The Rose of the Heptarchy

Chapter 1 Ella Mitchell would always remember that gloomy November morning, because it was the day her life was completely rewritten. As a curator of medieval manuscripts and artifacts at the Metropolitan Museum in New York, she had long grown accustomed to moving between climate-controlled display cases and dust-filled archives. But that day, she stood on the distinctive chalk hills of southwestern England, while gusts of cold wind whipped at the temporary tent next to her, making it flap loudly. Her colleague, Thomas Gray—a heavily bearded archaeologist from the University of London—paced excitedly around the edge of the dig pit, but Ella’s gaze was locked on the stone tablet that had just been fully unearthed at the bottom. The stone stood about five feet tall, carved from a single block of blue-gray sandstone. Its surface was scarred by time, yet the runes carved into it remained miraculously clear. They were Anglo-Saxon futhorc, an English writing system she had studied for nearly ten years. Each groove retained a nearly violent force, as if whoever carved them had not been recording something, but casting a spell. “Seventh century, probably religious in nature,” Thomas said behind her, his voice thick with academic greed. “But these runes have never appeared on a similar stone before. Ella, look at this repeating symbol—what is it?” “It appears very frequently, like someone’s name.” Ella knelt beside the stone, pulled off her right glove, and involuntarily reached out her fingertip. That recurring symbol looked like a pair of empty eyes, calling her touch. She had handled ancient objects for over a decade and had touched things far older than this, yet none had ever made her feel so uneasy—as if something inside the stone was breathing slowly. “Careful!” Thomas shouted, as if he had just noticed something, but Ella’s fingertip had already landed on the symbol. The instant her skin touched the ancient groove, a tremor like an electric current passed from the stone into her arm and shot straight to her heart. All the symbols on the stone suddenly burst with blinding white light, like dozens of tiny lightning bolts exploding at once. Ella vaguely heard Thomas’s terrified cry, but the sound was instantly swallowed by a massive roar. She felt her body float upward, as if it no longer belonged to her, then plunge downward, swept into a vortex with no up or down or left or right—only endless spinning and color. During the fall, countless images flashed before her eyes: villages consumed by flames, armored knights on horseback, blood splashing on stone steps, a pair of gray-blue eyes staring directly at her—then she lost consciousness, and everything went dark. … Consciousness returned slowly and painfully. Hearing came first: the low whistle of wind passing over grass, distant blasts of a horn, and the snorting of some heavy creature. Then touch—cold and damp, like lying on a sponge just pulled from a freezer. Ella struggled to pry open her eyelids; her lashes were nearly glued together by dried tears and mud. She lay in wild grass. A few stinging nettles pressed against her cheek, and her palm rested in a puddle of icy water. A strong odor—mixing livestock dung, wet wool, and wood smoke—poured into her nostrils, making her dry-heave. She swayed into a sitting position, and the coarse linen material of her clothes made a harsh rubbing sound. She looked down—she was wearing an undyed linen dress with a roughly sewn, crooked neckline, covered by a short woolen cloak fastened at her left shoulder with a sharpened wooden pin. Her skin had grown rough, her nails were packed with black dirt, and a pale old scar had appeared on the back of her left hand that she had never had before. What got her heart tighten even more was that the silver ring her mother had left her, the one on her right ring finger, was gone. “This is impossible…” she rasped, her voice sounding strange even to herself. She staggered to her feet, her bare lower calves exposed, the rough skirt hem sweeping across the nettles and leaving a stinging itch. But that pain brought a bizarre sense of reality—she was not dreaming. She hurriedly touched her face and hair. The features were still hers, but her once carefully maintained shoulder-length hair was now much longer, dry and tangled, falling to her waist with bits of grass mixed in. Her body seemed thinner, her cheekbones sharp and prominent. She could not tell whether this was still her original body, or if her consciousness had somehow been placed inside a medieval woman’s body. Pieces of memory suddenly rushed back: the stone, the symbol, the white light, the fall. That frequently appearing symbol. As a trained scholar, Ella’s first instinct was to look for a scientific explanation, but everything she saw tore apart all reason. She bit her lip hard; the blood tasted sweet and metallic, utterly real. She forced herself to lift her head and study her surroundings. The leaden sky hung heavy, bearing down as though it might unleash a cold rain at any moment. At the edge of the wild grassland where she stood, a crudely plowed field stretched, the earth turned in uneven furrows, faint traces of the three-field system still visible in the soil. A few dirty sheep grazed in the distance, their ribs showing through coarse, scraggly fleeces—the small, unimproved breed of the medieval period. About half a mile away, a massive timber structure rose atop a gentle slope, its frame built from thick oak logs, its roof thatched. As was typical, a tall wooden palisade and encircling ditch surrounded it. From its peak flew a dark blue banner embroidered with a golden griffin rampant—a heraldic design that appeared to belong to ancient Wessex. Below the structure on the slope, a dozen or so thatched wooden huts clustered together, a few wisps of smoke escaping through gaps in the walls and quickly torn apart by the wind. On the muddy paths, tiny figures moved like ants—men in short tunics and leg bindings, women with baskets balanced on their heads. No power lines, no rumble of engines, only the wind, the bleating of sheep, and the faint clang of a blacksmith coming from somewhere far away. Medieval England. Perhaps the early eighth century, the time of the seven kingdoms, maybe? Ella couldn’t pinpoint the exact, but as a curator, she recognized that the cut of the clothing, the style of the buildings, even the farming marks in the field all matched the world she had studied for years in illuminated manuscripts and tapestries. She had been thrown alive into the era she had once only glimpsed through glass display cases. Panic finally flooded her limbs like ice water bursting through a dam. She spun around sharply, searching in every direction for any c***k of light, any flash of a symbol, even the slightest anomaly that could take her back. But there was only endless wilderness and howling cold wind. The stone was not here—it might be hundreds of miles away, or it might lie buried for another dozen centuries before Thomas’s shovel unearthed it. She was trapped.