“The plan failed, as you know, because you stole the ATTO and so it did not go onto the wagon that the Fuggers had waiting but instead departed by some other way. There was a big mess, and what it came down to was that Magnus begged me to solve his problem for him. ‘When the ATTO is turned on—which it must be, so that they can save the woman Melisande—then you, Thord, can be Sent there at the same moment. They will try to turn it off as soon as they have Melisande back. You must prevent them from hitting the red button. Then we can Send more fighters, and witches, and fill the whole ATTO with our people in a short period of time, and then it will be ours. It’s just a bit of wrestling, after all, and you’re good at that.’”
I saw a little grimace on Tristan’s face, and a shake of the head, which I took to mean: Actually you’re a crap wrestler, you’re just overwhelmingly strong.
“This plan almost worked, as you saw,” Thord continued. “But when I saw Anne-Marie with the bang-stick pointed at me, I thought to myself, ‘Fuck this, I have a wife and children in Iceland, I don’t need to pry any more bang-stick rocks out of my body or even perhaps die just to make everything perfect for Magnus.’ So now I will just wait here in this future until someone can Home me.”
At this moment we heard car tires crunching the gravel on the drive outside.
“That’ll be Julie,” said Felix. “She can Home Thord.”
“She should take you to the hospital first,” said Tristan. “So you stop bleeding all over Anne-Marie’s furniture.”
“It’s just a broken nose,” said Felix. “I can go to the local walk-in clinic.”
Tristan gave him a look, which he did not see because the ice pack obscured it. “We’re in the middle of nowhere, there’s one car, and it has to end up back in Le Havre. Go the hell to Le Havre.”
Felix was so startled by Tristan’s intensity that he removed the ice pack to give Tristan a WTF bro? look. Tristan immediately stared at the floor. Felix glanced at me, then back to Tristan, back to me. He looked around the room, noting who else was here—just Thord—and figured it out.
“Right, I should go to Le Havre,” he said. “Julie can Home Thord tomorrow.”
“Right, by tomorrow morning everyone will have congregated in Le Havre and you can all pile in the car and come back out here together,” said Tristan in a rapid monotone, as if needing to rationalize being alone with me overnight as nothing more than a matter of logistics.
DEAR READER: It was not a matter of logistics. But you knew that.
When you know something is going to happen but it hasn’t happened yet, there is a surfeit of tension, both pleasurable and otherwise. So it was for several awkward moments, as Julie came in to greet us, registered my presence—and Thord’s—and helped Felix into the car. She was about to ask if I wanted to return with her to Le Havre—Tristan alone needed to stay here, to handle Thord—but then she, like Felix, understood the circumstances, and turned her head away trying to hide a delighted little smirk.
Tristan felt compelled to see the Viking settled in for the evening, to unburden Anne-Marie of her hostess duties. She vanished into her private rooms, clearly relieved.
Other than the room where Thord was to stay overnight, there were two guest bedrooms upstairs. They both had double beds. I chose the cozier room with one small dormer window. I half-closed the door and turned off the lamp, leaving the small nightlight on. I began to undress, then hesitated, feeling self-conscious, and sat on the bed, waiting.
Eventually I heard Thord’s door open and shut, and Tristan’s slow footfall on the landing between rooms. Seeing the dim light from my room, he entered and stood in the doorway. Ever the gentleman. Even when I did not wish him to be so.
“Just come in,” I suggested. “Don’t pretend there’s anywhere else you’re planning to spend the night.”
He strode up to the bed and hovered beside me a moment, his arousal nearly in my face even as his own face, absurdly, attempted to remain subdued. “We should have some understanding of—”
“After five years, if there’s anything we still don’t understand, fuck it,” I said, and ran my hand up the front of his body. Then back down it.
He grabbed me and in one smooth movement picked me up and then tossed me face up onto the bed, settling his weight carefully upon me, nudging my thighs apart with his knees. It felt so good to be trapped beneath him I almost fainted. Except— “This generally works better when there are no clothes in the way,” I pointed out.
“Jesus, Stokes, it’s been five years, why the sudden rush?” he shot back, with a very rare impish grin. “On some other Strand I’ve probably already torn your dress off.”
“I want to go to that Strand,” I said at once. “Take me there.”
I WAS AWAKENED by a deep, subsonic throbbing that I felt through the frame of the bed before I heard it. I rolled over on my stomach and buried my face in a pillow, but the sound didn’t go away. I groped out with one hand and found a warm, rumpled place where Tristan was supposed to be.
The noise got louder. Was it a wave of Diachronic Shear cresting over Normandy? I rolled onto my side, opened my eye, and saw Tristan in the dawn light gazing out the little dormer window, watching events in the yard. He looked interested, but not alarmed.
Finally I got up, pulled a robe around myself, and went to look.
IT WAS A helicopter. A preposterously large helicopter, bug-like, with a round cockpit in the front and nothing behind it save a long skinny spar running back to its tail rotor. It was hovering over the yard. Dangling from it were four cables, which were being attached to the corners of the ATTO by men in black.
The roar of its rotors grew even louder, the cables grew taut, the ATTO rose off the ground and ascended for perhaps a hundred meters. Then, slowly, it flew off. An unmarked van pulled out of the yard and drove away, carrying the men in black.
It was just past sunup.
Tristan and I dressed and went downstairs. Anne-Marie didn’t seem to be around, and neither was Thord.
Beyond the head of the table were windows looking out onto the farmhouse’s kitchen garden, currently bare and dead, and rolling fields and hedgerows beyond that. Seated at the head of the table with his back to that view, enjoying a cup of café crème and reading a French newspaper, was our old friend Frederick Fugger. As before, he was dressed in an impeccable grey suit, though as a nod to the rustic setting he was wearing a turtleneck sweater instead of a shirt and tie.
“Thord’s been seen to,” he said. “We Homed him before moving the ATTO. Anne-Marie is in town shopping for groceries, at our suggestion.”
“At five in the morning?” I said, dumbfounded.
“It’s after eight,” protested Frederick pleasantly.
“You own the grocers,” Tristan guessed.
“Not literally. Please, make yourselves comfortable. The coffee is nice and hot and the cream is fresh.”
My eyes met Tristan’s. He shrugged. There was no reason not to. For a minute or two we busied ourselves pouring coffee and cream, then took seats. Frederick finished the article he was reading, then folded the paper neatly and arranged it on the cracked and weathered planks of the old table.
“I wanted to be the first to congratulate you on the rescue of Dr. Stokes,” he said. “The two of you look very happy together. I’ve taken the liberty of ordering a bottle of 1851 Chateau Miqueu, to be delivered to your room—a very old vintage, obviously, but it’s been well cellared and I hope it is still drinkable.”