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They left London behind three weeks ago, once she had a shiny new Canadian passport in the name of Nell Foster.
Left Copely to clean up, to wipe up the mess that Merrick and his company had made.
They left Booker, and that hurt more than Nile expected. More than leaving the unit she’d trained and fought with, sweated and bled with. People she’d thought of as sisters and brother in arms. Her Corps. Her family beyond blood. Semper Fi and all of that shit.
But Booker hadn’t looked at them in the end the way Dizzy and Jay had right before she was supposed to ship out. Like she was a monster. Booker looked at the four of them- her, Andy, Nicky, and Joe- like someone had ripped out his still beating heart.
She understood the pain of betrayal. Vividly. Viscerally. She knew why Nicky and Joe were so very profoundly pissed. But she also knew that they’d had each other since the day their world turned over. No matter how many times they’d killed each other before they’d given up on the futility of it and become something other than enemies, they’d never been instantly lost. Instantly alone. Not like Andy had. Not like Booker had.
They’d found a great love and had yet to lose it. While no one had said what exactly Andy and Quỳnh had been to each other, Nile wasn’t stupid. She didn’t need it spelled out.
And Booker? Well, Booker had lost everything a man could lose. And it wasn’t 900 years or millennia in the past. It was a 200 year old gaping wound. Maggot infested and necrotic. Looking in Booker’s eyes was like looking at the soldiers on their fourth or fifth tour, who got served with divorce papers halfway through or got a call their family got killed by a drunk driver. The ones you knew were going home in a body bag. The matter of time guys. Only Booker couldn’t play the hero and jump on an IED, or throw himself in front of a bullet for his buddy. Or he could. Just over, and over, and over for who knew how many centuries before his time ran out.
Booker betrayed them all. But she understood it.
What she didn’t understand is why they were now just...sitting. After brief stops in Belfast and Reykjavik to hit up caches for money and IDs and Nile knew not what else, they’d flown into Canada on a private plane and then taken a rental car and ferries to the ass end of Prince Edward’s Island and some luxury rental house by the sea.
For the first two days, she didn’t see Andy once. The woman moved like a ghost if she left her room at all to eat or shit or shower. She saw a little more of Nicky and Joe, riding into town with them for groceries and booze and other supplies. Enough to say they planned to stay for a while.
On impulse, she’d popped into a fancy little Middle Eastern restaurant and used some of the ridiculous wad of plasticky Canadian cash Joe had shoved at her before they’d left the house to buy a box of baklava. The smell of it on Andy’s fingers had lingered through their fight on the plane, long after she’d finished it in the front seat of the stolen Humvee a lifetime ago.
Joe nodded at her and smiled when he saw the box. “Nice choice, little sister.”
Nile rolled her eyes. “I’ll show you little if you’d ever spar with me.”
“Soon. But not yet.” Joe shook his head. “We have time.”
When they got back, the three of them helped put the groceries away before Nicky and Joe disappeared to their own wing of the ridiculous too large house. Nile left the baklava on the counter, fixed herself a sandwich, and then went upstairs to use the laptop Booker left behind to watch Netflix.
On the morning of the third day, two pieces of baklava were missing and Andy joined them for dinner before disappearing again.
Nile took to running on the beach outside the house, up and down in the early mornings, followed by PT. You could take the Marine out of the Corps, but apparently couldn’t beat, shoot, stab, and knock the Corps out of the Marine, even if she jumped out of a tall building. What she really itched for was target practice. But, well, Canada.
In her otherwise copious spare time, she read. On the Scythians. The Crusades. The Napoleonic Wars. The Witch Trials. Wikipedia at first, and then heavier, more intense stuff. She blinked, realizing how old Andy really, truly was. How much the three people sharing the house with her had seen.
How little she really had.
Dinners became more common. Andy started to come out and spend more time with them. Joe and Nicky started to finally spar with her. From somewhere, Joe produced a third sword, offering to teach her how to use it. Nile bit her lip, remembering her dad’s non-commissioned officer sword. “Please.”
Andy watched them, still healing, and offering her own critiques. Days bled together. Nights got easier, even if the nightmares didn’t. The man who she’d killed. Who’d killed her. Quỳnh. The charnel house in the old church. The men they’d killed in Merrick Pharma. Merrick’s scream as they’d fallen in tandem to their deaths.
One night, a storm rolled in off the Atlantic, knocking out the power. Joe went around, lighting candles and oil lamps while Nicky built up the fire in the fireplace and Nile fixed sandwiches for dinner. As they all sat around, drinking rapidly warming hard cider and beer, Nile found herself pondering a question that had nagged at the back of her mind.
“Have there really only been seven of us?” she asked as the conversation lulled. Nicky sat next to her on the couch, Joe at his feet and his fingers stroking through his curls. Andy was curled up caddy-corner from them in an over-sized chair, wrapped in a fisherman’s sweater and her legs covered in a plaid blanket. “In all of history?”
The others went still for a long second before Nicky and Joe glanced at Andy.
“No.” Andy said, her voice quiet and a little tired. “Back...back when it was Quỳnh and I and Lykon, we had dreams of others, but of peoples we’d never seen and places we didn’t understand. For almost a thousand years. Then one by one they disappeared.”
“I don’t understand.”
“They were probably places our people didn’t have contact with yet. The Americas. Or Australia.” Andy shook her head. “Their time ran out before there was a way there, so we never met them. But we knew them in our dreams.”
“How many?” Nile asked.
Andy took a long sip of her cider and closed her eyes, thinking. “Four women, three men. Different clothing, different weapons, different environments around them. I still dream of them sometimes.”
“So fourteen then.” Nile let out a long, slow breath. Fourteen.
“No.” This time, Joe spoke. “Fifteen.”
“Joe,” Nicky murmured. “Please”
“She deserves to know,” Joe said, looking at Andy instead of Nicky. “She’s family. She should know about all of us.”
Andy nodded. “Fifteen. Gwyn.”
“Gwyn?” Nile looked back and forth between them. “Who is Gwyn?”
“Was,” Nicky muttered. “Our own Saint.”
“What?”
Joe pinched Nicky’s leg. “Let Andy explain it.”
Andy sighed. “She woke us up in the middle of the 6th century common era.”
***
Quỳnh and Andromache gasped awake in each others’ arms somewhere on the Turkic steppes.
“Through the heart,” Quỳnh muttered, clutching her chest. “A woman. Hair like...trees on fire.”
“I saw,” Andromache grunted, rubbing a hand over her face. “That man, he stabbed her.”
“Bastard men.” Quynh spit to the side. “None have been worth anything since…”
“Since Lykon.”
Fifty years hadn’t been enough time yet to grieve.
Andromache leaned back into Quỳnh. “She fought him, but not like a warrior. Like a scared woman. What would we even do with her?”
“Teach her. Warriors can be made.”
“You are an optimist.” Andromache ruffled Quỳnh’s hair.
“You taught me beyond what I knew. Between us, imagine what we could teach her.” Quỳnh pressed a soft kiss to Andromache’s neck. “We shall set out tomorrow. West, I think. The land looked to be to the west.”
Five years of dreaming followed, five years of the woman gasping back to life. Five years of a language neither of them knew interspersed with Latin so horribly accented it hurt. Five years of a woman building up some tiny backwater wat and dauble church into a proper stone building with an attached community of holy women and herself as abbess. And finally, a word- Cymru. A lead to a place, a land of mists and mountains on the south of the isle the Romans had called Brittania.
From there, it only took asking after a woman raised from the dead to lead them to the church and the community of the Blessed Gwynog.
When they rode up to the community, two people came to greet them. One a spindly wheat stalk of a priest, all sharp angles and thinness. And the other. The other was the face that had haunted their dreams, smiling out from under a veil concealing her hair. In better Latin than the priest spoke, she greeted them.
“Hello. Our Holy Mother Mary told me you were coming. I’m Gwynog. Walk with me.”
Andromache and Quỳnh stared at each other for a long moment, then nodded. “Of course.” Two of the holy women took their horses to the small attached stable, leaving them free to follow the small, soft abbess in her plain robes.
The woman, Gwynog, led the way across the field and into the woods. She remained silent as they trailed her along a rugged deer path, twisting up and into the hills until it abruptly spilled out at a small clearing around a crystal clear pool and a waterfall. The woman turned to them. “You’ve come far, yes? I thought you might wish to bathe as we talk.”
“I don’t think you understand,” Andromache started, but Gwynog shook her head.
“That I am undying? As are you. I’ve seen you die many times now. The Holy Mother has shown me” She smiled, unpinning her own veil and then beginning to disrobe. “This is safe, here. People respect it for my sake. Join me.”
Soon, the three of them entered the pool, Andromache and Quynh yelping slightly at the chill. “Cold,” Quỳnh complained. “It’s cold.”
“Snow melt.” Gwynog slid through the water like some sort of naiad.
“Look, Gwyn…”
“Gwynog. But Gwyn is fine.” She laughed, her hair sparkling in the light. “You are warriors, and very much older than me, I think.”
“Yes,” Andromache responded. “Why do you keep speaking of this Holy Mother?”
“Holy Mother Mary. Because she saved me when my refused suitor plunged his knife into my heart. Raised me up to be as you are.” The woman’s eyes took on a kind of fervent light, brighter and glowing. “She’d appeared to me before the attack ever happened, told me of my calling as a holy virgin, a bride of our Lord Christ.”
Gwyn turned from them briefly to duck her head under and rinse her hair. Andromache looked at Quỳnh, mouthing the word for madness in her lover’s language. Quỳnh shook her head back.
When the girl resurfaced she turned back to them, her smile still beatific. “It’s alright you don’t believe me. I don’t expect you to. The Holy Mother said it was likely.”
“What else has she told you?”
“Well, more my Lord husband.”
Quỳnh looked intrigued. “This is your Christ, who died and is also risen?”
“Yes. And ascended to Heaven. He also comes to me in my sleep.” Gwyn seemed unperturbed when Andromache made a rude noise. “He speaks of the truth and how it has become lost in the words of men.”
“The truth?”
“Do good. Sew love.” Gwyn shrugged. “Feed the hungry, clothe and house the poor, care for the sick, the widow, the orphan.”
“And you do that by praying all day?” Andromache scoffed.
“You think we pray all day?” Gwyn giggled. Giggled, and Quỳnh had to cover her own laugh as Andromache scowled. “We wake early to pray. And then we work. Some grow food that feeds us and those in need. Some are healers who make visits to those who are ill. Some have learned to read and write and teach others. We have sheep we shear, card and spin and weave to wool to make clothes for those who need them. And we pray in the evening. And again before bed.”
Silence reigned for a time. Finally, Andromache sighed. “You cannot stay here. In time, people will notice you don’t age. And your God’s love or not, they will turn on you.”
“I know. I am already making preparations.” Gwyn’s smile dimmed a little. “I will miss these mountains of home.”
“We are warriors. Our way is to also help. To fight for those in need,” Quỳnh said. “We can teach you.”
“That isn’t my path.” Gwyn swam to the edge of the pool, climbing out and then squeezing her hair out. She began to dress. “Your path is to shield the weak. Mine is to heal and serve them. So I must ask you to give me a little time. Stay here with us until the Spring. My successor will be ready to take over and I can leave in peace.”
The two other women scrambled out of the pool after her.
“And do what, if not be a warrior with us? We can’t play nursemaid to you.”
“Andromache,” Quỳnh chided.
“You’re returning to the east. There must surely be holy houses like mine between here and where you plan to go. Help me find one to enter and learn from.”
Andromache growled.
“That is reasonable,” Quỳnh offered. She glanced at her partner. “We have never explored Britannia. We can wander and return in the Spring. So Andromache doesn’t get bored.”
“Very well. There is an old festival in the isles known as Beltane, half way between the equinox and the solstice. That would be enough time. We should meet here, not at the church.”
Andromache sighed. “Fine. And then we take you to the continent and find somewhere safe for you. What then?”
“If you have no wish to see me again, so be it. If you do, perhaps we shall meet again. If my God and your truth wills it.”
“Our truth is that we are immortal until we are not. You will also die some day. As will we.”
“Of course.” Gwyn nodded, a look of perfect, eerie peace on her face. “Whenever it is my time, as is true of all things.”
“Beltane then.” Quỳnh said as she and Andromache finished dressing.
“Beltane.” Gwyn bowed her head to them. “Thank you. Now, will you stay as our guests tonight for dinner?”
“Might as well,” Andromache muttered.
***
“How did she manage to leave?” Nile asked.
Andy chuckled ruefully. “She’d saved back a portion of her bride price her father had ended up giving to her to establish the church, and a set of her old clothes. That last day, she gathered flowers, and in the night, after everyone was abed, she laid out her robes and her church veil as if she’d been praying barefoot in the aisle of the church and been transported to heaven, then left flowers scattered all around. The legend was that for her holiness, St. Gwynog was simply called home.”
Nile’s mouth dropped open as Nicky and Joe laughed.
“But that’s lying. Why not just tell them she felt called to pilgrimage or something?”
“Pilgrimage wasn’t that common yet. Especially for a woman alone. One or more of the sisters might have wanted to go too.” Nicky shrugged. “What she did was the kindest thing she could do. Let them think she’d had a peaceful, ecstatic end worthy of a blessed holy virgin.”
Nile stood. “I need another. Anyone else.”
A chorus of yeses followed, and she came back with another round.
When she returned, she settled in back next to Nicky, slouching into his side a little. “So did she just spend her time hopping from convent to convent? You must have seen her again, if she knew Nicky and Joe.”
Andy smiled and there was a flickering sadness. Like when she spoke of Lykon. Or Quỳnh. “She grew on us. On me. I think Quỳnh liked her from the beginning. Liked how similar their names sounded. How Gwyn had this unshakable commitment to her God and his Son and her Holy Virgin idol.”
Nicky made a slightly rude noise.
“Literally nothing we said to her could shake that faith. She just smiled at us and shrugged from the back of her rugged mountain pony. And kept up with us, and hunted.” Andy’s eyes drifted closed. “We were set on by bandits in Frankia and she didn’t fight them as we did. She dodged and got out of the way, and even got herself killed once. Then she stopped us from killing the last one, a young boy who’d been pissing himself in terror. He spoke just enough Latin to understand her and she told him this wasn’t the way. That he could be more. Better. She bandaged his wound and gave him what money had been on the one he said had been his father and the man’s horse and sent him away. Without her, we’d have killed him.”
“What if he grew into a better bandit?” Nile asked.
“I asked her that. I was furious.” Andy chuckled. She took another pull on her bottle. “Gwyn looked at me calmly, blood from a healed wound still staining her where we couldn’t protect her, and said, ‘What if he becomes a better farmer? Or a fisherman? Or a potter?’”
“That was Gwyn,” Joe murmured, his hand still rubbing idly up and down Nicky’s calf.
“She had this faith that humanity, given the opportunity could be better. Would be.” Nicky smiled. “Remember how we met her?”
“Because of course that’s where she found us all,” Andy groaned. She turned back to Nile. “She always found us, in those early years. Never the other way around. Always said her Christ told her where to go when we needed her.”
“Where did she find you?” Nile asked.
“Ayla. In between Crusades, shortly after Andy and Quỳnh found us.” Joe’s smile grew fond. “The water of the Red Sea in the port there looked like Nicky’s eyes.”
***
Yusuf’s Genoese had gotten marginally better than Nicolo’s Arabic, which is to say they could both flail in each other's language about as well as a child kicked in the head by a donkey. They struggle in a mix of it and Greek, with gestures and now pictograms drawn either on sand or on the paper with charcoal he’s acquired in the market.
Enough to know they’d tired of killing each, they couldn’t die, and they were plagued by dreams of women. Two who were warriors traveling in each other's company, fierce and fearless. And one who was not. One who seemed to be somewhere else entirely, dressed in simple clothes, her hair veiled, but her hands often covered in blood.
When Andromache and Quỳnh found them, they’d been in Tunis. And between the women and their command of languages, they’d learned what few answers there were. Long lives beyond measure. Resurrections without number. Until one day, sometime in the distant future, their life would end. The two women offered them a place with them. A promise of fighting for those who needed protection, against those who would do ill to the common people. A purpose. A chance to explore the wide world, to learn and grow and become more. To be family, together.
Yusuf looked at Nicolo, at the man who he had killed in hatred and had stopped hating quite a while before now and for whom his emotions were a jumble. His eyes met Yusuf’s own, and he gave a small nod. Then, in his excorible Greek, he asked. “What of the other. The third?”
“We go to meet her first,” Andromache, the ax wielder declared. “We will start back around to the Levant and then head north. The last we knew, she was living near Constantinople. We’ll see if we can take work as caravan guards.”
There were caravans that get them as far as Egypt, and then work as pilgrim escorts from Alexandria to the Sinai and St. Catherine’s Monastery. From there, Quỳnh insists that they need to travel up the coast to Ayla.
“There is little there,” Yusuf argued. “It’s a trade city on the route to India, but not a major one. And my people still hold it. Nicolo and Andromache may not find a welcome after what happened at Jerusalem.”
“So we cover Nicolo’s head or dress him as a Jew. And Andromache tends to make herself welcome.” Quỳnh grinned, showing all her teeth. “It will be worth it. We go to Ayla.”
Yusuf looked beseechingly at Andromache, but she shrugged. “If my heart wants to see Ayla, we stop at Ayla.
It turned out the what Quỳnh wanted was less to stop at Ayla and more to stop near it, along the waters of the sea. And oh, the sea. Yusuf had seen it only once, briefly as a very young man on his hajj, and had paid little mind then. But now, the sea bloomed before him in the exact same shade as Nicolo’s eyes, a shade neither purely blue or purely green, but some divine mix of the two.
As they had traveled, Quỳnh and Andromache had schooled them separately in Genoese and Arabic, and then made them practice together. Also in Latin and Greek. They could have whole conversations now. Conversations about their homes, their lives, their families. Their Gods. He knew Nicolo had been a priest before he took the cross. Knew that he’d never known the touch of anyone. And he wanted to touch him. Merciful Allah, he wanted him with a fire that burned. This man who had gone from enemy to family, who now sat up in the night to watch with him, who slept next to him, transfixed him in a way no one had before.
He sat on the shore, watching as Nicolo, raised among seafaring merchants, stripped off his clothes and followed Quỳnh and Andromache into the waves. He had come to embrace the two women as sisters in their months together. Strange, violent sisters to be sure. But sisters all the same. It pleased him to see them all happy.
“As-salaam wa-alaykum,” came the voice beside him, the Arabic soft and with a melodious accent.
Yusuf jerked, fumbling for the dagger in his belt as he turned to find the third woman from his dreams standing beside him. Dressed in the cool, long cotton robes of a local woman with her hair veiled with a brilliant blue scarf, but her face uncovered, she held her hands out to the side. For a moment, she looked like nothing so much as statues of the mother of Jesus he had seen in some churches he’d had cause to visit before the Siege had torn his life apart.
“Peace, brother. I am sorry I startled you. The sand doesn’t make much noise.” She waved a hand at the ground. “May I sit?”
“Peace be upon you, sister. Please.” He addressed her in Arabic, since hers had not faltered. “I am called Yusuf al-Kaysani.”
“I was born Gwynog ferch Brochfael.” She smiled when Yusuf blinked at her. “The language of the Cymru is hard for those who’ve not encountered it. And sadly, the only men you might have heard speak it would have been enemies to you. I am sorry for it. Our sisters Andromache and Quỳnh call me Gwyn.”
“Quỳnh and Gwyn sound almost the same.”
She smiled at him, her face open and kind. “Would you prefer to give me a name in your language? I don’t mind.”
Yusuf met her smile. “I would think on it.”
“So, who is your other half?”
He coughed as she turned her attention to the water where the other three splashed and played like children, oblivious to what happened on shore.
“He is not mine.”
“Is he not? Hmmm.” Glancing around the stretch of deserted beach, the woman reached up and began to unpin her veil. “Do you not swim for fear of the water?”
“No. I was just thinking. And, I suppose, afraid the leave our things unguarded.”
“They will be fine.” Pulling off her veil to reveal braids like slow glowing brands, she turned her back to him and stripped her robes off, leaving herself bare. “Come, you do not wish to miss Andromache’s reaction to my arrival.”
Yusuf quickly undressed and followed her with his eyes as she snuck down to the water, entering away from the others. He hurried down, joining Nicolo just as a figure arose behind Andromache and in a language he nor Nicolo spoke, shouted a word.
The tall, stoic warrior woman spun just as the woman disappeared below the waves, the axe wielder diving after her as Quỳnh shrieked and clapped her hands. They resurfaced several feet away, Andromache lifting the smaller woman clear out of the water and dunking her back into the depths.
“Who is that?” Nicolo asked him as Quỳnh swam to join them.
“Our sister.” Yusuf replied.
***
“She just found you?” Nile asked.
“That was her extra super power.” Andromache set her empty bottle aside. “When we needed her, she came and she found us.”
“And it always worked?”
The three of them went quiet for a long time. Then, Nicky whispered, “Almost.”
Nile stopped.
Quỳnh.
“She was in…” Nicky stopped to think. “Russia? I think it was Russia. There was a woman on the throne as regent for her young son, and Gwyn had made herself indispensable as her lady in waiting to try to influence her and the boy, to try to improve things for people in Russia. She was almost two thousand of miles away when she had a vision of Andy and Quỳnh in prison.”
“And she tried. She tried so goddamn hard to get there in time, but this was the 16th century. There were no planes or trains or steamships.” Joe rubbed a hand over his face. “She didn’t stop to eat or sleep. Just kept paying to change horses. Rode for weeks until she could get the fastest ship she could.”
“By the time she reached England, it was too late. Quỳnh was gone.”
***
Nico and Joseph sat in the inn, considering their options. Two of them, and an entire prison staff. They’d kill them all, if they had to. But the reality was that wardens often lived on site. Their families too. Women. Children. Nico closed his eyes, remembering what he’d seen after Jerusalem fell. The slaughter in the streets. He swore to never enact anything so brutal again.
But Andromache or Quỳnh’s life depended on it. They’d heard about the first witch, clapped in an iron maiden, sailed out to sea, and thrown overboard. The horror of it, of drowning over and over for eternity. Nico prayed that destiny had been kind, that whichever sister they’d lost had been granted her final death.
The door swung open and a woman staggered into the inn covered in mud and smelling of brine, a pair of saddle bags slung over her shoulders. She dropped them on the table closest to the door then leaned back against the wall and slid to the floor.
“Off with ye, I’ve no truck with vagrants!” the innkeeper called from the bar.
The woman snarled something in...Russian? Nico looked more closely as she dug into the pouch at her side and threw a coin with surprisingly deadly accuracy across the room. The coin sparkled gold.
“Oh. Beg pardon.” The innkeeper came round the counter to stand over the prone woman. “What do ye be needing?”
In a voice suddenly, startlingly familiar, the soft melodious Welsh accent said, “Food. Bath. Bed.” Then paused. “Flexible on the order. But quickly.”
“Gwyn?” Nico breathed at the same moment that Joseph whispered, “Fatima?”
The innkeeper glanced at them and scurried off the start ordering around the staff.
The woman turned her head, saw them, and promptly began sobbing.
Nico knocked his bench aside, rising and rushing to her. He pulled her up, picking up her weight and carrying her to their table. Once he’d settled her next to Joseph on a bench with a wall at it’s back, he returned for her saddle bags and brought them over.
Gwyn laid her head in her arms and sobbed as Joseph stroked her hair and crooned quietly to her in Arabic. Eventually, she stopped. When she did, a serving girl brought her a tankard of hard cider, a bowl of fish stew, and a quarter loaf of bread with butter.
Nico and Joseph looked at each other as Gwyn started to eat. Nico began, keeping to Arabic. “We have news. Terrible news.”
“I know. Give me a moment.” She ate the stew like she’d not eaten in days, tearing hunks of the bread off to sop in it and drinking down the cider. At her speed, she surely tasted none of it. When she pushed the bowl away, she nodded. “What do you know?"
Joseph looked around, then leaned in. “Andromache and Quỳnh were trying to free those accused of witchcraft and heresy. But they were captured and accused themselves. When they tried to hang them…”
“They couldn’t die. Oh, dammit.”
“They tried other things. Torture. They announced plans to burn them.”
“They didn’t.” Gwyn leaned back against the wall, suddenly looking all of her near thousand years. “It’s worse.”
“One of them...we don’t know which…” Joe stopped, tears welling in his eyes.
“They thought they were drawing power from each other. So they took one and put her in an iron maiden, and then threw it off a ship into the sea.” Nico kept his voice level, but only just. “And the other remains in the prison here. They’ll either burn her or...or find another iron maiden.”
Gwyn reached on hand for each of them and they took it. Softly, she said, “Andromache is in the prison. It was Quỳnh who...that they…”
“How…?” Joseph breathed.
“I saw them captured in a vision from my Lord.” Her hands squeezed theirs tighter, so tight Nico felt the bones of his fingers grind. For all their Gwyn wasn’t a warrior, she had her own strength. “As soon as I saw it, I dropped everything and rode. Barely stopped. It took weeks, and all along the way, I saw visions. I saw Quỳnh... I was Quỳnh when they… I fell from my horse thirty miles from Calais and broke my neck.”
“Is Andromache…”
“She lives. If it can be called living.”
“We’ll get her out.” Nico raised Gwyn’s mud crusted hand to his lips, pressing a kiss to the knuckles. “We’ll get her back and then we’ll find a way to get Quỳnh back.”
“I’ll help you.”
“Fatima,” Joseph murmured, the name he’d bestowed on her hundreds of years before, his own pet name. It had been his grandmother’s, and Gwyn reminded him of her with her good, kind heart. “You are not made for this work.”
“You may be surprised what I am made for.” At the sight of the servant girl returning, she lurched to her feet. “She is safe for tonight. Let me wash and sleep. Tomorrow is soon enough.”
***
“Did she? Help?” Nile asked.
“She did.” Nicky said. Joe and Nicky looked at each other, then at Andy, whose gaze returned to the fire. Nicky continued. “She presented herself as a woman of good, sober charity with food for both the prisoners and the guards. Delicious meat pies, the best you ever ate. She even prayed with each of the guards and the warden and his family for their strength and protection against witches and heretics and their foul deeds.”
“She what now?” Nile snapped. “How is that helping?”
“Because she knew as soon as this good, sober woman left, the guards would take all the food for themselves. All of it carefully drugged with opium.” Joe grinned like a wolf.
“She also managed to lift one of the guard’s key rings when he was trying one of the few non-drugged pies she’d brought to initially hand around.” Nicky shook his head. “She was a beautiful woman, our Gwyn. She finally started letting us teach her self-defense over the years, because men sometimes didn’t want to take no for an answer.”
“She brought us the keys. And once we were sure people were mostly unconscious, we went in and freed Andy. And many other prisoners.”
“Damn.” Nile swirled the last of her cider in her bottle. “If her visions were that good, why couldn’t she find Quỳnh?”
“She tried,” Andy said. “Begged that God of hers. Pleaded for a vision. A sign. Where we should dredge. Hell, where we should dive. Prayed for it daily for the rest of the years we knew her. She never got an answer. Blamed herself for that for the rest of her life. Didn't leave us again for over 200 years.”
Nile looked back and forth between them. “What...what happened to her?”
Silence reigned long enough that Nile waited for a nightmare story, one like Quỳnh’s with a less ambiguous ending.
Finally, Nicky spoke, his voice broken. “We don’t know.”
“What?”
“We had been over in America, for their revolution, and had stayed on, trying to help things settle,” Joe said, his own voice leaden with sadness. “Gwyn had been there initially with us helping with medical care, but had gone with a delegation to Paris to try to seek out support for the colonies with Benjamin Franklin. She’d had some contacts there, thought she could help him. She stayed on as revolutionary ideas began spreading in France because she had concerns. She wrote to us, but letters were slow at that time, having to cross oceans. So slow.”
“Her first letter begged us to come, that there was trouble and she needed help dealing with it.” Nicky swallowed hard. “Then a second, posted within a month, begged us to stay far away. That there was only madness and death.”
“The Terror happened.” Andy’s voice had gone hard and cold. “The revolution in France turned into a bloodbath. We know Gwyn was working with a group to try to get people out before executions. Priests and nuns. Aristocrats. Women and children. She left notes at the caches of what she was doing, who she’d been saving. A record for us, in case.”
“None of us has ever been truly beheaded.” Tears cracked Nicky’s voice. “It’s one of the few ways we haven’t died. We don’t know if…if that would end things.”
Nile remembered her high school world history class. The pictures of the guillotine. “Oh, fuck.”
“Gwyn disappeared. Her alias she left America with wasn’t on the death lists, but if she changed it, we’d have no way of knowing. She didn’t put it in her notes. She could have given a false name if they caught her.” Andy’s fist clenched. “By the time we made it to Paris, her trail was just gone. No more notes. No more letters. She never showed up again. And when Booker… when Booker started dreaming of us in 1812, Gwyn wasn’t in his dreams.”
“She was over 1200. It might have been her time,” Joe said softly, his hand wrapped tight around Nicky’s calf. “But for all her strange insistence on being in love with and married to her Christ, on speaking to her Virgin, she was a truly good woman. And one of us.”
“The Welsh venerated a lot of people who were never formally made saints,” Nicky said. “They had that in common with Italy. The convent she founded only lasted a few hundred years, but the church near it has been rebuilt and still stands. St. Gwynog’s.”
“I’d like to see it sometime,” Nile said, solemnly.
“It’s beautiful,” Joe said. “Even if the stained glass doesn’t look a thing like her. We'll take you someday.”
The three of them laughed, a soft healing sound.
“To St. Gwyn,” Andy said, raising her glass.
“To St. Gwyn,” the others toasted.
Nile raised her own glass. “To St. Gwyn. I’m sorry I never got to meet her.”