Chapter Twenty-two - The River

 

Dawn was just beginning to color the sky when we arrived at the boat docks. Crude wooden piers stretched out like gnarled fingers into the Seine, and shallow-bottomed boats of different sizes were tied up alongside them.

Archer walked with Ringo to help support his weight on his injured side, and I was moving a little slower than usual because breathing still hurt, but we made it to the docks in time to get everyone settled.

Max reminded me of an art teacher I once had in Oregon. All over the place, with the kind of energy for everything that made me tired just looking at him. But he wasn’t just fast-twitch busy; there was an inherent happiness under it all, like life was just so great he couldn’t wait to taste and smell and touch everything. I also soon discovered Max had a Frenchman’s passion for food. Archer had arranged for crates of food to be delivered to the docks – he traded some of the bits of broken gold jewelry my mom had given him – and before we could load any of them onto the boat, Max opened each one like it was Christmas, exclaimed over all the contents, and then decided what should go where according to its need to stay fresh.

Max’s wife, Sophie, was the complete opposite of him. The enthusiasm and passion in Max was serenity and ease in his wife. She was about 5’7” tall, with thick, dark hair and the kind of curves that looked deceptively soft, but which I knew were full of muscle. She handled the packing of the boat with calm efficiency, and her smiles at Max’s exclamations of joy over the fresh bread and big wheel of cheese were affectionate and private.

When Archer introduced us all, Max shook everyone’s hand effusively, like the human version of a big puppy jumping all over us, but Sophie studied us. She used the distraction of his big personality to mask what she was doing, but I noticed, and so did Charlie. She saw the order in which we were presented, and heard things in Archer’s voice as he said each name that added to the impressions she was already forming. And then later, as we loaded things in, Sophie sought me out to ask about meals, and placement of personal bags, and most importantly, to show me the shade they’d rigged for Archer and me to sleep under during the day. Charlie was usually on hand to translate, or we made do with hand gestures and pantomime, but I thought it was pretty fascinating that Sophie chose me – one of the non-French speakers among us – to be the voice of the group.

We were underway before full dawn. Max navigated the shallows with a long pole, and Connor and Ringo sat on either side ready with oars. Ringo insisted on taking a first shift at the oar, saying that if he didn’t get some exercise he was going to wither away into a useless lump.

Archer’s tarp was rigged between two benches, and there was a bedroll spread out on the floor of the boat for us. He had explained that he had an allergy to the sun, so he and I would take the night rowing shifts. Sophie thought it was a very efficient way to travel, and she said she would rig this kind of shelter on every trip to allow for night rowers to sleep.

So we were under the tarp, snuggled in our own cave in the middle of the boat.

“I like them.” I didn’t want to say Max and Sophie’s names to draw their attention to my whispers, but Archer knew who I meant.

“I thought you would. She reminds me a little of my brother’s wife, always quietly supporting him in a way such that few people noticed how strong and capable she was.”

I smiled sleepily. “Not like me, all up in everyone’s face?”

Archer stroked my hair. “There’s no one like you.”

I scoffed. “That bad, huh?”

“You make things happen that seem impossible. When you set your mind to something, you create the opportunities for it, and then you go after them. I’ve never met anyone more powerful or determined than you. It would be quite intimidating, if I didn’t know where you were ticklish.”

He grabbed for me with tickling fingers, and I barely muffled a shriek before he pulled me close to his chest. I poked him one last time for good measure, and he tightened his arm around me as he kissed my hair. I could feel him start to slip into his daytime sleep, and I lay awake a few minutes longer listening to the dip of the oars in the water and the sounds of the city waking up along the banks of the river. I fell asleep with a smile on my lips.

 

It was well past noon when I woke up. Archer was still asleep beside me, so I tuned my hearing in to figure out who was doing what outside our little shelter. There were murmured voices in French coming from the front of the boat, which I assumed were Sophie and Max. I tuned them out because I couldn’t understand enough French yet to make the effort to listen in worth my while.

The rhythmic slap of oar into the river was soothing, and it punctuated a quiet conversation in English between Charlie and Ringo. Their voices were low enough that I doubted anyone else could hear them, but between their location on the boat and my hearing, I couldn’t help but listen.

Charlie spoke with certainty. “I’ve seen ‘is kind before. They like the water, and they’ve a fair bit o’ joy in ‘em all the time. But in tough spots they run for it, and ye can’t count on ‘em in a fight. ‘Is kind’ll always save their own skin first.”

“Do ye think she’s one, too?” Ringo must have been asking about Sophie, which meant Charlie had been talking about Max.

“No. She’s ‘uman all the way.” Ah, so it wasn’t Max’s character they were discussing. It was an Otherness. That was interesting. I trusted Charlie’s Other-sight, and wondered what, if anything, Max’s Otherness meant for us as we traveled down the Seine with him.

Charlie spoke again in an even softer voice. “And ye? ‘Ow are ye really feelin’?”

“The leg ‘urts, but it’s better.”

“That’s not what I’m askin’.”

“Ye mean what do I think about this that we’re doin’?”

“Yeah, that, and ‘bout the people we’re with.”

Ringo was silent a moment, and the murmur of French voices from the bow had paused, too.

“Wilder feels dead to me already. Like ‘e isn’t worth pursuin’ anymore. I know that’s what we came ‘ere for in the first place, but somethin’ tells me ‘e’s already done.”

“’Ow do ye figure that?” Charlie seemed skeptical, and I was glad she asked the question, because I probably would have popped my head out and asked the same thing.

Ringo scoffed. “Cause this is the wrong time line, and I’ve always ‘ad a sense for things ‘avin’ to do with my survival. The thing with Wilder at this moment just feels … beside the point.”

“What about the rest of it?”

“I trust Saira and Archer. This feels like what we’re meant to be doin’. But what about ye? What are ye thinkin’ about this whole adventure yer on?”

She inhaled sharply. “I shouldn’t be ‘ere, Ringo. I’m not … enough for any of it.”

“’Ey. It’s not right what yer sayin’.”

Charlie’s voice sounded teary. “Ye ‘ad to rescue me from the Mongers, and again from the wolves. I’m not strong or fast, and I can’t run like ye and Saira do. Give me a fryin’ pan and I might be able to knock ye on the ‘ead, but without it, I’m just not … enough.”

In my head I was yelling at her, telling her that was a load of crap. But I knew my anger was misplaced, because it hadn’t been that long ago that I questioned whether I was enough to fulfill a prophecy, and because I still struggled with my own doubts about being capable enough to do what needed to be done.

I snuggled closer to Archer’s body. Even when he was sleeping, he could still comfort me.

Ringo didn’t yell, and he didn’t try to talk her into believing all the ways she was strong. His tone was matter-of-fact and very straightforward. “Well, I chose ye, didn’t I? If ye don’t believe yer enough, yer callin’ into question my judgment. And that calls to question my judgment about ‘Is lordship and Saira and Connor, too. And I’m not changin’ my mind ‘bout them, just like I’m not changin’ it about ye. So, I guess the only thing left for ye to do is change yer own.”

I would have applauded if I could have without giving my eavesdropping away. And in fact, I was starting to feel a little slimy for it, so I decided to interrupt them with some waking up noises. I yawned and stretched, and murmured a little as I rolled over and crawled out of the little shelter.

I blinked blearily in the sunlight and squinted around the boat at everyone.

Charlie looked a little white-faced, like she’d just been yelled at, Sophie waved at me from the front of the boat, and Connor stared out at the water grimly as he rowed. Jehanne sat across from him, looking pissed, and Ringo hit me with a smirk that said he knew I’d been listening.

So I owned it. “He’s right, you know.”

Charlie’s head snapped around to me. She definitely hadn’t considered that I could have overheard him. “You insult him by believing you’re anything less than amazing. Because he chose you, and he has pretty great taste in people.” I smiled at her to take the sting out of my words, but her face flamed anyway.

“Most days I don’t feel so very far from Whitechapel.”

I quirked a smile at her. “Really? Have you looked around lately?” I did actually look around, for the first time since emerging from the sleeping cave. The banks of the river were green and lush, full of big trees and flowering bushes. We were just approaching a small village with little huts dotting the fields. As we rounded a bend, a massive tower stood tall on a hill in the distance, and I was slapped with the realization, again, that we were in medieval France, where wars were fought with bows and arrows, and castle fortifications included boiling oil.

“Quite a view, isn’t it?” Charlie finally had her own quirky smile back on her face.

I nodded my head toward Max, setting up a crude fishing line off the side of the boat. “Really?”

After a startled second, she caught my meaning and nodded. “Not trouble, but don’t count on ‘im to ‘ave yer back.”

“’Ow much did ye actually ‘ear of our talkin’?” Ringo looked at me suspiciously.

“Sorry. I woke up right when you were discussing him.”

He looked at me thoughtfully as he pulled the oar.

“I’m going back to Paris when this is done.” I said. Maybe I was warning him, maybe just hoping he’d still be in.

He nodded. “And I’ll go with ye, of course.”

“Thank you.”

There was a whole bunch of stuff we weren’t saying, but it was kind of speculative naval-gazing stuff about what we’d find when we got back to Paris, what would change, and whether any of it would have mattered at all? So instead, I asked Charlie to start teaching me French.

Ringo laughed at everything that request covered up, and tossed out badly pronounced body parts he’d heard down at the quay in London. Charlie pretended shock, but she came in with her own off-color words picked up at the food markets she used to steal from as a little girl. French bakers were apparently even more descriptive than sailors. By the time we went ashore to have our evening meal and use the field facilities – basically, go for a squat – I had a fairly interesting vocabulary to try out on Archer.

Dinner was kind of amazing. Max had caught several fish he said were pike, and had gutted and cleaned them with Jehanne’s help in about fifteen minutes. Sophie had me go with her to forage some thyme and wild onions, and we stuffed the fresh herbs inside and then coated the outside with some olive oil before roasting them on sticks in the fire. With the fresh bread and cheese and some apples Charlie found in an abandoned orchard, it was a total feast.

Archer had gone hunting while the rest of us ate, and the hunger in Jehanne’s eyes when he brought back a gutted and dressed wild rabbit was a tad unsettling. Connor was keeping a sharp eye on her, and I saw him tense at her reaction to the fresh meat.

When the rabbit was stuffed with the leftover onions and was roasting on its own stick to have for breakfast, Max settled in with a pipe and told us tales about the river we’d traveled that day. There were fish in it, he said, as long as a man, and strange-looking, armored fish that were so rare he’d only known of two people besides himself who had ever seen one. I knew that any fish that had gone extinct before the 1500s was considered prehistoric, and I wondered if that’s what he was talking about.

I settled in against Archer and ignored the sharp-edged looks Jehanne sent me across the fire. When silence stretched for a couple of minutes after Max was finished talking, Charlie cleared her voice and began to sing a quiet ballad in English about a nine-year-old boy imprisoned for stealing handkerchiefs. Her voice was as haunting as the lyrics, and afterwards, the quiet settled in like a sigh.

Finally, Archer stood and offered his hand to me. “My lady, I believe it’s our turn to row.”

When the boat was back on the water and everyone but Sophie was tucked into various corners of the hull to sleep, Archer and I took our place at the oars.

We sat close enough to each other on either side of the boat that we could speak in low tones and hopefully not keep everyone else awake. Sophie was at the tiller behind us, and a lantern hung from the bow.

It only took a few minutes before we were rowing in an easy, synchronized rhythm, and it felt, somehow, like a metaphor for how we worked together. Just a couple minutes to find each other’s pace before we ran side by side. It’s how we ran home from the Tower, on the days Archer caught me, and how he taught me to sword and knife fight, too. The oars dipped quietly in and out of the water, and I counted the days since the last time things had felt normal. Because, of course, midnight free-running and weapons training was normal.

I gasped suddenly, and Archer’s attention snapped to me. “What’s wrong?”

I made a sound somewhere between a snort and a chuckle. “Nothing. Except I think today’s my birthday.”

“It’s at midnight tonight.” Archer’s voice was calm with certainty.

“It is?” I mentally ran down the nights – that was easier than counting days – and realized he was right. “Right. So, I’m seventeen for another, what, twenty minutes?”

I could feel his smile in the darkness. “Something like that.”

“You remembered.” It actually touched me more than I thought it could that he remembered my birthday in all the chaos and madness.

“My love, I’ve been celebrating your birthday for more than a hundred years.”

Wow. Okay. “How?”

“How do I celebrate?”

“Yeah. I’m trying not to be overwhelmed or weirded out by how intense that sounds.” I had come to terms with the idea that Archer had loved me since 1888, but it actually hurt to think of him waiting around for a century until I was even born.

He chuckled. “I suppose it does sound a little obsessive, even for me. But I don’t think I’m as bad as I seem on paper.”

“Yeah, that whole too-good-to-be-true thing can be kind of a bummer,” I teased. The momentary freak-out was over, and now I just had a case of the warm fuzzies. I was also intensely curious. “Seriously, though. How did you spend every July 25^th?”

“Talking to you.”

“So, that must’ve gone over well with the people you hung out with.”

He laughed. “Remember when we first met, I told you I didn’t have cronies because Immortal Descendants weren’t sane topics of conversation for my peers?”

My voice got a little smaller. “I’m guessing the nocturnal habits of the undead weren’t really conducive to making friends either?”

“Ravi really was one of the few people in my life I’ve ever considered a friend. After you, of course, and now Ringo.”

“And Mr. Shaw and Connor and Charlie and Ava and maybe even Adam …” Suspiciously absent from that list was Tom, who would have considered Archer to be a friend if he had lived.

“Well, they’re all your fault. I had done a fair job of convincing myself I didn’t need friends until you showed up in my life that night in Whitechapel.”

“Clearly you were delusional. And apparently still are. What do you mean, you talked to me on my birthdays?”

He laughed. “Just that. I started talking around midnight – just telling you things I’d seen and done throughout the year. The best place I’d gone running, the most interesting person I’d met or seen, someone’s cooking I’d smelled that you would love, or a photograph I wish I’d taken. Sometimes I’d share conversations I’d overheard, or a piece of music.” He chuckled again. “The year I heard Dust in the Wind, I learned it so I could sing it to you on your birthday.”

“Would you sing it now?”

I knew the lyrics to the old Kansas song, but until Archer’s quiet a cappella voice sang the haunting melody about the inevitability of death, I had never really paid attention to the words. His voice was much deeper than the one in my head, and on the second verse, my voice unconsciously joined his. Then he dropped to a deeper harmony for the chorus, and by the time the last notes died away across the space between us, I knew I never wanted to spend another birthday away from him.

“Thank you,” I whispered.

“That was much better than I did the first time. I didn’t know you knew any seventies music.”

“Anything in a minor key.”

“Hmm. Me, too.”

We were quiet for a few oar pulls while a not-unpleasant burn set into my shoulders from the repetitive motion. Crickets were singing from both shores as we passed on the right side of a small river island, and a fox’s eyes glowed at us from its edge.

“What would you tell me tonight?”

Archer made a sound in his throat that was something between a hum and a rumble, the kind of sound that sent chills across my skin when it came from behind me, in my ear.

“Well, last year’s birthday conversation was full of anticipation. I tried to imagine what you were doing that night in Venice. Had you been out tagging, or had your mum done something special to celebrate turning seventeen?”

I smiled. “We made a cake together and then took a walk to the art wall at the beach. Then I did a little free-running at the playground, since it was after dark and I wouldn’t scare the kids, and one of my favorite street artists did a sketch of me flying off the monkey bars and gave it to my mom. It actually was a great birthday.”

“Thank you for that visual image. It sounds wonderful.”

“Yeah, it was one of the better ones. I think my mom was starting to finally understand my art, and we were dealing okay with all the things we weren’t saying to each other.”

“What a difference a year makes?”

“No kidding.” I could never have pictured this life for myself a year ago.

“You’d be proud of me. I didn’t actually start stalking you outside Elian Manor until September.”

I laughed. “That’s some pretty major restraint, buddy.”

“You have no idea. I do think Jeeves might have seen me in the woods once or twice, and I had to start buttering up the gardener’s dogs with beef bones.”

He was silent for a long moment, and then he choked on his voice a little. “And when I saw you running down the road, in the boots, jeans, and hoodie that had been burned into my brain that night in Whitechapel, I very nearly crashed the Aston Martin. I could barely believe it was you after so many decades of wondering and dreaming about seeing you again. And even after I dropped you at the Upminster station, knowing I wouldn’t see you until the following night, I prowled the area around Whitechapel, just in case something changed and you came back before dawn.”

My heart constricted in my chest. My experiences of those early days of Archer were a whole galaxy apart from his. I remembered getting a big case of overwhelm in the woods outside Elian Manor when he told me how he felt, and now I can’t imagine how he held himself back. I took a couple of deep, slow breaths to regulate the pounding of my heart.

He continued speaking quietly. “So, on this birthday, I would tell you about the night we met again. How dumbstruck I was that my memories of your energy and your smile and your wild beauty were transparent ghosts in comparison to the living, breathing, stunning girl who jumped into my car. You took my breath away. You made my heart remember to beat. The scent of you filled blanks in my memory I hadn’t known were there. And then I spent those first weeks utterly terrified to lose you. I’m not even certain how I was able to function as a rational being some nights. I would have killed Bob Shaw if you hadn’t gotten between us the night he was training you to kill … me, I suppose.”

“Not you. Never you.” My voice broke on its whisper.

“And in the end, when it was completely out of my hands, I finally surrendered to the reality of what it meant to love you. And it truly was surrender or break into a thousand pieces every day.” He took a deep breath. “Fear for your safety paralyzed me, but you, my beautiful woman, are always moving. So I had to break free of the fear in order to run with you, and since that day, and every day I choose not to fear, I have known more freedom and happiness than I ever imagined was possible.”

I took a shaky breath, and tears prickled at the backs of my eyes. I could hear a smile in Archer’s voice when he continued speaking.

“I thought finding you again would be about you – about learning your likes and dislikes, reading your moods, uncovering your passions. What I didn’t expect is that it’s been about me, too. I thought I knew myself well – after more than a century of life, I expected to. But I didn’t realize that being myself with you was not just simply loving you. I had to grow and change and adjust myself to stand next to you. I’ve become stronger to be strong for you. I’ve become more tolerant and less afraid, even as I let myself feel everything, rather than risk missing anything I could feel with you. And the things I feel …” He scoffed at himself, and his voice went husky. “I thought blood lust was a challenge to control.”

I couldn’t breathe. Definitely couldn’t speak and risk breaking the spell he’d woven, or cooling the heat that had lodged inside me at his words. We were rowing a medieval river boat full of people on our way to war, and all I wanted was to have Archer wrap around me, to let my hands explore his skin, to taste him and feel his desire for me. Because that’s what the heat was. Total desire. I had no real idea what to do with it, no experience to fall back on. Usually, our circumstances were a big enough barrier that desire couldn’t dig in and take hold. But not even that was working right now. And I wanted to feel it. I craved the heat that had built inside me with the caress of his words.

His whispered voice was ragged. “Happy Birthday, Saira.”

I almost moaned.

“Thank you,” I whispered back.

I took a breath and let the flush of heat begin to escape. One last mental image of his hands on my body, and then I shook it free.

“You just changed color.” His low voice was almost back to normal.

“What?”

“Something lightened in you. The color surrounding you is a lovely rich rose.”

Okay. That was impressive. “Really?”

“What did you let go?”

It was midnight. On my birthday. I was eighteen. Talking to a man who just bared his soul to me.

“I want you.”

He inhaled.

“But I can’t do anything about, it so I let it go.”

There was a long silence, but I didn’t let it worm into my confidence. I’d been totally honest, and it felt good to actually say exactly what I’d been thinking.

Archer broke the silence. “So, at some point we’ll need to discuss marriage and morality and our future, but I think if that conversation happened right now, I might have to throw us both overboard and swim for shore.” His tone sounded casual and conversational, and I laughed.

“Thank you. A marriage and morality conversation might just do me in.”

He joined me in laughter, and I felt the heat inside become warmth that wrapped around us both and held us in an easy embrace.