Eirik: A Time Travel Romance (Mists of Albion Book 1)

by Joanna Bell

  Willa wasn't joking. About being dead by the same time next year. I could see in her expression that she was entirely serious. I opened my mouth to speak, to try to provide some comfort, but my throat was tight and no words came out.

  Were my friends going to die?

  The death of Willa and Eadgar's father was a turning point for them – and for me, for us. I'd always known their lives were hard, but it didn't quite make sense to me until I saw the real fear of death, of starvation, on their pale faces. I started to bring food after that, and there was no pretense at turning it down on their part, no protestations, no reassurances that they would be fine.

  I tried to bring food that made sense, too, searching the kitchen at my house fruitlessly the first time. What would they have made of sugary, colorful breakfast cereal? I didn't know, and I didn't want to find out. Cheese slices? No, they wouldn't recognize those as food, either. Cheese was a good idea, though. They ate cheese. They ate cheese and bread. So before my next visit to Caistley I went to the store and bought an unsliced loaf of bread and a package of cheddar cheese, both of which I carefully took out of their plastic packaging and wrapped in a plain white kitchen towel before giving it to them.

  Watching them devour the food made me feel terrible. I began to cry when they both set aside some of their bread and cheese, which I could see from their sunken cheeks they clearly needed to eat, for their mother.

  "I should have brought you food before," I said, sniffling. "I'm sorry – I'm so sorry. I didn't realize it was so bad! I thought you had enough and you were just so skinny from working all the time. I didn't think –"

  "No matter," said Eadgar, panting from the effort and speed with which he had consumed what I brought him. Willa joined in, patting my head. "No matter, Paige. No matter. It's not your job to keep us fed."

  'No matter.' They always said that, usually at the same point I would have said 'it's OK.' Sometimes, in River Forks, I would use some of the phrases or words I learned in Caistley, and people would look at me oddly.

  As to it not being my job to keep Eadgar, Willa and their mother fed, they were technically right – it wasn't. But I took it on anyway, using my dad's credit card to shop (I had long since set up an automatic payment process for all our bills every month, a system my father approved of, and I knew he wouldn't even notice the extra outlay) and then arriving in Caistley with my arms full of apples, bread, cheese, cream (which I had to transfer into a wooden bucket I found in the garage) and everything I could think of that would keep them fed. At one point, Willa brought me a little sample of something she called 'porridge' and, tasting it, I thought it mostly tasted like pea soup. It was what they mostly ate, she said, sometimes with pig bones from the landowner mixed in if he or his wife had seen fit to part with any. After that I brought sacks of dried peas and pork knuckles I bought at the butcher in River Forks.

  It's no self-congratulation to say that nothing had ever made me happier than seeing Willa and Eadgar – my truest, best and only friends in the world(s), go from almost too weak to play in the woods with me after the loss of their father to, if not exactly glowing with health, at least substantially more robust than they had been. I actually had to scale back on my food deliveries at one point, because some of the other people in the village had grown suspicious, started to suspect them and their mother of somehow stealing or procuring food that wasn't theirs.

  The three of us were as close as triplets, chattering and laughing and playing almost every day. Even Willa, always the more aloof of the two, seemed to warm to me greatly. It was unspoken, the way these things often are between children, but they understood what was driving my food deliveries – my care for them, my concern. And I in turn felt theirs for me, as they listened with serious expressions on their faces to my tales of loneliness and torment at school, and to my detailing of my father's inability to leave his bed, or even to shave off the beard that now made him look like some kind of crazed mountain man.

  "I'll kill her," Willa said one day, when I told them that the bruise on my arm was from Jessica McAllen – Kayla Foster's second in command – punching me out of the blue as I walked past her in the hallway. "Why did no one punish her? Are her parents dead?"

  I shook my head and explained that it just didn't work that way where I was from. And Willa and Eadgar's fury on my behalf did more for me than countless hours of talking to Dr. Whittington did, I have to say. I could have talked and talked and talked until the mountains turned to dust and nothing would have put the feeling in my heart that my friends and the fierceness of their affection – their love – did.

  "Thank you," I said, after both had sworn they would help me take revenge on Jessica McAllen, and just before I left to go back home. It was dusk, and even Willa and Eadgar – the only kids in the village who were brave enough to spend time in the woods during the daytime – had never stayed there past nightfall, not for as long as I'd known them. Evil spirits, they said. Demons. Witches. Outlaws.

  "You're one of us, Paige," Eadgar said simply, as if it was obvious. "So anyone who hurts you hurts us, too. What happens to you happens to us."

  Chapter 5

  9th Century

  Our childhood idyll didn't last. Not because of any one act or event, but because that's the point of childhood idylls – they don't last. They slip away so slowly, so almost imperceptibly that sometimes it's years later before you even realize that they've ended and that your memories are tinged with a kind of golden light, making you wonder if they ever happened at all, if you were ever truly that content, that at ease in the world.

  Not that childhood is a time of pure contentment or ease – only the luckiest can say that and neither myself nor Willa or Eadgar would describe the early parts of our lives as 'easy.' But we had each other – and that's no small thing – and we had the forest and the beach and the sunshine and the games we invented and then forgot about as the days and years passed.

  I was twelve when Willa had her first baby. There was pressure, after her father's death, to marry and have a child as soon as possible. Children were mouths to feed in Caistley, just like they were in River Forks, but not for as long. By 3 or 4 the little ones in Caistley were helping out and by 6 or 7 a lot of them were doing as much work as the adults. If anything, Willa and Eadgar turned out to have been a bit of an exception to the rule, born to parents who didn't believe in working them to the bone as early as possible.

  Even before Willa's marriage, I was seeing a lot less of both her and Eadgar. They were busy doing the things their father had done before them. It didn't stop me going to Caistley, but it did mean I spent a lot more time there on my own. I started to take books with me, reading them in a little clearing close to the beach where none of the villagers ever came. The villagers – some of them – seemed to know about me. Or, to know that Willa and Eadgar had a little friend who wasn't from the village itself and that we used to play together in the woods, anyway. I was wary of them – and they, I think, of me.

  It was Willa herself who announced her marriage to me, after it had happened. I was hurt at first, and asked her why she hadn't mentioned it.

  She shrugged. "I didn't think you approved, Paige. I thought you'd try to convince me otherwise, when the truth is I had little choice."

  "Did they force you?" I asked. "Your mother, I mean – did she force you to get married?"

  Willa laughed. "No one forced me, girl. Unless you can call life itself a force. My father's gone, my mother's getting old (Willa's mother was in her mid-30's when she told me this), we need people to help with the garden and the crops and the animals. This is just how it is here. I don't know how it is in River Forks or on a grand estate, but that's how it is here."

  "Well who is he, then?" I asked, curious and not entirely happy.

  "Aldred," Willa replied. "He's ten and seven, just like me, and he's as tall and strong as an ox. I hope our babies will be tall and strong like him."

  Seventeen. Willa was married at 17, to ano
ther 17 year old. It was no scandal, either, nothing out of the ordinary. Neither was it a surprise to anyone when her belly started to grow and I saw even less of her than I already was at that point – which wasn't very much.

  The day she crept into the woods with a tiny, snuffling bundle in her arms, with all of her attention focused on him, I knew it was the end of something for all of us. Her baby was tiny and beautiful and Willa was in love. I was slightly unmoored, fiercely jealous of the new person who had taken my stand-in big sister and her stern, maternal attentions away from me.

  I was old enough to realize it would not be right to express any of these things, but I felt them all the same.

  Dr. Whittington noticed something was wrong, too. I'd been seeing him for awhile then, talking around and around the central relationships of my life, searching the chambers of my heart where River Forks and my father and my long-lost mother lived for new material. When he asked me one afternoon after class why I was so quiet, for some reason I decided to tell him some of the truth, for once.

  "I think I lost a friend," I told him, looking out that same window I always looked out of. "A good friend – my best friend."

  Dr. Whittington tried, somewhat unsuccessfully, to keep the surprised tone out of his voice. "Your best friend?" He asked, knitting his brows. "Who is that? I don't recall you mentioning a best friend before, Paige."

  "Her name is Willa," I told him. "She doesn't live here in River Forks. Anyway, she's been looking after me for a long time. Not like a mother, really, maybe more like an older sister. It's not just her, either. There's Eadgar, he's her younger brother. They're both my best friends."

  "She's been looking after you for a long time?"

  I nodded and swallowed as a sudden lump formed in my throat. I couldn't speak without crying so I just nodded quickly in response.

  "You're emotional," Dr. Whittington said calmly. "Willa and Edgar must be very good friends to you."

  "Eadgar," I whispered.

  "Why haven't you mentioned these friends to me before?"

  I shrugged and wiped my nose on my sleeve. "It's complicated. I guess I haven't mentioned them because no one really believes they exist."

  I didn't tell Dr. Whittington everything. I didn't tell him about Caistley itself or the tree or any of that. But I did tell him more than I ever meant to, and he was good enough at his job not to push me when I didn't want to give specifics on this or that little detail. After that, and ironically at the point that they both began to play smaller and smaller roles in my own life, I began to talk to the doctor more and more about my friends.

  That's not to say that I knew whether he thought they were real or not – even as I tried to make it sound like they were friends from a few miles away, perhaps ones who attended a different school, I slipped up fairly frequently, dropping mentions of the 'demons' in the woods (demons I definitely did not believe in, but demons that were real enough to me in that my friends did) or the fact that Willa and Eadgar's father had died after a kick from an ox. No one in River Forks in the 2000s died from being kicked by an ox. But the doctor listened. When I told him how much it meant to me to have friends, as an outcast at school and someone who might as well have been an orphan at home, he nodded and I could see some human empathy in his brown eyes, some acknowledgement that even if I was making it all up, he understood what it was to need company, to need people on your side.

  Dr. Whittington nodded quietly when I told him how sad I was not to be seeing Willa and Eadgar so much anymore and, as the weeks passed, almost at all. I barely ever saw Willa at that time, and Eadgar maybe once or twice a month.

  "They're growing up," he said to me one day. "They have responsibilities. It sounds like they come from a different kind of family, and with their father gone Eadgar will be stepping into the role of man of the house – and Willa has her child to attend to. I wouldn't take it personally, Paige, as painful as I can see this is for you. People grow, relationships change, but love remains."

  It applied to so much of my life, and not just the one that took place in Caistley. I still loved my mother, a woman whose face I could hardly remember without a photograph to remind me, and I still loved my father, too, even as he became a kind of living ghost. I went home from therapy that night and sat in my room, looking at myself in the dusty mirror and wondering what was going to become of me. My mother was gone, my father might as well have been gone, and my friends were far away, busy with their increasingly adult lives.

  Love remains. I whispered the words out loud as my eyes brimmed, desperate for it to be true.

  Chapter 6

  9th Century

  I wake up in the midst of vomiting, my head woozy with nausea, and only remember I'm on a ship when I finish and the sound of the water slapping against the wooden sides reminds me. In a panic, I crane my neck up, looking to the left and going limp with relief when I see it there, a strip of blackness even darker than the star-studded night sky. Land. We're still sailing north, still hugging the coast. I can still get back to Caistley.

  The other women are with me, all seated, all with their hands still bound behind their backs. Most of them look to be asleep, their heads lolling forwards, only waking up to be sick – and sometimes not even waking up for it at all. I'm thankful for the brisk, briny maritime air and the way it carries away the stench of seasick human beings who do not have access to bathrooms or water.

  I doze off again, waking to the light of dawn when it creeps into the sky to the east and the sound of the Vikings speaking to each other. We appear to be anchored in a bay, and spoils from Caistley are being unloaded – casks of ale, sacks of grain and peas, wooden crates filled with apples. Live pigs, too, squealing with indignation, are lowered down over the sides.

  That's what you are, I think as somebody whose face it's still too dark to see lowers me into the thigh-deep water and prods me towards the beach. A sack of peas. A resource. Keep your eyes open, Paige, you have to get out of here.

  I look to my left when I emerge out of the water and onto a sandy beach, but it isn't going to be possible to make a run for it, not before I've at least been able to get a look at the terrain. Just north of Caistley it's all marsh, and I certainly don't want to get caught in anything like that with a pack of Vikings on my heels and no food in my belly.

  At the top of the beach, and in the growing light, I spot a woman waiting, looking right back at me. She's short, but solidly built, and her straw-colored hair has been braided and wound around her head like a crown.

  "Did you treat them gently?" She asks the Viking bringing up the rear, making sure none of us are dumb enough to try to make a run for it. "You know Jarl Eirik doesn't – "

  "They're fine, woman," the Viking grumbles. "Not a scratch on any of 'em."

  The woman steps forward as he approaches, looking up (for she is at least a foot shorter than him) and smacks him square across the face. I cringe away, anticipating the return blow, but the warrior does nothing but hang his head and rub his tender cheek.

  "You want a seeing to, Hildy, is that it?" He asks a few seconds later, grinning. "I can come to your bed and put an end to this foul mood, but I need to get these girls up to the –"

  Crack. She slaps him again, and then turns her attentions to us. "Come with me, girls. We need to scrub that filth off you before you're presented to the Jarl."

  The Jarl. There's that title again. The woman's tone of voice is slightly reverent when she says it. As we follow her up the beach and over a series of grassy sand dunes, I steal another glance to the south. It's lighter now, and I can see that the land here isn't treed. Even if it gets marshy, I could just follow the coast, couldn't I? Walk along the beach?

  It took us hours to get where we are, though. All night, and I have no idea how fast the ships were sailing, how much ground we've covered. If this was my first visit to the past, I might consider an escape attempt right now, with only the stout Hildy to chase me down. But it's not my first visit and now I've see
n what hunger can do to a person. I can't cover miles of terrain on no food and possibly no water. My escape – and make no mistake, there will be an escape – will have to be better planned than this. It will have to wait.

  Hildy leads us to a deep stream, about five feet in breadth, and slices the bindings from our wrists with a small knife. Then she commands us to take our clothes off. The other women do so at once, and they do it easily. It is not so easy for me. I am not comfortable being naked, especially around strangers.

  "What is it?" Hildy barks at me, slapping me upside the back of my head. "You deaf? Take off your tunic so the Jarl doesn't take off my head for presenting him with a pack of dirty rats."

  When I move too slowly in pulling my dress off over my head, Hildy slaps me again. She's stronger than she looks – and she doesn't look weak. I shrink away from her and draw my legs tightly together when the thin layer of fabric between my nakedness and the world is finally removed. Hildy leans her head back and laughs out loud.

  "Preciousness won't get you anywhere with us, child. Now get in the water and wash yourself."

  She shoves me into the stream and then raises her eyebrows, surprised, as I come back up and tread water in place. The rest of the women are hesitating and I know why – none of them can swim. Willa and Eadgar couldn't swim, either – it just wasn't something the people of Caistley learned how to do – and they displayed a healthy amount of fear about any kind of water, often hinting at strange creatures or sickness lurking in the depths. Fortunately I'm a strong swimmer, and Hildy's attempt at scaring me hasn't worked. She turns her attention to the other women, screaming at them to get in deeper, smiling as they whimper and cling to each other.

  Ten minutes later we're led naked and shivering to a round wooden building that doesn't look like anything I ever saw in Caistley. Inside, a small fire is burning. It doesn't offer much heat but something is better than nothing and we crowd around it, our teeth chattering audibly.