The Spacetime Pool Read Online Free PDF Page A

you.”
     
    His words had so many
painful implications, she hardly knew what to say. She spoke softly. “I’m
sorry.”
     
    He clenched the reins
so hard, his knuckles whitened. “Max and I were close as boys. He has hardened
over the years. I mourn the loss of the brother I loved, but I hate what he has
become.”
     
    “It must be difficult
for you both.”
     
    “You are generous, to
offer sympathy to those who put you in this situation.”
     
    She had no answer for
that.
     
    “Janelle.” He spoke
thoughtfully. “Make a bargain with me.”
     
    “How do you mean?”
she asked, wary.
     
    “Marry me, and I will
do what I can to help you return home. If you get back, who is to say the
marriage exists in that universe? You can resume your life without me.”
     
    Given her lack of
options, he could have demanded she do what he wanted. It mattered that he
asked her consent and offered his help. But she knew too little about him. So
far he had acted with honor, and a kindness incongruous with his obvious
capacity for violence, but she had no guarantee that would continue. Nor did
she doubt his offer came with strings; he wasn’t talking about a marriage in
name only. Her face heated. Yes, she found him attractive. But that wasn’t
enough. She needed to know him better. To trust him.
     
    “I’m not ready,” she
said.
     
    “We don’t have the
luxury of time. This is the best way I know to protect us both.”
     
    What to do? Given how
little she knew about life here, going it alone didn’t seem particularly
bright. After a moment, she said, “All right. I accept your bargain.”
     
    It wasn’t until his
rigid hold eased that she realized how much he had stiffened. He said only, “Good,”
which relieved her. She wasn’t ready for any heart-to-heart talks with the
fiancé she had just acquired.
     
    They rode higher into
the mountains, and the fog thinned until they were traveling under a sky
brilliant with stars, far more than she saw in the city of Cambridge where she
lived. The day’s warmth had fled. When Janelle shivered, Dominick reached to
the bags he had slung over the flanks of his biaquine. He folded a sheepskin
around her shoulders, with the fleecy side against her skin.
     
    “Thank you,” she
murmured.
     
    As they rode, Janelle
mulled over his words. She couldn’t fathom why she would figure in anyone’s “prophecy.”
Her only talents were writing proofs and solving equations. She smiled wryly.
Maybe she could subdue the nefarious Maximillian with Bessel functions.
     
    Up ahead, peaks rose
out of the fog, dark against the sky. Then she realized it was a cascade of
onion-bulb towers, each topped by a spire. Dominick’s party approached a cliff
that stood about ten feet high—no, not a cliff, a great wall that curved away
in either direction, topped by crenellations.
     
    Eerie whistles broke
the night’s quiet as the biaquines gathered before the wall, stamping and
snorting. A gate swung outward, huge and dark, groaning. Torchlight flickered
beyond, where men were cranking giant wheels wound with rope as thick their
burly arms. Past the gate lay courtyards, and past them, a huge building
surrounded by smaller structures. The layout resembled a European castle, but
the architecture evoked the palaces of Moorish Andalusia that Janelle had
visited when her family lived in Spain. Icy moonlight edged it all, turning the
spires, domes, and delicate arches into frozen lace.
     
    As much as the scene
enthralled Janelle, it also bewildered her. Who had settled this land? Dominick’s
men spoke a dialect of English, but their names sounded Mediterranean, Arabic,
or Near Eastern, with English more rarely in the mix. That described their
appearance, too. Maybe the Ottoman Empire had spread farther across Europe in
this universe. If East and West had blended more, the mix of colonists who
settled the New World here could have been different than in her world.
     
    They rode to a
courtyard in