My Heart Stood Still by Lynn Kurland (best book club books of all time .TXT) 📕

about to tell her how to deal with her past, which was apparently very much the present for her. He smiled grimly.

"I'll see how bad it is."

"I don't want to know."

"I understand."

But he also knew he had to see for himself, so he walked across the courtyard. He spent a brief moment considering the fact that his unwilling hostess had spent the better part of the morning showing him around her castle. She easily could have told him to take a hike. That she hadn't, and that she was even speaking to him in brief sentences, was significant.

He came to a halt in front of the guard tower. Now that he was standing in front of it, he could completely understand why his guide hadn't wanted to come. There was something exceptionally unpleasant about the vibes he was getting from the place in front of him.

Well, standing there uncertainly wouldn't dispel any uneasiness he had, so he took a deep breath and stepped through the dark doorway. And as he made his way up stairs that were impossibly small and incredibly claustrophobic, the déjà vu that overwhelmed him was staggering.

He'd been up these steps before.

He felt as if the past had somehow layered itself over his present in such a way that it was he and an echo of himself that crept up the stairs together.

It was, on the whole, an extremely unsettling experience.

He stopped at the landing. There was a torch in a sconce there. He pulled a lighter from his pocket—he didn't smoke but he had been a Boy Scout and he was nothing if not prepared—and lit the thing. He was almost surprised that it caught.

He put his hand on the wood of the door and the two worlds of past and present shuddered together with an almost catastrophic collision.

He gasped as he pushed the door open. He couldn't breathe. He wondered if he might ever again suck air into his desperate lungs. He hunched over with his hand on his thigh, gulping in great breaths of air and trying to keep the torch aloft at the same time. It seemed forever before he managed to stand up straight. He leaned against the doorway and looked inside the guardroom.

And for an instant, he saw a man there with his sword bared, standing before a woman who refused to cower.

The woman he'd left standing in the bailey.

He blinked. And the vision was gone.

He walked into the tiny guardroom with its stone floor, ceiling, and walls. He jammed the torch into another sconce and walked to the window slit. As he stared out over the countryside, he felt the effects of the almost surreal events of the past ten minutes recede, leaving him weak. He put his hands on the walls on either side of the window and bowed his head. There was something going on, something far larger than him, something he had never expected.

Did she relive this every day that dawned? Was this what she lived with each one of those days?

" 'Tis a small place."

He turned around at the sound of her voice. She stood just inside the room, hovering on the edge of the light like a shadow. Thomas waited, perfectly still, as she took a step or two inside. She looked down at the floor for several minutes, then she looked up at him.

"I remember it being bigger."

He nodded carefully. "I think we do, with things that frighten us."

She shivered and wrapped her arms around herself. "It was all for foolishness, you know. All for the sake of a secret that would have had no meaning to him."

"Your name?"

"Nay, the secret of my home."

"Your home has a secret?"

"Several of them, or so the tales go." She looked back down at the floor. "He wanted my name as well, but I wouldn't give him that either."

"What did your family call you?"

She was silent for quite a while, then she spoke. "My father called me girl. My half-brothers called me various things. Most of them not pleasant."

"What names?" he asked gently.

"Old woman," she said with a half shrug. "Heather-gel."

"Because of your eyes? The color?"

She looked up at him then. "Because they were fools," she said shortly, "and there was an abundance of the stuff surrounding our hall."

He walked across the chamber until he was standing in front of her. He looked down into her eyes and felt himself on the edge of knowing something. It was that damned intuition again, but it was only nagging at him, not providing him with answers.

He racked his brains for something that made sense. He considered the word woman in all the languages he knew. He spoke German and French, knew a smattering of Japanese, Italian, and Greek, could ask for the nearest bathroom in Russian and Dutch, and could haggle for a yak and a cup of Sherpa tea in Nepali.

None of that was helping him at the moment.

Heather. Violet. Lovely.

And then a word popped into his mind, a word he was certain he must have read somewhere in some obscure spot on some far-flung travel.

Violet.

Greek.

"Iolanthe," he said.

She couldn't have looked more surprised if he'd slapped her. Her mouth worked for several moments, but no sound came out.

"How did you ... how ... who told you ..."

He was so surprised—no, in reality, he wasn't surprised at all. Once her name had left his lips, he realized he'd always known it, just as he'd always known dozens of other impossible things. He looked at her helplessly. "No one told me," he said. "I just... knew."

She started to cry.

Damn.

"I'm sorry," he offered desperately. "I never meant... it's a lovely name—"

But she was gone.

"Please come back," he said earnestly. "I never meant to upset you!"

There was no answer.

"I won't tell anyone!"

There was only silence in response.

He closed his eyes briefly, then leaned back against the wall and opened his eyes. He looked around him and let the past and present swirl around him in dizzying eddies. He wanted to call out to