9th Century
Less than a day later and the Jarl's shoulder is visibly worse. The foul smell has grown and Eirik is sweaty with fever now, still speaking but not always making sense. The sense of panic around us is palpable. Veigar and Hildy, usually enemies, speak in low voices outside the roundhouse as I tend to him inside. When they come in, both of them look to be expecting a fight from me, but I give them none. I have other plans.
Before they leave, I grab Hildy by the arm – Veigar is an idiot, I know he won't listen. Hildy, for all her bluster and cruelty, is not an idiot.
"Wash the wound with boiled water," I hiss in her ear as she tries to pull away. "Dress it with nothing, wash it and expose it to the fresh air. He's going to die if you don't!"
"No one's going to die, girl," Hildy replies, freeing herself from my grip. But I can hear the fear in her voice – she's trying to convince herself more than she's trying to convince me.
As soon as they're gone, I take advantage of the fact that the whole camp is bound up in the Jarl's worsening injury – no one has been left behind to guard the roundhouse – or me. It's a warm night but I pull a woolen tunic over my head anyway, and slip my feet into the crude leather sandals Eirik had made for me. I grab a cloth sack, into which I shove the loaf of bread and the apples that have sat uneaten on the table for the entire day. Then I slip out into the night, to find Willa.
Thankfully there is no one at her roundhouse, either, and it's easy for me to whistle in the distinctive tone we developed as children, so she knows it's me. She emerges a couple of minutes later.
"What is it, Paige? Are we to leave now?"
"Yes," I reply, glancing from side to side, ready to duck into the roundhouse myself if any of the Vikings come near. "Get the children. The Jarl is unwell, everyone tends to him, this is our only chance."
There is no hesitation from Willa. She steps back into the roundhouse and comes back with two small children in her arms and another just behind her. I take the largest of the two little ones – all three are as silent as mice – and we make our way swiftly, carefully to the place where the palisade stops on the eastern edge of the camp, facing the sea. No one is there. We slip out, still not saying a thing, and follow the path to the beach, where we head south.
It's twenty or thirty minutes later before we feel safe enough to talk.
"I brought some bread," I tell Willa. "And apples. The children can eat."
"You must eat, too," Willa tells me, nodding down at my belly.
"This isn't how I planned it," I say as our pace naturally slows the further away we get. "I did not plan to escape with a big belly holding me back, or with three little ones to carry. Do you think we have even a chance?"
Willa turns back, eying me. "If you didn't think you had a chance, Paige, why did you leave? Even if the Jarl dies, they'll find you another husband. You're beautiful and strong, they know your babies will be as beautiful and strong as you."
"The Jarl isn't going to die!" I cry and Willa, never one to hold back, looks baffled.
"Then why are you leaving?"
"Because I need to get him something to save his life. Some med–" I cut myself off, because Willa doesn't know what medicine is. "Some, uh, plant. A plant. It grows in the woods outside Caistley. Yes, a healing plant. I need to find it and bring it back, to heal the Jarl."
"Wait," Willa says, stopping. "Let's take a short break, alright? Just until we catch our breath. And you will tell me what craziness this is you speak of. You plan to return? Is that it?"
We sit down in the tall grass that runs along the top of the coastline, each of us with a sleeping child in our aching arms. I don't like the fact that my arms are aching already – it's been less than an hour, how do we propose to keep going for many more hours without becoming too tired to continue? I push the question out of my mind. Willa is staring at me waiting for a response.
"Yes," I nod, looking out over the sea at the moonlight dancing over the waves. "He's going to die if I don't."
Willa watches me for a few seconds and then joins me in gazing out over the water before responding. "You love him. I thought as much. Is it a wise thing, Paige? To love one of the Northmen? Do you think, if your healing plant works, that he will live a long life? I suppose it doesn't matter, none of us are wise when it comes to love."
My mind is trying to get ahead of itself, I'm already picturing the pharmacy in River Forks, wondering how difficult it will be to break the glass with a rock in the dead of night, thinking maybe I should bring one of my father's tools to help. I'll need to get online, too, so I can find out what particular variety of antibiotic I need to steal. What if my bike has a flat tire? Can I walk to the pharmacy? What if there's an alarm? I won't have the energy to run from –
"Paige?"
"Huh?"
"We should keep going – it'll be too hot in the middle of the day, the children can sleep then. We should take advantage of the dark."
So that's what we do, and the walk isn't too arduous at this stage. It gets easier when the gray dawn begins to swallow the darkness and we can see where we're putting our feet. Willa is right, though – by the time the sun is high in the sky it's too hot to keep going, and our bellies are grumbling with hunger. We retreat into the woods and sit in the shade. Willa and I tear pieces off the loaf of bread for the children, and hand them apples. We drink from a stream, as we have been doing since we left the Viking camp, and then we all fall into a deep sleep.
Willa shakes me awake sometime later and I immediately see from the light that it's late afternoon. Beside us, the children sleep restlessly and I notice the oldest, a boy named Rowyn, has a bright pink sunburn across the tops of his shoulders. Willa wakes them as I take the rest of the bread and apples, and the various tunics we've shed in the heat, and stuff them into the linen sack I took from the Jarl's roundhouse. Thinking of the Jarl urges me on, even as I fear I am too late, that he was too sick when I left, that there isn't enough time for me to travel all the way back to Caistley and then all the way back to the camp – not to mention the trip to 2017 in between.
"He's strong," Willa says, scooping her youngest baby into her arms and seeing the expression on my face as we set out again. "He's the strongest man I ever saw in my life, Paige. I wouldn't have believed such men existed until I saw your Jarl. If anyone can fight off a fever, it's him."
Please be right. Please be right.
Soon, we come to a place where the land is marshy all the way out into the sea. I take a few steps into it, sinking up to my knees, and realize there's no way it's passable, even if we were without the little ones.
"The marshes go inland a far ways." Willa says. "Miles. Perhaps someone has built a bridge over it, out of wood? There is such a thing in the marshes north of Caistley – or so the people say."
I look to the west, inland, and then east, out to sea, shielding my eyes against the setting sun with one hand. "Is this the marsh north of Caistley?" I ask. It's a marsh north of Caistley, I know that, but I don't know if it's the same one Willa speaks of.
"I don't know," Willa replies. "I've never been so far north – until your Jarl and his men took me."
"We're going to have to swim," I announce. And even as I announce it I am fully aware of Willa's feelings about swimming. Not only does she not swim, she actively fears the water – be it the sea or the deep stream that ran through the woods near Caistley. Both she and her brother seemed to associate the water with disease, bad fortune, death. I could never persuade them to do so much as stand in it up to their knees, and neither of them ever made an attempt to hide the fact that they considered me completely insane for swimming in it – even in the harmless, slow-moving sections of it that passed through the woods.
Willa shakes her head immediately, chuckling with humorless disbelief. "No. No, Paige. I'll not have the children anywhere near the water."
"Where will you have them, then?" I ask. "Back at the Viking camp, without their father? Without their uncle? Because that's where they'll be if we don't get around this marsh. The Vikings won't just let me go, you know. I'm carrying their Jarl's baby – and you're an escaped captive. They'll be coming after us, and some of them are likely to be on horseback.
"We're not going into the sea!" Willa shouts, distraught at what I've just said, because she knows it's true. "We'll go inland, we'll walk along the borders of the marsh. We'll find a wooden walkway or we'll just go all the way around."
"But so will the Vikings, if they choose to come after us!" I exclaim, grabbing her by the shoulders and giving her a little shake. "They'll be expecting us to do that – they know the Angles fear the water, and they don't know I don't. You don't even have to swim – we can use pieces of wood, we can use these dry logs from the woods to float, we can find some big enough for you to hold yourself and the children with, to keep your heads above the water!"
Twenty minutes later, I am swimming out into a calm evening sea, gasping at the cold of the water and dragging a large, floating log behind me, onto which cling Willa and her three children, all nestled between her arms and bawling with fear. Willa is silent, but I see from the pallor of her skin that she, too, is terrified, and that she is only holding it together enough to contain her own screams so her kids don't have to hear them.
Their shrieks get louder, too, as I drag them further out, but I have to do that because the sand underneath my feet remains marshy and eager to suck my legs down into it for quite a distance. Once we are at about chest depth, I can swim freely.
It takes a long time. I knew it was going to. I knew there was no choice. But there are a couple of times during the swim that I wonder if I am going to have the strength to complete it. I can't go back to the land, because the land isn't solid, we'll drown there as sure as we'll drown out in the sea. I ask Willa to help, showing her with a little demonstration how to lift her legs up behind her, near the surface, and kick. She learns quickly, and that makes my job easier.
Soon, though, I am experiencing a kind of fatigue I have never felt before. It's the kind of tiredness you just know cannot be overcome by willpower or believing in yourself or any of that motivational talk. I am simply running out of gas, like a car – and when I do I'll be as much use as a car with an empty tank on the side of the road. I turn back towards the land as the sun slips below the horizon, and pray to the universe that when we reach it, it will be solid.
"Are we past the marsh?" Willa asks, her voice a whisper.
"Yes," I reply, because I have to believe that's the truth.
The children are silent as we close in on the dark shore, their teeth chattering now as their mother whimpers and frets and as I tentatively move to set my feet down beneath me and discover if my friend and I and her babies are going to drown in this cold sea, or if we might still have a chance.
I cry out, a raw sob of relief that rings through the night, when I feel pebbles under my feet. Willa lifts her drooping head. "Are we past it, Paige? Have we found the solid ground again?"
But I am too tired to respond. I just keep pulling the log, and the people attached to it, until the water is thigh-deep and Willa feels the ground for herself. She stands up and gathers the kids in her arms and we make our way through the final feet of water to the beach, saying nothing until we step onto it. And then we collapse, all five of us, into a heap of cold, wet, exhausted humanity. No one has the strength to weep or speak so we just lie there, unmoving, panting, for a half an hour – maybe longer. We're soaked, and all of our clothing is soaked.
"We need to get higher," I say finally. "We need to get to the grass or the dry sand at least – we need to dry off."
So Willa and I drag ourselves – and the children – up to the grass at the top of the pebble beach, and then we fall asleep.
I wake first, and it is still dark. The youngest of Willa's babies, a girl, sleeps with her body curled neatly around my bump. So as not to wake her, I don't move. We ate the rest of the bread before the swim, knowing it would be ruined by the water, and we only have three apples left. We need to find Caistley soon. As much as I want to let them sleep, we have to keep moving. I shake Willa gently.
By what feels like mid-morning, we are seriously flagging. My whole body aches with fatigue, muscle-strain and hunger. We're stopping every five or ten minutes now to rest, barely able to carry the smaller children. During one of these frequent rests, Willa looks up at me as she feeds a chunk of apple to Eadgar, her second-born son.
"I won't make it too much farther, Paige. Even you look weak, and I've never seen you look weak before. Promise me if I die that you'll keep going with the children. Eadgar and Aldred will be waiting, they'll be looking for me – for us."
"No one's going to die," I say, but both of us know, as we look grimly into each other's eyes, that it's just as likely to be a lie as it is the truth. "If you get too tired I'll go on, I'll find Eadgar and come back for you. But no one's going to die."
We keep going, trudging along, too tired to do anything but put one shaky foot in front of another. It's late afternoon, the sun just beginning to drop towards the horizon, when Rowyn stumbles to his knees and doesn't get up.
"Up!" Willa commands, and even as she tries to hide her fear from her babies I hear it there, the shaking in her voice. "Up, boy! We'll see your father soon – don't you want to see your father?"
But Rowyn does not get up. He doesn't raise his head. Something is wrong, and Willa and I both know it. My heart begins to pound as she kneels beside her son and lays him on his back. I see that he's barely conscious, his eyelids fluttering.
"Is he tired?" I ask, my breath coming short and quick. "Is that it? Does he need to sleep? He can sleep now, Willa. We can take a break now. Does he want some more apple?"
Rowyn is 6 now, the oldest of Willa's children, and he has been walking as much as his mother and I have on this journey, because neither of us has the strength to carry him.
I watch as Willa lifts him to his feet and lets go, her face contorted with fear. The boy's knees buckle and he lurches to the side like a drunk before falling over again and curling up into a fetal position. Willa screams.
"Is he dying, Paige? Is that it? What can I do? He's my first baby. My first! I can't – I can't –"
I lean over the child, terrified, but am soon close enough to hear his breath. I look up at Willa, who has her hands pressed tightly to her mouth as she tries to contain herself. "He's breathing," I whisper. "He's alive. We have to let him rest. Stay here with them, I'll go and find a stream."
I stumble off into the woods that lie just to our right, and wait until I'm far enough away so I won't be heard to crumple to the ground, sobbing. I look up at the sunlight as it peeks through the leaves, an image I have seen so many times before, and think of how happy I was in woods like this as a child. Now I'm no longer a child, and there is no happiness at all. Willa's son is not dead, but he will be soon and I don't need a medical degree to see it. We have less than a single apple left.
An image of Eirik's face enters my mind and, at the same time, I feel the fluttering sensation that is the growing child in my belly – his child. I have to keep going. There's no other choice. I force myself to my feet and stumble on, pausing every now and again to listen for the sound of water. And then, suddenly, I hear something. Not water. Voices. I'm on the ground before there's even time to think, trying to figure out which direction they're coming from. They're close. Too close. I move to scramble deeper into the undergrowth but then I hear them right there, feet away.
"Who is this trying to snuffle for acorns like a pig?" A male voice asks and I give up, knowing I don't have the strength to run or fight. I take a deep breath, put a submissive smile on my face, and turn around.
A man, clearly a peasant, carrying no weapons. He doesn't look threatening. Behind him, another man whose face I can't quite make out until he steps forward, into the sunlight, and I gasp.
"Eadgar!"
My childhood friend wears a dark, scraggly beard now, and something about his face his different, rougher. But it's him. He steps forward, narrowing his eyes.
"Paige?" He asks, stunned. "It can't be – am I seeing things? Is it you?"
He reaches out and pulls me to my feet and we fall into each other's arms.
"I thought I was never going to see you again," he says when we pull away to look at each other, still disbelieving. "We thought you married one of the King's men, but," he looks me up and down, taking in the state of me, "you don't look like you – Paige, what are you doing out here in the woods? And with a baby in your belly – where is your hus –"
"Come," I say, grabbing Eadgar's hand and gesturing to the other man, who I assume is Willa's husband. "I am with Willa and the children – they're resting right now but the oldest isn't well. I'll take you to them."
At the mention of their sister and wife, both men race on ahead of me as I go back to her, and then Eadgar and I stand back, watching, as the family is reunited. The children use the last of their strength to reach for their father and he scoops them up, all 3 of them, and holds them tightly.
"They need food," I say. "And water – that's what I was looking for when you found me. We've been walking for close to three days with only bread and apples. Rowyn is the weakest."
Willa and I, exhausted, sit back and watch as the children's father and uncle tend to them, pressing pieces of the bread to their mouths, giving them sips of water from their waterskins. I wait for a few minutes, until Rowyn manages to sit up on his own, and then I turn to Eadgar and speak quietly.
"Are we close to Caistley? I need to get back there very –"
"It's gone, Paige. Burned down by the Northmen – we've set up a smaller settlement close to it, though. it's just a little further –"
"I know," I whisper. "I just – I need to get back to Caistley anyway – the old Caistley. Is it close?"
Eadgar looks at me, confused by the urgency in my tone. "It's just down the coast," he says, pointing south, past a stretch of rocky shoreline to a beach that, now I see it properly, does look familiar. I get to my feet and Eadgar grabs my wrist.
"Wait! Paige we've only just found each other again – do you need to leave so soon? We need to hear what's happened in your life since we –"
Willa cuts in. "Let her go, Eadgar. She's got business with her own family, a husband with the fever and a healing plant in the woods outside the village. But before you go, Paige, we should arrange a meeting spot. I know you need to get back to your husband but just – just in case. In case something happens."
As Willa speaks it dawns on me, as it should have already, that this might be the last time I ever see my friends. Because I'm not going to Caistley for a plant, I'm going to get back to 2017, and when I return – if I return – I'll need to go straight north again, there'll be no time for anything else.
"The clearing in the woods," I say, my voice shaking. "Where we used to make crowns and bracelets of the yellow flowers. That will be the place."
Eadgar helps Willa to her feet and we wrap our arms around each other.
"The clearing," Eadgar says. "It's close to our new settlement, I'll check it every day Paige. Every day between the work in the fields and the evening meal. I promise."
And then it's goodbye. We all know it. Willa gives me her husband's name very quickly, and tells me he already knows mine, as she and Eadgar always talk about their old friend from the estate.
I've never been as close to being torn in two as I am at the moment of leaving, of actually turning my back to them and walking away. And even as I know every step brings me closer to the moment when I will no longer hear their voices, and probably never hear them again, Eirik pulls me forward, on towards Caistley in spite of my aching body and my empty stomach.
I cry almost the whole way there, walking along the coast alone with the warm breeze playing through my hair. When I get to the path that leads to Caistley – still in use but more overgrown than I remember it, I turn around and look back. All I see is coastline, trees, darks rocks, sea, sky. I do not see my friends anymore. I jog, then, down the path, out into the clearing where the remains of the village stand, and then into the woods.
The sun has just set when I get to the place I'm aiming for – the tree. I have only the loosest of plans – go home, get online, break into the pharmacy in River Forks, steal antibiotics, return to past, go north. I know, even as I kneel beside the great gnarled roots, that I should give it more thought. But there's no time. I take a deep breath and hold it, and then I lay my palms flat against the base of the tree's trunk.