Magic: The Curse of Lanval, #3

Chapter One: Do I have to do everything?

I HAD A VISION OF MY mother I missed the most. Her strawberry blonde hair fell softly on her shoulders as she sipped coffee in a Paris café. The smile on her face evoked safety, belonging, and love. It was one of my earliest memories of her.

Yet, my mother was not here in medieval France; she was centuries away. And I wasn’t safe.

Far from it, actually.

Well, fuck me. My mother taught me to always introduce myself. Apologies.

My name is Guillaume Lanval, but please, call me Gill.

A curse has plagued my family for as long as I can remember — mysterious deaths, car accidents, vases toppling off the fireplace in the middle of the night, that kind of thing. My mother would never admit it, but we all knew. Even that day in the café, which is burned into my memory, when a taxi cab had splashed my mother’s white dress, streaking it with dirt.

She tried to tell my five-year-old self it was just a horrible driver, but even in my innocence, I knew something was up.

It was never clearer than the day my sister touched a mirror in an ancient chapel that sent us spiraling back to 1154 A.D. We were dropped in the middle of a fucking war, with injured princes, evil queens, and rat-like bishops of the almighty Catholic Church.

So, yes. Fucking cursed.

I missed my mother, my dorm room; the ambulance bay where I spent long nights saving lives as a paramedic. I longed for my simple life in the present, with coffee and chocolate bars and toilet paper, all while I was trapped here without even modern fucking bathrooms or portable water. I wanted to be back in my ambulance. It was a kind of calming stress, saving lives as a paramedic, even in the midst of chaos. It would have been a welcome change to the near death we experienced every day since we arrived here. Every fucking day I flipped between Gill the Awesome and Gill the Lifesaver. Forget Gill, the college student; he was fucking gone forever.

It was exhausting.

I wondered what my mother would be doing now. Jules and I had been gone for a little over three weeks. Surely, they would have found Cousin Andre’s car in the empty parking lot of the castle, but we would have been nowhere to be found. It was hard to think of my mother crying over us, wondering if we’d been kidnapped, run away, or maybe just went insane. One minute she had healthy, happy college-aged children – me, the cool, calm, confident, twenty-year-old paramedic son, and history major; and slightly older, my sister Jules, a firefighter daughter who was majoring in medicine – the next my mother would be childless. My father might even fly to France to look for us, and my aunt would be just as upset at my mother.

Did I mention this was Jules’s fault? That we were trapped eight-hundred and fifty years in the past? Today was October 20, 1154, and we were somewhere on the west coast of France.

Oh, as if that wasn’t fucked up enough, it got worse.

Way, way worse.

I was about to be crowned King of England and France.

It’s a long story, so you should probably stop here and go read the first two parts of this tale. Go ahead, motherfucker, I’ll wait.

Back already?

All right, so now you know about Prince Henry and how I had to take his place. And some other stuff I don’t want to think about. Magical kind of shit. But I’ll get to that later. So, there I was, in a carriage made for a king, next to my wife, the girl I’m kinda in like with, and a fat priest named Thomas Becket who history says I have to kill in a few years.

I hoped I wouldn’t be around for that mess.

Hey, I warned you it was pretty fucked. Keep reading, though, because it gets more awesome as we go. You ready? Hang on for the fuckin’ ride.

OUR CARRIAGE RUMBLED over the bumpy, barely-a-road we traveled on, sending my head smacking against the roof as we traversed the treacherous French woods. It was day two of the journey to the Kale, or Calais as I remembered in my present, the ancient French port that would take us to the shores of England. I figured it was something like two hundred miles, maybe even more. Becket had inform us the journey would take four or five days, which I couldn’t fucking believe. It would have taken us a couple hours to drive in a car, but this was the middle ages. I’d give anything for a car about now.

Next to me, Queen Eleanor, who had slept softly until now, jolted awake. She glared at me with contempt and scooted closer to the carriage window, her eyes snapping shut once more. I couldn’t blame her. We had consummated a marriage I never asked for, or wanted, and I still felt like a horrible fucking human being. As a result, the tension in the ancient carriage was palpable.

Then there was Marie, seated across from me. I couldn’t help staring like a fool, even though I didn’t much know why. In the last few weeks, she had grown to be my calm after the storm, especially after she stabbed me and saved my life, twice. She spoke modern English and many more languages, had seen the walls of the library at Alexandria, and I still didn’t know who she was. Except she could turn me into a frog at a moment’s notice, however, and though that should have terrified me, it gave me the weirdest hardon at times.

Hey, we can’t control it, ladies.

Anyways, enough about my little brain. He’s not a quiet fellow, you’ll see. In fact, that little fucker is the reason Marie isn’t talking to me. After my union with the queen, Marie had made herself scarce, and in the week it took us to prepare for our trip we had only seen each other in passing.

Of course, it didn’t help I had kissed her and accidently named her my mistress by waving flowers around in court — in front of the queen, nonetheless – so I understood, partially, why Marie had made herself all but invisible.

And Jules hadn’t been around much either. She stopped coming to debrief me, and I never saw her at breakfast.

The small castle where we stayed had never felt more like a tomb.

Everything was fucked.

Prince Henry, you’re staring. Marie’s soft, slightly French accented voice ripped me from my thoughts. It was the first time I’d heard her utter anything in the last two days of travel. She didn’t even look at me, her dark eyes hidden under her delicate lashes.

Sorry. I sighed, leaning toward Marie, running a hand through my wavy red hair. It was a nervous tick I’d worked hard to quell since high school, but it had since resurfaced. It was annoying as shit. Next to her, Archdeacon Thomas Becket snored loudly with his head leaning alongside the window. Becket’s voluminous robes pinned Marie between the plum colored velvet lined walls of the carriage. She couldn’t even reach her familiar parchment to write. Her arms were clasped straight in front of her, and her cheeks were flushed a bright rosy red, as usual.

I shook my head. This is awful.

A smile played at the edge of her lips, but she kept her head lowered.

Goddamn it, I needed her to look me in the eye. It was killing me. Why couldn’t I make her smile anymore?

I’d only been around for twenty years, but I knew the silent treatment when I saw it. She was still mad. Why? Because I’d kissed her? Or done my duty to king and country and slept with the queen? Literally, every woman was pissed at me, well, save my sister, and I was pretty sure she was a little mad at me, too, though by now I was used to Jules being pissed about something or other.

How’s the ride in there? I heard Jules call from outside the window. I threw open the purple curtain and gazed up at her on her horse. Though I couldn’t see him, the English ambassador, Francis, would be trotting along on his own steed on the other side of the carriage. I could barely make out the flank of soldiers, both before and after us.

This is a lot of effort to crown the wrong prince. Only Marie and Jules could understand me, so I didn’t bother worrying about saying our secret out loud. Everyone else, of course, spoke old French, which I was quickly learning to translate from my modern fluency in the language. It was still hell. Marie was still shrouded in mystery, but her translation skills were desperately needed.

Are you sure this is the right thing to do? I asked for probably the twelfth time since we left Chateau de Falaise just before dawn yesterday. Becket had pushed us to travel through the night, and I was exhausted.

Don’t worry, little brother, Jules smiled. You’re in good hands. She tipped her head, and her steel helmet fell over her eyes. She pushed it back on her head with an annoyed shove.

I stared at her chainmail shirt with the blue and white coat of arms thrown over it, pants ending at the knee, and her boots pulled high. Whose idea was it to let you dress like a soldier, again?

Eleanor’s, Jules answered, her voice muffled by the helmet.

Uh-huh. I eyed her. I still couldn’t figure out what was going on between them. My sister had had some grand love affairs in her time, but she didn’t always have the best sense when it came to women.

But then again, neither did I.

To make matters worse, I was sharing a carriage with my wife beside me and across from me was the girl I was in l...lo...I snuck a glance at Marie again and swallowed hard, almost gagging on the word.

The girl I liked a lot.

I tried saying that L word a few times, but fuck me, I couldn’t. She had ditched the white wimple again today, which made me glad. One thick brown side braid was tucked over the front of her shoulder, but tiny tendrils of her shiny hair escaped to frame her round face. God, she was sexy as hell right now. She was wrapped in a brown cape, because it was almost November, and northern France was freezing. Between the folds of the cloak, I could see the brown bow tied above a golden shimmering corset edged with threadbare lace. I hated brown on girls, and I hated she had always dressed modestly. But there was something about how she carried herself that made me sit up and notice. She was gorgeous in anything she wore.

She didn’t have the face of a model. She wasn’t airbrushed, layered with makeup, or thin and sickly with hallow cheeks and sunken eyes. None of the typical twenty-first century looks I was used to. No, she wasn’t my type at all. Her eyes were a soft brown under bushy brows, with thin, pale lips below plump, rosy cheeks. Most of her was round, from the soft curve of her face down to her ankles; curvy in all the right places.

I hated curvy girls. What was wrong with me?

Her lips. Yes, I stared. What else was there to look at in this carriage? The gaunt, sickly priest next to her? My queen next to me, with the pinched and slender face, what my buddies called resting bitch face. Marie was different, a stark contrast to everyone in this tight space, drowning out all