Still not sure what she was doing in the kitchen, Bronwyn took a seat at the table as Alannah made tea. At least Baile had stopped shaking things.
Cheeks flushed and eyes sparkling Mags paced the kitchen, peering out the window and then through the archway into the rest of the castle. “I’m not sure where they’ll come from.” She giggled. “This is super exciting.”
“Will they want tea?” Alannah paused with a spoon of tea leaves hovering over the teapot. She frowned. “I have some poppy seed loaf left but it’s not to everyone’s taste.”
“It’s a tad…dry.” Sinead pulled a face and shrugged. “But everyone likes tea.” Then she glanced at Bronwyn. “Except maybe for you. Is that because you’re American?”
“I like tea.” They were missing the point. “I just pref—never mind.” Somebody had to keep them all focused. “Who is this visitor, and what do they want?”
“Not a visitor.” Sinead took a deep breath. “He belongs to Baile, like he’s part of her.”
Alannah added a couple of extra spoons of tea to the pot. “We’ll definitely need biscuits.”
“Do we have any of that lemon cake you made?” Sinead got up and brought cups to the table. “That was delicious.”
“I do.” Alannah bustled over to fetch a cake tin from the Welsh dresser against the far wall.
“At last!” Mags ran over to the kitchen door and opened it. “Hi!”
A man and woman stood on the other side. They were dressed in what looked like some kind of historical dress and staring at the occupants of the kitchen.
Bronwyn stared right back with the rest of the Crays.
“Hello.” Alannah found her voice first. “You should come in.”
The man stepped into the kitchen.
The hearth fire flared, and Baile shook and groaned, but it did have an oddly joyful note to it.
The man put his hand on the doorjamb. “Settle down, girl.”
He had a deep, raspy voice and a strange accent that sounded nothing like the other accents of Greater Littleton.
“Wait there,” he said to the woman and strode deeper into the kitchen. “I am Roderick. Who are you?”
Nobody answered his question. For her part, Bronwyn was still stuck on his name. “Roderick?”
“Aye.” He nodded his dark head, and his pale blue eyes swept the kitchen and everyone in it. “If you’re here, it means you are cré-witches.”
“Ye-e-es.” Niamh stared at the man. She frowned and raised a hand. “When you say Roderick—I really only know of one Roderick—now I’m confused.”
“Roderick?” The woman at the door wore a long, old-fashioned dress. And by old-fashioned, they weren’t talking the seventies. Not the nineteen seventies anyway. Her blond hair hung in a thick braid over one shoulder. She was short and slim with darkly lashed blue eyes. Bronwyn put her at about her own height of five foot nothing. “Can I come in yet?”
“I need to ascertain your safety first, Blessed.” Roderick’s tone had Bronwyn’s eyebrows heading for her hairline. And she’d thought Alexander was bossy. She needed to focus.
Holding out her hand and stepping forward, Mags said, “Hi, I’m Mags. Well, my full name is Magdalene, but nobody calls me that.”
“Seer?” Roderick stared at her.
“Um…okay.” Mags shrugged. “Can we get back to the Roderick thing?”
“What year is this?” As Roderick glanced around the kitchen, his gaze stuck on the range. “Where is the kitchen hearth?”
Alannah stepped aside and motioned the range with her hand. “They put this in a while ago. It takes some patience to get the hang of it, but once you do, it’s marvelous.”
“Hmm.” Roderick prowled the kitchen while they all stayed stuck to the spot and watched him.
Bronwyn grabbed her courage and cleared her throat. “Umm…I think I speak for all of us when I ask if you could explain who you are and how you come to be here.”
“I am called Maeve.” The pretty blonde waved from the door. “And we came through the tunnels from the church to the caverns.”
It couldn’t be the Maeve from the statue, but that was not a name you heard all that often. Perhaps Bronwyn had hit her head harder on the table than she thought.
“There are tunnels from the caverns to the church?” Sinead straightened her shoulders. “How come I’ve never seen those?”
Maeve shrugged and looked at Roderick. “I really cannot say.”
“Blessed! I have already spoken. Wait there.” Roderick held his hand up to her, and Maeve snapped her mouth shut.
“Big bossy person.” Sinead squared her shoulders. “If you speak to her like that again, you and I are going to have an issue.”
“And you are?” His pale blue gaze stuck on Sinead with disconcerting intensity.
Sinead didn’t flinch. “I’m Sinead, and that’s my sister Alannah.”
Alannah nodded and held the teapot aloft. “Tea. I was just making a pot.”
The man switched his gaze to Bronwyn. It made her feel stripped to her bra and thong.
“Bronwyn.” She pushed to her feet, not liking how much sitting put her at a disadvantage. “Bronwyn Beaty, and I know how I got here, but you still haven’t answered my question as to how you got here.”
“I am Roderick of Baile,” he said.
Baile rumbled beneath their feet and Roderick smiled. In all the excitement, she hadn’t noticed until he smiled how good looking Roderick was. Tall as well, with a pair of shoulders that looked like he could take the world’s problems and tote them around for a bit.
He wore breeches and a cream shirt that fastened at the neck with a leather tie. Long, full sleeves did nothing to disguise the muscle beneath. If Roderick suddenly turned nasty, he could do some damage.
“The only Roderick I know of is the one who built Baile,” Bronwyn said. “The original owner.”
“Nobody owns Baile.” Roderick chuckled. “But she did allow me to put stone and mortar together to create her.”
Bronwyn sat down again. The blood drained to her feet, and she had to breathe deep. “I’m afraid that’s impossible.”
“Blessed.” He smiled at her like she was a cute kid who made him laugh. “Nothing is impossible when magic is involved.”
“Magic?” Niamh breathed the word on a sigh. “Is that how you’re here?”
“Roderick.” Maeve jammed a hand on her hips. “I can see there is nothing dangerous about these women. They are cré-sisters.”
Roderick hovered by her side as Maeve stepped into the kitchen. “I am beginning to think we have been gone for a long, long time.” Her gaze lingered on the dishwasher and the fridge. She skimmed Alannah and stared at her sleep pants. “A very long time.”
“Perhaps.” Roderick looked at Bronwyn. “What is the year, Blessed?”
She didn’t get the blessed business but at last a question she could answer. “Twenty twenty.”
“What?” Roderick stilled.
Maeve paled and leaned into him.
His arm went around her immediately. “Did you say twenty twenty?”
“Yes.” Maybe she could have broken that a bit gentler. “Two thousand and twenty.”
Roderick gaped at her.
Maeve stared at her and whispered, “I think I need a cup of tea.”
“Tea!” Alannah beamed at Maeve. “That I can do.”
Sinead nodded. “With lemon cake.”
Bronwyn had to keep reminding herself not to stare. But there really wasn’t a behavioral precedent for having tea and some excellent lemon cake at a hair shy of dawn with a man and a woman who had been a statue for nearly four hundred years.
Even thinking about all the impossibilities of the situation made her glad she was sitting down.
“This is wonderful.” Maeve ate Alannah’s cake in three enormous bites. For a small woman, girlfriend could eat. “Cook makes, I mean used to—” Her face creased into an expression part pain and part confusion.
“It may even be the same recipe.” Alannah smiled at her reassuringly. “There is an old recipe book that’s been in the kitchen since before my grandmother’s time.”
Roderick side-eyed the cup of tea Alannah put in front of him. “Let us begin with who is king.”
“No king. Not really a queen either.” Sinead was clearly a rip the Band-Aid off type of girl. “I mean the queen and the rest of the royals are still around, but they don’t rule or anything.”
“Except for Meghan and Harry,” Alannah said. “And they’re not dead or anything, but they’re not really still around.”
“I beg your pardon?” Roderick glared at her. “What else do they do but rule?”
“They do charitable works, raise awareness of issues.” Alannah had the mixing bowl out and was working more baking magic. “They’re a great tourist attraction.”
Roderick sat back in his chair and gaped at her. “And who rules the country?”
“The people.” Bronwyn leaped into the gap. “For the people, by the people.”
“Eh?” Roderick blinked at her. “Everybody dispenses law on everybody else? Has the world gone mad?”
“Obviously not.” Sinead rolled her eyes. “The police dispense law.”
“The civil administration dispenses the law? Now you are speaking foolishness.” Roderick snorted. “Woman, I think you do not understand how matters work.”
“Are you being serious?” Sinead scowled at him. “And I know how things work a fuckuva lot better than you, mate.”
Maeve gasped and choked on her tea.
Roderick looked thunderous. “Watch your mouth, Blessed.”
“You watch yours, fossil.” Sinead got to her feet, jammed her hands on her hips and stuck her chin out.
“I see manners have been lost along with womanly decorum.” Roderick frowned at Sinead.
“We also lost the sexist bullshit along the way.” Sinead snorted and stared him down. “You have a lot to learn, big guy. I’m gonna love teaching you every bit of it.”
Maeve put a hand on Roderick’s arm. “Perhaps we should let them explain?”
Breaking his glare-off with Sinead, Roderick grunted and nodded.
Sinead glowered for a few more seconds and took her seat. She jabbed her fore and middle fingers at her eyes and then at Roderick. “Got my eye on you, big man.”
Roderick raised a brow at her, and turned to the table. “You may begin.”
Bronwyn settled in for a long conversation. And one that blossomed with every new piece of information revealed. It took an entire lemon cake to get to the spread of democracy. By which stage Maeve was looking shell-shocked.
“I think that’s probably enough new information for now,” Bronwyn said. “The rest might be easier to cover on a need to know basis.”
“Hmm.” Roderick hadn’t spoken since they’d broken it to him that women now voted. His hotness factor seriously dimmed with every sexist statement out his mouth. Bronwyn tried to cut him some slack, but Sinead looked like she had made it a personal mission to bring him into this century.
Maeve folded her hands carefully on the table in front of her. Thus far, her biggest revelation had been the dishwasher and the fridge. She was beyond fascinated, and Bronwyn looked forward to introducing her to the washer and dryer and the vacuum. “May I ask you a question?”
“Go ahead.” Alannah put a plate of chocolate muffins on the table.
“The magic.” Maeve looked confused. “I cannot sense any magic.”
Roderick looked at her. “Nothing?”
“Very little.” She chewed on her lip, picking at the edge of the table with her fingernail. “There is always magic at Baile.”
Bronwyn leaned closer to Maeve, along with the Cray cousins. It suddenly occurred to her that Maeve would have even more answers for them. “There are only a few of us left.”
“Only you?” Sadness filled Maeve’s eyes. “Are there no more witches?”
Roderick covered her hand on the table with his. Sexist and arrogant he might be, but his tenderness with Maeve went a long way to diluting that.
“There’s Roz.” Niamh pulled a face. “But that’s it.”
Bronwyn had almost forgotten about Roz. In a morning packed with weird, Roz and the sofa perching would have to take a number. “The women in my family never lived very long.”
Alexander’s revelations were still too painful for her to approach. He’d loaded their final interaction with so much information she needed time to sift through it.
“Our mothers were sisters,” Mags said. “There were four of them, including Roz.”
Sensing the same sadness that dogged her, Bronwyn asked, “What happened?”
“They died in a car crash,” Niamh said. “Fifteen years ago.”
“I’m sorry.”
Alannah touched her shoulder. “Our grandmother raised us, but she passed five years ago.”
“What’s a car?” Roderick’s frown grew deeper and deeper.
They’d get to that, but Bronwyn wanted to know how Roderick and Maeve had ended up as a statue. “Were you here when the village attacked the castle?”
Maeve recoiled and gasped.
Putting his arm around her, Roderick nodded. “Rhiannon had turned half the coven to her side. We did not see it coming.”
“Rhiannon.” Niamh glanced at her. “That name keeps cropping up.”
“Alexander said we need to do our research about her when he brought me here,” Bronwyn said.
Roderick growled, a sound so menacing Bronwyn wanted to put more distance between them. “There is a reckoning to be had between that whoreson and me.”
“What do you have against Alexander?” Mags chuckled. “He’s a good friend.”
“Friend!” Roderick pounded the table with one huge fist. Cups rattled in saucers and a glass of water nearly went over. “You are a cré-witch. Alexander is not your friend.”
“No.” Maeve shook her head vehemently. “No. Alexander is…evil.”
Bronwyn was glad she hadn’t brought the prophecy thing up. The Alexander she had experienced had been confusing, enthralling, and thrilling, but not evil. She couldn’t think of him as evil, but Roderick looked adamant.
“Evil?” Niamh gaped at them. “Maybe we’re not talking about the same person?”
“Tall, handsome, dark hair, dark eyes?” Maeve looked hopeful.
Mags sighed. “We’re definitely talking about the same person. He’s always been very nice to us.”
“Indeed.” Roderick looked angrier than Bronwyn had ever seen another being look. He leaned his fists on the table and got in Mags’s face. “Like he was nice to the ninety women he murdered. Witches like yourselves. And the thirty good men who were my brothers in arms who died trying to protect those women.”
Alexander had never said anything to her like that.
Heavy silence blanketed the kitchen.
“Okay.” Bronwyn cleared her throat. Her head spun, and her chest ached. She didn’t want what Roderick said to be true. It made no sense for her to have reacted to Alexander the way she did if what Roderick said was true. At the same time, there were enough commonalities between what Alexander and Roderick said for her to need to know more. She needed to put her heart aside and let her head take the lead. “I think there’s a lot we don’t know.”