Luce wore a light brown dress with a wide skirt. Her long black hair was braided into three thick plaits, held together with narrow white ribbons. Her skin looked paler than usual, with a frosty pink flush dotting her cheekbones. She was circling the urn in slow, meditative steps, standing apart from the other girls. In the chaos of the square, Luce seemed to be the only person who was alone. Her eyes had that soft, unfocused look they got when she was in the trance of her thoughts.
“Shelby—wait!”
Shelby was already halfway across the square, almost running toward Luce, when Miles clasped a tight hand around her wrist. He pulled her to a stop, and she turned, ready to lay into him.
Except his expression … glowed with something Shelby couldn’t decipher.
“You know this is the Lucinda of the past. This girl is not our friend. She won’t know you—”
Shelby hadn’t thought about that. She pretended she had. She turned and took another hard look at Lucinda. Her hair was dirty—not greasy, but something beyond greasy, really dirty—one thing Luce Price would never abide. Her clothes fit her strangely, from Shelby’s modern standpoint, but Lucinda seemed comfortable in them. She seemed comfortable in everything, actually, which was also not very Luce Price. Shelby thought of Luce as chronically—though charmingly—maladjusted. It was one of the things she loved about Luce. But this girl? This girl seemed comfortable even in the desperate sadness saturating every movement she made. As if she was as accustomed to feeling glum as she was to the sun rising every day. Didn’t she have friends to cheer her up? Wasn’t that what friends were for?
“Miles,” Shelby said, grasping his free wrist in her own hand and leaning close. “I know we agreed to let Daniel find our Lucinda Price, but this girl is still the Lucinda we care about … or an earlier version of her. And the least we can do is cheer her up. Look how bummed she is. Look.”
He bit his lip. “But—but—everything we’ve learned about Announcers says you shouldn’t mess with—”
“Hiii there!” Shelby said in a singsong, pulling Miles along until they arrived at Lucinda’s side. She didn’t know where the Southern belle accent had come from, other than hearing present-day Luce’s mom’s drawl at Thanksgiving back in Georgia. And she had no idea what people here in this medieval British world would make of her sounding like a Georgia deb, but it was too late now.
A few feet behind her, Miles shook his head in horror. It was an accident! Shelby told him with her eyes.
Lucinda hadn’t even noticed—that was how lost in sadness she was. Shelby had to step up right in front of her and wave a hand in her face.
“Oh,” Lucinda said, blinking at Shelby with no hint of recognition. “Good day.”
It shouldn’t have hurt Shelby’s feelings, but it did.
“H-haven’t we met before?” Shelby stammered. “I think my cousin from, er, Windsor knows an uncle on your father’s side of the family … or maybe it was the other way around.”
“I’m sorry, I don’t believe so, though perhaps—”
“You’re Lucinda, right?”
Lucinda started, and for a moment there was a familiar spark in her eyes. “Yes.”
Shelby pressed a hand to her heart. “I’m Shelby. This is Miles.”
“Such unique names. You must have traveled from the North?”
“Sure.” Shelby shrugged. “Very, very far north. So, we’ve never been to … ye olde Valentine’s Faire here before. Are you dropping your name in the urn?”
“Me?” Lucinda swallowed, touching the hollow of her throat. “The idea that a stroke of chance could decide my heart’s destiny does not appeal to me.”
“Spoken like a girl who’s got herself a studly boyfriend!” Shelby nudged Lucinda, forgetting they were strangers, forgetting that her words might be coarse and her sarcasm foreign to Lucinda’s medieval sensibilities. “I mean … is there a knight you fancy, lady?”
“I was in love,” Lucinda said somberly.
“Was?” Shelby repeated. “You mean are in love.”
“I was. But he’s gone.”
“Daniel left you?” Miles was red in the face. “I mean—what was his name?”
But Lucinda didn’t seem to have heard. “We met in the rose garden of his lord’s castle. I must admit that I was trespassing, but I had seen so many fine ladies come and go, and the gate was open, and the flowers so, so comely—”
She clasped her hands to her heart and sighed with deep regret.
“That first day, he mistook me for a girl of higher stature. Of class. I had my best kirtle on, my hair woven with hawthorn flowers, as some ladies do. It did look fine, but I fear it was dishonest.”
“Oh, Lucinda,” Shelby said. “I’m sure you’re a lady in his eyes!”
“Daniel is a knight. He must marry a fitting lady. My family, we are common. My father is a free man, but he grows grain, just as his father did.” She blinked and a tear slid down her cheek. “I never even told my love my name.”
“If he loved you—and I’m sure he does—he’ll know your true name,” Miles said.
Lucinda shuddered as she took a breath. “Then, last week, as part of his knightly duty to the lord, he—he came by my father’s door to gather eggs for the lord’s Valentine feast. It was the anniversary of my christening. We were celebrating. To see my love’s face when he saw me in our meager home … I tried to stop him going, but he took his leave without a word. I’ve looked for him in all our secret places—the hollowed oak tree in the forest, the northern fringe of the rose garden at dusk—but I have not seen him since.”
Shelby and Miles shared a look. Obviously, Daniel didn’t care about what kind of family Lucinda came from. It was the anniversary—the fact that she was getting closer to the limits of her curse—that had spooked him. By now Shelby was familiar with the way Daniel sometimes tried to pull away from Luce when he knew her death was near. He broke her heart to save her life. He was probably moping around somewhere, brokenhearted, too.
It had to be that way. This girl standing before Shelby had to die, maybe a hundred times before the lifetime when Shelby knew Luce—the lifetime when Luce got her first chance to break her curse.
It wasn’t fair. It wasn’t fair that she had to die again and again, and had to go through pain like this at so many moments in between. More than anyone, Lucinda deserved to be happy.
Shelby wanted to do something for Lucinda, even if it was something small.
She glanced at Miles again. He raised one eyebrow in a way Shelby hoped meant Are you thinking what I’m thinking? She nodded.
“This is only a big misunderstanding,” Shelby said. “We know Daniel.”
“You do?” Lucinda looked surprised.
“Tell you what: You go to the fair tomorrow, and I’m sure Daniel will be there, too, and you guys can just—”
Lucinda’s lip quivered, and she buried her face in Shelby’s shoulder as she began to weep. “I could not bear to see him draw another’s name from the urn.”
“Lucinda,” Miles said so warmly that the girl’s eyes cleared and she looked at him in the intimate way Luce sometimes looked at him. It made Shelby strangely jealous. Shelby looked away as Miles asked, “You believe that Daniel truly loves you?”
Lucinda nodded.
“And in your heart,” Miles went on, “do you really believe that the connection you have with Daniel is so weak that your family’s position might sever the bond?”
“He—he does not have a choice. It is written in the Knights’ Code. He must marry a—”
“Luce! Don’t you know that your love is stronger than some dumb code?” Shelby blurted out.
Lucinda raised an eyebrow. “Come again?” she asked.
Miles shot Shelby a warning glance.
“I mean, erm … true love runs deeper and stronger than mere social niceties. If you love Daniel, then you must tell him how you feel.”
“I feel odd.” Lucinda was flushed, holding a hand over her breast. She closed her eyes, and for a moment Shelby thought she was going to burn up right then and there. Shelby took a step back.
But that wasn’t how it worked, was it? Luce’s curse had something to do with the way she and Daniel interacted, something his presence awakened in her.
“I want to believe that what you say is true. I do feel suddenly that our love is very strong.”
“Strong enough that if we brought Daniel to you at the festival tomorrow,” Shelby said, “you would go to him?”
Lucinda opened her eyes. They were wild and wide and brilliantly hazel. “I would go. I would go anywhere in the world to be with him again.”
THREE
HIS SWORD, HIS WORD
“That was brilliant!” Shelby cried when Lucinda had gone and she and Miles were alone at the well.
In the western sky, the sun’s rays had turned pale. Most of the citizens were making their way home, carts and satchels heavy with provisions for the evening’s supper. Shelby hadn’t eaten in a long time, but she hardly noticed the scents of roasting chicken and boiling potatoes in the air. She was running on the fumes of her excitement. “You and I were completely on the same page back there. It was like I thought something, and you said it—like a crazy rhythm we got into!”
“I know.” Miles plunged the ladle into the bucket and took a long, slow drink of water. His freckles had come out in the sunlight. Shelby was still getting used to how different he looked without his baseball cap. “You were right—it felt good to make Luce feel better. Even if she’s not our Luce.” For a second, Miles’s head jerked to the left, as if he’d heard something. His body stiffened.
“What is it?” Shelby asked.
But then his shoulders slumped a little lower than their normal casual mode. “Nothing. I thought I saw an Announcer, but it was nothing.”
Shelby didn’t want to think about Announcers; she was too excited. “You know what would be amazing?” she said, sitting down on the edge of the well. “We could go shopping for them both, get some lacy trinket for Luce and tell her it’s from Daniel. I could write some cute poem—’roses are red’ or whatever—hey, that’d probably be new to these medieval rubes. And we could—”
“Shelby?” Miles interrupted her. “What about getting home? We don’t belong here, remember? We’ve already helped Lucinda by giving her hope to go to the Valentine’s Faire, but we can’t really do much else to change the way her curse plays out. We need to find an Announcer.”
“Well, you know wherever Luce is, the rest of them are bound to be nearby,” Shelby said quickly. “If we could just find Daniel, it would be, like, two birds, one stone. He’d go to the Faire; we’d find our way back to Shoreline.”
“I don’t know if it would be that easy to get Daniel to that Faire.”
