diseases
was off the charts: plague, smallpox, polio, all manners of STD’s of course. The least we could do was not cause an epidemic in our own time.
“Lean against my back,” I said, shifting. “That way both of us can sleep.”
“First light,” she whispered as she nodded off.
I was surprised I faded so quickly, my head still pounding as it was.
I never slept very soundly, and neither did Jules. As emergency responders, it was common to run on little sleep and stay awake and alert for hours, sometimes days, when our jobs required. Luckily, both of us hadn’t seen that kind of action for quite some time, but we were still trained to wake at a moment’s notice and jump to action.
Thank God for that.
The first flaming arrow landed a few inches from my leg, and though the fire crackled quietly, it was enough to send me flying to my feet, jerking Jules at the same time. She looked me. “What the hell is that?”
“We’re under attack,” I said.
Chapter Eight: There Be Fire
Ì realize there’s a time and place for everything, and medieval France probably had some rules of decorum and decency. However, now was not the right time to follow societal rules. I waved my hands and started screaming. “Attack! Attack!” hoping they could understand me. The room was blanketed in darkness; I couldn’t even see my hands in front of my own face.
Like a flash, bodies bounded up, candles sparked to life instantly. I had no idea how long we had been asleep. Through the narrow slits of windows, I could see the purple sky, which meant dawn was likely a couple of hours away. Another arrow pierced the chest of a sleeping wounded soldier, and he awoke screaming.
Jules grabbed my hand. “This place is about to be chaos,” she said, “let’s sneak to the chapel while we can!”
I looked at her. “Where is the queen?”
“Who cares?”
“The soldiers, Jules… where are the soldiers?” I glanced around the room. A dozen or so seemed to be missing, either in another room or standing guard. If they stood guard, they were likely dead.
“There’s no time,” I said, leaping off the dais. “I have to check on the prince.”
“Gill!” Jules screamed at me. “The chapel!”
“It can wait!” Without waiting for her, I dodged two more arrows and leaped over bodies, skirting a fallen young girl with a flaming arrow in her back. All the while my brain, which must have been too confused to talk to me yesterday, was screaming at me: What the fuck, Gill? You better not be doing this to impress that queen. She wasn’t even interested in you, it’s like she was…
Shut up.
To make matters worse, my paramedic brain snapped into its place. Check the wounded, see who you can help, try to clear the wound. Save lives. The place was filled with fire and smoke, and even I knew there was nothing I could do.
Shut up, I said to myself again.
It did. Well, I guess there was a first time for everything. As I passed the great hall doors, I saw they were shut and barred, but not from the inside, as they had been yesterday. Someone had locked us in.
Not someone… the enemy forces. Whoever they were. The English, I assumed. I had to face the fact that we weren’t going to get out alive. Even if I had gone with Jules, we would have run right into the enemy forces. Where was Jules?
“I’m right behind you, idiot!” my sister called.
“Did I say that out loud?” I didn’t dare and look at her. The narrow doorway was within my sights, where I’d seen them carry the prince hours before. I nearly smashed my head as I stooped to squeeze through. Were these French people much smaller than their modern day counterparts? I guess they were no match for my half-American six-foot-three frame.
The small doorway opened into a room almost the side of the main great hall. It was sparsely furnished; a crooked dresser and a threadbare rug thrown in front of it. In the middle sat an enormous four-poster bed, a figure propped in a sitting position, but it was still too dark for me to see. I saw a light shine through another doorway on the back wall, to the left of the bed. I took a few steps closer to the bed and saw the door was seamless – hidden into the brick of the wall.
A secret entrance.
Cool!
“My queen,” Piers jolted through the door, his candle held high. “I’ve readied the horses.”
It was then I saw another figure sitting on the side of the bed. The queen was dressed the same as I’d seen her the day before, but her carefully pinned hair was in shambles around her neck. Even in the low light, she was still gorgeous. She turned and looked at us.
“He’s awake, but groggy. We must be away – my guards have not returned, and I fear they will not. Help me.”
I froze, but Jules pushed me forward. “But the soldiers, out there…”
“Are lost to us, I’m afraid,” she said, her voice cracking. “Please help us! If the Black King finds my husband, he will be executed!”
“Husband…” It was Jules who breathed what I was thinking.
But this was no time to think about that.
I moved quickly, hoisting the prince up by the shoulders. He murmured his thanks, but was wobbling on his feet. Piers quickly picked up the prince’s other shoulder, and we help him through the doorway. Jules and the queen followed immediately behind us.
A crash sounded as the sounds of battle erupted behind us. “They’ve breached the great hall!” the queen said, her voice distraught.
Although we hurried, the going was slow. The path was too narrow for Piers to help me with the prince, so I half carried, half dragged him with me, the women following so closely we trampled each other once or twice. The dirt floor sloped steadily downwards, and I caught the prince from tripping on the hidden rocks at our feet. With only Piers’ candle to guide us, I knew the soldiers would be on us at any moment.
Yet, as we continued our descent, the cries and clashing of swords fell to a dull roar. I could hear water rushing from somewhere, but I had no idea if it was around us or before us.
There used to be a moat back in the day, Jules had said, a million years ago, it seemed; where the parking lot replaced the moat.
I could see the purple sky before us, yielding to crimson. A doorway, even smaller than the one in the castle, opened to the fresh night air. Piers helped me with the prince, and I ducked, a tight squeeze that nearly stuck me in the castle. I’d never held my breath so tight. Jules and the queen easily made it through the narrow slit in the stones behind me.
True to his word, there were four horses tied to an arrow hilt stuck in the side of the wall.
“We must away,” the queen said again, more urgently.
I was busy doing math in my head. Three horses for the five of us. How would this work? And how would the queen and Piers, who were barely strong enough to wield a candle let alone a sick prince, going to escape safely? The horses looked sturdier and bigger than the ones I’d ridden as a kid. Hell, I hadn’t ridden in ten years, and neither had Jules, I knew.
How hard could it be?
“I’ll take the prince,” I said, surprising even myself. I knew the horse would be burdened, and it would slow me down, but it was a chance I had to take. I looked at Jules. She was a few inches shorter, maybe sixty pounds lighter. Maybe she could…
“Gill, wait, let me.” Sometimes I wondered if we should have been born twins instead of two years apart. “I’ll take him,” Jules said to me, “I’m light and strong and can hold him.”
“I know, sister, but now is not the time to play the hero.”
Behind us, the crackle of fire spread, and I could hear the screams of the sleeping castle.
I translated to the queen that I would take the prince. She nodded, but looked concerned.
Jules swung up into the saddle, the horse moving and stamping. “I know buddy,” I whispered as I patted the horse’s nose to calm him while they got the prince hoisted in front of Jules. I turned to see the queen just standing there, clasping her black shawl around her f
ancy dress. When she had time to get dressed I never knew; had she, even? She was looking from me to Piers.
“Oh, for fuck’s sake, do I have to do everything around here?” I murmured, knowing only Jules could understand me. I tossed the reigns to Piers.
I hooked my arm under the prince’s shoulders and lifted him towards Jules, who leaned over to pull him into the saddle. Behind me, Piers mumbled to the queen and appeared on the other sided of Jules’ horse to help us. The prince was awake, but weak, very weak, and his grip slipped twice, sending Piers tumbling to the ground.
Once the prince was firmly seated in front of me, I turned to see the queen still standing there, waiting. I barked at her in French, commanding her to mount her horse, and though she blinked at me for a minute she readily obeyed.
Jules was already mounted and offered her hand to Piers, who wasted no time in climbing into the primitive saddle behind her. I wondered if the young boy even knew how to ride at that point, but of course, he did, didn’t everyone in this time?
“Hold on tight,” I told the prince in French, even though he probably couldn’t hear me.
It really was like riding a bike. Everything came back to me, from the way I tucked my legs around the belly to the feel of the reigns in my hand. What I wouldn’t give for stirrups about now. My other hand gripped the prince’s slim waist, holding him firmly on the saddle.
“Lead the way,” Jules urged behind me.
“Mistress?” Piers’ voice behind Jules was timid and terrified.
“Chateau de Falaise,” the queen said. She pointed to the Northwest, the opposite direction from the budding daylight. The queen dug her heels in and swung the horse’s head around, taking the lead.
I recognized that name somewhere. Someone famous was born there, died there? Maybe lived there? I couldn’t remember. Where were we heading? I exchanged a look with my sister, as she stared beyond the great hall, where the chapel used to be, but now flames rose high, and the crackling was unmistakable. In the early dawn, she turned and looked at me, and I saw a tear slip down her cheek.
“How will we get home now, Gill?” Her plea was unmistakable.
Mirrors (Curse of Lanval Book 1) Page 8