“How did you do it?” Brody asked him. “How did you stand there and watch them jump?”
Alex dropped his hands and let them rest on the table. “I didn’t know it would be this bad, staying back and watching.” He stared down at his hands. “Yet I can’t argue with the cypher. It was critical I stay here.”
Brody sighed and tapped the sheets in front of him. “You’ve been studying this for three days. Did you think there might be a reason why you get to sit this out buried in there in another code?”
Alex sat up and looked at him. “There is another code. Was that just a guess, Brody?”
“It wasn’t even a guess. I was teasing,” Brody said frankly. “There’s another code? Where?”
“In the body of the story.” Alex pulled the sheets toward him, frowning down at them. “The little Latin I know is all medically oriented. Nomenclature, mostly. So I’ve been trying to translate this. The phrasing is all screwed up.”
“It’s Latin.” Brody shrugged. “The sentences get fucked up every which way to Sunday when you try to bring it back to English.”
“I mean, beyond the usual sentence arrangements. There is a rhythm to Latin, a general form that makes it flow if you’re reading and comprehending in Latin. These phrasings are odd. That’s what makes me think there’s a code in here. Something to do with how the letters are placed.”
“What, every third letter or something?”
“Or something,” Alex agreed. “They twisted the sentences up to make sure the letters they needed were exactly where they should be. Only, I’ve tried every second letter, every third, all the way up to every twenty-second. Nothing is pulling together so far.”
Brody wondered if there was a code in there at all. However, it was keeping Alex distracted, so he said nothing.
Marit came in, carrying a mug of hot chocolate. “Uncle Alex! You’re here!” She put the cup down and hugged him.
Alex kissed her temple. “I’m here,” he agreed. “For now.”
“Then you’re going back to save the queen?” Marit asked.
Brody rolled his eyes. Ever since she had met Sydney, Marit had insisted on calling her the Queen, or Morrigan, her middle name.
Alex brushed tendrils of hair away from Marit’s face. “Is that what you think I should do?” he asked seriously.
Brody frowned. It was an oddly adult question, put to his twelve-year-old daughter. “Hey…” he said softly, only faintly alarmed. “I think there’s enough people around here dispensing advice right now.”
Marit ignored him. “You should do what you’re told to do,” she said seriously.
Brody let out a breath. “Wisdom everyone should listen to.”
“Indeed,” Alex said gravely. He gave Marit a smile. “Need any help with your homework?”
Marit grinned. “It’s language arts. How to use nouns and verbs.” She rolled her eyes.
“Maybe you should write your answers in Riau Indonesian,” Alex suggested.
“Don’t give her any ideas,” Brody said with a scowl. “Why Indonesian?”
“That particular version of Indonesian does haven’t any verbs or nouns,” Alex said. He was smiling at Marit, who was grinning back, a co-conspirator.
“Do you know that one, Marit?” Brody asked curiously. He’d stopped being surprised at the languages she did know.
“No, but I’m going to learn it,” Marit said, settling in front of her homework.
Alex drew the sheets of the manuscript back in front of him. “And I’ll learn Latin,” he said.
“I’ll beat you,” Marit warned him.
“I have no doubt about that at all,” Alex assured her.
Brody left them talking and went back upstairs to check on Veris and his two patients. Alex didn’t notice him leave and that pleased him. He had no idea how the man was still coherent and upright. If it had been him sitting there watching Taylor bleed out in front of him, he would have been tearing down walls by now, completely out of his gourd with helplessness.
Chapter Seven
Brody watched Taylor lower Rafe back to the mattress. He still forgot, sometimes, that her strength was so much more than human.
Taylor shook her head. “No bruising, of course. Nothing. It’s just Sydney who is being put through the wringer.”
Veris finished injecting antibiotic into Sydney’s IV and capped the syringe. Her arm was wrapped in a neat white bandage. Taylor and Brody had changed the sheets beneath them and cleaned up the blood, and bathed Sydney and changed her clothes. “She could have scraped her arm walking through a door,” Veris said firmly.
“And hit her head on the same door frame?” Brody asked.
Veris glared at him. Brody wasn’t moved by the scowl. Veris was worried. They all were. Veris always vented his worry by being impatient with everyone who couldn’t keep up with his mental speed.
“Well, she didn’t do this with her embroidery needle,” Taylor pointed out. “She’s fighting, Veris.”
“You think I don’t recognize a sword wound by now?” Veris shot back. “Just don’t let Alex hear you speculating. He doesn’t need any more fuel for his imagination.”
“Where is Alex?” Brody asked, looking around. “I expected him to be back here before long, inspecting your embroidery.”
“He and Marit were heads together over something in the dining room when I came through,” Taylor said. “It sounded like Marit was giving him a Latin lesson.”
Veris snorted.
“Her Latin is better than yours, big guy,” Brody told him.
Taylor frowned. “Brody’s right, though. We’ve been up here for ages. Latin isn’t that absorbing.”
Brody caught his breath. “The manuscript itself might be,” he said slowly. He turned and headed for the door.
“Why?” Veris demanded behind him.
“He thought he’d found another cypher in the story itself,” Brody called back over his shoulder as he headed down the stairs. “Only he didn’t know Latin well enough to figure it out.”
“Marit does,” Taylor breathed. Her quick steps followed right behind him.
The dining room was empty. Marit’s books were still sitting open at the end of the table and her hot chocolate was untouched. The manuscript pages were gone.
Veris came into the room behind the two of them, frowning. Brody turned to him. “Was Alex still screwing around with the serum, Veris?”
“The sedative antidote?” Veris sighed. “We both were.”
Taylor glared at him.
“It’s interesting,” Veris said flatly. “A sedative that works on vampires is ground-breaking.”
“So there is more of the stuff in the house,” Brody said. “Except Alex doesn’t have a surgery here.”
“His office,” Taylor said. She spun and ran out of the room. Brody and Veris followed her into the wood-paneled front room that Alex used as his office.
Marit was sitting on the big desk, her legs kicking, as she watched Alex. Alex was sprawled in the armchair in front of the desk, his head back and his eyes closed. His shirt sleeve was rolled up and a bottle and syringe sat next to Marit’s hip.
She held up the manuscript as they entered. “He said he was going back to look, and that I should give you this.”
Veris picked up the bottle as Brody took the sheets from her. “Marit, could you go upstairs and watch Aunt Sydney and Uncle Rafe for us, please?” Veris said.
She rolled her eyes.
“He’s not shoving you out of the room, honey,” Taylor said quietly. “They really do need someone to keep an eye on them and we’re going to have to help Alex now. If anything happens, especially to Aunt Sydney, you yell, okay?”
“Okay,” Marit said quietly.
Once she was gone, Veris swore. “This is the juiced up stuff,” he said, putting the bottle on the shelf behind the desk. Then he cleared off the desktop with a sweep of his arm. “Brody, put him on here. We’ll have to hold him down if he starts convulsing.”
Brody looked up from the sheets in his hand. “He found the cypher,” he said.
Veris shook his head. “I don’t care right now.” He bent over Alex, pulled him up, lifted him and laid him on the desk. He pressed his fingers against Alex’s neck. “Rapid heartbeat. He’s deep into it.”
“I mean it,” Brody said. “This explains why he took the stuff.”
Taylor looked at him. “He isn’t just desperate?” she asked.
Brody shook his head.
Veris raised his head. “Read it to me,” he said.
Brody studied the sheet. He had spoken and thought in Latin all through the long years he had been a slave in New Rome, the city that had been known throughout the world by its nickname, Constantinople. He knew the language organically. Most recently, he had used it when they had jumped back there, so he had reacquired it via time jumping, too.
Someone had underlined each fifth word with orange pencil crayon, probably Marit’s. Now the words seemed to leap off the page as they would if they were English. “It was every fifth word,” he said. “Not letters at all.” He started reading them aloud.
“English, Brody,” Taylor told him.
“Sorry.” He looked at the words, building the whole sentence in his mind and then translating it. “Physician, you must go, too. The queen’s favorite will take you. Edward must live and peace be found. Hurry.” He lowered the sheets and looked at Alex lying on the desk. “He did what he was told to do.”
Taylor looked ill. “He’s trying to go back there using the serum?” she whispered. She looked at Veris. “That’s not possible, is it?”
Veris folded his arms. He was staring down at Alex’s still form, frowning.
“Veris?” Brody prompted.
Veris sighed and looked up at them. “We’ve established that the serum lets you see across the timescape, into any time, any place. It removes the linear blinders we all must have to live. Until now, I would have said that was all it lets you do.”
“Until now?”
“The Queen’s favorite,” Taylor said slowly.
“Marit is upstairs!” Brody shouted, as fear grabbed his throat.
“That Marit is upstairs,” Veris said softly. “That isn’t the Marit that Alex found in the timescape, before.”
“A Marit from a different time?” Brody asked.
“Another woman who can jump through time as she pleases,” Veris added. “One who knows her way around the timescape, too.”
Veris looked down at Alex again. “We will have no way of knowing if he makes it there or not until he comes back to tell us. If he comes back.”
* * * * *
It had been such a long time since Alex had found himself floating freely through time in this way, yet it felt as if no time had passed at all. Life marched on beneath him and the beautiful silence surrounded him.
Ahead was the familiar place, the Alice in Wonderland hall with its books and black and white tiles and emptiness. Except it wasn’t empty.
Marit was there waiting. She tossed her hair over her shoulder and tilted her head to study him, looking more like Brody than Veris. “I was pulled here. Was that you, Uncle Alex?”
“I don’t know,” he admitted. “It has been a long time since I was here, although it might not seem that way to you. I may have forgotten how it works here.”
“No, you haven’t forgotten,” she said, “because you never learned in the first place. It’s instinct, Alexander. You know what you need to know.”
“Except I need to move to a place that I don’t know at all. Rafael and Sydney are there now, or will be there, or have been there.”
“Just as you have been there,” Marit said. “Time is not linear here.”
Of course. The knowledge settled in his mind. He knew the place he needed to go to because he had been there/would go there. He lifted himself up and groped around with his mind, looking for the tug, the beckoning that came from familiar places.
Over there.
He began to move in that direction, as time and people and places flowed beneath him at faster and faster rates. “Marit!” he called.
“I’m here,” she said calmly, although he could not see her.
The timescape below him was becoming a rushing stream. Then he saw where he was going. “The stream is divided!” he cried. There were two streams—a major one, wide and well-trodden. A smaller stream branched off from it. The place he was looking for was at the junction of the two streams. He could see it ahead, calling to him.
The two streams were parallel to each other, until they joined. He reached for that place and details became clear. Hills, green growing things. Mist.
He could only see it. It was too far away.
“Marit! I must go there!”
“You really must, Alex?”
Yes! The shout echoed in his mind and before the echo died, a giant, invisible hand grabbed him and threw him like a pebble. He rolled and twisted and rolled some more, even as he began to fall….
Chapter Eight
Aethelfreda’s personal physician was a monk wise in herbs and healing. Even so, Sydney refused his aid, until Aethelfreda ordered her to let Hrodgar look at the wound. Hrodgar took her behind a cart and she stripped off her gunna and rolled up the sleeve of the undershirt, which was stiff with dried blood. “It’s just a scratch,” she assured him. In truth, she barely felt the wound at all, now. During the night it had throbbed although it had not started bleeding again.
Hrodgar peered at the wound. “It does appear to be a simple scratch, which is remarkable, given how much blood you have spilled.”
Sydney turned her arm and peered down at the wound. The edges were pushed together and were a pasty white color, as if the wound was several days old. There was no redness or inflammation, which had been her greatest fear.
“They are saying you are the one who gutted the Powys giant,” Hrodgar said as he turned her arm this way and that, so the light would fall on the wound better.
“I barely nicked him, I’m sure,” she said. “I was too busy running away to take notice.”
“You must be a fierce fighter if the champion of Mathrafel could only reach through your guard enough to deliver a simple slice.” He dropped her arm. “You are right, the wound is minor and already healing well. I would not disturb it any further.”
He gave her a nod and left her to dress again. She fingered the neat tear in the sleeve of the gunna. The sword had been sharp and by rights should have cut a much deeper wound that it had. There was something strange about the way it was healing so well in the septic conditions of tenth century England.
And now Aethelfreda was convinced she was a lucky charm and would not move without Sydney by her side. How could she desert the army and escape back into Powys if the Lady wanted her always in sight?
With a sigh, she dressed again, wincing as she moved. Another day on horseback. That was what was really going to kill her.
* * * * *
Rafe let himself “wake” in slow stages, approximating the stages of sleeping and waking that a wounded human would go through. He would have to find a way to cut open his flesh just before a physician inspected it, so that a suitably gory wound would be seen.
“This one is just coming round, sir!” came a young, piping voice just above him.
“Let him be. He’ll wake on his own and then I will deal with him,” was the answer.
Rafe caught his breath. The voice had been Alex’s. He fought not to open his eyes and look around immediately, because he had to maintain the illusion of a weakened and groggy human.
Then a hand picked up his wrist and held it, the fingers over where his pulse should be.
“What’s this one’s name?” the voice that was Alex’s asked.
“Rhys, sir. He’s the King’s scribe.”
“Rhys. Wake up,” Alex said.
Rafe let his eyes open.
Alex was watching him.
Rafe battled to hide his shock
. He scrambled to put it together. Nothing made sense. He was still in Powys. The smell and the sounds told him that much. Alex was crouched beside him, which meant Rafe was lying on a floor. There was a roof overhead that looked familiar. Were they back in Powys already? Had he been unconscious that long? The blow Sydney had given him had been deep and effective. Had it been bad enough to keep him out of it for the day or more it would have taken to get back here?
And Alex…. Alex.
“What are you doing here?” he whispered, so quietly it was almost sub-vocalized.
“Shhh….” Alex also whispered. Then he got to his feet. He was wearing the robes of a lord or a prince. They were rich garments, speaking of a man who was well compensated for his work. A boy was standing beside him with a small wooden chest in his arms. Those would be the tools of Alex’s trade.
“This man is not ill enough to be kept with the others,” he told the boy. “Have him put in a proper bed to sleep and recover.”
The boy frowned. “A bed, my lord?”
“Not in one of the dormitories, either. He needs peace.” He glanced at Rafe and the corner of his mouth lifted. “I hear tell that he tackled the Lady of Mercia’s personal champion before she tried to run him through.”
“Aye, he did and all,” the boy said, excitement threading his voice, lifting it higher. “They say she is taller than Tegid himself and she gutted him and all, too.”
“I had the pleasure of stitching Tegid up. She didn’t gut him, but she did slice rather close to parts without which a man wouldn’t be a man.”
Rafe held back his laughter.
“So find the scribe a bed and some peace and quiet to recover in, there’s a lad,” Alex said. “He’s a hero.”
“My lord, there’s no bed to be had that is quiet, like you say.”
“Then give him mine,” Alex said shortly. “God knows I will not be using it for days yet, with all these war wounds to see to.”
Rafe closed his eyes and pretended to be sleeping, so when the porters came and carried him to the peaceful bed Alex had prescribed, he looked in need of it.
He had a thousand questions. And a thousand more after that. Yet there was a deep relief in knowing that Alex was here with him in this time.
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