Sent (20 page)

JB froze the action on the scene of the grief-stricken king. Jonah could see each individual tear rolling down his face, each deeply etched furrow in his anguished brow. Katherine was right: It was impossible not to feel sorry for someone in such obvious pain.

“Why is it necessary to hate him?” JB asked quietly.

“He’s the enemy, isn’t he?” Katherine asked.

“Is he?” JB replied, raising an eyebrow. “Shall I also show you the queen’s conniving and plotting during this same time period?” Scenes flickered past quickly: the queen meeting again and again with clusters of solemn men. “Would you like to consider how much she’s willing to endanger her children in order to regain political power? Nobody in this story has pure motives. Not even your friends.”

Once again the scene changed. Now they were back to Chip and Alex, parrying back and forth with wooden swords in a meadow. Chip swung hard, knocking the sword from Alex’s hand. Then Chip used the broad side of his sword to push his brother down; he thrust the sword’s point against Alex’s chest to pin him to the ground. Chip threw back his head and laughed.

“They’re playing,” Jonah said. “They’re just playing.”

“Of course,” JB said. But he looked like he wanted to say something else.

Jonah stared hard at his friends, trying to discern any hint of an Einstein T-shirt showing through Alex’s tunic, any trace of a Nike swish on Chip’s black shoes. He couldn’t. He stared at their faces: Were they thinking fifteenth-century thoughts or twenty-first-century thoughts? It was impossible to tell.

Then he noticed something else.

“Is that
hair
on Chip’s lip?” Jonah asked. “Has he started growing a mustache just in the couple of days he’s been there?”

JB glanced down at the Elucidator, checking the date.

“That’s 1485 you’re watching,” he said. “Summertime again. Chip and Alex have been there two full years. Chip’s fourteen and a half now—closing in on fifteen.”

Jonah fingered his own lip. Back home sometimes he’d lock the bathroom door and stand there staring into the mirror, searching for his first signs of facial hair. If he stood in just the right light, at just the right angle, it was possible to see at least six faint hairs on his upper lip. He would have said Chip’s crop of mustache hair was about the same.

This new, 1485-era Chip had enough hair on his lip
that it showed up at any angle, in both sunlight and shadow.

“Chip’s the same age as me,” Jonah argued. “Thirteen.”

“If you pull Chip away from the tracer, he’ll be thirteen again,” JB corrected. “But right now …”

Chip lifted his sword triumphantly in the air, and the sleeve of his tunic slid back on his arm, revealing well-defined biceps. His hair streamed back in the breeze—somehow the shoulder-length blond curls didn’t look girly at all anymore.

“Wow,” Katherine whispered. “He looks like he could be in high school. On the football team. Varsity.”

On the ground Alex started to sit up. In a flash Chip had the wooden sword back down, aimed at his brother’s throat.

They aren’t playing after all
, Jonah realized, chills traveling down his spine.
They’re practicing
.

“You have a very narrow window of opportunity,” JB said.

“Really?” Katherine said sarcastically. “You never mentioned that before.”

They were finally ready to go rescue Chip and Alex. JB had been through their instructions a million times, repeating again and again how important it was that Jonah and Katherine separate the boys from their tracers at exactly the right moment. Too soon and they’d mess up time.

Too late and Chip and Alex could die.

It was that possibility that made Jonah’s stomach churn, his skin prickle, his mustacheless face break out in a cold sweat.

I’m a thirteen-year-old kid
, he thought.
Katherine’s not quite twelve. Why would anyone trust us with life-or-death decisions?

He knew the answer to that. He knew, because JB had told them, that the time experts had run computer projections checking out every possible scenario. The only way Chip and Alex could survive the fifteenth century was if Jonah and Katherine saved them.

It didn’t make Jonah feel any better to know that he and his sister were Chip and Alex’s only hope.

“Well, let’s go, then,” Jonah said gruffly.

“Wait! Just make sure that …” JB broke off. A rueful grin spread over his face. “Oh, never mind. What I was about to say—you already know that, too. Just … be careful, all right?”

“Aye, aye, Captain,” Katherine said, rolling her eyes.

“Are you
sure
you want to do this?” JB asked, hesitating, with his fingers poised on the Elucidator.

Jonah nodded so vigorously that his armor rattled.

“Send us already!” Katherine demanded. “Now!”

Everything vanished from before Jonah’s eyes.

Traveling back into the fifteenth century was not quite so distressing this time. There was the nothingness again—
Yeah, yeah, seen that before
—and then the distant lights far below, zooming closer. Once again Jonah felt as though his whole body was being tugged apart during his reentry into time. But maybe the armor helped; maybe he was protected because he’d been in the fifteenth century
before. He didn’t feel quite so miserable and disoriented when he landed.

Darkness? Check.

Spinning head? Not really.

Churning stomach? Nope. If anything, it was more like his stomach had just awakened and was crying out,
FEED ME!

He’d forgotten how hungry he’d been when he left 1483. His stomach almost felt like he’d lived through an entire two years without food.

“Katherine?” Jonah whispered. “How’s your timesickness?”

“It’s …” She hesitated. “Not too bad. Not bad at all.” She sounded surprised.

“Good,” Jonah whispered back. “I’m going to go look for some food.”

He scrambled up, swaying only slightly.

“Jonah!” Katherine whispered. “Are you crazy?”

Jonah shrugged, which wasn’t the easiest thing to do while wearing armor and dealing with even a mild case of timesickness.

“The battle’s not until dawn, remember?” Jonah asked.

JB had sent them back early so they’d have some time to adjust, in case their timesickness was extreme. Also, the battle they were about to witness had always been
something of a historical mystery, so many, many time travelers had watched it over the years. That made travel in and out during the battle difficult—there was always the danger of running into someone from another time, someone equally out of place.

“JB said to hide,” Katherine reminded him. “That’s the safest thing to do.”

“I can’t hide when I’m starving,” Jonah said. “My stomach will growl.”

He half expected JB to start yelling at him too, but they hadn’t brought the Elucidator this time around. That would have been too dangerous, too potentially anachronistic. Half of the time projections of them bringing the Elucidator showed that it would lead to a curious wave of English peasants turning invisible during the 1500s. Somehow that completely messed up the Protestant Reformation, changed the outcome of dozens of witchcraft trials, and, strangest of all, led to an invisible ship crashing into the Massachusetts coastline in the early 1600s.

So—no Elucidator. This meant that Jonah and Katherine had had to get “translation shots,” a sort of vaccination against the problems they would have had understanding Middle English on their own. (Jonah wished this alternative was possible in the twenty-first century—it would make Spanish class
so
much easier.) But not having the
Elucidator also meant that they had no way of communicating with JB or anyone else outside of 1485.

Right now that was a good thing.

“Look,” Jonah said. “It’s the middle of the night. Everyone’s asleep. We’re already invisible—and in a tent. Nobody’s even going to know if I creep around a little looking for something to eat.”

“Fine,” Katherine said. “I’m hungry too.”

She stood gingerly. Through the armor Jonah felt a jerk on his arm, as if she’d needed to hold on to him to pull herself up. It was just like being back in elementary school, Katherine always wanting to tag along with whatever Jonah was doing. Her armor clanked softly against his.

“Katherine!” Jonah scolded. “We’ve got to be quiet, remember?”

“Then, quit running into me,” Katherine retorted.

“I didn’t run into you. You grabbed my arm,” Jonah accused.

“I did not!” Katherine said.

“She’s right,” another voice said. “She did not. It was I.”

The voice was deep and adult, and for one long moment Jonah dared to hope that it was only Chip, with a two-years-older grown-up voice to match his grown-up muscles and facial hair. But then there was a scratching sound in the darkness, and a candle sprang to life.

Jonah found himself staring directly into the face of the king, Richard III.

“Ahh! JB!” Jonah cried, forgetting in his surprise that they’d left the Elucidator behind. Jonah wanted to talk to JB now. No—Jonah wanted to yell at him.

How’d JB mess up so badly?
Jonah wondered.
I thought we were landing somewhere safe and quiet and out of the way. Not in the king’s tent!

Now that it was too late, Jonah noticed a ghostly shape—the king’s tracer—glowing softly on a bed at the
far end of the tent. The king’s tracer tossed and turned, his expression anguished.

“What’s that?” the real Richard said, leaning closer. He was blinking in the sudden light, and swinging his hands out before him. Jonah barely managed to jump out of the way of the candle.

At least it’s only a candle, not a torch
, Jonah told himself.

Katherine was making a similar dodging maneuver to avoid Richard’s other hand. In her haste to get away she threw back her arms and hit her own chest, the armor ringing loudly this time.

King Richard’s eyes stayed wide and awed and unseeing.

“You will not show yourselves to me this time?” he asked sadly. “But I know you are there. I hear you moving. I heard your voices. I
touched
you. I know who you are.”

Somehow it seemed wrong not to answer. The king just looked so desperate. And … hopeful.

“Who do you think we are?” Jonah whispered.

The king’s face was amazingly calm.

“You are the angels who appeared to me at Westminster,” he said. “The ones who carried my poor nephews off to heaven.” He hesitated. “The ones who said I would never see heaven myself because of what I’d done.” A sob seemed to catch in his throat. “My wife and precious son are in heaven.”

“Uh, yeah,” Jonah said. “We know.”

Katherine glared at him, her face all but see-through in the candlelight. Jonah held up his hands helplessly in a
What was I supposed to say?
gesture.

“You’ve seen them, then?” Richard said eagerly. He reached out like he wanted to clutch Jonah’s arm again, but Jonah edged backward just in time. “Are they well? Are they happy? Have they been blessed by God?”

“That’s what heaven’s all about,” Katherine said softly. She shrugged at Jonah, as if to say,
Okay, you’re right—it’s hard not to answer back
.

Richard’s shoulders sagged.

“But I will never see them there,” he said. “I can never enter heaven myself.”

Katherine leaned over and whispered in Jonah’s ear. “What kind of religion do these people have?” she asked. “Don’t they believe in forgiveness or anything?”

Richard must have heard at least the word “forgiveness,” because suddenly he fell to his knees and clasped his hands together, the candle clutched between his fingers.

“Oh, please,” he begged. “I could do penance, I could offer indulgences. …”

Katherine snorted.

“Right,” she said. “That’s easy for you to say now. Now
that you’re wearing the crown. Now that you think—I mean, now that you know your nephews are dead.”

Richard peered up earnestly toward her, even though he still couldn’t see her.

“I had to take the throne, for the good of England,” he said. “You are heavenly creatures, you may not know the evil deeds of men. A boy king is an invitation for rogues and thieves and usurpers—”

“And you were the first in line,” Katherine muttered.

“No, no!” Richard cried, shaking his head violently. “It was the Woodvilles, the mother’s family. They were grasping and greedy, and had I not stepped in, they would have stolen everything. …”

“
You
were the one who hired murderers,” Katherine said scornfully. “How many people have you had killed?”

“A king must show strength,” Richard pleaded. “I know it must seem strange to a heavenly being like yourself, but that’s how these things are done on earth.”

“But to want to kill boys,” Katherine said. “Boys. Innocent children.”

Tears began streaming down Richard’s face.

“If I could, I would atone for that,” he said. “I know that is why my son died—a child for a child, a son for a son. That is no more than I deserved, but much worse than my son deserved. And yet … and yet …” He raised
his tearstained face toward Katherine, toward heaven. “I swear to you, upon my dead son’s soul, if my nephew Edward could be resurrected, I would put the crown upon his head myself. I would give everything back.”

Jonah tugged on his sister’s arm.

“Katherine!” he whispered. “We’re not trying to get the Crown back for Chip. We’re trying to get him out of here!”

“I know!” Katherine whispered. “But—just look at that face!”

Richard’s countenance was twisted now, drowning in anguish and grief and guilt.

“Oh, please,” he cried. “Pray do not fall silent now!”

“Uh,” Jonah said. “Uh … I’m sure, if you are sincere, there is a way for your sins to be forgiven.”

“And what is that way?” Richard asked eagerly. “Tell me!”

Jonah tried to think about what he’d heard in church. Then he tried to think about whether what he’d heard in church would be the right thing to say in 1485, or if it’d ruin time forever. Was this maybe why “theological arguments” was one of the choices on the Elucidator? Was this maybe why they should have begged to bring the Elucidator with them, no matter what?