But lots more important stuff to focus on right now, namely the way Lowri was shaking her head and sighing into her pint.
“No, poor dove never did find out what it was he’d been sent back to do, so he was stuck here. Not in Tywyll—think he eventually moved to London or summat, maybe Cardiff—but out of his own time.”
The cider and the fire and Bowen’s elbow patches had done a good job of warming Tamsyn up from that freezing ride in the rain, but now a new kind of chill seeped in, one that twisted her stomach.
“He got . . . stuck?” she asked, and Lowri nodded, licking the Guinness mustache from her upper lip.
“Aye. That’s the thing with time travel. You only have a certain window to get back.” The old woman leaned in closer, smelling like an odd mix of woodsmoke, lavender oil, and mothballs. “When did the two of you arrive?”
“Last night,” Bowen answered, his voice rough, and Tamsyn felt that odd, disorienting sensation again, like the ground was sliding out from underneath her.
Less than a day. And yet somehow, everything was different now.
Bowen’s eyes briefly met hers, and Tamsyn hoped he thought her cheeks were pink from the fire.
Or from trying not to wheeze to death in all this smoke.
Lowri nodded and said, almost to herself, “Yule, I’d bet. Just a few nights away, and magic loves that kind of deadline. A solstice, a ritual, a moon phase. Yes, if I had to guess, I’d say the two of you need to figure out why you were sent back here lest you want to stay in 1932 forever.”
Tamsyn sat up in her chair, the cider suddenly sour in her mouth. “Wait, 1932? I thought this was 1957.”
Lowri paused, looking up toward the dim ceiling of the pub before nodding and fiddling with those beads again. “Oh, aye, that’s right. I get my years mixed up all the time.”
She laughed merrily at that while Tamsyn gave her a kind of sickly smile in return and Bowen scowled into his Guinness.
Great, they’d found one person who might be able to help them with this whole time travel problem, and she mixed up her years.
“We were sent back with some kind of spell,” Bowen told her. “Or at least we think that’s what it was. A witch—one of the Merediths in our time—was wearing a brooch, a piece of jewelry called Y Seren. Do you know anything about that?”
Now it was Lowri’s turn to frown. “The Star?” she translated. “No, no, can’t say I’ve ever heard of any jewel like that, but I’ll look through my books and such back at the cottage. I live just at the end of the high street in the other direction. Right before you get to the woods. You two come see me in a day or so, I might have something for you then. But for now, Sir Bedivere and I need to be getting home. Gets dark early this time of year, you know.”
“Sir Bedivere?” Tamsyn echoed as the old woman got up, and Lowri nodded toward the door of the pub.
It was hard to see through all the smoke, but there, just by the row of pegs where patrons could hang up their coats, was a large basket, and in that basket, a black cat stared back at the three of them with bright yellow-green eyes.
“He’s a right love,” Lowri told them, “but a devil when he wants to be. Fathered half the cats in this village, I think.”
“He doesn’t . . . talk, does he?” Bowen asked, and Tamsyn stared at him, because even for Bowen, that was a bizarre question.
But Lowri only laughed again. “Cor, that would be something, wouldn’t it? A talking cat! Would love to hear what Sir Bedivere would have to say.”
“You wouldn’t,” Bowen told her, and once again, Tamsyn stared at him, hoping she was telegraphing with her eyes, Are you having a stroke?
But Lowri didn’t seemed fazed, only shrugged as she set her now empty glass down on the table and made her way to the door. “I mean it,” she said, pointing one wizened finger at them. “Figure out why it is you’re here, fix it, and do it fast. The solstice is just a few days away, and I’d bet Sir Bedivere himself that’s your deadline.”
A few days.
A few days to get Harri and Elspeth back together, or she was going to be stuck in the 1950s forever.
With Bowen.
Okay, admittedly, the idea of that wasn’t so terrible, but the rest of it? How was she supposed to live in a time when she wouldn’t even be able to get a credit card in her own name? Or buy a house? Or be able to watch the next season of Below Deck?
No, not happening.
Which meant—
She turned back to Bowen as Lowri was leaving, but he held up a hand. “I know,” he said. “Parent Trap.”
“Parent Trap,” she confirmed, and, with that, finished off her cider and headed for the door.
Bowen plucked both their jackets off the pegs by the door, and they stepped out into the cold twilight.
She wasn’t wearing a watch, but Tamsyn would have guessed it was late afternoon, so it was disorienting to see it already so dark.
“Sun goes down early this time of year in these parts,” Bowen told her, flipping up the collar of his coat. It had stopped raining, but it was even colder now, the air biting. “Worst part of winter, if you ask me. Looking up before teatime and seeing the sky already dark.”
“Well, the worst part of this winter is that our bikes are gone,” Tamsyn told him, pointing to the now empty space in front of the hedge.
How were there bike-thieving hooligans in this tiny village in 1957? Wasn’t the whole point of the past supposed to be that it was safer and people didn’t lock their doors and all that?
Bowen stared at the empty hedge, then heaved a sigh that seemed to come from the bottoms of his feet. “Well, this’ll be a pleasant walk,” he muttered, and then, hands still shoved in the pockets of his mackintosh, he offered one elbow to Tamsyn.
She took it, giving a sigh of her own, and the two of them headed back up the high street as it turned into the winding road through the forest back toward Tywyll House.
“At least it isn’t raining now,” she told him, but that was cold comfort—literally—when it was freezing and getting dark, and they were about to walk through an almost certainly Haunted Forest to get back to a house where they had a few days to make two people who were currently fighting like two hissing cats trapped in a burlap sack fall in love.
“Are you all right?” Bowen asked, looking down at her with a concerned frown.
