He had things to do, and those things didn’t include wasting time with wenches who weren’t where they were supposed to be. He would see the woman masquerading as the Faery Queen fed, hope Joan fed Persephone, then he would get himself the hell out to the lists where there were swords and curses and other things he could understand. Perhaps he would stay there for the rest of the day. Perhaps he would have torches brought and stay there far into the night until he’d rid himself of any more fanciful imaginings about faeries and the Future and things that didn’t belong in his nice, orderly, responsible world.
He paused and wrestled with himself for a moment or two. He gave in, only because he allowed himself to, and looked back over his shoulder. Persephone was standing at Joan’s worktable, looking off into the distance as if she could see things he couldn’t. Her profile was hauntingly familiar, and now he understood why. She had obviously been standing in the middle of a time gate and he’d somehow seen her from his side of it. That she was now in his hall, in his care, within his reach meant nothing but that he was responsible for finding a way to get her home.
Because he was the only one for leagues who would know how.
Chapter 8
P
ippa
didn’t think she was one to overreact, but she was fast coming to a conclusion that was about to make her do so.
Her sister was delusional.
It wasn’t just the little
let me show you how well I internalized that method acting class I took in New York from Someone Famous
or the less erudite but equally annoying
let me show you that this tiara I have on my head comes with an attitude so fetch me some carrots and hummus
. It was a full-blown
I’m the Faery Queen so deal with it
, only Cindi had taken it to a level that made Pippa wonder if her sister had had one too many crowns pinching her poor head and they had finally cut off blood flow to important reality centers of her brain. For all she knew, all the parts of her body Cindi had injected and scraped and lifted had finally rebelled and pushed her over the edge.
“Serving girl,” Cindi said, sitting in a hard, uncomfortable chair that had been made less uncomfortable by the addition of a pillow, “fetch me something to drink.”
Well, one thing could be said for Cindi, and that was her French was excellent. Maybe the utter craziness she was wallowing in had tapped into previously untapped reservoirs of language aptitude. Either that or the thrill of sitting at the lord’s table the day before and having the entire cast of castle characters staring at her as if she’d really been the bloody Fairy Queen belched out from the land of fairies to astonish and delight them had finally shorted out her Botox-drenched brain and given her abilities far beyond the norm.
Maybe it had simply been the deliciousness of being waited on hand and foot. Pippa had supposed she didn’t have much choice but to humor her sister so she didn’t break into some sort of Broadway tune or throw some sort of tantrum in modern English that would have changed admiration to anger. A vision of villagers with pitchforks was right there for examination, but Pippa pushed it aside because it wasn’t helpful.
The question of where they might have been or why she was sharing so fully in her sister’s hallucinations was one she hadn’t been able to answer. It had been all she could do the day before to keep her sister fed, keep herself from throwing up from the pain of the bump she still had on her own head, and finally get them both to bed in accommodations that were substantially less comfortable than any KOA campground she’d frequented in her youth. She’d hoped for a better day—or a return to reality—when she’d awoken.
No such luck, but she wasn’t ready to toss in the towel yet. Her headache had receded a bit, her determination had increased, and she was ready to ditch her sister and do some investigating. The last was an especially attractive alternative to sitting locked in a chilly castle room with a beauty queen who had become far too empowered by her crown.
She poured her sister a glass of wine that Cindi downed with abandon, dribbling a bit down her chin. It went down her cleavage, but Pippa wasn’t about to dive after it there with a Kleenex—not that any were to be found in their mutual delusionary state. Cindi didn’t seem to mind, so Pippa moved on. She gathered up a few more crystals from the floor out of habit, stashed them in the little pile she’d made inside one corner of the trunk, then took stock of her day.
First on her list was figuring out where the hell she was.
Second was figuring out how she was going to get out of wherever the hell she was.
She looked at her sister, but Cindi was staring into the fire as if it held answers she couldn’t get anywhere else. “Cindi?”
Cindi looked at her. “I will rest now. Leave me.”
“No problem,” Pippa muttered under her breath. She made her escape before she got to indulge in any more servitude. She heard the door lock behind her, so she supposed she could go on her little explore without undue anxiety about the safety of her clueless sibling.
She hitched up her tights, then remembered they weren’t hers. She suspected that they—plus the cloak someone had delivered to her door the night before—belonged to Montgomery de Piaget. She had deduced from Joan’s rustic English that she and Cindi were sleeping in his chamber. The fact that he was a de Piaget and looked as much like Stephen de Piaget as he did was enough to make what was left of her puzzler sore. He didn’t look like a thug, his rather serious and grim expressions aside, but he also didn’t look like a reenactment fanatic who was hiding his rather ordinary Marks and Spencer shirts in his very medieval-looking trunk.
That was just the beginning of what bothered her. Why did the castle—which she was certain was Sedgwick—look nothing like it should? Where was Tess and running water? Why was there nothing in the kitchen that would have made a quick snack except a few carrots? She could have gone on all day with the things that alarmed her, but she decided to just deal with the most troubling, which was why the castle looked as if it had been overrun by a medieval French reenactment troupe with a few members who’d escaped from Cambridge’s department of Anglo-Saxon literature. It was almost as if she’d stepped back in time—
She put the brakes on that thought before she finished it. She knew all about those impossible time-travel romances Peaches read. She’d even read the start of one in which a poor girl had fallen asleep on a park bench and woken up in medieval Scotland, only to find herself tossed into the castle dungeon while the laird tried to talk himself into burning her as a witch. That was entertaining when read in an overstuffed chair with a cup of hot chocolate nearby, but not so diverting when considered after two days in backwoods England without a single sighting of toilet paper.
It was time to have a few answers.
She pulled Montgomery de Piaget’s cloak around her and started down the passageway. She’d already begun day three without the appropriate twenty-first-century hygienic items—in an inside biffy that looked a great deal like the garderobe Tess had showed off with pride and a great amount of descriptive detail—and poached a bit of what Cindi had found too far beneath her to eat. She would have preferred to have had some sort of weapon, but maybe she could nab a kitchen knife later.
The hallway was empty, but the stairwell wasn’t. She’d made it only partway down the stairs before she ran into one of the men who’d been sitting at the lord’s table the night before. She suspected he was related to the other man sitting with him and perhaps to the woman who’d just about stabbed Cindi with her glares. He had been, she could readily admit, the most unpleasant looking of the lot.
“You and I should speak privately,” he said with an ugly smile.
“We should,” she agreed, feinted to her left, then dashed past him to the right. She kept on trotting right through the great hall, ignoring her would-be friend’s family and continuing on outside before anyone could stop her.
She concentrated on her usual slog through the courtyard mire, managing to keep her shoes on her feet this time. She paused by the barbican gate, then looked over her shoulder.
The place looked worse in the daylight. The courtyard was full of shells of buildings that had been perfectly restored in her sister’s castle. She knew she should have turned away, but she couldn’t. It simply wasn’t possible that within hours, the castle should have gone from perfectly glorious to perfectly horrible, but she couldn’t deny what she was seeing. It was truly as if the clock had been turned back.
And not in a good way.
She turned away and walked through the gatehouse. It was just as functional as it had been three days earlier, with the portcullis spikes hanging down through three separate gates. Where things took yet another turn for the worse was the bridge. Her sister’s bridge was a solid, well-built thing with no propensity to rising and falling depending on the mood of the guards in the tower. Pippa hurried over it and had to jump off the end thanks to a couple of jokers who laughed as she did so.
Karma was going to give them something nasty for lunch, she was just sure of it.
She walked over to where the gift shop should have been and sat down. She did so even though the shop with its quaint table and chairs was gone and all that was left for her to sit on was a fallen log. At least she had a good view of the reenactment practice going on in the field in front of her.
Men were training with swords. She thought she might have recognized a few of them from the night before, particularly the blond man named Everard. The rest of the guys were a guess, but she felt fairly confident in identifying their leader. He was tall, exceptionally handsome, and definitely knew how to use a sword.
Montgomery de Piaget, apparently.
She would have gaped, but she was tired of gaping. She was just plain tired of everything—and cold, and rather frightened, truth be told, so she just sat there with her knees pressed together to keep them from trembling and her chin resting on her fists. She watched the madness in front of her with a detachment that should have worried her, but somehow she just didn’t have the energy for that, either.
That detachment helped her ignore the fact that there was something about the whole scene that just didn’t belong in the twenty-first century.
Take, for instance, Montgomery de Piaget. He didn’t look like he was simply practicing for a mock fight, but what did she know? She was a costume designer from a sleepy little town on the West Coast where people recycled their theater programs and it rained a lot. She knew actors with collapsible swords and the occasional crazy method guy who carried his weapon around with him at all times to stay in character. Not even those rare birds ever looked as serious about their training as Montgomery did. Either he was somehow the real deal or he was planning on putting on one helluva show. He wasn’t flashy, or loud, or obnoxious; he was just in charge. She might have liked that about him if she hadn’t been so uninterested in the whole thing.
The morning passed. She was sure the three men who seemed to always be closest to Montgomery would give up, or give in, or beg for mercy, like the man named Everard had. To her surprise, they seemed as driven as their leader was, as if their primary task was to whip the rest of the guys into shape. The other, less skilled men weren’t as driven, but still they worked as if their paychecks depended on how well they did their jobs.
Their paychecks, or maybe their lives.
She didn’t want to believe it, but she couldn’t help but think that somehow, beyond all reason, she had become trapped in a paranormal romance novel where she—as the heroine’s servant, of course—had been sent back in time to watch the gorgeous, if slightly gloomy, hero fall in love with the gorgeous, if slightly batty and undeniably buxom, heroine named Cindi. The only thing that kept her from believing that fully was that not even Karma would have been so cruel as to relegate her to watching her sister get the guy. Again.
It certainly wasn’t as if she wanted any of the guys stomping around in the dirt in front of her, no sir. If this was some other century than her own and this was the way guys passed their time, that meant the bad guys had swords as well and were likely spending their time running around not saving maidens in distress, but creating them.
Sort of like the guy who had just grabbed her from behind and jerked her to her feet.
She shrieked before she could stop herself, then, blessing Peaches for having dragged her to more than one self-defense class, she put into action the training she’d never been sure she would have the guts to use. She bit the hand that was covering her mouth, then elbowed her captor as hard as she could in the stomach.
“Duck!”
She dropped to her knees partly because her attacker had let her go and her knees buckled, but mostly because Montgomery de Piaget had a knife in his hand and looked like he meant business with it. There was a thud, then the man who had attacked her fell over her, rolled over the log she’d been sitting on, and landed on his back in front of her. She stood up and stared down at him in surprise. She realized she was screaming only after Montgomery took her by both arms and shook her.
“Cease,” he said loudly. “You’re safe.”
She shut her mouth, but that didn’t help at all with her teeth chattering. There was a man lying at her feet with a dagger shaft poking out of his chest and Montgomery didn’t look like that bothered him. He patted her, as if by so doing he could calm any and all hysterics, then reached down to jerk his knife free of the man’s flesh. He cleaned his blade on the man’s tunic, then looked over his shoulder at one of his men.
“Rid us of this refuse,” he said simply.
Pippa turned away and threw up. It was becoming a very bad habit, that getting so worked up over things. She felt a hand on her back and shrieked again in spite of herself. She realized almost immediately to whom it belonged, though that wasn’t terribly useful in ending her shivering. She dragged her sleeve across her mouth, then found herself turned around. Montgomery dabbed at her cheeks with the hem of his sleeve, then patted her again.