“You nearly passed out in the hall.” I smiled at him.
He sniffed. “I did so with dignity.”
“That feels historically unverifiable.”
A tired laugh escaped him. My fingers brushed his wrist while tying the clean linen in place. Geoffrey looked down at my hands for a long moment.
“When I left court,” he said quietly, “I regretted leaving you more than I regretted leaving the king.”
Something inside my chest simply stopped functioning.
He seemed almost surprised he had said it aloud. He was looking at me like coming back to Thames had become the closest thing he possessed to rest.
My hand still rested lightly against his wrist.
Outside, winter pressed quietly against the castle walls while somewhere beyond Thames the war continued grinding men into history. But inside the study there was only candlelight, damp wool steaming near the hearth, Geoffrey’s pulse beneathmy fingertips, and the terrifying realization that I no longer knew whether I wanted the psalter to send me home at all.
Fifteen
GEOFFREY
Snow beganbefore dawn and did not stop. By midday the roads north of Rochester had vanished beneath white drifts and churned mud frozen hard enough to lame the horses. Geoffrey rode through it, cloak stiff with ice, gloved hands aching around the reins as wind tore across the open fields.
England no longer felt like a kingdom. Three villages had been burned along the road between Rochester and Canterbury. Geoffrey had passed one just after sunrise. Smoke still curled upward through the snow while villagers picked silently through blackened beams searching for what remained. A child stood barefoot in the ashes holding half a wooden spoon.
John’s work. Retaliation had become the king’s preferred language.
The siege at Rochester had broken more than walls. It had broken whatever fragile illusion remained that reconciliation was still possible. Men who once argued over charters and taxes now fortified keeps, hired mercenaries, and watched neighboring banners with suspicion.
Every road carried rumor. Every hall carried fear.
And Geoffrey was tired unto his bones of all of it. His horse stumbled slightly descending an icy slope as he steadied the gelding automatically before swearing beneath his breath. Snow clung thickly to the animal’s mane. Both of them were exhausted.
Beside him, Martin pulled his cloak tighter against the wind. “We should stop before dark.”
“We stopped four hours ago.”
“We stopped long enough to drink ale standing in a stable.”
“That still counts as stopping.”
Martin muttered something in Norman French that sounded deeply insulting.
The wind shifted sharply as they reached higher ground. Through the falling snow Geoffrey finally saw the Thames Castle in the distance. Stone walls softened white beneath winter. Smoke rising from chimneys. Lanternlight faint against the storm-dark afternoon.
Home.
Merde. He had not consciously decided to ride there but some instinct deeper than reason had simply turned his horse south the moment negotiations collapsed in Canterbury two days earlier. Geoffrey told himself he needed to speak with Aldwin regarding troop movements before spring campaigning resumed.
A transparent lie. The truth sat far less comfortably beneath his ribs. He wanted to see Harper. Not because she understood history or because the psalter remained unpredictable, but because the thought of another freezing night without hearing her laugh had become intolerably bleak.
Geoffrey exhaled slowly through the cold. This was precisely why men should avoid emotional attachments during civil wars. Ahead of him the gates of Thames began to open through the falling snow.
And despite the exhaustion grinding through his body, despite the reports of burned villages and fractured loyalties and England collapsing one betrayal at a time, Geoffrey smiled.
* * *
HARPER