She Owns the Knight Read Online Free PDF Page A

“Nay.”
    She’d find one up at the castle. She’d call the police and they could try and make sense out of everything that had happened to her. Maybe they’d have a laugh at her expense as she tried to explain the wild things that had occurred. Maybe everyone in the area knew what was going on here and she’d look like an idiot. But surely they’d escort her back to her car? Or find it, if it had been stolen?
    Relaxing a little now that she had a plan, she swayed with the horse as they went through the small village, full of busy adults and playing children. Simply built cottages lined the streets. Some looked to be businesses, displaying wares. Animal pens clustered between dwellings, filled with noisy, smelly, pigs, goats, cows, and sheared sheep. Plowed fields and pastures with people working them surrounded the village, but Gillian couldn’t see any farm equipment.
    She spied a river and a pond, and what looked to be a mill. A man pounded metal in one of the buildings, and smoke poured from a chimney in the middle of the structure. Several paths led from the village to the castle.
    As Gillian and the knight passed, everyone stopped what they were doing to stare. She looked back, wondering if she should call out for help, wondering if she needed help, only most of these people didn’t look as if they would, bowing and dipping as the entourage moved by.
    Every person was dressed in medieval clothing. The women in loose dresses with their hair covered, the men in belted tunics and tight pants. Most of the children were barefoot. Could this simply be a new style in England?
    She gazed up at the castle dominating the landscape, again searching for differences, but nothing had changed since the last time she’d looked. She’d stared at the ruin for hours while she’d sketched. There was the turret in the correct location. The parapets. The bay windows. The tower. Did they make identical castles back in medieval times? Sort of like medieval tract housing without the subdivisions? Cheaper to make the same type over and over again? Had she been moved to a restored version?
    The gatehouse, with its twin towers jutting skyward, caught her attention. According to the brochure, they were completely unique, with no other in England or anywhere else like them. This had to be the same castle, only now it stood in its full glory, strong and rugged, not a crumbing stone in sight.
    She shook her head. How could that be? What was going on? Had she fallen into a fairy ring? Moved through a worm hole and into the past? Entered a time machine without noticing?
    She looked for electric lines, anything that would establish this as the twenty-first century, but found nothing.
    She closed her eyes. She was a logical person. She could figure this out. If she took away all the illogical things she believed she was seeing, and remembered back to the last thing she remembered for sure, it was obvious that none of this was even happening to her. That only left one explanation.
    She was dreaming, delusional, or out of her mind. And was there anything that had happened to her that could cause her to be in that state of mind?
    She felt the blood rush out of her face. Of course there was an explanation. The hoodlums who’d chased her toward the castle ruins were assaulting her right this minute, and she was lying in the graveyard and her mind was taking her to this far-off place so she could escape the trauma.
    Her heart pounded in her chest and her breathing escalated.
    She’d turned the hoodlums into medieval hoodlums in her mind and then conjured up a Knight in Shining Armor to defend her, complete with sword and shield and strength. She patted her knight’s arm, grateful for his reassuring presence, but ready to let go now and face reality.
    Because this was unacceptable. How was she going to fight the violence if she didn’t show up for the event? Had she hit her head? Had her attackers hit her head? Was she unconscious? In a coma?