The Guardian by Diana Knightley
Fifty-four - Kaitlyn
Ireturned to the sitting room, sat on a couch and my kids curled up on and beside me. I kissed both their foreheads and held them close.
“What are we going to do about Da?” asked Archie.
“There is nothing to do but wait. He has to have surgery and while he does, we are going to hold onto each other and be gentle with each other because we might be scared. We might cry, we might feel angry, and we will pray that he will be all better when it’s over. Does that sound good?”
“Aye,” he said. Then he said, “I’m hungry.”
“Me too.” There were trays of food on a table at the side of the sitting room. Plain white bread sandwiches and cut veggies and dips for the kids, plus plain potato chips.
Zach grumbled, “It tastes like food from the eighteenth century, I wanted something special.”
Emma said, “Like what?”
“I don’t know, a cookie bar, or like, spaghetti carbonara, or... could’ve been ice cream.”
Quentin had his head back on the couch. “Can’t have ice cream until Magnus is out of surgery.”
I asked, “Hayley, when are you and Quentin going to leave?”
“Hammond is gathering supplies. I want to go, but he told us to eat something and get some rest while he’s organizing our supplies for the trip.”
Beaty went to the table and returned to the couch with a cola poured into a glass with ice. “I am verra excited tae drink this, but remember when I was verra sick from it? The first time I ever jumped?”
I said, “I remember it so well, you drank that whole gigantic Coke and then you heaved all over and—”
Beaty clapped a hand over her mouth. “Daena say it, Queen Kaitlyn, ye will get me started again and it has been a long time with nae good food. I want tae keep it all inside.”
“Did you bring Mookie? Is he okay?”
“Aye, we were able tae bring him with us. He was terribly frightened but he is goin’ tae be fine now. They winna allow me tae bring him in the hospital though, tis a shame, I am sure ye want tae see him.”
“I do desperately.”
I watched the door, it would probably be hours before we knew anything, at least two. Ben was spider-monkey-asleep on Zach’s lap. Zoe was asleep in Emma’s arms.
Beaty was beside me cross-legged, a plate of food in front of her. James at the end of the couch, staring into space, his eyebrows knit, deep thinking.
“How you doing, James?”
“Not good, she was pulled away from me, I didn’t... I keep reliving it.”
“There are so many moments like that. I’m sorry.”
I looked down at Archie, rubbing his eyes trying to stay awake, and Isla tucked against my side, her mouth open, deep sleeping, drooling.
I whispered, “We have our apartments. You could all go up there, it’s just a different floor.”
James said, “You forgot we blew out a whole section of the building with the helicopter when we were rescuing Magnus.”
“Oh shit. That feels like a long time ago. It still happened?”
He said, “Yes indeed.”
“I’m sure there are a ton of other guest rooms though, with the royal residence exploded and the recent war, I doubt there are many visitors.”
Emma said, “We don’t need a room, not yet. I can’t leave this room until I know how Magnus is.”
“Thank you... as soon as I offered I kind of regretted it. I don’t really want to be alone.”
Emma said, “That’s the thing about having a big family, you’re never alone.”
“True.” I leaned my head back on the pillows. “But oh man, I was so alone in Los Angeles...” I glanced down to see that Archie was sleeping and then I told them the story again, more, longer and detailed. I told them about the hotel and Lady Mairead’s rooms, and her well-laid plan that had been a pile of horse poop before I even walked into the restaurant. I had to answer Zach’s questions about the restaurant and the food, and then the play-by-play of what went wrong: everything, literally everything went wrong. Then finally about how I killed Sir Padraig and rescued Lady Mairead and the young pregnant woman and then escaped through the streets of Hollywood. By then almost everyone was asleep except Zach, Emma, Hayley, James, and Quentin — we were whispering in the darkened room.
James said, “And you never saw Lady Mairead, the first or the second one, again?”
“I don’t know where she went. I took her vessel. She said she had one in New York—”
Quentin said, “Did she say it was in a closet in a house on the Upper East Side?”
“Yeah, I never heard of it before, how did you know?”
“Magnus started talking about it the other day.”
I shrugged. “Looks like I’ve got more real estate. What’s worrisome though is I’ve got a Lady Mairead situation, possibly two of them.” I stared off into space. “Unless… unless she knew she was dangerously looping, she did seem very cavalier about it. Maybe she purposely left so there wasn’t a chance of looping with herself.”
Hayley said, “She left you stranded?”
“Nah, she left me with a pisspoor plan, a terrible situation, and barely a chance of survival, but she didn’t leave me stranded. She told me exactly where the vessel was.”
James shook his head. “That lady is something else.”
“True.”
Quentin said, “I can’t believe you shot Sir Padraig.”
“I scratched his face too. Wish there had been a YouTube video of that one, I was pretty proud of it. Magnus taught me what to look for; I saw my moment and took it. And Hayley, I even used that jump-on-the-table move we practiced.”
Hayley said, “That is so badass, I forgive you for everything.”
“Yeah, if ever a murder deserved a complete wipe-clean of all the bad I’ve done, it would be that one.”
James said, “That shit was self-defense. And I can’t believe you scratched his face. I always said, don’t cross Katie.”
I said, “That mofo crossed me hard.” We all chuckled.
James said, “I need to go, I need to be doing something productive. Mind if I head down to help Hammond?”
Quentin said, “That’s probably a good idea.”
James left.
Hayley said, “How is he going to find her?”
I said, “I don’t know. Maybe she can get us a message somehow... but would she even know how to do that? Or why?”
I stared off considering impossibilities. “You would have to understand the future to know how to send a message, I don’t think she’d be able to, we just have to find her, make lists of possible places.”
Hayley said, “Hope she stays put and waits.”
“Yep.”
Emma said, “Maybe if we research from here, look for her.”
There weren’t shifting images on these walls, because it was a hospital waiting room, but... “All I have to do is ask.”
One of the shifting images projected on the far wall, almost as if it read my mind. “Yes, Queen Kaitlyn?”
“I need to find someone, a Sophie Cook, Scotland in 1707.”
“I have a wedding record for Sophie Cook, married to James Cook in 1706.”
“Do you have any other record of Sophie Cook, after 1706?”
A moment later, “No, there is no record of Sophie Cook after 1706.”
“What about before 1706, like between 1552 and 1710?”
“There is no record of a Sophie Cook between those years, Sophie was formerly named Sophie Campbell and then Sophie Milne, wife of the Astronomer—”
“Yeah yeah, that’s not that helpful.” I sighed. “We don’t know what her name would be, or what... wait, what is her birthdate? That would help.”
“I have no birthdate for Sophie Campbell later Milne and then Cook. Usually this is because of poor record keeping in those centuries.”
I grumbled, “True, or she was born in a different century, and you’re not being smart enough.”
Beaty, her eyes wide, said, “She could be from any century if ye think on it.”
Hayley said, “Yes, that’s a whole consideration—”
Beaty said, “What if she is related tae one of us?“
Quentin said, ”She might be, but more likely she isn’t, there are a lot of people in the world.”
She nodded. “Aye, but nae time travelers. I daena think there are many of those.”
Emma said, “I’ll start looking tomorrow.”
Zach said, “Now we’re here, I really hope we can go back to Florida. I missed it.”
Quentin acted incredulous. “I’ve been running votes for months, and you wouldn’t vote with me. We might have done this earlier.”
Zach said, “But that would have meant going against the boss. I’m not going against Magnus.”
We all looked at each other and sighed.
I said, “He’s going to be fine, right? I mean, what happened? Same as before?”
Quentin said, “Yeah, the same as before, but also, there was something really scary about it, like — I don’t know if we noticed how weak he had gotten. Before it was as if a healthy man had his heart stop, now it was like he was weak and it was just ending for him.”
Zach said, “It was chilling.”
I said, “We had a horrible fight about it just a few nights ago. I wanted to do something, he was worried about all of us. I wasn’t okay with that, I felt desperate. Then Lady Mairead sent the the message and I just had to go try something else.”
Hayley joked, “Once you set your mind to something...”
“Yep, I’m relentless. It’s one of my biggest failings. Everyone knows it. But also, I killed that guy who was menacing us.”
Quentin chuckled. “Are you going to say that all the time?”
“I might get it printed on a T-shirt. Maybe a new family motto. It could be a coat of arms. It could say ‘Campbell’ with sea grass and a sword, maybe a heart, the word ‘time’ in Gaelic, what would that be, Beaty?”
Beaty said, “It would be ùine, but ye might want tae hae it say Tempus Omegas, like the vessels.”
“Ooh, that’s a good idea. Then under it a motto: ‘I killed that guy who was menacing us.’”
Hayley said, “I like it, nice and threatening like all good family shields should be, but maybe a little too serial killer sounding, maybe it should be like time jumping.”
I said, “Or ‘entangled’.”
I took another bite of my sandwich. “But he is going to be okay, right?”
Zach said, “Of course he is. He’s at the royal hospital, the royal physicians are working on him. He’s going to be fine.”
A look passed between him and Quentin and my heart sank to my toes.
Zach joked, “I miss Eamag already.”
Emma laughed. “That was one of our more interesting friendships in our year in the past.”
“Who would have thought I’d have so much in common with an old lady who was born mid-seventeenth century?”
Emma asked, “Did you have a lot in common with her? From my standpoint, it looked like a lot of arguing.”
He said, “True, there was a lot of arguing. I really miss having a fucking kitchen all to myself.”
We had a long pause.
I adjusted Archie because he was heavy on my side, but the good kind. I had been without him enough of my life that I never begrudged his sleeping against me. Soon enough it would be gone, he would have grown out of it.
Tears welled up in my eyes. “What would I do without Magnus?”
“You don’t have to think about it, it’s not going to happen,” said Quentin. Then he joked, “Who am I kidding though, I can’t live without him, either.”
Zach said, “He’s the greatest goddamn thing that ever happened to me.”
“More than Emma?”
“If it hadn’t been for Magnus, Emma would have left me years ago. It was that stability, the fact that someone trusted me the way Magnus did, that got me to grow up.”
Quentin said, “Yeah, me too. I would probably be mall security right now, riding around on a Segway, harassing kids for gathering in groups of more than three.”
The house manager, Marie, entered, “Your Highness, I have some guest rooms made up, enough for everyone, I think.”
“Thank you. Can you find some changes of clothes? I know we need to be fresher than this to be in a hospital.”
“I’ll see what I can find.” She bowed out of the room, something I would need to get used to again.
* * *
Hammond and James returned.
“I have the supplies ready for your trip. There are plenty of weapons, I urge you to remain on guard, and to go fast, once the vessels are out of the cave anything could happen, you ought to have an army with you, but that in itself would be dangerous.”
Quentin said, “We’ll go fast.”
Hayley jumped from her seat. “We’ll definitely go fast.”
To me she said, “I’m going to go get Fraoch, we’ll be back tomorrow. Sorry I won’t be here right now.”
I said, “I understand, you need to go get him, I’ll see you tomorrow.”
She air kissed us all since there were so many sleeping people in the group. Then they left. Quentin saying, “Tell Boss as soon as he wakes up that I won the vote, I knew I would eventually.”
And then Hayley, Quentin, and James left to go look for Sophie and relieve Fraoch from his watch.