Chapter 11

Imogen sat on the steps leading up to the great hall, reflected on the crazy that had become her life, and tried to pinpoint just where she’d gone wrong.

She had been a dutiful daughter. She had tried to keep the peace with her siblings. She had stayed out of trouble, bitten her tongue, avoided conflict like the plague. It was possible that she’d been a little too agreeable to whatever plan her most determined sibling had hatched, plans that always seemed to put her in the hot seat, taking the blame for not only instigating but carrying out whatever nastiness had taken place, but surely that shouldn’t count against her when Karma was tallying things up, should it?

All right, so she’d escaped to college as quickly as possible without obtaining the obligatory validictorial pole position, but she had attended a pair of exclusive institutions for both her undergrad and graduate degrees. She’d even paid for it all herself thanks to the jump start of a small inheritance from her late grandmother.

She paused. So she’d almost run over one of her older brothers when he’d tried to appropriate her college money, but he’d had the reflexes to get out of her way—something she’d been sure would serve him well in the future with angry clients—so that was all good. But the truth was, it had been one more in a very long series of things she shouldn’t have put up with.

She wondered if the universe was now trying to tell her to stop lying down and letting people walk all over her.

She stared out over the courtyard of a castle she never should have come to and wondered where in the world she was. Or, more to the point, when in the world she was. It looked like Haemesburgh, but then again not. Gone were the modern trappings, the floodlights, the bare walls where wooden outbuildings had no doubt stood in the past but suffered the ravages of time. Now, the place looked so damned medieval, she thought she might never want to see anything medieval again.

She had resigned herself to the possibility of being in a time not her own, though it still seemed so far-fetched as to be impossible. People didn’t travel to other time zones unless they were on board a nice 747 with complimentary meals and drinks. She didn’t believe in paranormal happenings and she had most definitely not wasted any time watching all the shows Marcus had recommended. That guy was just short of crazy with his enormous collection of super-duper paranormal spying stuff that he was sure would camouflage him enough that ghosts wouldn’t notice him, leaving him free to get said specters on tape and thereby cement his reputation as a first-class ghost hunter.

It had done nothing but cement his reputation in her mind as a first-rate crazy person, but now she was beginning to wish she had at least listened occasionally to what he’d been saying. She almost had the urge to give him a call and find out what he thought of her current straits.

She didn’t bother to pull out her phone. She was out of range and out of explanations for what had happened to her. She’d hoped for power chords, mischievous siblings, big-name directors putting her to the test to see how she operated under pressure. She had clung to the possibility of a hallucination, a barely adverted insulin coma, the fallout from not enough coffee before getting on the train.

She had even hoped for something more... well, something more paranormal, like Heather being a witch, the cabbie being a kindly though unsettled guide to another dimension, or time travel without a phone booth. She’d gotten a sword away from a teenager and jammed it into the floor to see if it would transport her back to where she’d come from. Nothing had changed her situation. She was trapped in a place full of things she didn’t understand, people she didn’t know, and languages she didn’t speak.

She needed to get home. She just had no idea how she was going to manage it.

The shadow of someone sitting down next to her left her jumping a little in surprise. She saw she had been joined on her step by that woman who she was just sure had spoken English but now seemed incapable of speaking anything but French. Well, to be entirely accurate, she spoke a bizarrely accented French and that equally weird English that everyone seemed to be speaking, as if they’d minored in Anglo-Saxon and needed to keep up their language on the off chance they might run into Geoffrey Chaucer. The woman sitting next to her claimed she also spoke Gaelic, though Imogen couldn’t be sure about that, not being a Scot herself yet having a deep fondness for plaid in all its varieties.

She looked at her new friend and had to admit she was drop-dead gorgeous. Aqua eyes that would have been the envy of any print model, perfect skin, perfect teeth... and a mouth like a sailor. Imogen listened to her chew out a lad who seemed not to be doing what he was supposed to and had to laugh a little at words that seemed to cross language barriers.

“Understand that, did you?” the woman said.

“Yes,” Imogen managed.

“I’m Rose,” she said. “Still. And you’re Imogen.”

Well, she could understand that much French, especially when it was liberally sprinkled with names she recognized. “Yes,” Imogen managed. “I am.”

“But you’re not the lady of Haemesburgh.”

“No,” Imogen said slowly. “Why would I be that?”

Rose shrugged. “You’re here and Heather is gone. I was just curious if you knew her or had decided to trade places with her for some reason.”

“Heather,” Imogen echoed, feeling quite suddenly as if she were having an out-of-body experience. “You know Heather?”

“Of her,” Rose corrected. “I’ve never met her myself.”

Imogen started to say that she certainly had met the woman—and she was very tempted to list a few of her more unsettling qualities—but good sense stopped her just in time. Whatever current Heather Rose thought she might know couldn’t possibly be the same person as the Heather in twenty-first-century Scotland. The names were the same, but that happened a lot in families. It was a coincidence.

Surely.

“That was an interesting scene inside with the swords.”

Imogen followed that, eventually, but the effort was starting to give her a headache. “Yes, it was.”

“You seem to be interested in swords,” Rose continued relentlessly. “I prefer arrows, but that’s just me. If you need Phillip’s sword, I’m sure he’ll bring it back eventually. Did you have a particular reason for wanting it?”

Imogen wasn’t sure where to even begin with that, so she made a few inarticulate sounds and willingly relinquished the floor when Rose carried on as if she’d already answered.

“You could borrow a sword from one of my cousins instead, perhaps. Let me point the lads out to you, that you might recognize them at a later time if you need them.”

Imogen nodded because she didn’t have the strength to protest. If Rose wanted to identify potential victims so Imogen could indulge in sword-stealing activities later, there was no point in stopping her.

“That lad over there is my brother, Jackson,” Rose said. “Those are my cousins Connor, Theopholis, and Sam standing next to them. And that is Phillip there. See him?”

Imogen did indeed. She had the feeling that no one could look at anyone else anytime he walked into a room.

“’Tis his squire, Bartholomew, standing behind him. Heather of Haemesburgh’s men are currently being held in the garrison hall.”

At least that’s what Imogen hoped she was saying. All that time in grad school spent studying Renaissance and eighteenth-century French poetry just wasn’t helping all that much. Rose wasn’t speaking in iambic pentameter, which hampered Imogen’s ability to understand her, and there was that truly wacky accent she seemed to be using, but the upside was that Rose was speaking to her as if she’d been approximately six years old. Maybe if she spent the rest of the day listening to that, she might actually begin to understand a little of what was being said around her.

“Let’s go find something unpoisoned to eat.”

That translated fairly well. Imogen pushed herself to her feet, swayed, then decided that everything would look better if she just had a clear head. She couldn’t make a plan to get where she needed to go unless she knew where she was starting from and had had a good breakfast. Her father the corporate raider said as much and while he might have been perennially in the race for worst father of the year, he was very good at cleaning up messes. He would have had a robust culinary start to the day, then looked at her situation with a pitiless eye and a stack of pink slips at his elbow.

She couldn’t fire the people in front of her, but she could certainly do her best to figure out whom to trust. Phillip seemed actually like the safest bet—

She froze. He had said his name was de Piaget, hadn’t he?

Stephen de Piaget is the current lord of Artane...

Tilly had said that on the train north. At the time, she had pushed the conversation aside because it hadn’t seemed critical to what she’d needed to do. Now she wished she had let Tilly go on about it for a bit longer. Actually, she wished she had let Tilly rent a car and take her to that enormous castle on the edge of the sea. Who knew what might have happened? She might have had an encounter with a real live nobleman and gotten a private tour of his castle.

She didn’t want to think about what she’d gotten instead. The truth was, she was in deep trouble and sinking fast. There were no jets traveling overhead. Her cell phone wouldn’t stay charged forever and there wasn’t a plug in sight. People were speaking languages she struggled to understand and wasn’t sure she wanted to become more familiar with. Guys were carrying swords, and those didn’t look to be swords from the prop trailer. She didn’t see any running water, and there was definitely no catering service pulling up with sandwiches she would have turned her nose up at twenty-four hours ago but was now thinking would look pretty damn five-star.

She watched Phillip de Piaget give a teenager an encouraging shove in her direction, then take himself off to do heaven only knew what. Imogen recognized the kid. He’d been the one she’d used as a crutch that first day after she’d dropped off the drawbridge into Phillip de Piaget’s arms—what a pity she hadn’t enjoyed that nearly as much as she should have.

“What is it, Bartholomew?” Rose asked.

“My lord Phillip asked me to come and help the lady Imogen with her tongues.”

Imogen sized up the trembling, skinny teenager in front of her, then looked at Rose. “My tongues?”

“Bartholomew is the son of a monk,” Rose said with a shrug, “and knows all sorts of useful things about several languages. Phillip obviously thought it might amuse you to have a lesson or two.”

“Very kind of him.”

“He is that.”

Imogen wasn’t sure she should ask what sort of lessons they were beginning, so she didn’t. She also decided it was best not to ask why little Bart had a board, quill, ink, and parchment. There was obviously someone who was truly into reenactment.

She took the opportunity while he was making himself comfortable on a stool in front of her to indulge in a minor, silent freak-out. She was tired, hungry, and out of her depth. She didn’t like that feeling of not knowing exactly what the lay of the land was so she could get out of the heat of battle, so to speak, at a moment’s notice. Worse still was to have seen what the landscape looked like and know it wasn’t going to be of any use to her.

She’d already tried the front gates, but that way lay dead knights and other bad guys lurking out in what should have been the village. She’d tried the great hall, but that way had proved equally unresponsive. She supposed she could go around the keep and borrow swords from every single guy there, but she suspected none of them would behave any differently than what she’d already tried.

What she needed was to find that sword with the big blue stone in the crossbar.

But even beginning that search was going to be impossible unless she could ask the right questions of the right people and she wasn’t going to be able to do that until she could understand everyone around her better.

She couldn’t say she was good at very many things outside of avoiding familial drama, but she was good at organizing things. Language first, then she would consider her next step. She could only hope it would include a sword, a trapdoor back to where she was supposed to be, and something with chocolate at the end of the road.