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

by Joanna Bell

  As far as I could tell, the Caistley I had spent my childhood visiting existed sometime in the mid to late 9th century in the Kingdom of the East Angles – known today as East Anglia. If I was right about that, and based on my reading, Willa and Eadgar had good reason to fear the Northmen who they spoke of in hushed tones. I wanted to warn them that the Viking raids they talked about were going to become more frequent and, eventually, more permanent. The invaders were going to move from brief forays into Anglian territory to secure resources to a pattern of settlement which was going to lead to two centuries of rule by the foreigners.

  But Caistley itself had never been hit – not at that point – and when Willa and Eadgar spoke of the Vikings it was the same way they spoke of the demons they believed lurked in the woods at night – scary, but avoidable. Not an immediate threat. And perhaps they were right about that, given that I could not pinpoint exactly what year – or even what decade – it was.

  I tried, though, one afternoon when I was 17 and visiting Caistley as infrequently as once a month. I hadn't seen Willa for ages, but Eadgar was there that day and, based on my readings, I tried to impress Caistley's vulnerability upon him. I tried to make him understand how welcoming the little bay would be to Viking ships, how short the path to the village, how completely undefended it all was.

  Eadgar didn't disagree with anything I was saying but he did display the streak of what I took to be fatalism that I had come to believe was one of the deepest differences between myself, and the people in my time, and Eadgar and Willa and the people in their time. He even shrugged at one point when I reminded him of what he himself had told me about what the Vikings did to the inhabitants of the villages they invaded. I became annoyed.

  "Don't you care?" I asked, wanting to see some sign that my friend was taking my words seriously. "What about Willa and your mother? What about Willa's son? Do you want to see them killed by Northmen?"

  Eadgar had looked at me sharply then, something he rarely did, and thrown my questions right back at me. "Do you take me for a soldier?" He asked angrily. "Have you ever seen a sword in my hand? It is always this way with you, Paige, there is always this bridge between us, as if you assume me a King, with the powers of a King. You've never seemed to quite understand that however it is on the estate, or with your kin, it is not that way here in Caistley. Here in Caistley we are farmers. We grow food, we tend animals. We don't fight. If someone attacks us who will go hungry? Yes, we will go hungry. But so will the ealdorman – the King's man – and his family and it is their task to protect those who work for his estate. They protect their own interests in protecting ours. Everyone plays their part, and this is what you always fail to understand."

  "So you're fine with that?" I asked, exasperated. "You tell me of invaders, of murder and plunder, and your response is to just act like there's nothing you can –"

  "But there IS nothing I can do!" Eadgar shouted, losing his patience with me – for the first time ever, as far as I could recall. "Everyone has a role, Paige. I fulfill my role, Willa fulfills hers, all the others in Caistley do the same. The ealdorman has a role, too. And the reeve and the slave. And none shall go outside their role, lest it all fall entirely apart. Why don't you understand that? None of it would work if we all tried to do all the roles at once. Sometimes I question if you are even from the estate. Seems as if you might be from somewhere else, somewhere across the sea."

  Somewhere across the sea. 'Across the sea' was the phrase used by Willa and Eadgar to mean 'incomprehensibly foreign.' And I can't say as I blamed him for using it during that conversation. I was being stupid and impatient because I was fearful for my friends, because I wanted them to be safe. And it was as difficult for Eadgar to fathom a different way of life as it was for me. Just as he couldn't wrap his head around people stepping outside their roles, I couldn't wrap my head around having an assigned role at birth, with no chance to improve my lot or follow a different path than the one laid out in front of me by biology and social class.

  When I asked him a short while later if anyone in Caistley had thought of building defenses – even a fence of a kind to keep invaders out, rather than livestock in, he shook his head, annoyed again.

  "If the ealdorman or the king want to put up fences, Paige, then they will put up fences."

  "But surely you and some of the other men of the village could –"

  "Could what? Put up fences ourselves? We are forbidden to cut down the trees, Paige! None of this land is our own. It belongs to the King or the King's men. We're not to take trees or animals from the woods or fish from the rivers without permission – to do so would mean losing a hand or even death."

  ***

  A couple of evenings later, Dr. Whittington noticed the edge in my usually flat voice and commented on its presence.

  "I'm just frustrated," I told him. It was true – I was frustrated. About the fact that even with a foreknowledge of what was coming there appeared to be very little I could do to help my friends in Caistley. But I was frustrated with Dr. Whittington, too, and the situation between us. I wanted to tell him the whole story but I couldn't. If imaginary friends are frowned upon at 9, there's no telling what could happen if you still have them at 17. And kind and tolerant as Dr. Whittington was, even I knew he wasn't just going to believe me if I told him what was really going on with my friends who lived 'out of town.'

  When he asked me what I was frustrated about I frowned. "I don't think they're taking care of themselves," I replied. "I think something bad is going to happen to them but when I tried to warn Eadgar he just shrugged it off. It's not even because he doesn't believe me, either! He just has this whole fatalism thing going on, like there's nothing he can do about any of it!"

  "Eadgar is your age, isn't he?"

  I nodded. "About a year older."

  "Perhaps your annoyance with him and what you perceive as his weakness, or his inability to help himself, has some parallels to your own life?"

  I closed my eyes and took a deep breath – but only to keep myself from rolling my eyes and yelling "WELL, DUH!" at my doctor. Yes, my own situation was a seemingly endless grind of days, one the same as any other, but that didn't mean my worries with regards to Eadgar and Willa were wrong, somehow, or that they didn't exist.

  Not that any of that mattered in my conversation with Dr. Whittington, because I couldn't really explain any of it.

  Over the next year or so, Eadgar's irritation with me grew. The more I read about the Viking invasions the more I worried, the more I was unable to hold back from encouraging him to take his sister and her children (she had two by then) and move further inland. I totally understood his irritation, too. He couldn't move inland, as he repeatedly told me. It wasn't up to him where he lived. His parents were born in Caistley to work the land for an ealdorman, a person much higher on the social scale – and so Eadgar and Willa and their children and grandchildren would also work the same land for the ealdorman and his children and grandchildren.

  It got so bad that I cried one day, when Eadgar threw down the branches he'd been weaving together as we talked and started back towards Caistley, so angry at me he didn't even bother to say goodbye.

  "Maybe I should just take you to the – to the estate!" I shouted after him, immediately shutting up as I realized I'd just crossed an unspoken-of and generally unacknowledged line. Eadgar stopped walking away, too, and came to a dead stop with his back to me. He waited a few seconds before turning around slowly and peering at me.

  "You never talk about the estate, Paige."

  "I know," I replied, wiping my eyes and wondering what kind of enormous can of worms I'd just opened.

  "So why are you talking about it now?"

  I have a very clear memory of Eadgar that day, of the way it was just at the moment, over a period of less than a year, when he turned from boy into man. His face was still rounded near the chin, like a child's, but his voice had deepened and his shoulders broadened. He still would have been considered s
crawny in River Forks, and none of the football coaches would have taken a second look at him, but I could see the difference. I remember he was half-obscured by shadows from the woods that crept right up to the edge of the beach where we'd been sitting and just for a second or two it looked like someone else – a grown man – walking towards me.

  "Why are you staring at me in the way?" He asked as got back to me and maybe if the conversation hadn't already been about something else, I might have told him.

  I didn't, though. I didn't tell my friend he was beginning to look like a man because I didn't want to embarrass him or make him think I was interested in him in a way that I wasn't. Instead I made a scoffing noise and he seemed to forget about it.

  "So why now then, Paige?" He asked. "Why do you speak of the estate now, after all these years?"

  "It's what I've already told you a thousand times, Eadgar. I'm worried about you – and Willa. I'm worried if the Northmen come to Caistley, you'll be taken or worse. I'm worried that you don't seem to –"

  Eadgar stepped forward. He didn't put his hand on me but he drew himself up in a way he had never done before. I'd always been bigger than him, despite our being almost the same age, but he was as tall as me by then, perhaps even an inch or so taller. He leaned in close to me and shook his head."Don't say it again, Paige. I can't hear it again. I can't hear you telling me I don't care about my own kin, my own life."

  He was right. I knew it, and he knew I knew it. "Alright," I replied, "I won't say it. But don't expect that to stop me from worrying. I worry about you all the time, you and Willa out here, with no one to call if the Northmen come, no one on hand to defend you."

  "Is that why you mention the estate? Is that why you mention bringing us to the estate? You must know it's impossible, Paige. As impossible as me building a fence around the village."

  But it wasn't impossible, because there was no estate and what there was – a literal different world – was not subject to the social customs of the 9th century. I'd already successfully brought one person through the tree – admittedly in the opposite direction – but there was no reason to think it couldn't work.

  Even as I thought of it, though – and it was not the first time it had entered my mind – I remembered Kayla Foster's reaction. Kayla Foster from the 21st century, who had barely seen more than a few trees when I brought her to the past. I knew, even without having to imagine it explicitly, that neither Willa nor Eadgar could be prepared for the distant future. Not because they were too stupid, but simply because the future was too alien, too much. No one could have been prepared for it. No, bringing people from the past to the future was an impossibility.

  Chapter 9

  21st Century

  "Are you going to your prom?"

  Dr. Whittington was asking out of politeness, because the topic had come up. I could not imagine he was asking because he actually thought there was some chance I was going to my prom.

  I shook my head no and we moved seamlessly on to another topic.

  Prom night came, though, in the spring of my final year of high school, and I spent it at home, alone, the way I spent every evening. I ended up being more disturbed than I had anticipated, too. Why was missing out on prom such a big deal to me when I'd already missed out on so many other adolescent rites of passage? No boyfriends for Paige Renner. No parties, no driver's education classes, no first kisses or photographs of me next to a gangly boy in a tux.

  I brought my dad's dinner upstairs to him at five o'clock – he ate early and went to sleep early – and then I tiptoed back downstairs and stood at the entrance to the kitchen, seized suddenly by a memory of my mother shooing me out after she'd washed the floor, telling me to wait for it to dry. I looked down at the tiles, clean enough because I kept them clean, but broken in multiple places, and uneven. I could clean floors, but I didn't know how to fix them.

  It was the next thought that really got to me, that sent me scurrying down to the woods and the tree at a later time than usual. And that thought was what my mother would say, what she would feel, if she could see me at that moment, on my prom night. I have photographs of my mother from her childhood and adolescence. I was starting to look very much like her by then, the only thing difference between me and the grinning woman in the photographs was our clothing and hairstyles. My unruly, chestnut-brown hair was like hers, as were my round hazel eyes and my heart-shaped face. My mom was thinner than me – I seemed to have inherited a certain thickness of limb from my father's side of the family. I wasn't fat, but I wasn't skinny either, and my body was generous and womanly way before I was ready for it.

  Unlike me, though, my mother was popular. In so many of the photos she's wearing cut-off denim shorts and halter tops and standing with a crowd of other girls dressed the same way, all of them with their bangs teased way up into the sky and huge, wholesome smiles on their faces. The young, happy girl in those photos wouldn't have wanted her only child to spend prom night alone, in a dingy old house that was falling apart at the seams.

  But I was alone and that night, it was too much. I checked that my father was asleep and then ran down through the yard to the woods to lay my hands on the tree and close my eyes with relief as the darkness pulled me away from my own loneliness.

  The woods on the other side were empty. Willa and Eadgar avoided leaving the village after dark, suspicious as they were of whatever it was they seemed to believe lurked there after night fell. I wandered the trails for a little while and came out on the rocky point at one end of the beach. There was a wind blowing but it was a warm wind, carrying the promise of summer on its gentle gusts. I turned my face into it.

  What are you doing?

  The question just popped into my head unbidden, as if spoken aloud by someone standing a few feet away from me.

  I'm sitting on the rocks, enjoying the wind on my face.

  But the question wasn't really about what I was doing at that very moment, and I knew it. It was larger than that and it was the right time for it to be asked. High school was almost over. What was I going to do? Dr. Whittington and the librarian at school, who had taken pity on me after seeing me spend every lunch hour alone in the library, were both encouraging me – gently – to go to college. Kayla Foster and her crowd spoke of little else but college in those waning school days. College boys, college parties, prestigious colleges, state colleges, colleges in California, colleges hundreds of miles away from all parental supervision.

  I felt what I felt often at that time – envy, exclusion. And sitting on the rocks outside Caistley I realized that there wasn't actually anything stopping me from going to college. If anything, it might be one of the last opportunities of my youth to start over in a different place, somewhere where nobody knew I was the weird girl or the 'witch' or that I had never kissed a boy.

  It wasn't yet summer when I walked back through the dark, dew-sparkled woods to get home. It didn't cross my mind that it might be my last trip to Caistley – for a very long time, anyway. I reassured myself with the thought that it was months before September, that there would be ample time to come back, to say a proper goodbye to Eadgar and Willa.

  But in the end, I didn't go back. I applied to a few different colleges, all within a day's drive of River Forks, so I could check in on my dad on weekends and holidays, and got into every single one. The final decision on what college I would actually attend was made for me one day at the grocery store where I overheard Kayla Foster's mother talking about the college – one of my own picks – that Kayla herself had chosen. It was one of the last two I was hemming and hawing over and discovering that Kayla would be at one of them made my decision for me.

  "Grand Northeastern," I muttered the name of the institution that would not be favored with Kayla's presence as I exited the store, "here I come."

  My father didn't want me to go away. Not at first, anyway. He didn't want it so much he actually got himself up and dressed one night and came downstairs to eat a dinner of boxed macaroni and c
heese and steamed broccoli with me. Just before the meal was finished, he put down his fork and stated that it would be a bad idea for me to go to college.

  "Why is that?" I asked, prepared to defend myself even as I was mortified at having to – what kind of parent tries to stop their child from going to college? I had a scholarship and everything!

  "Why do you think?" My father replied immediately, without looking up from his plate. "Look at this place, Paige. Look at me. What am I going to do without you here to take care of everything the way you do?"

  I was prepared for that conversation. I had known it was coming. I knew what I was going to say. But the sorrow in my dad's voice got to me and instead of calmly reciting all of the solid, rational reasons why I should go to college, I found myself tongue-tied and awkward.

  "Dad," I whispered. "Dad!"

  "What?" He mumbled, still studying the last few remnants of dinner.

  "LOOK AT ME!" I shouted, shocking myself almost as much as I think I shocked him. It worked, though. He looked up.

  "Jesus, Paige! Are you trying to give me a heart –"

  "Dad why are you doing this?" I asked, the words all tumbling out in a rush because I didn't want to lose my nerve before I could finish saying what I suddenly needed to say. "Why are you trying to stop me going to college? You spend all day reading the news, reading how bad it is for my generation, how there are no jobs here and you want me to stay? I'm 17 years old, Dad! What would mom say? I don't even have to ask, do I, because we both know what she would say. Why do you want me to waste my life the way you –"