And then I can rest. He could die knowing that he had finally broken the last chain binding him to this man. But Etta…
Love. Sacrifice. Release.
He could not save her and still destroy Ironwood. Even if he had the time to steal the astrolabe and escape—the shallow flutter of his heart, the labor it took to stay on his feet, spoke the truth: if he did not kill Ironwood, he was not long for this world.
And he would not kill Ironwood.
This was all he could do, and still live as he chose. It would be a good death, an honorable one. And, in this way, he could tolerate the surrender.
He would see them again. His mother. Friends lost at sea. Etta.
Wait for me, wait for me, wait for me. He would follow, as he had before, into the unknown; into whatever adventure awaited them there.
The man began to pace, his hands clasped behind his back. His words ebbed and flowed, disappearing into nonsensical muttering as Ironwood worked through his plan. If he had stripped out of his attire, Nicholas was not sure he would have seen the man as naked as this. The veneer of steel was gone, and it was deeply, deeply unsettling to him to see Ironwood’s desperation rise to a pitch of such barely restrained frenzy.
“Say yes, Nicholas,” Ironwood said. “She’s not lost to you. This is your inheritance. This is what you deserve.”
A sureness took his heart, lightening it enough for him to breathe for the first time in days. With each thud of his pulse, he felt the poison inch through his system. He moved toward the window, looking down into the garden where the candlelight from the ball seeped out, highlighting where Sophia was hiding in the bushes. Her face was turned up like a stargazer’s in the darkness, searching for his.
When their eyes met, he gave the slightest shake of his head and pulled the curtains shut on her confusion. I’m sorry.
“I accept your offer as given,” he said, turning back. “But I would ask for ink and paper, so that I might write a letter to Captain Hall, and assure him I am well.”
Cyrus Ironwood looked up, eyes gleaming. He moved to his own secretary desk, retrieving the necessities.
“Of course,” he said. “Of course. You’ll come to find you have a great deal of paper and ink now, as much as your heart desires. My man will search him out to deliver it. I’ll have him bring a physician to repair whatever it is you’ve done to your arm. Better yet, you’ll join me in the twentieth century. Medicine is remarkably improved by then.”
“No, it’s not necessary,” Nicholas said, his voice loud to his own ears. “I am already healing.”
“Good,” he said, “good. There’s a bed for you down the hall. Rest. We’ll discuss plans to retrieve the funds necessary to enter the auction in the morning.
“My God,” he heard the old man say as he reached the door. “My God, my boy, this is almost at its end.”
Indeed.
Nicholas wandered down the hall, past the startled guards. He walked along the carpet, not hidden in the walls like the unwelcome secret he’d been. But when he arrived at the staircase and heard the dancing, the airy melody of crystal and glass gently colliding, he turned toward the entrance to the servants’ stairwell and wound his way down it.
He was unsurprised to feel Li Min’s hands on his throat the instant the door shut behind him. Good. He could face her in the darkness.
“What is the meaning of this?” she hissed. “You’ll serve him now?”
“You heard it all?” She nodded. “Good. I haven’t much time to explain. I’ll take on the role of his heir only long enough for him to find the astrolabe, and for me to then take it from him and destroy it.”
It was an easier thing to tell Li Min, who, in her way, always seemed to see the path they undertook from several steps ahead. Sophia would have turned back and finished the old man herself.
“I did not expect you to choose artifice,” she said. “Can you maintain the deception long enough to reach your end?”
He nodded. What else did he have now but this one goal?
“Do you despise me for this? It’ll mean an end to your way of life. If you’ve accumulated wealth in other eras outside of your natural one, now is the time to collect it.”
And to prepare for the worst of it.
“If this is my last—my only—opportunity to say so, I am grateful to call you my friend. No, please hear me on this,” he said, seeing her begin to speak. “I generally consider those who save my life friends, and hope that doesn’t offend your mercenary sensibilities. I’m grateful for all that you’ve done, and that I’ve known you, even if that bond is broken by what comes next.”
“I believe that nothing breaks the bonds between people, not years or distance,” she said. “But you seem to simply take his word for it? What if his claims about its destruction prove false? I have heard—” She caught her next words, taking a moment to reconsider them. “It’s been a rumor for years that destroying it would revert the timeline back to the original. But the other points sound like fear tactics.”
He was too tired to argue this with her. As it was, he could hardly keep himself upright, and had to lean against the corridor’s wall to support his own weight. Too quickly, all of this is coming too quickly—
I need more time—please, God, more time—
“The man I saw in that room was afraid,” he said finally. “I do not know what to believe now. The world is upside down and this is the only way I can think of to right it.”
“All right, my friend,” she said. “We will follow you and assist in any way we can. If we need to meet, unknot your sling.”
Nicholas, in truth, had not expected this, and he was moved by the fact that she’d made the decision so easily.
“What if you need to speak with me?” he asked.
“We will find a way.”
“As you always do,” he said, with a ghost of a smile. “Until then.”
She raised her hand, touching his shoulder just for a moment before pulling back. His vision had adjusted to the darkness enough to make out the pale moon of her face as she stared hard at the buttonless jacket she’d stolen for him only a few hours before. “What would you have done…if she had survived? If you had found her?”
He couldn’t bear to say Etta’s name; it was a thorn on the tongue, as much as it bloomed in his heart. “I think…it does not matter much now. If the chance doesn’t present itself, tell Sophia I’m sorry it’s come to this. That I hope she’ll understand.”
“She’ll understand; she may yet even appreciate your cunning in destroying the old man,” Li Min said, drifting further from him as she found her way back to the same window she’d entered by. “But she’ll tear down the gates of hell and drag you back by the throat if you allow yourself to die.”
That, at least, was absolute in his mind. But he felt pleased in knowing that Sophia would never allow herself to be constrained by the limits of her natural time in the twentieth century. She would carve a way toward the same independence that had eluded him for so long. He had been so very wrong to assume that their uneasy alliance would rest on nothing more than a mutual hatred.
He had been wrong about so many things.
Rather than continue down the stairs, past the glittering souls dancing into the morning hours, past the cooling kitchen, he began to climb. The steps bore his weight with quiet protest, and he drifted up to the attic that had been his home for the first years of his life.
The support beam came within a hairbreadth of cracking against his temple. Nicholas sucked in a surprised breath and ducked through the entryway, bent at the waist to avoid skinning his back against the rough roof.
The old man must have completed some sort of renovation—the rafters couldn’t have been so low as this, suffocating the attic so it was little more than a crawl space. He tried to recall if his mother or any of the other five house slaves who had slept with them in this room had been forced to make themselves smaller to enter, to contract their bodies to fit inside what little
space they’d been granted.
Now there was no bedding on the floor, only the bed jammed up against the wall below the window. Straw exploded out of the bare mattress through a hole some industrious rat had likely chewed in it. Dust carpeted the floor, undisturbed for many years.
The room coiled around him, nearly unrecognizable from the vantage point his height gave him; he knelt, trying to reclaim some semblance of memory, to understand why this room had once felt like a kingdom. There had been so many times he’d sat beside the room’s low window and watched the wide, pale sky above the townhomes, tantalizingly endless beyond the glass. Nicholas wondered if that was the reason Ironwood had given them this room and not the cellar—to show them that everything in their lives would remain just as far out of reach.
The lacework of spiderwebs spread from corner to corner, catching the fragile moonlight. Time began to slip around him, peeling back the years, mending the cracks in the floor and the scuffing on the wall, filling the room with soft candlelight and whispers of life. The bed linen still smelled as he remembered it, of starch and leather and polish. Even in this small sanctuary, they hadn’t been able to fully escape their work. They lived it.
He sat on the bed and, using his left hand, finally went about writing a short missive to Hall. But after the salutation he stopped, uncertain of what to say, beyond, I am well. I will find you when I am able. Both were lies, and he couldn’t abide the thought. But if Ironwood himself didn’t break the seal to read it, one of his men would, and report on its contents. So, instead, he gave Hall all that was left to him now: gratitude.
For all that you have done for me, I thank you. I have been warned of the regret of being too sentimental in the face of an uncertain outcome, but I would be remiss not to take this opportunity to say this to you, if nothing else. I have lived a life of vast fortune owing to the generosity of your heart. I will never cease fighting to be the sort of man who will honor those values which you have so graciously bestowed by example. If there is a way back, I will find the bearing and come posthaste.—N.
Nicholas folded the paper and stowed it inside of his coat.
How strange it was, to be near the end of one’s journey, and to find oneself back at the place one began and see it as if for the first time. To remember that small rebellion that had lived inside him at the thought of the untraveled world that lay beyond these walls.
The name Carter had come from his mother’s first master, and he had kept it, even as he’d chosen a new given name for himself at Mrs. Hall’s suggestion. It had been the sweet lady’s idea, a way to make him feel as though he had some mastery over his life. But he had kept the surname as a way to honor all that his mother had endured, and all that she had risked in hiding him. If Ironwood had sold him away down to Georgia with her and the others, he knew he likely would not have survived it.
This was the bed he’d slept on with his mother. Here she had cradled him in her arms, her scarred hands smoothing his hair, soothing his spirit. Here she had sung that song from her faraway home, thousands of miles from the cramped, dreary room. It had filled his ears like a fervent prayer, the only weapon she’d had to drive the darkness away from him. It had breathed life into his unconquerable soul.
He had lived so many lives, and yet the sum of his existence felt like so much more than any one part of his history. Even now—even now, in the face of the poison he felt inching through his veins, that same rebellion burned inside of him. That same demand for the distant horizons summoned him to fight.
Nicholas, he named himself on the deck of that ship, in the light of a sea of stars.
Bastard, the Ironwoods declared.
Partner, Etta swore.
Child of time, the stranger beckoned.
Heir, the old man vowed.
But here, in this hidden place, he had only ever been Samuel, the son of Africa, the legacy of Ruth.
Your presence is requested at the auction of a rare artifact of our history: one astrolabe, origin unknown. October 22, 1891, at the cusp of midnight. Kurama-dera Temple, north of Kyoto. The entry fee remains a hundred pounds of gold or jewels per bidding party.
Etta read the note again, ignoring the soft patter of freezing rain on her hair and face. They’d gone upstate, to a cabin that sat like an afterthought in the woods, and waited a day, watching its doors for any Ironwoods. Hungry and frustrated, she’d broken away from Julian and gone to where he said the key would be: buried beneath the root of a nearby tree.
By the time she’d gotten the door open, he’d been brave enough to join her in sorting through the endless piles of letters and notices that had been slipped inside of its mail slot. Some were torn, clearly battered by their delivery; others showed the era in which they were written by the quality of the paper and the ink. Most were sealed with the same wax seal, bearing the sigil of the Ironwoods, except for one: blank wax, marked with a B that rested inside the curve of a crescent moon. Julian had picked it up between two fingers and shaken it, as if afraid it might suddenly reveal a set of teeth.
He had gone through his travel journal to try to locate the nearest passage, but she’d found a small reference book of passages, left on the empty cabin’s table for anyone who dropped in and needed help in navigating away. A passage in Brazil would take them directly to Mount Kurama, but one rather weighty problem remained.
A hundred pounds of gold or jewels—not just difficult to locate, but difficult to carry to the auction site.
“I don’t want to alarm you,” Julian began. He pulled back from the hulking outcropping they’d hidden behind, observing the black beach below. “But there seems to be a gaggle of Vikings rowing up to shore.”
That startled her out of her thoughts. Etta pulled him back by his simple tunic and took his place, scanning the fog spreading its pale hands across the sea. A carved wooden face appeared ahead of the rest of the ship, slicing silently through the heavy cover of gloom.
The figurehead was a serpent, a dark specter, all teeth and long, curving neck. Etta sat back, flinching as it broke through the gloom, gliding forward like a knife through a veil. The rush of the tide and the birds circling overhead covered the sound of the oars splashing through the water.
“I thought you said he picked this place for his gold reserve because it was deserted—your exact words were ‘untouched by time and man,’” she said, glancing back over her shoulder.
“All right, I’ve been known to embellish my tales with a touch of drama, but do you honestly believe I wouldn’t pay special attention to where I could find my shiny inheritance?” Julian said, leaning over her shoulder. “This was the safest place to keep the loot because of how little play it got with the timeline. No one is supposed to actually like this place enough to come visit.”
Several other caches they’d checked had already been emptied and moved to an unknown location, or the timeline had shifted so severely that they had faded out of existence entirely. “Except Vikings,” Etta said.
“All right, except Vikings.”
“And the Celts,” Etta said. “And other Scandinavian peoples. Why didn’t he go way back—beyond ancient times? Prehistoric. Actually, how far back do the passages go? Could you see, like, the dinosaurs? Cavemen?”
Julian leaned back against the rock, pressing a hand against his chest, his expression one of pure astonishment. “My God, Linden-Hemlock-Spencer. I believe you’ve just given me a new purpose in life.”
Etta’s brows drew together. “Finding new passages?”
“No, hunting for dinosaurs,” he said. “Why did I never think of that—oh, right, the eating thing. Big teeth and all. Well, never mind.”
“How quickly the dream dies,” Etta said wryly, turning back toward the beach.
For an hour now, they’d kept watch on the cave, hidden just out of their line of sight by a curve in the mountain. All they could see of it through the mist and fog was the edge of the entrance: towering stacks of stone, some round like pipes, others as straight
and narrow as bone, had seemingly splintered from a rough rock face. From a distance, Etta had thought they’d merely been piled closely together, like ancient offerings for whatever king had ruled the mountain and beach below.
The longship navigated between the narrow, towering black rocks jutting up from the water, before driving up onto the shore itself. The landing was quick work; the oars were tucked inside, the sails drawn up so as not to catch the whistling wind.
A half dozen men poured out of the belly of the ship, their feet striking the black sand, moving swiftly to catch the five empty leather sacks thrown by the others on the deck. The depressions their feet left in the black sand filled with rain, shining like scales from a distance.
Finally, a tall figure jumped down from the deck of the second ship, struggling for balance with one arm cradled against his chest. He was darker than the others, both in skin and dress, wearing none of the fur they did. The men around him gathered slowly, as if with reluctance, their heads bobbing up and down with whatever instructions he was giving them. Then he began his long strides toward the very cave Etta and Julian had come to clean out, his shoulders set back, chin raised, the way—
She was on her feet before she could think to rise. Etta choked out something between a gasp and a laugh. “Nicholas.”
Julian reached for the back of her shirt, trying to pull her down, but Etta twisted away, frantic. He was too far away, too far—her whole body trembled in protest at being forced to remain where it was.
She edged as close to the line of the cliff as she dared, starving for a better look at him; her heart was thundering so hard, she was half worried it might suddenly give out on her.
How long his hair had grown, how thin and battered he was in the face. The distance between them was more than just air and sand and mountains; it manifested in all of those missing days between them, creating a deep valley of uncertainty. The sling for his arm—what had happened? Who were these men, and why—