My Own True Love (35 page)

She took her gaze from the press to look at him. "I was wondering," she said, "if there's any way we could make that thing look inconspicuous."

He lifted his eyebrows questioningly. "Inconspicuous? Like a piece of very uncomfortable furniture, perhaps?"

"Yeah." She gave him a teasing smile. "Think we can find enough flowered chintz to make a really big slipcover?"

He didn't want to answer her; he wanted to kiss her, but the soldiers smashed down the storeroom door before he had the chance to do either.

"This is another fine mess
you've gotten me into."

Lewis brought her hand to his lips and kissed the tips of her fingers. One of the men guarding them snorted derisively at the gesture. "I'm sorry," he told Sara. "I am so sorry."

On the other side of the throne room the British ambassador was talking very fast. Grand Duke Alexander was sprawled on his throne, looking more bored than anything else. The walls were lined with the duke's well-armed German mercenaries. The mercenaries' attention was on Lewis and her. Neither Captain Rudeseko nor any of his men were anywhere in sight. Things did not look good for them, Sara had to admit.

She turned a gentle smile on her husband. "It's only an old joke," she told him. "I didn't mean to make you feel guilty." Despite their dangerous situation, she found herself yawning tiredly. "Long night."

"I am guilty," Lewis said. "Sir Horace isn't going to talk him out of executing us."

"Probably not," she agreed. "You know, it wasn't supposed to end like this," she mused. "The legends say Sara and Lewis lived to a ripe old age and had many children."

"Legends lie," he answered. "A pity the officer who arrested us recognized both of us. Now we've both been accused of spying and Sedition."

"Well, at least we're guilty of it," Sara said with a cheerful grin. She didn't feel cheerful, but Lewis was taking this thing far too seriously. Okay, so they were going to get executed, but she didn't want him to die thinking it was his fault. She jerked a thumb at the mad duke. "He was going to have me executed for giving one bad show. Now that is a bad review. If I'm going to get killed I want it to be for something I can be proud of. Not that I want to get killed at all."

"Of course you don't."

She'd almost forgotten about the ring. She wondered if there was anything it could do to get them out of it.

"Think about it," the ring answered in its usual annoying, cryptic way.

"If I'd known it would come to this six months ago . . ." Lewis's voice trailed off with a sigh. He kissed her hand again. "If I'd believed in you, us, sooner ... I love you. Now I'm going to lose you."

"Six months," she said as she touched his cheek. "Has it only been six months? Then again, it hardly seems like any time at all since I wished to meet my own true love." Six months? Something teased at the back of her mind.

"It was a bad wish," he said. "I wish you'd wished something else. You'd be safe now."

"But I wouldn't have met you." She made a face. "This is the most disgustingly mushy romantic conversation I have ever heard."

It was Lewis's turn to give a cheerful grin. "People who wish to meet their own true love shouldn't complain when they end up having romantic conversations with them."

"Under trying circumstances," she added, looking around the throne room again.

The danger was thick enough to cut with a knife. Duke Alexander was on his feet. Sir Horace, called out of his bed to defend the British government against charges of spying, had stepped away from the throne. Several officers had taken his place. Without looking at them, the duke pointed at where she and Lewis were standing. The officers bowed and came toward them.

"It don't look good, hon," she said.

He followed her gaze. "You do have a gift for understatement, my dear."

Orders were given; men surrounded them. Lewis's fingers were tightly woven with hers as they were hustled from the throne room. Dawn lit the sky as they were led outdoors. Sara was exhausted, frightened, distracted, but the cold blast of the winter air brought her fully alert. They were taken to the square in front of the palace and made to stand before a wall. The surface of the wall was pitted with bullet marks.

Sara saw the evidence of other executions and gulped hard. "Oh, dear."

"Stand here," the officer in charge ordered. A half dozen soldiers with rifles were lining up not more than ten feet from where they stood.

"Think they'll miss from that distance?" she asked when Lewis waved away the offer of blindfolds. She heard the effort to remain calm in the high pitch of her voice.

"Highly unlikely," he answered, voice equally strained. How did one say good-bye in such circumstances? Lewis wondered. "I feel that I've hardly had time to say hello," he told the woman he loved. At least they weren't tied, not that he supposed her dying with her hand in his was much comfort for her.

"Time," Sara said, voice distant and thoughtful. "Time. Six months." She looked at him. For some reason her eyes were lit with hope.

Her expression was almost enough to make him believe she'd found a way out of this totally desperate situation. He ignored the noises of the firing squad loading their guns as he gazed at her. "What?" he whispered.

"I think I got it."

"What?" he repeated.

Sara didn't know whether to groan with frustration or giggle with relief, not that she had time to do either. Time. Six months. "What's the date?" she asked Lewis.

He looked confused, then thoughtful, then answered, "February twenty-fourth, I believe."

She punched the air with her fist, just as the firing squad raised their guns to their shoulders. "Yes!"

"Sara?"

"You know,"
she had said to Mala, "/
wish I had six months free to do the research about what
really happened. I'd start in London and go all the way to Bororavia. Follow their trail and find
out what really happened."

That had been her first wish,
not
meeting her own true love. She just hadn't known it was a wish when she made it. But the ring had. The ring had granted it.

Well, she'd found out exactly what had happened all right. "It's been exactly six months," she said.

"Not exactly six," the ring responded.

"Close enough," she argued. "Are you going to help me? Or are you going to split hairs while we get shot?"

"Sara?" Lewis asked anxiously.

Nearby, the officer in charge said, "Ready."

"I suppose we could take different time zones into consideration."

"I think we'd better." She looked at Lewis. "Don't worry," she told him. "How about the kid?" she asked the ring.

"He'll be fine."

"Aim."

Him, huh? She gave a satisfied smile. "We're going to have a boy," she told Lewis.

"Oh, God!" His words were a strangled whisper of pain. He grabbed her in a tight embrace.

Looking up into his anguished face Sara said, "Don't panic." She touched his beard-stubbled cheek.

"Don't worry. It'll be fine. Hit it," she said to the ring.

A nanosecond later the whole world was yanked away from her. Correction, she was yanked out of it.

Sara went limp in Lewis's arms at the same instant the commander shouted, "Fire!"

******************

The first difference she noticed was the temperature. It felt as if she'd been tossed out of a freezer into an oven. "More like out of the frying pan into the fire," Sara said as she opened her eyes in Mala's tent.

"Was that all a dream?" she wondered as she looked around.

"No, it wasn't." The acid voice of the ring rang in her head.

Sara sighed, and wiped a hand across her sweat-beaded forehead. "Good," she said with a fond smile for all the memories she'd brought back from six months in the past. She stood, then swayed and almost fell back onto the pile of colorful pillows. Her body did not feel at all as she remembered. She felt big and clumsy and not at all like herself. "Okay," she said to the ring. "Where do we start?"

"I'm not allowed to tell," it answered sheepishly.

"Oh, for crying out loud!"

She could hear the noise and laughter from the Renaissance Faire outside the tent. She had returned to the same twentieth-century afternoon she had left, probably only a few moments before. She dismissed the sounds and world beyond the tent walls without a second thought. She wasn't in the least bit tempted to walk out of the tent and return to the life she had known. She had to get back to Lewis. Before he was executed.

"I'm not in the mood to put up with any 'magic is complicated' technobabble from you."

"I can't help it!" the ring answered in a metallic shout. "That's the way I was made. You've got to figure the next part out for yourself. It is fairly simple," it added in haughty challenge.

Sara looked at the ring, and noticed her square, short-fingered hands instead. She had never liked her hands. "I wish I still looked like the other me," she said wistfully. A moment later, after a shriveling blast of pain that drove her to her knees, she did.

While she was still trying to catch her breath, the ring said, "Next?"

Sara's aching head cleared at the question. She threw back her head and laughed. "Of course! I made a wish. It's still August twenty-fourth here. I can wish for anything I want!" She held her hand up so that the orange stone caught light coming in from the roof of the tent. "I wish for you to bring Lewis into the future. Right here, right now."

"Sorry. I can't do that."

"What!"

"It has to do with transmigration of souls," the ring explained. "Try again."

"Why are you giving me trouble?"

"I'm doing the best I can. Try using your brain. Hint—does the word 'anomaly' have any meaning for you?"

"Anomaly? Anomaly." What was the ring talking about? Wasn't time traveling to a former incarnation anomaly enough? No, she corrected herself, that wasn't anomalous; it was just plain crazy. "Okay, so what anomaly are we talking about here?"

"I can't tell you."

"Twenty questions with a magic ring." She folded her hands together and tried to remain calm. "I can do that," she said. "What happened in the past that was an anomaly? What the heck's an anomaly, anyway? An irregularity. Something weird you can't explain." She shrugged. "Plenty of things like that happened back in the past."

"Such as—?"

"Well, take the guitar," she began thoughtfully. "How come she stole a guitar when a guitar was just what I needed? And where do you suppose Sara found a guitar perfect for these little hands?"

"Good questions. Where do you think?"

The exasperation in the metallic voice in her head triggered the obvious realization. Sara slapped her palm against her forehead. "I'm the one who gave me the guitar? No way!"

"Way," the ring insisted.

Sara hugged herself and laughed. "But? . . . Why? ..."

"Rules of magic won't allow you to interfere in history directly. You have to be subtle about it. You have to direct things from behind the scenes."

"The rules of magic are a pain in the butt," Sara said.

"Tell me about it. Shall we get started?"

"But... how?" Sara asked.

The ring sighed dramatically. "It requires your being in two places at once, more or less, that's all."

"That's all?"

"Piece of cake. While the you that lives in 1811 is traveling through Europe, the you from right now moves around in time, providing yourself with the things you'll need."

"Oh." She didn't understand it. She wasn't going to try.

Sara got to her feet. What should she do first? Get back to the past, she supposed. "How about," she said to the ring, "I make a blanket wish for you to give me stuff and take me where I need to go without having to waste any more time with this twenty-question game?"

"Very good," the ring replied in its usual sarcastic way. "Consider it done."

Maybe it sounded sarcastic, but she could tell by the way her finger tickled that the ring was pleased with her suggestion. "Okay. London. August twenty-four, 1811. I need to see a man about a guitar."

******************

Startled, Sara looked down, to discover that while her body had changed, she was still wearing her twentieth-century clothes, leggings under a very long, loose red T-shirt. "It's a moose," she said.

"Oh." Evan shook his head and walked away.

Sara was glad the old man hadn't asked for any further enlightenment. She wondered if she should have the ring give her more appropriate clothes, but then decided defiantly against it. Somehow, a Rocky-and-Bullwinkle T-shirt seemed like the perfect attire for this escapade.

"Where to next?" she asked the ring.

The next moment she was standing in the kitchen garden behind a tall, imposing house. She looked around quickly. "Nobody around. Where are we?" She was holding something, a key. "Oh. This must be Lewis's dad's place." Sara chuckled. "You mean the key wasn't really hidden under a rock at the bottom of the stairs?" The burglary had seemed awfully easy, come to think of it.

"It will be in a moment. Hurry up."

Sara gave another cautious look around, then knelt at the bottom of the stairs and worked loose the stone she'd found the key under when she and Toma had come here—uh, would find when they came here tomorrow night.

"What next?" she asked when the key was safely hidden.

"Guess."

Sara sat back on her heels while the sun beat down on her head and the rank London air filled her nostrils. "What do you mean, guess? I thought you were going to cooperate."

"I am. But why should I do all the work?"

The ring was out to drive her crazy. It
always
had been. She knew it. She closed her eyes and thought. What next? What other anomaly had she encounter— "Got it!" she said as she popped up off the ground. "France. The crossroads—with a little Eric Clapton as background music, if you please."