The rain seemed suddenly louder as he looked down at the silver in his hand, then back at me, and I watched understanding move slowly across his face.
“This? But you said it was old.”
“It was.”
He glanced again at the shining metal. “This is not old.”
Wulfric took one step closer. “How can it be the same? You said it was lost.”
“I don’t know.”
And I didn’t. I’d spent months making peace with impossible things, yet somehow this was worse, because I could see the whole circle now, the terrible, beautiful shape of it. This brooch would survive me. Survive Wulfric, Norman kings and plagues and wars, survive cities rising and falling, survive until one wet afternoon in Hastings when an old woman put it into my hand.
Find him.
My hands began to shake.
“Do not touch it.” The fear in his voice nearly undid me. But the brooch had already brought me here once, and perhaps courage was only terror that had finally run out of room to retreat.
I held out my hand. “I have to know.”
His jaw tightened so hard I saw the muscle move, but after everything we’d survived, after every truth I’d hidden and everyimpossible thing he’d chosen to believe, he didn’t decide for me. Slowly, Wulfric placed the brooch in my palm.
The silver warmed in my hand as the garnets glowed and the world tore open. Light burst between the trees with such force that I cried out, going down on my knees, my fingers closing around the brooch as the forest vanished beneath fluorescent lights and glass and polished floors.
The Hastings pavilion. The antique fair. Real, not a memory. Rows of crowded tables stretched before me beneath electric lights, silver fish knives gleaming beside chipped porcelain and framed paintings. A woman in a red waterproof coat walked past carrying a paper cup, while somewhere close by a child whined for chips.
The sounds came next. Traffic, a horn, the hiss of tyres over wet pavement. Voices layered one over another, hundreds of them, speaking the English of my century. Then a siren rose beyond the pavilion, faint at first, then louder as I swayed.
Wulfric shouted my name.
I looked over my shoulder to see him on one knee in the wet leaves, one hand braced against the oak, his face pale as the impossible roar of my world crashed through the quiet forest. He couldn’t see it clearly. I knew that from the way his eyes searched the light without finding anything to hold on to, but he heard it.
The engines, brakes, and sirens. All the things I had tried to explain with words that had never been enough.
Now he knew. Not believed, knew. I reached for him, but he pushed himself upright before I could touch him.
“Go.”
For one stupid second, I thought I had misheard.
“What?”
His face looked carved from stone except for his eyes.
“You said you had no road home.”
The siren wailed behind me. “I didn’t.”
“You do now. Go, Darcy.”
Everything I had lost came rushing back so quickly it hurt. Hot water, electric lights, medicine that could have saved Gilda without three nights of terror. Tea bags, toilets, my own bed and takeout. The firehouse with Hassan, Ellis, and Brian’s empty locker.
London in the rain. A world where I knew the rules. I could step forward and have all of it again.
Wulfric stood on the other side of nearly a thousand years and didn’t ask me to stay, didn’t speak of the settlement or the children, didn’t tell me they needed me. He didn’t offer duty as a chain because he understood, better than anyone, exactly how tightly I had bound myself with it.
“I love you.” He cleared his throat. “I love you enough to know I cannot make your world smaller so mine may keep you.”