Divide and Conquer (16 page)

Sera let out a long breath. “This looks right,” she whispered.

Dak heard the soft murmur of voices from somewhere up the hill and felt Vígi tense under his fingers. She raised her head, sniffing at the air. Curious, Dak sniffed, too. He smelled woodsmoke and copper, dirt and sweat.

Before he could get a better grip on the dog, she bolted. Dak didn’t think twice before chasing after her. As he ran he heard Sera and Riq following, crashing through the underbrush.

The dog slowed at the edge of a clearing, her steps silent in the night, and Dak did his best to quiet his own steps. But Sera and Riq weren’t as stealthy as they tried to catch up, and it was no surprise when a cluster of burly Viking warriors intercepted them and began asking questions.

Instinctively, Dak felt his fingers tighten around his own axe to defend himself and his friends — then he realized that the Vikings didn’t seem to be paying him any attention. Only belatedly did he remember he was still dressed as a
berserkr
from the battle in Paris; he was actually blending in.

Vígi paused and whined, and for a moment Dak felt torn between his friends and the dog. His mind was made up when Vígi pressed her nose against the back of Dak’s knee, urging him forward. “They’re with me,” he called over his shoulder as he continued running.

The center of the camp was subdued — nothing like Dak would have expected after such a huge victory as the Battle of Chartres had been. A knot of unease began to tighten in his stomach.

A giant of a Viking sat in front of the remains of a fire, the glowing embers casting shadows on his face. His shoulders were slumped, his empty hands hanging limp and his hair graying to white. Dak knew it must be Rollo — who else could be so massive? — but this man bore little resemblance to the laughing, high-spirited warrior Dak knew.

Whatever the three of them had done to change history hadn’t been kind to Rollo, Dak realized.

He slowed his approach, but Vígi showed no such hesitation. She raced across the clearing, tongue lolling from her mouth, and then leapt through the air, landing fully against the Viking’s chest and pushing him from his stool.

The man fell to the ground with a crash, the dog crouched over him. She tilted her head back and let loose with a happy howl before lapping at his face.

“Ugh, ick!” he grumbled, and Dak smiled at the reversal.

The giant pushed to his elbows, no easy feat with a one-hundred-fifty-plus pound dog perched on one’s chest. “Vígi?” he whispered, his voice almost cracking. Dak wasn’t sure, but he thought the warrior’s eyes might have been glistening.

The beast’s tail thumped heartily, her face breaking into a grin that bared every single gleaming tooth. She licked at the Viking again. “Only one dog I know with breath as vile as that,” he muttered, scratching at the dog’s ears. “But how?”

His gaze snapped up, landing on Dak. Rollo’s face lit up. “My time-traveling friend!” he said, rising to his feet. He pulled Dak into a hug that felt like it might have cracked several ribs.

“Come! Join me at the fire and tell me of your travels,” Rollo boomed. He motioned over Dak’s head, and Dak turned to find Sera and Riq being escorted into camp. They seemed to visibly relax when they saw Vígi sitting happily by Rollo’s side.

“We just needed to run this one errand and really don’t have time to sit and chat —” Dak started to say.

Rollo roared with laughter. “With your shiny Ring, all you have is time.”

While Riq and Dak chuckled, Sera stepped forward, her face grim and serious. She twisted her hands together in front of her anxiously. “I know it was a long time ago for you,” she said. “But when we warped away a boy by the name of Billfrith was there in the church and he was hurt. Do you know what happened to him?”

Rollo’s eyebrows drew together, his expression one of curiosity. He cupped one hand around his mouth and shouted, “Bill!” before turning back to Sera and saying, “Why don’t you let him tell you?”

S
ERA WAS
pretty sure her heart stopped beating. Her hands tightened until her nails dug into her palms. The echo of Rollo shouting Bill’s name resounded in her ears.

There’s no way
, she thought as her pulse stuttered and began to gallop.

From behind her she heard someone whisper, “Sera?” The voice was just as she remembered it, causing her cheeks to heat and a smile to break across her face.

He was not only alive but she got to see him again! It was beyond her wildest dreams!

She was already calling out his name as she spun on her heel and came face-to-face with a man who looked to be as old as her uncle. His hair thinned around his temples, and wrinkles crowded the corners of his eyes.

She choked on his name. Of course he was older, her mind tried to reason. While she’d just left him no more than twenty minutes ago, he’d lived an entire life apart from her.

She heard herself cry out as her eyes blurred with tears.

Bill reached out a hand toward her, tentatively, but it was the way a father might move to comfort a child.

Sera turned and fled.

She didn’t get far into the woods before reason pulled her up short. It was dark, and she was near a battlefield. It was stupid of her to continue running. She pressed her back against a tree and sank to the ground. Blindly, she stared at her hands in her lap.

Less than an hour ago Bill had twined his fingers through hers. He’d leaned toward her and she’d thought she might be about to experience her first kiss. Her stomach twisted as her brain warred between the two time lines, trying to orient her.

She heard Bill coming even before he called out her name, softly. She closed her eyes — his voice really was exactly the same as she remembered. For a moment she was convinced he’d appear as he’d been before.

But when she opened her eyes he stood there, still so much older. He sat down next to her.

“This is strange, isn’t it?” he asked.

She could only nod.

“I thought about you after . . .” He took a deep breath and ran his hand through his graying hair, such a familiar gesture. “In my mind you were growing older, just like I was. Seeing you now, exactly how you were when you left . . .” He trailed off.

Sera forced a swallow. She couldn’t bring herself to meet his eyes. “What happened? The last I saw you’d been hit by an arrow.”

“I got lucky. It was a clean wound — didn’t hit anything important.” He eased the collar of his tunic aside and in the soft glow of the night Sera saw a puckered scar. “Rollo was able to fend off the rest of Siegfried’s men. He waited until dark to take me back to the camp and dress the wound. That’s when we put two and two together and realized that his great-grandfather is the one who saved my great-great-great-uncle. Once we realized all we had in common, I joined up with him.

“I thought Siegfried would be angry after Rollo let you guys escape, but once Rollo told him that there was a lot of land worth plundering down the Seine in Burgundy and that he’d let Siegfried have it all, that seemed to smooth things over. Then they went their separate ways — Siegfried and his men carrying their ships overland to farther down the river, and Rollo staying behind outside Paris for a while until King Charles the Fat finally paid him to leave.”

He picked up a stick from the ground and began to break it into smaller segments. “It feels like it was ages ago.” After a pause he asked, “How has it been saving the future?”

Sera still didn’t lift her eyes. “We haven’t been. When we realized Vígi had hitched a ride we came back here to return her. I . . .” She swallowed with effort. “I thought you’d been killed trying to save my life.”

He reached out and lifted her chin with a finger. “If I had died for you, it would have been worth it. The cause of the Hystorians means everything to me.”

She realized, then, that’s what she’d been to him. Not a girl he liked, but a part of a larger cause that needed protecting. She stood abruptly. “I need to get back to the others. We shouldn’t even have come to this time — it’s dangerous to interfere.”

“Wait.” He stood, but age had made him slower and she was already several steps away. “There’s something you should know.”

Her shoulders tensed. She just wanted to leave, for this whole night to end. She wanted to remember Bill as he’d been before, not this stranger.

“You told me that in order to fix the Break the Vikings had to be kept away from Normandy, right?” he asked.

Sera nodded without turning to face him. “If Siegfried went to Burgundy instead, then we did our job.”

“Siegfried recently changed his mind,” Bill said. “That’s why we’re here. Rollo’s trying to fight his way into Normandy by way of Chartres. But he lost the battle today —”

Sera spun toward him. “Dak said Rollo won Chartres. That’s why we came here.”

Bill shook his head. “We lost today, Sera. And this was Rollo’s last chance to get ahead of Siegfried.”

“We have a problem,” Dak said as soon as he saw Sera striding back into camp. She didn’t look happy to see him, but that had never stopped Dak before.

“If this is about cheese, so help me . . .”

“Rollo lost the battle today,” he said, keeping his voice low. Dak still couldn’t get over the changes in his Viking friend’s appearance. Where before he’d strode through camp with his wide shoulders thrown back and chin high, now he slumped forward on his stool, staring at the fire. Every now and again Vígi would nudge his hand with her nose and he’d smile down at her, but Dak knew that his defeat earlier today had been a crushing blow.

And it shouldn’t have happened. It wouldn’t have if Dak, Sera, and Riq hadn’t been mucking around in history. By getting Rollo involved, they’d practically ruined his life.

Dak glanced around the clearing and lowered his voice even more. “Rollo said the Franks have surrounded the hill. They’ve completely cut him off from water . . . and his ships. If they attack, he has no hope of fending them off.”

Riq strolled over just in time to hear this last bit. “Then I’d say now would be a fine time for us to fire up the Infinity Ring and catch the first warp out of here.”

“We can’t,” Sera said simply. For once Dak and Riq were on the same page as they both stared at her with confusion.

“Come again?” Riq asked, taking the words right out of Dak’s mouth.

Dak noticed Sera glancing over her shoulder to where Bill hovered around the edges of camp. “It’s worse than you realize,” she whispered.

“Worse than being sitting ducks for an army three times our size?” Dak asked.

She leveled her gaze at him and Dak’s stomach sank. He knew that expression. It was the same one she’d worn just before their fourth-grade science fair when she’d found out she wasn’t the only student who’d thought of using demotic technology to monitor household energy use.

“Siegfried’s marching on Normandy and there are other SQ Vikings behind him ready to take his place if he falls,” she said. “Rollo was headed there to try to stop them. But the Franks have this hill surrounded, and if he can’t find a way out, he won’t be able to confront Siegfried. And we’ll have failed to fix the Break.”

I
F THERE’S
one thing that always calmed Sera it was losing herself in the intricacies of physics. The world could be falling apart outside (and with all the earthquakes, tornadoes, and hurricanes roaring about it in the twenty-first century, it sometimes was) and she’d never notice. She’d always had the ability to focus in on problems with a laser-like precision and she hated nothing more than failing to come up with a proper solution.