Fallen in Love (4 page)

“Oh.” Shelby cleared her throat. Of course that was what he meant. “Yeah, good point.”

“What’s wrong?” Miles dipped the ladle into the well and held the cool cup of water up to Shelby’s lips. He stopped and wiped the edge clean with his sleeve, then held it out again.

Shelby felt herself blushing for no reason, so she closed her eyes and drank deeply, hoping she wouldn’t catch some sort of withering sickness and die. After she’d finished, she said, “Nothing.”

Miles dipped the ladle again and drank a big gulp, his eyes scanning the crowd.

“Look—” he said, dropping the ladle back into the bucket. He pointed behind Shelby to a raised platform
at the edge of the market stalls where three girls were huddled together, doubled over in fits of giggles. Between them was a tall pewter pot with a fluted rim. It looked old as dirt and pretty ugly, the kind of expensive “artwork” Francesca might have in her office at Shoreline.

“That must be Cupid’s Urn,” Miles said.

“Oh, yes, obviously. Cupid’s Urn.” Shelby nodded sarcastically. “What the heck does that mean? Wouldn’t Cupid have better taste?”

“It’s a tradition carried over from the classical days of Rome,” Miles said, going into scholarly mode as usual. Traveling with him was like carrying around an encyclopedia.

“Before Valentine’s Day was Valentine’s Day,” he went on, his voice tinged with excitement, “it was called Lupercalia—”

“Looper—” She waved a hand, working out a bad pun. Then she saw Miles’s expression. So earnest and sincere.

Registering her eyes on his face, he reached up instinctively to tug his baseball cap down over his eyes. His nervous habit. But his hands met only air.

He flinched as if embarrassed and tried to stuff his hand in his jeans pocket, but the coarse blue cloak covered his pants, so all he could do was cross his arms over his chest.

“You miss it, don’t you?” Shelby asked.

“What?”

“Your hat.”

“That old thing?” He shrugged too quickly. “Nah. Haven’t even thought about it.” He looked away, casting his eyes emptily around the square.

Shelby put her hand on his arm. “What were you saying about Looper … um, you know?”

His eyes flicked back to hers, dubious. “You really want to know?”

“Does the pope wear Prada?”

Now he smiled. “Lupercalia was really just a pagan celebration of fertility and the coming of spring. All the eligible women in the town would write their names on strips of parchment and drop them into the urn—like that one there. When the bachelors drew from the urn, whoever’s name they pulled out would be their sweetheart for the year.”

“That’s barbaric!” Shelby cried. No way was some urn going to tell her who to go out with. She could make her own mistakes, thank you.

“I think it’s sweet.” Miles shrugged, looking away.

“You do?” Shelby’s head swiveled back to him. “I mean, I guess it could be cool. But this urn tradition comes before the festival had anything to do with Saint Valentine, right?”

“Right,” Miles said. “Eventually the church got
involved. They wanted to bring the pagan celebration under their control, so they attached a patron saint. They did that a lot with old holidays and traditions. Like it wasn’t a threat if they owned it.”

“Typical males.”

“Now, in his life, the real Valentine was known as a defender of romance. People who couldn’t legally get married—soldiers, for instance—came to him from all over and he’d perform the ceremony in secret.”

Shelby shook her head. “How do you
know
all this stuff? Or rather,
why
?”

“Luce,” Miles said, not meeting Shelby’s eyes.

“Oh.” Shelby felt like someone had just stuffed a stiff fist into her gut. “You learned about the history of Valentine’s Day to impress
Luce
?” She kicked the dirt. “I guess some girls dig nerds.”

“No, Shelby. I mean”—Miles gripped her shoulders and pivoted her to face the platform with the urn. “It’s
Luce
. Right over there.”

Luce wore a light brown dress with a wide skirt. Her long black hair was braided into three thick plaits, held together with narrow white ribbons. Her skin looked paler than usual, with a frosty pink flush dotting her cheekbones. She was circling the urn in slow, meditative steps, standing apart from the other girls. In the chaos of the square, Luce seemed to be the only person who was alone. Her eyes had that soft, unfocused look they got when she was in the trance of her thoughts.

“Shelby—wait!”

Shelby was already halfway across the square, almost running toward Luce, when Miles clasped a tight hand around her wrist. He pulled her to a stop, and she turned, ready to lay into him.

Except his expression … 
glowed
with something Shelby couldn’t decipher.

“You know this is the Lucinda of the past. This girl is not our friend. She won’t
know
you—”

Shelby hadn’t thought about that. She pretended she had. She turned and took another hard look at Lucinda. Her hair was dirty—not greasy, but something beyond greasy, really
dirty
—one thing Luce Price would never abide. Her clothes fit her strangely, from Shelby’s modern standpoint, but Lucinda seemed comfortable in them. She seemed comfortable in everything, actually, which was also not very Luce Price. Shelby thought of Luce as chronically—though charmingly—maladjusted. It was one of the things she loved about Luce. But this girl? This girl seemed comfortable even in the desperate sadness saturating every movement she made. As if she was as accustomed to feeling glum as she was to the sun rising every day. Didn’t she have friends to cheer her up? Wasn’t that what friends were for?

“Miles,” Shelby said, grasping his free wrist in her own hand and leaning close. “I know we agreed to let Daniel find our Lucinda Price, but this girl is
still
the Lucinda we care about … or an earlier version of her.
And the least we can do is cheer her up. Look how bummed she is. Look.”

He bit his lip. “But—but—everything we’ve learned about Announcers says you shouldn’t mess with—”

“Hiii there!” Shelby said in a singsong, pulling Miles along until they arrived at Lucinda’s side. She didn’t know where the Southern belle accent had come from, other than hearing present-day Luce’s mom’s drawl at Thanksgiving back in Georgia. And she had no idea what people here in this medieval British world would make of her sounding like a Georgia deb, but it was too late now.

A few feet behind her, Miles shook his head in horror.
It was an accident!
Shelby told him with her eyes.

Lucinda hadn’t even noticed—that was how lost in sadness she was. Shelby had to step up right in front of her and wave a hand in her face.

“Oh,” Lucinda said, blinking at Shelby with no hint of recognition. “Good day.”

It shouldn’t have hurt Shelby’s feelings, but it did.

“H-haven’t we met before?” Shelby stammered. “I think my cousin from, er, Windsor knows an uncle on your father’s side of the family … or maybe it was the other way around.”

“I’m sorry, I don’t believe so, though perhaps—”

“You’re Lucinda, right?”

Lucinda started, and for a moment there was a familiar spark in her eyes. “Yes.”

Shelby pressed a hand to her heart. “I’m Shelby. This is Miles.”

“Such unique names. You must have traveled from the North?”

“Sure.” Shelby shrugged. “Very, very far north. So, we’ve never been to … ye olde Valentine’s Faire here before. Are you dropping your name in the urn?”

“Me?” Lucinda swallowed, touching the hollow of her throat. “The idea that a stroke of chance could decide my heart’s destiny does not appeal to me.”

“Spoken like a girl who’s got herself a studly boyfriend!” Shelby nudged Lucinda, forgetting they were strangers, forgetting that her words might be coarse and her sarcasm foreign to Lucinda’s medieval sensibilities. “I mean … is there a knight you fancy, lady?”

“I was in love,” Lucinda said somberly.

“Was?” Shelby repeated. “You mean
are
in love.”

“I was. But he’s gone.”

“Daniel
left
you?” Miles was red in the face. “I mean—what was his name?”

But Lucinda didn’t seem to have heard. “We met in the rose garden of his lord’s castle. I must admit that I was trespassing, but I had seen so many fine ladies come and go, and the gate was open, and the flowers so, so comely—”

She clasped her hands to her heart and sighed with deep regret.

“That first day, he mistook me for a girl of higher
stature. Of class. I had my best kirtle on, my hair woven with hawthorn flowers, as some ladies do. It did look fine, but I fear it was dishonest.”

“Oh, Lucinda,” Shelby said. “I’m sure you’re a lady in his eyes!”

“Daniel is a knight. He must marry a fitting lady. My family, we are common. My father is a free man, but he grows grain, just as his father did.” She blinked and a tear slid down her cheek. “I never even told my love my name.”

“If he loved you—and I’m sure he does—he’ll know your true name,” Miles said.

Lucinda shuddered as she took a breath. “Then, last week, as part of his knightly duty to the lord, he—he came by my father’s door to gather eggs for the lord’s Valentine feast. It was the anniversary of my christening. We were celebrating. To see my love’s face when he saw me in our meager home … I tried to stop him going, but he took his leave without a word. I’ve looked for him in all our secret places—the hollowed oak tree in the forest, the northern fringe of the rose garden at dusk—but I have not seen him since.”

Shelby and Miles shared a look. Obviously, Daniel didn’t care about what kind of family Lucinda came from. It was the anniversary—the fact that she was getting closer to the limits of her curse—that had spooked him. By now Shelby was familiar with the way Daniel
sometimes tried to pull away from Luce when he knew her death was near. He broke her heart to save her life. He was probably moping around somewhere, brokenhearted, too.

It had to be that way. This girl standing before Shelby had to die, maybe a hundred times before the lifetime when Shelby knew Luce—the lifetime when Luce got her first chance to break her curse.

It wasn’t fair. It wasn’t fair that she had to die again and again, and had to go through pain like this at so many moments in between. More than anyone, Lucinda deserved to be happy.

Shelby wanted to do something for Lucinda, even if it was something small.

She glanced at Miles again. He raised one eyebrow in a way Shelby hoped meant
Are you thinking what I’m thinking?
She nodded.

“This is only a big misunderstanding,” Shelby said. “We know Daniel.”

“You do?” Lucinda looked surprised.

“Tell you what: You go to the fair tomorrow, and I’m sure Daniel will be there, too, and you guys can just—”

Lucinda’s lip quivered, and she buried her face in Shelby’s shoulder as she began to weep. “I could not bear to see him draw another’s name from the urn.”

“Lucinda,” Miles said so warmly that the girl’s eyes
cleared and she looked at him in the intimate way Luce sometimes looked at him. It made Shelby strangely jealous. Shelby looked away as Miles asked, “You believe that Daniel truly loves you?”

Lucinda nodded.

“And in your heart,” Miles went on, “do you really believe that the connection you have with Daniel is so weak that your family’s position might sever the bond?”

“He—he does not have a choice. It is written in the Knights’ Code. He must marry a—”

“Luce! Don’t you know that your love is stronger than some dumb code?” Shelby blurted out.

Lucinda raised an eyebrow. “Come again?” she asked.

Miles shot Shelby a warning glance.

“I mean, erm … true love runs deeper and stronger than mere social niceties. If you love Daniel, then you must tell him how you feel.”

“I feel odd.” Lucinda was flushed, holding a hand over her breast. She closed her eyes, and for a moment Shelby thought she was going to burn up right then and there. Shelby took a step back.

But that wasn’t how it worked, was it? Luce’s curse had something to do with the way she and Daniel interacted, something his presence awakened in her.

“I want to believe that what you say is true. I do feel suddenly that our love is very strong.”

“Strong enough that if we brought Daniel to you at the festival tomorrow,” Shelby said, “you would go to him?”

Lucinda opened her eyes. They were wild and wide and brilliantly hazel. “I would go. I would go anywhere in the world to be with him again.”

“T
hat was brilliant!” Shelby cried when Lucinda had gone and she and Miles were alone at the well.

In the western sky, the sun’s rays had turned pale. Most of the citizens were making their way home, carts and satchels heavy with provisions for the evening’s supper. Shelby hadn’t eaten in a long time, but she hardly noticed the scents of roasting chicken and boiling potatoes in the air. She was running on the fumes of her excitement. “You and I were completely on the same page
back there. It was like I thought something, and you said it—like a crazy rhythm we got into!”