Wayfarer

He placed one arm behind his back and the other across his waist, giving her a mocking little bow. “Julian Ironwood, at your service.”

HER DISBELIEF MUST HAVE BEEN SPLASHED ACROSS HER FACE, because his smile shifted, becoming sardonic. Clearly not the reaction he had been expecting.

Julian Ironwood? Etta let out a small, lifeless laugh. Time travel had already presented a number of brain-bending possibilities—meeting an eighteen-year-old version of the violin instructor she’d known from the moment she was born, to name only one. But, surprise, experiences like that didn’t make it any easier to come face-to-face with the dead. Etta tried to keep her expression neutral, knowing that staring at him in horror was going to raise some flags in his mind.

Nicholas had warned her repeatedly about the dangers of telling anyone their fate, that knowing how and when they would die could affect the choices a person made, and potentially, the timeline. Alice had given her an out, had specifically asked her not to say, but now…

The guilt felt familiar as it pooled in her heart. Etta bit her lip. It was just…what were the chances of meeting Nicholas’s brother, and here, of all places? And why hadn’t Nicholas mentioned that Julian had been held at some point by the Thorns?

“Either my adorably sadistic grandfather has done something terrible to you, or you’re about to inform me that I’ve died by—rather stupidly, if I say so myself—falling off a mountain,” he said. “Those seem to be the only two reactions I get these days.”

“You—” Etta sputtered, whirling back around. “I didn’t mean to—it’s just—”

“Calm down, will you? You’re going to give yourself the vapors for no good reason,” he said. “As you can see, I am not dead.”

“Wait…” she began, coming closer to better study his face. His eyes were the same icy shade of blue as Cyrus’s, and she could detect, under the scruff and grin, the same high cheekbones and long, straight nose that age had tempered on the old man’s face. Julian also seemed to have the Ironwood affinity for grappling for control of every conversation, no matter how short.

“You’re alive,” Etta finally managed to get out. “You…you didn’t die after all?”

He grinned, enjoying the conversation, and motioned down to his body. “Still in one piece. The luck of the devil, as old Grandpops used to say. Rather odd, that, considering he is the devil—”

“What happened?” she interrupted.

He gave her an infuriating grin. “Tell me what you think happened.”

Etta, with patience she had no idea she possessed, managed to tamp down her temper long enough to say, “There was a storm….You slipped on the path leading up to the monastery, Taktsang Palphug—”

“Did Grandpops really give the world that much detail?” Julian asked, flattening his hair with his hand. “He’s usually so quick to defend the family’s honor, but I guess even he couldn’t resist making me sound like a right idiot.”

There was a sharp undercurrent to the words that seemed at odds with his jocular tone. Etta studied him again—the slouching posture, the unkempt clothes, the glint in his eyes she’d originally taken as mischief—and wondered which side of him was the truth, and which he’d simply made a home in.

“I thought he would have…” He kept pacing, but this time turned his eyes to the floor. “Did he…I never heard anything about a memorial or the like…?”

Etta’s brows rose. “I don’t know. I’m assuming.”

“It’s not that it matters to me,” he said quickly, shaping the words in the air with his hands, “but it’s sort of…anticlimactic to disappear into a puff of snow and mist. A chap wants to know that—you know, actually, it doesn’t matter. None of it really matters.”

“Stop—stop pacing, you’re making me nervous,” Etta said. “Can you stand still for one second and actually explain this to me?”

He popped himself up onto the corner of the grand desk, folding his hands in his lap. Within seconds, his bare feet were swinging, drumming against the leg of it, and Etta realized she’d asked for the impossible. Not only did he not shut up, he couldn’t seem to burn off enough energy to stop moving.

“In that instance, the Thorns were also responsible for orphaning me,” Julian said. “Three years ago, they used a passage to New York in 1940 to set a fire at the New York World’s Fair, hitting at Grandfather’s business interests in that period. At the same time, I happened to be stupidly falling down a mountainside in Bhutan. Since I was born in 1941, I was kicked through the passages to 1939, which was, at that point—”

“The last common year between the old timeline and the new one,” Etta finished. Between tracking the timeline, the collection of years at the mercy of the travelers’ actions, and each traveler’s personal life that they lived straight through, even when they were jumping between centuries, she thought her brain might explode. “But I was born after 1940, too, and I wasn’t orphaned when that change occurred.”

“Then the change must have been confined to that year, and not rippled past 1941. I’m sure you’ve heard this a thousand times by now, but you know how the timeline is about inconsistency.”

Etta did know. It had self-corrected as if passing over a speed bump, instead of the road completely diverging. Interesting.