“Excuse me for not wanting to fight half-goblins on the Festering Plains of Gloth every Sunday afternoon.”
“You wouldn’t have to if you ever had an opinion about anything.”
“Great,” said Freddy. “I should be just like you. I should sulk and mope and knock stuff over and shove myself in where nobody wants me. Why’d you ever have to come here … you and your dad? We were fine without you.”
“You leave my dad out of this.”
“That shouldn’t be hard. He’s never here.”
“Your mum is? I see her about once a month.”
“As fun as this is,” said Mel, “I think maybe you guys should—”
“No.” Freddy didn’t turn to look at her sister. She knew Mel would be signing, and she didn’t want to see that. Everything she’d wanted to say for a year now seemed to be spilling out of her. “I’m sick of him. He needs to stop telling me what to do. I’m allowed to make friends on my own without him butting in.”
“I’m trying to stop you from doing something stupid, you boring, mindless, sniveling little brat!” Roland snarled.
The pounding in her head was making it hard to think. “I wish you’d go blind as well as deaf.”
Roland stood and looked at her. Freddy was dimly aware she had gone too far. The headache was getting right in behind her eyes.
“Right, then,” said Roland. “Do whatever you want. See if I care. I hope you die.”
“Right back at you,” said Freddy. Roland turned without another word and swept from the room.
“Let’s go,” said Freddy to Josiah. He didn’t argue. Afterwards, she wondered if there might have been something a little frightening about her then.
Mel said, “I’ll—”
“No,” said Freddy with more force than she meant to. “You stay here. Stop following me. Everybody in this house is—just leave me alone.”
She walked out through the kitchen, Josiah behind her. Her hand was wrapped around the key again; she hadn’t noticed until just now. “You can come over,” said Josiah, “but you know, Mel was just—”
“I don’t care,” said Freddy.
Her throat was tight. She didn’t know why. They moved past the bright red smoke bush and through the gate and into the lane and then the yard of the house on Grosvenor Street. Two crows were having an argument at the top of a spruce tree. You and me both, she thought.
Josiah paused just before unlocking the door. “You’re going to want to apologise in an hour or so,” he said. “You know that, right?”
“No,” said Freddy, “I won’t.”
He shrugged and opened the door. She followed him through. She felt her right foot break through the crust of the snow, and she reached out to steady herself on a tree limb and missed. Freddy skidded to her knees in the middle of a snowy forest. Josiah was just ahead of her, his fists jammed into his pockets, his shoulders sagging in a resigned sort of way. When she turned to look at the yard behind her, she saw nothing but more trees and much, much more snow.
7
“Get up,” said Josiah. “Unless I miss my guess—”
A silken whisper close to her left ear was followed by a thud and a noise that sounded very like boing. Freddy found herself gazing up at an arrow vibrating in the trunk of a tree. Small lumps of snow pattered from the branches, making holes in the white carpet that surrounded her.
“—the battle’s over there,” said Josiah, and threw himself to the ground. “Also, maybe you should forget what I said about getting up.”
He dragged himself behind the tree with the arrow in it. After the briefest pause, Freddy followed him.
“Okay,” said Josiah, “if I’m remembering correctly, what happened here was that somebody’s daughter ran off with her father’s deadly enemy’s son, and Group A has set fire to Group B’s mead hall. We’re in Sweden.”
“Oh,” said Freddy weakly. “Good.”
“They weren’t aiming at us,” said Josiah, “I don’t think. Unusual of these guys to use arrows, anyway. They’re more of a sword-and-double-headed-axe kind of people.”
“Are they?” said Freddy.
“Look through there.” He leaned a bit around the tree and pointed. Freddy, the snow beginning to seep through her jeans and turn her legs numb, scooched around so she could peer past the trunk.
She couldn’t see much. She thought they were near the edge of some sort of forest. There seemed to be a clear space starting maybe a hundred feet away. Through this space, people were running back and forth. She heard the occasional incoherent yell and the dull clash of metal on metal.
“We’ll have to wait until they settle down before we try anything,” said Josiah. “It’s going to get a bit cold.”
Freddy’s teeth were chattering. She thought it was already more than a bit cold. “Okay.”
Josiah looked at her sidelong. “You’re not taking this well, are you?”
She sat and stared, her mouth opening and closing soundlessly.
“Ah,” said Josiah, “shock. Come on … it should be safe to get up now. We have to keep moving if you don’t want to freeze to death.”
He clambered to his feet and held out a hand. After a moment, Freddy took it. Her head was pounding worse than ever. She wondered if concussions caused hallucinations and, if so, how detailed they got.
“The thing is,” said Josiah as they started through the trees, “this was always going to happen. I normally don’t sit around and wait to be walloped upside the head by destiny, but this was already a fait accompli. My advice is to suck it up.”
A brisk wind rattled the branches, sprinkling more snow on the forest floor. Freddy said, “I don’t know what I’m sucking up.”
He stopped, faced her, and sighed. “Stop thinking of it as a dream. It isn’t.”
“A hallucination?” asked Freddy hopefully.
“Real life,” said Josiah. “It’s Cuerva Lachance’s fault. To be fair, she probably didn’t mean to do it. The house has been getting a little hazardous lately. I’ve tried to calm it down, but thanks to the last choice, she’s dominant at the moment. I’m suspecting she has no idea she’s turned the back door into a time portal. If she does know, she’ll forget immediately.”
“Time portal,” said Freddy.
“Yeah. We’ve landed around the turn of the ninth century.”
“That’s impossible.” Freddy’s own voice sounded strangely polite to her. Stupidly, she looked at her watch. It showed the same date and almost the same time it had five minutes before.
“Of course it’s impossible,” said Josiah. “That’s why it happened.”
He set off through the woods again. Freddy hurried after him. “But I’ve got school tomorrow.”
“No,” said Josiah, “you’ve got school in twelve hundred years.”
She didn’t know if her headache was to blame for the growing feeling that she was teetering on the edge of a bottomless pit. “You’ve … done this before…?”
“Never,” said Josiah. “First time.”