Dreamspell

by Tamara Leigh

  He leaned his head back against the door. “The Dr. Kennedy Plain I knew didn’t need room for error. Four-point-oh, wasn’t it?”

  “This is different, Mac. It’s not textbooks and exams. This is more. This is. . .” She tossed up her hands. “It’s life and death.”

  “It is. But I’ve tried it the other way. As you know from what happened at Farfallow”—he gripped his leg—“the farther out one goes, the more there is that can go wrong. You have to come back to this night. If I could live it again, it’s what I would do. I would forget the heroics and just bring the boys out and. . .” His face crumpled. “. . .worry about the loose ends later.”

  He was right. To return to a time prior to the confrontation between him and Fulke at Farfallow was too great a risk, one that would likely land her right back here with two little boys caught in a fire. “Then this night it is.”

  “Do it soon, Ken.”

  As if she could control her awakening. “When the pull comes.”

  She thought he might sleep, but a few minutes later he said, “Before you return here, get as near your death as you can.”

  “Why?”

  “That way there may be too little left to pull you back to the world you leave behind.”

  Providing she made it to the fourteenth century. “I understand.”

  “Didn’t you say your first awakening occurred while you were sleeping?”

  At Lady Jaspar’s castle. “Yes.”

  “You can’t let that happen again. When you return here, you mustn’t sleep until after the pull.”

  “I won’t.” What was a little more sleep deprivation? “Anything else I should know?”

  “Just that it’s real, Ken. Don’t let that educated head of yours tell you otherwise, and if it does, remember you have nothing to lose and everything to gain.”

  Including Fulke? Was there a chance she could make things right with him? “I’ll remember.” She scooted forward and tugged Mac’s hand into her lap. “I won’t fail you.”

  “I know.”

  She sighed and settled her head back against the door to wait for her ride to the twenty-first century.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX

  Fiery deaths, as foretold by Crosley.

  Fulke stood on the threshold he had been unable to breach in the earliest hours of morn when the flames had leapt into the corridor. He had tried, had been determined to go inside though he knew no life breathed within, but Richard had fought him and brought a sconce crashing down on his head.

  Now, with the rising sun, came the truth he could hardly bear. John and Harold were dead, and with them Lady Lark, though her death had not been known until the remains of three were brought out.

  He dragged a hand down his soot-streaked face. How had Crosley known? He looked again at what remained of the bed and tried to deny a vision of two little boys amid smoke and hungry flames. If it took him the remainder of his days, he would discover the murderer and kill the fiend.

  He stared at the ruin, fed off it. Though Lady Lark was also dead, this did not smell of Alice Perrers, but if it was her, nothing would keep him from her throat.

  Could it be Jaspar? It was possible, though she had stood for three hours on the night past and maintained she was innocent of the attack on Lady Lark. Had he put her under guard as he should have done, would this not have happened? He cursed himself, swept his thoughts to Crosley and Nedy Plain, and cursed himself again to feel relief at knowing they could not have done this.

  Something near where the bed had sat captured Fulke’s gaze. He crossed the threshold and drew a sharp breath as heat permeated the soles of his boots. Though the stone floor was still hot from the fire, a chill went through him. He strode forward, sank to his haunches, and lifted an object from the ashes into the light that shyly crept through the window.

  He stared at the small metal sword that had adorned one of the mounted knights he had given to the boys.

  God have mercy on his soul for the hate that swelled in him. He wanted blood! He shook from the deafening emotion, heard the roaring in his ears, dropped his head back and shouted until it felt as if his throat was torn open. Dropping his chin to his chest, he squeezed his eyes closed.

  “Fulke?”

  He thought it was the voice of an angel, but there was no mistaking its dulcet tone and curious accent. He jerked his head around and stared at the woman in the doorway where she stood beside the man-at-arms who had been sent to escort her from the tower. So beautiful in spite of her unsmiling mouth and the light emptied from her green eyes.

  Fulke drank himself full of her and felt her slip through the cracks and crevices of his emotions. “Leave us,” he ordered the man-at-arms.

  Nedy was the first to speak. “I’m sorry.” She stepped inside.

  He swept a hand though the ashes and lifted the blackened remains of the box that had held the tiny soldiers. On the night past, John and Harold had taken their treasure to bed with them—a gift given by a man who had utterly failed them. He dropped the box. “Who did this?”

  “I don’t know.”

  He thrust to his feet and strode toward her. “More lies? Crosley knew ‘twould happen, just as you did!”

  She didn’t retreat when he stood over her. “Yes, I knew.”

  “How?”

  The force of his voice made her startle, but she reached up and laid a hand to his jaw. “It’s not your fault.”

  For a moment he slipped free of the rending pain and let himself feel her touch. It healed, wrung longing from him that he had worked hard to deny these past days. Squeezing his eyes closed, he turned his mouth to her palm and breathed her in.

  Fool! He jerked his head back. “You will tell me what I wish to know.”

  She lowered her hand, the soot from his face on her fingers. “Are you ready to believe?”

  “No more lies.”

  “Perhaps we should go someplace else.”

  “We shall stay here.”

  “But it’s not—” She nodded. “All right. I know you’d prefer to believe me mad or a witch, but I’m neither. It begins with a dream. No!” She raised a hand to stay his sharp words. “Just listen.”

  He ought to call for the man-at-arms and have her dragged from here, but what had he to lose when all was lost? “I am listening, but I warn you, I am beyond patience.”

  She crossed to the window from which a blackened shutter hung askew. “An incredible dream brought me and Mac—or Sir Arthur, as you know him. But it’s not a dream as I believed.” She looked over her shoulder. “It’s time travel. The reason Mac and I don’t fit is that we’re not born yet, and won’t be for another six hundred years.”

  Mad! To travel from one time to another was not possible.

  “How else do you explain my disappearances?” she continued. “I vanish into thin air—literally—and that’s when I return to my own time. The twenty-first century, Fulke.”

  He didn’t know anything about this thin air of hers, but the rest of it was impossible. And yet how had she done it if not by magic or this time travel?

  “Please hear me out, and if you still don’t believe me, you can send me back to the tower.”

  Grudgingly, he said, “I will hear the rest of it, Nedy Plain.”

  She drew a deep breath. “My name is Kennedy Plain, and I’m a doctor who specializes in the psychology of dreams.”

  What unwound over the next hour was a tale that made the head injury Richard had dealt Fulke pound more fiercely. Unbelievable, and yet when she spoke of the book and its changes dream to dream, a small part of him began to believe. It was as if he had lived the book through, and through again with the appearance of Lady Lark’s impostor. A feeling as if he had once been earl, yet a peculiar tightening about his neck as if he had been hanged. Absurd. Perhaps he was the one gone mad.

  He grappled with all she told and told himself it could not be, yet something stopped inside him when she said, “I have to go back one last time.”

 
“What do you mean?”

  She tested a hand to his arm, and when he did not reject her, settled it. “It’s the only way to change what happened tonight.”

  He looked around the chamber. From its blackened walls to its charred ceiling and floor it reeked of death. “’Tis done.”

  “Mac says it can be done again.” She leaned near. “John and Harold don’t have to die, nor Lady Lark. If I return to my time and come back to yours prior to—”

  “Nay!” He stepped back and threw his hands up. “What do you think me? A fool? This cannot be undone.”

  “If it was possible, even if the odds were against you a million to one, wouldn’t you try?”

  Of course he would, but John and Harold were dead, their little bodies. . . He longed to curse God in his cruel heaven for what He had allowed to happen.

  “Fulke, whether or not you believe what I’ve told you, I’m leaving, but I will return.”

  “How long will you stay when next you come?” he asked, hardly able to believe the words he spoke.

  She smiled. “Forever, I hope.”

  “If what you say is true, will you always be appearing and disappearing?”

  “Not once I die.”

  He took back the step he had taken from her. “Of what do you speak?”

  “I’m dying, Fulke. I have a brain tumor.”

  His heart, which he would have sworn no longer existed, jerked.

  “Remember what I told you about Mac—Sir Arthur? How he was able to cross over permanently? I can leave my illness behind, too. In your world, I’m healed.”

  “Then ‘tis the reason you wish to return here?” Lord! What was he saying? He did not believe she had come from six hundred years into the morrow.

  Kennedy took his hand. “Of course I want to live. I haven’t lived nearly enough. But when I return, it will not only be to save two little boys, but for you, Fulke. I know I deceived you, but I meant it when I told you I loved you. If you believe nothing else, believe that.” She slid a hand around his neck. “Deny it though you may, I am not alone in these feelings.”

  The nearness of her was almost too much. He longed to hold her, to press his face to her neck and breathe her, to forget the horror of this place.

  “Nedy.”

  “Fulke.”

  He clasped her to him and lifted a fistful of her hair to his lips. “Sweet Nedy.” He lowered his face to her neck. In spite of her stay in the tower, she smelled as he had only ever dreamed a woman might smell, and when she laid her head on his shoulder, he knew he could not let her go. Having lost so much which he had stubbornly resisted embracing, it was unbearable that he might also lose this strange, beautiful woman.

  “Do not go,” he spoke against her warm flesh.

  Her hands flexed on his shoulders. “I have to.”

  He drew back. “There is naught you can do for John and Harold. They are dead.”

  “Next time it will be different.”

  Was it possible they might live again if she did this thing which he still could not accept? It was even more unbelievable than that she was capable of dreaming herself across the centuries.

  “I also need to say goodbye to some people,” she said.

  “Who?”

  “My mother, Graham—”

  “Who is Graham?”

  She drew a deep breath. “He was my husband.”

  Fulke released her. “Your husband?”

  “We’re divorced.”

  He stared at her. “‘Tis nearly impossible to gain dissolution of marriage from the Church.”

  “In my world, it’s not only possible, but almost as common as marriage.”

  Kennedy watched the emotions war across Fulke’s face. He wanted to believe as she had wanted to herself but, like her, he could not accept something so incredible. It was too big to dream. Unfortunately, they had to move on, for she needed answers.

  “Marion told me you sent for Jaspar, that you believe she may have ordered the attack on Lady Lark.”

  It was a long moment before he rose above his emotions. “Thus far, ‘tis as near as I can get to finding the one.”

  “Then you no longer believe Mac and I had anything to do with it?”

  “I know you did not.”

  Relief flooded her. “What made you think it might be Jaspar?”

  “Lady Lark was held at Castle Cirque. ‘Tis known by all that Jaspar wished to be my wife, and by her own admission she knew of Edward’s plans to wed me to Lady Lark ere any knew. Then there was the eve of my return when we sat at meal. It has been determined that Lady Lark escaped earlier that day after knocking her captor unconscious. Beside me, Lady Jaspar suffered what I thought was a headache. Mayhap not.”

  Kennedy had also noticed that the woman seemed in pain, but something else stirred at the back of her mind. Hadn’t—

  Her breath caught. There it was, the pull Mac had told her would come. She caught Fulke’s sleeve.

  “Nedy?”

  “It’s happening.” Her voice trembled. What if she couldn’t return? Never saw him again? But she had to go—for John and Harold and Fulke. No peace would he know with the boys’ deaths upon him. No happiness. He would die in dishonor, a noose about his neck. But she could change that.

  “What is happening, Nedy?”

  She wrapped her arms around him. “I’m leaving.”

  He tilted her chin up. “Of what do you speak? You are not—” His eyes widened. “Nedy!”

  “I’ll be back. I promise.” She touched her mouth to his. “Remember this.”

  He trapped her face between his hands. “Stay with me.”

  “I love you, Fulke.” Her words echoed around her, then she was torn from him. She saw him as if from a distance, the disbelief and grief on his face, his empty arms.

  “Nedy!”

  “Fulke. . .”

  “Mom.” Kennedy’s voice slurred, broke. She raised a heavy arm and touched her mother’s face.

  Laurel snapped her head up from where it lolled on her neck. “Oh, Nedy.” A smile quivered on her lips. “I was afraid. . .”

  She couldn’t say it, though Kennedy knew what she had feared. “I’m back.” She put an elbow to the sofa and levered up from her mother’s lap. She was feeble, possessing hardly more strength than a ragdoll. “You sat here all this time?”

  “I had to get up once or twice.”

  “Thank you for staying with me.”

  “It’s been a long time since I had your head in my lap.” Tears wet her eyes. “I was afraid you wouldn’t wake.”

  There, she had said it. Bittersweet progress.

  Kennedy eased herself to sitting, lowered her legs to the floor, and sank back into the sofa cushions. “I’m here, Mom.” She squeezed a hand over her mother’s and winced at the effort required to make the reassuring gesture. “I imagine your legs are numb.”

  Laurel waved away her concern. “You slept a long time. It’s been. . .” She squinted at the small clock on the opposite wall. “Goodness, a day and a half.”

  Incredible, but not surprising, as this time she had spent nearly five days in the fourteenth century. But then, she was very ill—which reminded her that, as much as she longed for more sleep, she had no time to lose. “Mom, I need your help.”

  Laurel sat forward. “What, dear? You’re thirsty? Hungry? Well, of course you are.” She pushed off the sofa and staggered from the disuse of her legs.

  “No, Mom, it’s something else.”

  “What?”

  “I need my laptop.”

  Her eyebrows tacked. “What for?”

  “I’d like to do some online research—”

  “Research? How can you think about work when—”

  “Not dream research. It’s British history I’m interested in.”

  The air went out of her mother’s indignation. “Well, if you really want to.”

  “I do.”

  “All right, but let me fix you a tray first.”

  Kenne
dy wanted to argue, but she was hungry.

  While Laurel puttered around the kitchen, Kennedy eyed the laptop on her desk. Would she find the answers there? Could she return to the fourteenth century with a name that would prove Fulke’s innocence and save the boys?

  A half hour later she was fed—a meager four bites that was all she could choke down—pillows plumped at her back, a blanket snugged up to her chest, glasses on her nose, and the computer online.

  “Anything else I can get you?” her mother asked.

  “I’m fine, Mom.” It almost hurt to talk, her tongue thick and slow. “You should get. . .home to Jack.”

  “Don’t you worry about Jack. He understands.”

  Understood that his wife was on death watch. Kennedy pushed the nasty reminder to the back of her mind. It was time to do a search for things medieval, specifically heraldic devices. “All right, Mom, but this could take a while.”

  “That’s fine. I brought plenty of audio books.”

  Her mother’s one vice—books she didn’t have to struggle through. Kennedy managed a small smile. “Thank you for staying.”

  Laurel kissed her daughter’s cheek. “What’s a mom for?” She turned, curled into the chair beside the sofa, and fit her headphones.

  Kennedy swelled with love for the gentle woman. She was going to miss her.

  The internet search through medieval heraldic devices proved mind-boggling. Bend sinister this, chevron that, here a dragon, there a lion, everywhere a wyvern. But none two-headed. Her thoughts playing tag amid her pounding head, she squeezed her eyes closed.

  “Why don’t you rest, dear?”

  Kennedy shook her head. “I’m not done.”

  “But—”

  “Please, Mom.”

  Laurel nodded and repositioned her headphones.

  A few minutes later, Kennedy gave up—temporarily. There was something else she needed to know, no matter how much she feared it. Her next search for information on the life of Fulke Wynland turned up a curiously titled book, The Troubadour in the Tower that, fortunately, was available in digital format. Too fatigued to read it through, she skimmed. Though written by a different author than the one who had written The Sins of the Earl of Sinwell, the early twentieth century account echoed the revised story told by Kennedy’s mother. But near the end, the impostor was revealed, a woman known only by the name of Nedy who disappeared following the fire.