He turned to study the woman in white. She was obviously not of this world, obviously quite used to the privilege of royalty, doubtless used to those around her immediately and without question seeing to her every need. She was no doubt rich far beyond even his rather high standards for the like, and he wasn’t precisely certain she didn’t possess magical powers. How else had she walked through a gate from her world to . . .
He felt his thoughts grind to an ungainly halt.
How else had she walked through a
gate
from her world to his?
His thoughts took him in a new and rather alarming direction. It was a rather well-kept secret that there were a few souls in his family who weren’t—how was he to say it?—exactly from the current day, as daft as that sounded. His sister-in-law Jennifer, for instance, had seemingly sprung up from the grass, yet Montgomery had spent enough of his youth with his brother Nicholas to realize that Nicholas’s wife was not a faery, but rather from a time not their own.
The Future, as it happened.
It couldn’t be that the Faery Queen was . . . it couldn’t be that she came from . . .
He rubbed his hands over his face and wished he’d had more sleep. Any sleep, actually. He’d spent all night either sitting or standing in front of his bedchamber door. He’d had no other choice. Only one brief trip to the garderobe had resulted in his two male cousins trying to sneak into his bedchamber. His vigil had kept the women safe, but it had apparently resulted in the complete ruination of his wits. The women were nothing more than he’d said they were: players who had wandered away from their company and become lost. Anything else was too fanciful, too improbable, too far out of his normal sphere of existence to be believed.
He clung to that thought desperately as he watched the queen flit around the back of the table and come to a stop next to his chair. She looked Gunnild over, as if she considered her potential prowess in battle.
“Move,” she slurred, in French. The word was accented strangely, but perfectly intelligible.
Gunnild obviously understood her, for she bristled. “I will not.”
The Faery Queen didn’t wait for another response, she merely wrestled the chair away and sat herself down in it, catching both Gunnild and Boydin with her wings. War would have ensued, Montgomery was certain, if he hadn’t rushed forward and stopped it before it could bloom and flower.
“Our guest will of course have the place of honor,” he said with a pointed look at Gunnild.
Gunnild stepped aside, though Montgomery didn’t doubt he would pay for that concession at some point in the near future. Montgomery ignored his cousin’s look of fury, then saw the queen seated.
She yawned hugely, then shook her head. A few of her sparkles fell and some of her hair came lose from its coiffure. “I’m hungry.”
“I’ll fetch you something,” Montgomery said politely.
The queen looked at him, then looked at him a bit longer. Apparently she saw something she liked very much because she wielded her wand with great deliberation on Boydin until he got up out of his chair and retreated with a curse to safer ground. The queen patted the seat.
“Come sit.”
Montgomery suspected he knew how it felt for a man to be bewitched. She was just so lovely, so flawlessly beautiful, so achingly perfect that he supposed a man could do nothing but watch her draw breath—
“Persephone!” she bellowed. “Food!”
Montgomery blinked and the spell was broken.
The queen’s handmaid looked as if she would have liked nothing better than to have bolted—that, or have silenced her mistress as quickly as possible. Unfortunately, she appeared to be unable to decide what she should do. She winced every time her queen shouted at her, but she seemed unwilling to move past Everard, who was looking at her with a now less-than-friendly eye.
Montgomery walked across the great hall and stopped next to her. She regarded him warily as well; not even his most unassuming and unintimidating expression seemed to ease her. He elbowed Everard out of the way, then put himself in front of her so she wasn’t favored with a full view of what was left of his household. Unfortunately, that left him with a full view of her.
She looked impossibly tired. Indeed, he suspected that the dual trials of the bump on her head and her lady’s demands had been very wearing on her.
“I daresay your mistress requires supper,” he said carefully. “Unfortunately, my servants seem to have decamped for more promising larders. I’m not sure if your duties include preparing your lady’s food, but I wonder if you might manage it today.”
She looked at the queen for a moment or two, then up at him. “Kitchen?” she echoed faintly.
“Aye. Shall I show you the way?”
She nodded slowly. “Thank you.”
“You’re welcome. Persephone, is it?”
“Yes.”
He made her a little bow. “I’m Montgomery de Piaget. Of Sedgwick,” he added, because he supposed he should, though it felt strange on his tongue. Sedgwick was not a place he’d enjoyed visiting in his youth—indeed he could remember only a pair of occasions when he’d been forced to do so with his father and brothers—and there were still times he could hardly believe the keep was now his. He could only hope at some point that he could make it a hall that inspired something besides headshaking and sneers.
He looked at Persephone to find her gaping at him.
“De Piaget?” she said, putting her hand to her head and wincing. “Montgomery?”
“Persephone,
now
!” the queen bellowed.
Montgomery wasn’t about to insert himself between Persephone and her lady, but he could readily see she was in no condition to be doing aught but going somewhere quiet and having a lie-down. He looked at Everard.
“Would you fetch our displaced noblewoman there a bit of wine?” he asked, nodding toward the woman sitting in his chair looking particularly out of sorts. “I’ll find her food quickly, before her complaints increase.”
“Is she a noblewoman now?” Everard asked with a deep frown. “I thought she was a player.”
Montgomery sighed to himself. Yet more lies that he would rather have avoided. But desperate circumstances called for desperate measures. He took a deep breath.
“I thought so, too, at first, but now I understand she is one of Henry’s acquaintances.” He cast about for something else plausible. “From Italy,” he added. “Her clothing is part of her, ah, charm.”
“A pity her charm doesn’t extend to quietly voicing her demands,” Everard said with a wince. “Perhaps you’d best send her little maid here to the kitchens quickly, so we might have a little peace.”
“My thoughts exactly,” Montgomery agreed. “So please, offer her wine, if you will, until we can see to food for her.” He didn’t wait for Everard to comply; he simply took Persephone’s hand and drew it through the crook of his elbow without thinking, as he might have done with his mother or his sisters. Her hands were icy cold. He looked down quickly into her face to find her visage very pale.
Who knew the horrors she was experiencing? She was obviously from a lovely and more cultured world, so how must his world seem to her?
And how daft must he be to be thinking anything of the sort? Faery? He had obviously gone too long without sleep.
But the very noisy woman sitting in his chair, queen of the netherworld or no, had obviously gone too long without food. The faster that was seen to, the sooner he would have peace for thinking.
He walked Persephone through the passageway to the kitchens. Joan had styled herself a benevolent monarch and was directing none other than Phillip of Artane to do the fetching of water and lifting of heavy things for her. Phillip looked at him and smiled briefly.
“I thought I might be of use.”
“You are too good for me,” Montgomery said with a sigh.
“So says my father,” Phillip said with another smile. “I think, however, my lord, that we won’t be able to feed the garrison with just us two here.” He paused and set his water down to come closer. “Forgive me for speaking freely, but I wouldn’t trust our cousins near the cooking fire.”
“Neither would I, Phillip. We’ll manage until I find other souls suited for the task. There might be a lad or two in the garrison happy to leave the lists for a bit.”
Phillip nodded, then shoved a stool closer to the fire with his foot. He looked at Persephone and made her a small bow.
“Perhaps you would care to sit?” he asked gallantly.
Persephone felt her way down onto that stool, then looked around her as if she’d never in her lifetime seen a kitchen before. Montgomery considered that for a moment or two. Perhaps she was accustomed to loftier surroundings. Or perhaps surroundings that didn’t look as if they’d just recently suffered a lengthy and quite injurious siege. She said nothing, but her shoulders slumped slightly.
Joan apparently thought she’d acquired help, for she walked over and began to give Persephone numerous instructions that showed she had either cooked for her mother at home or paid close attention to how things carried on inside a keep. Persephone only stared up at her as if she couldn’t understand a bloody thing she was saying. Montgomery frowned. Perhaps she wouldn’t have any cause to know the peasant’s English, but still . . .
He would obviously have to stay nearby and translate. In fact, he supposed he might do well at the moment to simply stay nearby and help. Persephone looked as if the simple act of sitting upright was taxing enough. He squatted down next to her to be more easily heard over Joan’s commanding of Phillip, then realized that he had made a grave tactical error.
Persephone’s queen might have been perfection embodied, but that queen was somehow not nearly as lovely as was Persephone herself, wearing his spare tunic and hose. She was lovely, and grave, and very, very lost. He reached up before he thought better of it and tucked a strand of her wildly curling hair behind her ear. She startled, as if she’d been a deer, then took a deep breath and visibly forced herself to remain calm.
“I will see to supper for both you and your queen,” he said quietly, pulling his hand away. “What will please her, do you think? Bread and cheese, perhaps? Stew, if it can be found in that pot yonder?”
Persephone blinked. “Queen?”
“The Queen of Faery,” he said. “Your mistress.”
“Oh,” she said, drawing the word out a rather long time, as if she’d just begun to understand something she hadn’t before.
“Persephone!”
That voice carried better than it should have. Persephone sighed, then rose.
“Thank you,” she said, apparently not having heard his offer. “I’ll help her.” She looked around her, then shuffled about the kitchen to see what it contained.
Montgomery supposed that looking would be the extent of what she would manage given that she was having to hold his tights up with one hand and keep the other pressed against her head. She hitched, rearranged, then took a bucket and walked toward the back door to no doubt go fetch water.
“I hate my life.”
He supposed he understood the sentiment. There had been times during his life when the difficulties had been such that he might have expressed something akin to—
He blinked.
Had she just said what he’d thought she’d said? In the same English that Jennifer, Abigail, and Jake spoke to each other—which, as it happened, Robin, Anne, Nicholas, Amanda, and Miles could converse in with equal ease? The same English tongue he had learned vast amounts of thanks to copious and unknightly amounts of eavesdropping?
The same English his siblings-in-law had brought with them . . .
“My lord?”
“Not enough sleep,” Montgomery said promptly, shutting his mouth with a snap. He left Joan standing there with a long wooden spoon in one hand and a knife in the other, then walked out of the kitchens to follow Persephone.
He caught up with her as she was standing at the well, peering into its depths as if she intended to call forth the water with words alone. He pulled up the bucket, filled hers, then dropped it back into the water. Then he looked at her. In the light of day, he realized he had been overtaken by a bout of stupidity. There was an easy answer to all the questions he had about her and that woman inside pretending to be the Faery Queen, he just hadn’t wanted to look at it.
Because if he admitted what he knew about times not his own, he would have to face things he would rather not, things that ate at him still, things to do with more than just his siblings-in-law—
He took a deep breath. Nay, it could not be. The queen was a well-dressed noblewoman pretending to be a queen and Persephone was . . . well, he wasn’t sure what she was, but she was surely just a wench. A beautiful wench, but a simple wench after all. Not a woman from the Future, nor from Faery, nor from other places he couldn’t convince himself existed. What he needed was sleep. It would clear his ears and his head.
But first things first. He carried water back into the kitchens, discussed with Joan what had already been planned for supper, then paused next to Persephone.
“I will take the bread to your . . . your queen,” he finished, because he couldn’t bring himself to acknowledge any of his other ridiculous thoughts.
The Future?
Impossible.
“That is kind of you.” Persephone’s accent hadn’t improved, but her words were intelligible enough.
A bit like Jake’s had been, and Jennifer’s as well when they’d first arrived from . . . well, wherever they’d come from.
“ ’Tis actually self-preservation,” he said without thinking. He managed a brief smile. “My servants have fled at the sight of her. I don’t want her terrifying the garrison as well.” Though he imagined she would do less terrifying than she would bewitching, he declined to say as much.
Persephone looked very, very pale. He thought there might have been tears beginning in her eyes, but those could just as easily have been from the onions Joan was cutting. He suppressed the urge to pat her on the back and flee, as Robin would have done. Instead, he nodded his head briskly and fled, because he imagined he would do less damage to her that way.