The boy’s grip tightened. “You speak strangely.”
“Yes, well, I’ve had a strange morning.”
The woman made a quick sign across her chest. The little girl peered around her skirts, eyes enormous.
I lowered my voice. “I was on the shore. Men came in ships. Men with horses and mail. I ran.”
That changed things. It wasn’t trust. We were a long road and several miracles from trust, but I had their attention.
The woman glanced toward the distant smoke.
“You saw them?”
“Yes.”
“How many are they?”
I thought of the ships rolling on the gray water. Men wading through the surf. Horses being dragged down ramps. Barrels, weapons, sacks of supplies.
“Too many.”
The boy swallowed.
“Enough that standing in the open hoping they go away seems like a poor plan.”
His brows drew together. “What plan would you have, then?”
“A better one than pointing that spear at the person warning you.”
His ears went red. Good. Embarrassed was better than frightened. Frightened people holding weapons made mistakes, and I preferred my internal organs on the inside.
Before he could answer, movement in the lane caught my eye. Two men were coming toward us.
I noticed the older one first. Gray-bearded and lean, he moved with the careful economy of someone whose knees had seen too many winters.
Then the younger man got closer, and everyone else faded away.
Younger wasn’t quite the right word. He was somewhere in his thirties, perhaps, though hardship had a way of putting years on a face.
Tall and broad through the shoulders, he wore a dark wool cloak pinned at one side with a plain metal brooch. Beneath it, I caught the glint of mail. Leather wrapped his forearms. Mud stained his boots.
A sword hung from his hip as naturally as my radio had hung from mine before I’d been ordered to take a few days off.
Before a strange old woman had handed me an ancient brooch and apparently flung me out of my own century.
His hair was fair, darkened by rain and tied at the nape of his neck. A short beard roughened a face that might have been handsome if life hadn’t taken a chisel to it. A pale scar crossed one cheek. Another marked the back of his hand.
Then I saw his eyes. Blue, but not a soft summer blue. Cold water. Winter sky. The sea a heartbeat before a storm.
He stopped several feet away and looked me over thoroughly, taking in my clothes, the wet hair plastered to my face, my boots, the scratch on my cheek, my empty hands, and probably the fact that I looked as though the Channel had spat me out and covered me with sand.
“You saw the ships?” he asked.
His English was strange. I understood it, mostly, but the words were thick and old at the edges, their shapes almost familiar and yet slightly wrong, as though someone had taken modern English apart and put it back together by candlelight.
The impossible part was that I understood him at all. If this truly was the past, which it wasn’t, because that was ridiculous, he should have sounded like complete nonsense. Instead, meaning arrived half a beat after the sound, like a voice coming through a bad radio signal.
Judging by their faces, my speech sounded just as peculiar to them.