Page 27 of The Empire and the Wolf King

“It better hold me, I want a good night’s sleep after last night in a hayloft.”

He crawled onto the bed with it squeaking and straining under his weight and lay on his side near the wall.

I was sitting up. “I’m just so excited, Magnus, we had a plan, we fulfilled our plan. We could be rescued any day now. Tommy wrote the name of the inn we will be staying in tomorrow, what was it called?”

“The Oakhurst.”

“...and we… we will get there tomorrow…” I blinked. “Uh oh.”

He put his arm under his head. “Aye, we are in the wrong place, mo reul-iuil. It gives me pause.”

I nodded. “Right, yeah, when we said we would be in Charlottesville. We were not… we aren’t there. What if someone shows up to rescue us and we haven’t gotten there yet? How long does it take to get there?”

“Some hours, but afore ye ask, Kaitlyn, we canna go tonight.”

“How did you guess I was going to ask that?”

“Tis not, as Chef Zach would say, my first day at yer rodeo.”

I chuckled. “Yeah, but wecan’t? I mean, I know we can’t, we can’t travel at night…” I sighed deeply. “But we can make it there by tomorrow night?”

“Aye, we will leave first thing.”

“So if someone does go to get us there tomorrow we will be there, just in the evening, they will just hae to wait for us. They will probably wait for us, definitely. If they are coming.”

I lay down beside him so he was spooning me, my head resting on his bicep. “Now I’m kind of bummed, I didn’t really think about the fact that we were putting our location in the journal and that it wasn’t where we actually were.”

“Thomas looks tae be the kind of fella who will write in his journal where he met us.”

“So anyone who rescues us will know to check both places.”

“Aye.”

“So we could leave a message here, with the tavern host that we left and went to Charlottesville”

“That will be good.”

“Exactly, that will be good. It’s all good. But in that case we maybe could just stay here…? Seems like a lot can happen in a trip of many hours by carriage through Colonial Virginia. We could get lost, injured, waylaid in some way — maybe we should have just told Tommy that we were staying here.”

Magnus was very quiet, then he kissed my head behind my ear.

I asked, “Why don’t we just stay here?”

“Because this is a verra small village, just a junction really, an inn for travelers and not much else, tis nae fit tae be a place for us tae live.”

“Oh, in case…?”

“Aye, in case.”

“That’s depressing.”

He inhaled deeply and exhaled.

“So we might be here, in the year 1775 for a while?”

“We ought tae plan for it.” He kissed my hair again.

“Without the kids, without our friends, without anything?”

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