A Crown in Time

Book 0: The Tempus U Time Travel series

by Jennifer Macaire

Genres: Fantasy; Historical Fiction; Time Travel; Historical Fantasy

Synopsis

Since it was perfected in 2900, time travel has been reserved for an elite, highly trained few. However, on certain occasions, a Corrector is needed to rectify a mistake in the past. Do your job well, and you'll go down in history. Fail, and you will be erased from Time . . . For fans of Jodi Taylor, the first in an exciting new time-slip series, from author of the action-packed Time for Alexander series, Jennifer Macaire. A CROWN IN TIME will have you on the edge of your seat from the very first page . . . In the far future, a convicted criminal is given a chance at redemption. The Corrector Program at Tempus University is sending Isobel back in time, to the year 1270, to rewrite history. Her mission? To save the crown of France. If she follows the Corrector's Handbook everything should run smoothly. But soon, Isobel finds herself accompanying a hot-headed young noble on his way to fight the infidel in Tunis: a battle Isobel knows is fated to be lost. Isobel must fulfil her duty, knowing she can never return to her time, knowing one wrong move can doom the future, or doom her to be burned as a witch . . . Praise for Jennifer Macaire's Alexander series: 'Fascinating . . . jam-packed with adventure and colour.' Jodi Taylor

Release date: January 16, 2020

Publisher: Accent Press

Print pages: 300

Sample

Pax in nomine Domini

Peace in the name of the Lord

The nurse in charge of freezing my molecules inserted a glowing needle into my arm and had me count backwards from ten. I got to zero and stared at her, perplexed.

‘Now what?’

‘Again.’

I obeyed without question. Years of prison had left their mark.

Then a cold wave washed through me. I felt my blood freeze. No one had told me it would be so painful. My teeth chattered and the place where the needle was inserted into my arm ached and ached. The pain grew. Frost bloomed in silver flowers on my hands and face.

The pain was so intense I passed out. My last thought before I fainted was that despite all the work and planning, the program would now lose its Corrector.

I was dying.

I didn’t die. I woke up lying on my back in the middle of a large mud puddle. Rain pelted my face, and my body convulsed with painful tremors. Groaning, I rolled over and propped myself up on my forearms. I retched and gagged, waves of nausea rolling through me. I tried to stand, but my legs wouldn’t hold me. I crawled off the road and collapsed on the verge. I had no idea why I’d been beamed into the middle of a road. I could have been killed.

I looked closer at the road and sighed. If anything was going to come down it, it would probably be an ox plodding before a heavy farm cart. The farmer would have been able to stop in time. Unlike me. I hadn’t been able to stop my car in time. I’d killed a child, and I’d been punished with life in a reproduction prison. For four years, I lay on a metal table once a month and donated an ovule, and in between, I worked at the prison library, copying ancient books and disks onto gel matrix for safekeeping.

Then one day, I’d been given a choice. Go back in time and change a mistake, or continue to live in solitude, where my only jobs had been to produce eggs and reproduce books. I’d been twenty years old when I went to prison. Twenty-four when I entered the Corrector Program at Tempus University, and now I was twenty-five, though I knew nothing of life. I felt both ancient and absurdly young. I’d barely had time to start living my own life when it ended. Now, I had the chance at a new beginning. If only I could remember what that was.

My mission now lay before me. I closed my eyes and tried to remember exactly what I had to do. Unfortunately, there seemed to be an empty space in my brain where that information was supposed to be. I couldn’t remember the first thing about it. I shivered with panic and cold. If my mission failed, the Time Correctors Facility from Tempus U would erase this portion of time, and I’d be erased along with it. I would never have existed past the day I entered the Tempus University Time Corrector Program. In the far future, it would be as if I stepped inside the doors of that building and simply vanished. The part of the past that was out of sync would be erased as well, and history rewritten to fit what had originally happened. At least, that’s what I had been told. I honestly had no idea what really happened, and I had no wish to find out.

I closed my eyes, took several deep breaths, and saw the image of a crown. It was coming back to me. I had to meet someone. I had to save the future crown of France by befriending a young boy and convincing him not to join the ill-fated Eighth Crusade. I knew his name: Jean. I even knew what he looked like, thanks to a time-travelling journalist’s holograms. I knew where he’d be on a certain date. I wasn’t sure where I was, though.

I sat up and looked around. The squall had blown over and the sun peeked from behind the clouds. The road stretched to my right and left, bordered by fields and dark copses. I wiped the mud off my dress as best I could and thought of my mission. It had all happened because of a mistake.

Time travel was reserved for a select few – mostly highly trained journalists chosen to go back in time and interview famous people. The journalist who’d caused the error I’d been sent to correct had spoken of the crusade in front of a boy who should never have heard about it. The man had taken holograms, as per regulation, but carelessly, he hadn’t checked to make sure nobody else listened to his interview with Queen Marguerite.

Jean de Bourbon-Dampierre had been near enough to hear. On the hologram, he cocked his head as the journalist began to speak. Because of what he’d overheard, the boy had slipped out of his bedroom one night and run away to join a ragtag gaggle of youngsters on their way to fight the infidel.

Jean would not do anything of note during his life, but his descendants would eventually rule France. By running away, he’d changed the course of history dramatically.

I was supposed to find him and bring him back. If I succeeded, I’d be allowed to live the rest of my life in the thirteenth century. If not, I’d be erased, along with all the mistakes the journalist had wrought in only two sentences. Just two little sentences which had been approved for the queen, but not for Jean de Bourbon-Dampierre, who had been visiting the court that day.

‘My Queen Marguerite, what have you heard of the crusade your husband, the King of France, has embarked upon? What about the group of youths calling themselves crusaders who have nearly reached Chartres?’

The words had echoed weirdly around the room, and that evening, Jean packed a few belongings in a leather bag and clambered nimbly down a castle wall in search of adventure and a way to get out of his Latin studies.

My mission was simple – get time back on track.

Time travel was invented in 2300 and used for short trips into the past. At first, trips were only possible with inanimate objects, primarily those made of quartz crystal.

When it was perfected in 2900, Tempus University, already an elite institution, started their reporting program. Because their time in the past was limited, researchers and historians had to make the most of it. It was decided that specially trained journalists would concentrate on interviewing famous people. Some early experiences were resounding successes: Shakespeare, Julius Caesar, and Marie Curie gave fascinating interviews.

Other interviews were failures – Jesus, for example, remained elusive. Some trips simply didn’t work out because the journalist was in the wrong place or the wrong time, but they usually came back alive.

The science of time travel is kept deliberately vague. I think it’s so that the Tempus Program will never face any competition. Not that they’d allow it. As far as I could gather from my own experience, two enormous electromagnets are placed above and below a chair made of pure quartz crystal. A lightning bolt is teased out of the sky, and its electric current is passed through the beam of magnetic pull, and the resulting ‘force field’ is able to send whatever is in that chair to another place and time.

Time travel can only happen during a storm. I gather it has something to do with the particular resonance of the quartz molecules with lightning, but that’s just from overheard conversations. Nobody felt they needed to explain it to a mere Corrector, especially not one taken out of the prison system.

When I’d started the mission, I was sceptical. Selected from thousands of prisoners because of my background as a French history major, I still didn’t believe I could make a difference. There were other ways of correcting a major mistake. The TCF could have erased a large enough portion of history to accommodate the changes the journalist had wrought.

However, the energy expended in such an endeavour was enormous and cost an astronomical sum. It’s the last resort. Don’t ask me how it’s done it’s used only in dire need. Mostly, they use Correctors like me to set time right.

What’s the difference between a Corrector and a journalist, you ask? When a journalist is sent back in time, he or she is left there for exactly twenty hours and then brought back with the magnetic beam to fame and fortune.

When a Corrector is sent back in time to correct a mistake, they are left there to fend for themselves for ever. It’s a life sentence. Usually the ‘volunteer’ is taken out of prison. I’d had one year to learn everything I needed to know to survive in a world two thousand years removed from my own. I had a limited chance of survival, but if I did my job well I’d receive a full pardon and my name in the roster of Humanitarian Awards. What an honour! From a criminal to a hero in the space of a day. This was how long it would take the TCF to verify my work in the history book, located in a vacuum at the North Pole.

Because face it, how could anyone know if time had actually been changed? If you changed the past, you automatically changed the future, right? Wrong. Well, almost wrong. Most of the butterfly theory is correct. Little things can have enormous consequences. However, big things, things you assume would alter history, are usually swallowed up in what scientists call the ‘Molasses Theory of Time’.

To make sure time isn’t changed in any irrevocable way, scientists placed a detailed history book in a permanent molecular magnetic beam located in the exact centre of the magnetic pole of the Earth. The beam doesn’t send the book anywhere, but it does keep it from becoming altered. A replica of the book is kept in another room, in a normal environment. After each time trip the books are compared. The differences show up within a day. Any discrepancies are fed into a computer and the results analyzed.

If there is no danger of time moving from its flow, then the book is closed and everything continues on its way. If, however, the changes make the flow of time deviate, then something is done to put it right. Within a year, a ‘volunteer’ Corrector is found and trained and sent to live and die in the past. After that, the possibility of correcting time becomes improbable and likely to influence the present in calamitous ways. Or so it’s theorized. Possible time change has never been allowed to go that far. The TCF always erases it.

Because of the high cost, little alterations to the continuum are ignored, and time, like thick molasses, keeps flowing as it should. Those changes never affect our present because the flow of time tends to glide over flaws without a bubble in its surface. Nor does the history book have the name and date of birth of every human being who ever lived on Earth. The faceless mass remains anonymous. A person could go back in time and fade into the background, and no one would ever be the wiser if he did his job well.

I got to my feet and looked around, but there were no signposts or any indication where I should go. Finally I shrugged, chose a direction at whim, and started down the road. I had no idea if I was going in the right direction, but I knew I’d eventually find out. Besides, I had to go somewhere, right? At the first crossroads a sign would likely tell me which way to get to Chartres, where I had to find a certain Jean de Bourbon-Dampierre.

I walked all day. The city of Chartres, a prosperous town of about a thousand souls, was on a flat plain, and the cathedral was visible for kilometres. Unfortunately I’d started in the wrong direction and it was only three hours later that I discovered my mistake and had to retrace my steps on the rutted dirt road.

Seven hours of walking in perfect freedom after five years of prison life. Seven hours of walking in a straight line, more or less, after years of walking around and around a courtyard. I saw grass and blue sky, although the grass was still dead, it being early March, and the sky was a frosty grey-blue that promised cold weather. I didn’t mind. I was free. The feeling was intoxicating. The road stretched empty to my left and to my right for several kilometres. The very tip of the cathedral spire showed in the distance.

My head spun, and I had to sit down. I gazed ruefully at my feet in their thick leather shoes. They were well broken in because I’d walked with them for six months in the prison. It wasn’t that my shoes, or my feet, hurt. It was the fact my stomach was empty and hunger was making me dizzy. I would have to wait until I found an inn, though, I had nothing to eat with me. I had nothing but the clothes I wore, my shoes, and a small leather pouch full of coins and a few trifles the historians at the TCF had allowed me to take. I groped for my purse and panicked when I didn’t find it right away. When I found it I sighed with relief, but a new worry assailed me. Most of my apprehension came from the thought of not being able to complete my mission in time. What if the boy was not here? What if I’d been sent back to the wrong day, or even year? I bit my knuckles and tried to empty my mind. It was easier to bear if I just didn’t think about it.

When I recovered my calm, I dug the purse out of my deep pocket and opened it. The coins inside were supposed to last me two years. There were three heavy gold ones, some silver and many, many copper and bronze coins. I took the gold coins from the purse and weighed them in my hand. They were valuable, and if I lost them or if anyone stole them, I’d be in trouble. I didn’t know how likely theft was, but I didn’t want to take a chance.

I searched in my leather pouch for the sewing kit. It was an antique, probably from a museum. The TCF historians had approved some of the items on the list of things I’d asked for, and this was one of them. I sewed the gold coins into the inside waist seam of my kirtle. Perhaps I should have done it before. It hadn’t occurred to me then, but now the reality of my situation hit me. I spaced them evenly and made sure that they were secure. Then I did the same with the silver coins. One silver coin I put back in my purse.

My clothes had been made by historians. I wore a linen undershirt, also called a chemise. Over that, I wore a sleeveless gown – the kirtle – and for warmth I had a cloak. Kirtle and cloak were made of finely woven wool. The undershirts were plain linen. I had woollen stockings that tied over the knee, and a coif, which was a head covering made of bleached linen, to cover my hair. Everything had been well but plainly made. However, laces now tightened waists and gores flared skirts. Fashion had just started.

I didn’t have many belongings. In a leather pouch, worn tied to my belt, I had the sewing kit, a change of undershirts, a cake of soap, and a few simple pieces of jewellery, which I could sell if need be. I had nothing else. Even my bones had been treated to remove any trace of modern surgery. There was nothing to show I came from the future, down to my fillings that had been replaced by an ivory-coloured composite that wouldn’t shout ‘Strange Person from the Future!’ even if I died and was dug up centuries later. (The Time Senders think of everything, believe me.)

The only thing I hadn’t changed was my face. A jagged scar down one side from temple to chin, sectioning my lower lip and ending halfway down my throat. It was a fearsome scar, but I had refused all offers to have it erased.

As I walked towards Chartres, the cathedral spire grew like a pine tree pushing itself out of the ground. Then the rest of the town’s buildings sprouted around it. Rooftops and chimneys rose out of the grey fields, and stone houses grew like squat mushrooms. Bare fruit trees, shrubs, and winter gardens appeared. I spotted a few people outside, hurrying through the gathering dusk.

The road I walked went straight across a flat plain, but Chartres crouched in a slight depression upon the banks of a river. The last things that came to my view were the main street, winding around the base of the massive cathedral, and the sullen black river flowing sluggishly under the bridge.

I wanted to find an inn, eat something hot, and lie down in a soft feather bed. At the entrance to the town, the gatekeeper directed me to the only inn, a large stone building near the church. To my relief, his words were easy for me to understand. The historians had done their job well, and I’d had many holograms and tapes from this period to learn the language and familiarize myself with the environment. The tight knot in my chest eased somewhat as I approached the tavern and peered inside.

A huge cauldron simmered inside the great chimney and the scent of roasting meat made my mouth water painfully. I rapped my knuckles on the lead-paned window and waited until a woman opened the door.

‘I’d like a room for the night and some food, please,’ I said.

‘No rooms left here, and the dinner won’t be served until after vespers.’ The voice was quiet but firm. Before I could open my mouth again the door was shut, the latch dropped and I found myself leaning against the wall in order to stand upright. For a moment I wanted to cry. My face screwed up, and I pressed my cheek on the rough stone and closed my eyes.

‘Pardon, Mademoiselle?’ The voice came from behind me, and I turned wearily.

Two blue eyes stared at me from beneath thick black brows. The boy had a peaked face scored with deep lines of hunger and suffering that made him look ancient, although I doubted he was more than ten years old.

He stepped closer. ‘If you’re hungry, the Church has food for the crusaders. They’re arriving and they want bread. Come with me, I’ll show you. That’s where I’m headed.’

I’d heard of bands of thieves that used children as bait. He’d probably lead me to an alley, where I’d be set upon and robbed. ‘How do you know?’

His voice dropped confidentially. ‘I’m joining the crusade. I want to go to the Holy Land.’

‘I see.’ I eyed him warily, but he didn’t look like a thief. The fact that he was joining the crusades didn’t surprise me. From what I’d learned, everyone wanted to go.

The crusades had been the world’s first publicized event. Recruiters were everywhere, promising untold riches and salvation without repentance.

His face suddenly tightened. ‘You won’t be saying anything to Madame Latrainée, will you?’

‘I don’t know who she is. I just arrived in the city.’

‘I know, I saw you coming down the road. I’ve been watching since yesterday, waiting for the crusaders.’

‘And you’ve seen everyone who’s come into the city?’ I asked him, suddenly interested.

‘Of course I did. At first I thought you were one of them, but you’re all alone.’

‘The crusaders in this group are nothing but poor peasant youths,’ I said. This was from my memorized speech for dissuading Jean. ‘They’re heading straight for their deaths. Listen to me, er, what’s your name?’

‘Charles.’ The boy looked at me sideways, his eyes a deep, navy blue.

‘Sharl,’ I pronounced it as he did. ‘Listen to me. This crusade is ill-fated. These crusaders will never make it to the Holy Land. King Louis is only planning on landing in Tunis in order to establish forts from which to attack Egypt. It’s far, far away from the Holy Land. What will happen if you are captured and sold into slavery?’

His steps faltered, and then he shrugged. ‘A slave here or a slave there, what difference? Here I sleep in the stables, I have food when the master remembers to feed me, and I have clothes when I can steal them from the washerwomen at the river. Otherwise I am just a slave, “do this, do that”, and no hope to do anything else.’ His voice broke and he frowned. ‘I was thinking of running away to Paris, taking a chance there, and then I heard of the crusade. Maybe I’ll have a better chance with them. At least they get fed when they come to town.’

I looked at my companion and for the first time noticed how dreadfully filthy he was. His hair was matted, snarled, probably crawling with lice. His face was not only peaked, it was pale and unhealthy. He held himself stiffly. I wouldn’t be surprised to discover old fractures on his limbs from beatings he’d obviously suffered.

When he walked, he limped. I bit my lip again. Children made me cry. Whether they were healthy and happy, or miserable, they were all reminders of what I’d done.

My knees trembled and I leaned on a wall to stay upright. I took a deep breath.

‘Charles, I, I . . .’ I hesitated. What could I do to convince him?

I looked at the doomed child, his face drawn and illuminated with the fervour of faith and a terrible hope. Hope for a better life, hope that would be completely shattered.

My hand slid down the mossy wall as I sank to the ground, and my eyes brimmed with tears. It came to me just what punishment Tempus U had devised for me. I turned away from Charles. If I couldn’t save this child, who could I save? It was hopeless.

‘Are you all right? Shall I get help?’ Charles sounded anxious. He poked my arm, then, when I failed to respond, pounded me on the back.

‘I’m fine, I’ll be fine.’ I got to my feet and stared over his head at the huge church spire. Suddenly, bells began to toll. The air shook with each clang. Each hard ring broke the sky into a puzzle of grey pigeons flapping loudly through the evening. Each thunderous toll shook me from the soles of my feet to my head. My face vibrated with the sound.

Charles’ little face blanched and he swallowed convulsively. ‘Vespers is starting,’ he said. ‘We won’t get anything now until it’s over.’

‘Well, we might as well sit down in the church.’ I sniffed and wiped my face with the back of my hand. ‘Let’s go, shall we? Maybe our souls will be saved.’

‘God forbid,’ said Charles and crossed himself neatly.

I looked at him askance, surprised by his irreverence, but he just shrugged and led the way to the great stone cathedral.

Time travel is reserved for an elite, highly trained few who are sent back for a few hours or days. However, on certain occasions, a Corrector is needed to rectify a mistake in the past. Correctors are sent on a one-way trip back in time with a specific mission. Correctors are both extremely important and disposable. Do your job well, and your name will appear on the gold board in the. . .