“Have you considered that perhaps Pippa might be interested in your very skilled chef, your rapier wit, and deliciously pretty eyes?” Nicholas countered. “How could she resist all that?”
“Easily, I assure you,” Montgomery said. “Now, if you would be so good as to direct me to one of these gates you know about, I would be most grateful.”
Nicholas studied him for a moment or two. “Very well,” he said quietly. “Make for the crook of those hills you see there to the west. If it were springtime, you might find an odd ring of flowers there in the grass. Now, I imagine you’ll only see a circle of things gone to seed.” He paused, then smirked. “I suppose
you
might call it a faery ring.”
“Amusing.”
Nicholas only smiled. “If I were Robin, I would enjoy the irony more, but I can’t for I see this is a parting that will be—how shall we say it?”
“Inevitable,” Montgomery said. “And unfortunately quite necessary.”
Nicholas put his hand briefly on Montgomery’s shoulder. “I’m sorry for it, brother, truly. Why don’t you come to Wyckham when you’ve seen your charges safely delivered to their time? Jenner and the lads will be happy to see you.”
Montgomery nodded, more grateful for the invitation than he wanted to admit. Aye, he would go to Wyckham once he was finished with his business.
It would be a distraction to spend a day or two with family so he might think on something besides what he would have just recently lost.
Three
hours and the return to consciousness of Cinderella later, he found what his brother had told him to seek. He wasn’t quite sure how he was to go about sending Pippa and her sister home with his guardsmen and his squire as four gaping witnesses to the fact, so he sent his lads back the way they’d come to wait for him. The excuse of the sisters’ kin being too cautious to want to encounter men-at-arms had seemed a decent lie, though he wasn’t any happier about that one than he was any of the others he’d told in the past fortnight.
He waited until he was alone with Pippa and Cinderella, then drew his knife and cut first the gag from Cinderella’s mouth, then the cloth Nicholas’s lads had apparently used to bind her wrists and ankles together.
Cinderella sat up and looked around her, dazed. “Where are we?”
“Going home,” Pippa said shortly. “Behave while I go change—”
“No need,” Montgomery said quickly. He suspected it would sound daft if he told her the thought of her having something of his in the Future was comforting, so he pressed on without hesitation. “Your gown is in the wagon. Just carry it along with you.”
Pippa looked at him gravely, then nodded and walked over to the wagon to fetch her clothes. She shook the gown out, then slipped her hands into the pockets one by one.
The blood drained from her face. He would have stepped forward to aid her, but she was searching the wagon so frantically, he didn’t dare get in her way. He glanced at Cinderella in time to see her watching her sister with a rather lucid expression on her face, all things considered. It wasn’t a very pleasant expression, which made him wonder what mischief she was combining. He kept Cinderella in his sights on the off chance she decided to bolt suddenly, then walked over to stand next to Pippa as she leaned back against the wagon.
“What is it?” he asked quietly.
“I had something in the pocket of my dress,” she said faintly.
Montgomery looked again at Cinderella to find her smirking, as if she’d done something she found vastly amusing. Pippa pushed away from the wagon and strode over to her.
“What did you do with it?” she demanded.
Cinderella flipped her hair back over her shoulder. “I’m just sure I don’t know what you’re talking about.”
Montgomery listened to them converse—in Future English, no less—in tones that became less dulcet with every exchange.
“Cindi, where’s my flash drive!”
“You hid my pills,” Cinderella snapped, “so I hid your little backup stick.”
“I didn’t hide your pills,” Pippa said through gritted teeth,
“you swallowed them all. Now, where did you put my drive?”
“Maybe you’d better go back and look for it in the castle.”
Pippa froze. “Did you leave it there?”
“I guess you’ll just have to go check and see, won’t you?”
Montgomery watched Pippa turn and walk away. Cinderella strolled past him to sit on the end of the wagon as if she had nothing more pressing to do than be at her leisure. He left her where she was, smiling triumphantly, and hastened to catch up with Pippa.
“Wait,” he said, reaching out to take her by the arm.
She stopped, then turned to face him. “You know,” she said flatly, “I’ve always thought my sister was just not too bright, that she couldn’t help overshadowing me in everything. Now, I think she’s been doing it on purpose all these years.”
Montgomery wouldn’t doubt it. “What has she done now?”
“She took something I can’t leave behind here.”
“Something from the Future?”
“Yes.”
He very briefly entertained the thought of seeing if she cared to return to Sedgwick with him to seek out that thing, but quickly dismissed it. The journey was long and she was no doubt eager to go back to her world. “Tell me what it is and I will destroy it, Persephone,” he said quietly. “You needn’t worry.”
She laughed a little, but it was a laugh of desperation. “The problem is, my life’s work is on this thing. It’s very small, but it has pictures inside it of all my designs.” She paused. “It’s the only one I have.”
“Then you must have it,” he said, vowing to ask Nicholas later how it was that Pippa could have sheaves of drawings on something that could fit into a saddlebag. “We’ll turn for home immediately.”
She took a deep breath, then shook her head. “I couldn’t ask you to go to all that trouble.”
“Well,” he said slowly, as if he pondered the enormous inconvenience it would cause him instead of furiously calculating how many more days it would mean he could have her company, “I do have things to do. Walls to patch, François’s delicacies to sample—that sort of thing. It might take a bit before I could bring you north again. Assuming this gate works as it should.”
She blinked rapidly a time or two. “I couldn’t ask it.”
“If the roles were reversed and you could help me save my life’s work, wouldn’t you?”
She nodded silently.
“Then allow me the same privilege.”
“It won’t bother your fiancée?”
“Wha—Oh, her,” he said. He knew at that moment why he’d never lied. It was a complicated business, what with all the tales he needed to keep straight. He would see Pippa home, eventually, then he would return to his habit of never telling anything but the absolute truth. It was less painful to his poor head that way.
He wasn’t quite sure why he just didn’t blurt out the truth of it right there, but he couldn’t bring himself to. It might be the only thing keeping him from yanking Pippa into his arms, professing undying love he couldn’t possibly feel for her after such a short time, and begging her to stay in his time and allow him to spend the rest of his days being as dazzled by her as Nicholas was by Jennifer.
“What about Cindi?”
He pulled himself back to the matter at hand reluctantly. “I suppose we should take her with us,” he said, though he didn’t imagine he could think of many things he would rather
not
have done.
“Or we could send her on by herself.”
He considered. “Would she be safe?”
“No less safe than if I went with her.”
That was all he needed to hear. He put his arm around Pippa’s shoulders and led her back to where her sister was singing rather loudly to herself and stroking her ragged locks. Once she saw Pippa, she felt her chin gingerly, then checked all her teeth.
“You hit me,” she said, her perfect brow beginning to furrow.
“You deserved it,” Pippa said shortly. “We’ll discuss it later. We’re going home now.”
“Good.” Cinderella straightened her crown and glared at Pippa. “I do
not
like to camp.”
“I know,” Pippa said, taking her sister by the arm, “which is why I’m going to make it so you don’t have to any longer.”
“What are you doing?” she demanded, trying to jerk away. “Tossing me in the moat? Oh, wait, that’s what I did to you.” She wrinkled her nose. “You still smell like it.”
Montgomery didn’t think anything of the sort, but he supposed now was not the time to make that clear. He also didn’t think now was the time to alert Pippa to the fact that he could understand her native tongue. He put that aside as a revelation to make if and when he ever admitted to the nonexistence of his betrothed, took Cinderella’s other arm, then looked over her head at Pippa.
“Up ahead,” he said quietly. “In that ring in the grass.”
“You’re trying to get rid of me,” Cinderella said incredulously. She looked from him to Pippa, then back. “One of you is jealous of me, but I’m not sure which one.”
Montgomery could have corrected her about that as well, but he didn’t bother. He was suddenly too busy pulling Cinderella away from her sister with a bit more enthusiasm than he probably should have used and subsequently giving her an equally enthusiastic bit of urging—accompanied by a fervent prayer she would land in the right time—right into the middle of the faery ring.
She took two steps inside it.
And then she disappeared without fanfare.
He gasped. Or perhaps that might have been Pippa. He wasn’t certain whose expression of astonishment had been louder. Even with all the tales he had fully believed in his youth and all the speculating he had done about things of a paranormal nature, he had never actually been a
participant
in those things. To be one now was profoundly unnerving.
He reached out and pulled Pippa close to him. “She’s gone,” he breathed.
“It’s spooky.”
“Aye,” he agreed.
Pippa shivered. “I know I should feel bad about sending her off, but she’s probably safer wherever she is. If she’d stayed here any longer, I would have killed her.”
Montgomery managed a smile. “Truly you have the patience of a saint.”
“Moral high ground,” she said with a faint smile. She paused, then pulled away and turned to face him. “I really could just follow her now—”
“Nay,” he said, likely with more enthusiasm than he should have. “Nay, you’ll come back to Sedgwick and find your flash drive. I’ll bring you back here afterward.”
She looked up at him for a moment or two in silence. “You know,” she said finally, “I think that might be the nicest thing anyone’s ever done for me.”
He shifted uncomfortably, mostly because he wasn’t one to accept praise for something he hadn’t done. And he most certainly hadn’t offered to keep Pippa in his time for any altruistic reasons.
The saints pity him for it.
He clasped his hands behind his back before he did something foolish with them, such as use them to pull her into his arms. “Perhaps we should spend a day or two at Wyckham,” he suggested. “In the event that perhaps she wanders back into my time and needs aid.”
“Will your brother mind?”
“He would only be irritated if we traveled so close to his hall and didn’t make an appearance at his supper table.”
She glanced at the patch of grass there beyond the wagon. “Did he know about this gate?”
Montgomery shifted—truly it was becoming an alarming habit. “ ’ Tis on his land,” he said carefully, “and he’s very particular about knowing what passes on his land. I imagine he listened to rumor. Fortunate for us that he did, isn’t it?”
“Very,” she agreed.
He wondered if she was wondering things she shouldn’t have been, but since she had reason, he couldn’t fault her for it. He quite happily left that unassuming patch of grass behind him, then offered Pippa his arm before he walked with her back to where his lads were waiting. He made up what he hoped was a believable tale about relatives fetching bedraggled queens and wagons being left for someone less fortunate, then distracted his men with thoughts of Nicholas’s kitchens. He helped Pippa mount Steud, then looked up at her as he handed her the reins.
“Thank you for learning to ride.”
“Thank you for taking the time to teach me,” she said with a smile. “Master Sensible was very wise.”
Montgomery smiled, then went to swing up onto his own horse. He wasn’t sure he would have called himself wise—he was, after all, encouraging a woman he most assuredly couldn’t have to remain with him long past when she should have gone back home—but perhaps he could take a day or two and forget that his life was full of duty and responsibility and a castle fair to falling down.
Would that it could have been full of Persephone Alexander.
Chapter 16
P
ippa
woke to sun streaming in the window. For a split second, she wondered if she’d dreamed the past two weeks, but no, that was definitely a carved canopy above her head. It was too handmade-looking to be the right-out-of-the-shrink-wrap sort of thing found in Tess’s castle, but somehow too intricate to be a mass-produced reproduction.
It was the real thing, which meant she was still hanging around in 1241.
The upside was, she was in a castle that had looked the night before to be capable of withstanding the whole of the English army. It had probably been midnight before their company had ridden through the gates, and she had listened to the comforting sound of the portcullis slamming home behind her. Stable lads had taken their horses and servants had come to see them settled. Pippa hadn’t remembered much past the impression of a spectacular castle, a warm piece of bread, and a rapid trip to a bed so soft, she’d wondered if she’d died and gone to heaven.
If she’d still had a crappy futon mattress to return to in the future, she wouldn’t have ever complained about it again.