Page 101 of No Place in Time

“A few days, maybe. A week at most,” he said. He squeezed her hand. “Anton will give us the answer.”

Finn looked around at the estate, his home. His jaw tightened.

“We can’t go to our parents. Not yet.” He met her gaze. “If we reveal ourselves without a plan, we could change nothing. Julian could still be born. My brother Geoffrey could still inherit. We could make everything worse.”

He was right. Cecily knew it.

“So my grandfather first.”

“Anton first,” Finn agreed. “If anyone can tell us why the machine disappeared, it’s him.”

“It’s a long walk,” Cecily said. “If we go now, we’ll be there before the sun goes down.”

She looked down at herself. Her dress was the same one she’d been wearing in 1301—travel-stained, worn thin in places. Finn’s clothes were no better. He looked like a man who’d been living coarse for weeks. Which, she supposed, he had been.

“We look like vagabonds,” she said.

“We are vagabonds,” Finn pointed out. “Vagabonds who just fell through time.”

Movement near the stable caught Cecily’s eye. More servants were heading toward the manor. The shadows were lengthening. They needed to leave.

“There’s a gate,” Finn said, pointing to a shadowed arch beyond the well. “It leads to a path through the woods. We can follow it to the main road without going near the manor.”

They waited until the courtyard was clear again, then broke from their hiding spot. Cecily’s heart pounded with every step. Any second, someone could look out a window and see them running across the courtyard.

Cecily reached for Finn’s hand as they walked. He took it without hesitation, his fingers warm and solid around hers.

They had each other, but they had lost the machine. It was somewhere in time, in someone else’s hands.

They just had no way of knowing whose.

48

FINN

1239

Anton’s house sat in the center of Graston, a stone building, expansive even for the merchant class, with a kitchen garden tucked along the western wall and a small, detached workshop where Anton did his private work. Smoke curled from the chimney. An upper window stood open to catch the evening breeze.

Cecily’s hand was in Finn’s.

“Let’s get some answers,” Finn said.

Cecily fell into step beside him.

Beja answered the door.

She took one look at them—travel-worn, hollow-eyed, dressed in clothes that had been tossed through time itself—and stepped aside without a word, pulling the door open wide.

“Come in,” she said. “Quickly.”

The house was warm, smelling of roasting meat and herbs. It was all so painfully ordinary. Finn leaned against the doorframe, the solid wood a comfort at his back. For the first time in what felt like a lifetime, the frantic rhythm in his chest began to soften.

Anton emerged from the back room. He stopped when he saw them, taking in their appearance. For a moment Finn saw it all in his face: the sleeplessness, the hours of not knowing, the particular hollowness of someone who had spent days bracing for the worst. Then it passed, and Anton’s face composed itself into the careful expression he wore when something difficult had to be managed.

“You’re back,” he said.

“Somehow,” Finn managed, the single word carrying the weight of years.