Divide and Conquer Read online

  “We just needed to run this one errand and really don’t have time to sit and chat —” Dak started to say.

  Rollo roared with laughter. “With your shiny Ring, all you have is time.”

  While Riq and Dak chuckled, Sera stepped forward, her face grim and serious. She twisted her hands together in front of her anxiously. “I know it was a long time ago for you,” she said. “But when we warped away a boy by the name of Billfrith was there in the church and he was hurt. Do you know what happened to him?”

  Rollo’s eyebrows drew together, his expression one of curiosity. He cupped one hand around his mouth and shouted, “Bill!” before turning back to Sera and saying, “Why don’t you let him tell you?”

  SERA WAS pretty sure her heart stopped beating. Her hands tightened until her nails dug into her palms. The echo of Rollo shouting Bill’s name resounded in her ears.

  There’s no way, she thought as her pulse stuttered and began to gallop.

  From behind her she heard someone whisper, “Sera?” The voice was just as she remembered it, causing her cheeks to heat and a smile to break across her face.

  He was not only alive but she got to see him again! It was beyond her wildest dreams!

  She was already calling out his name as she spun on her heel and came face-to-face with a man who looked to be as old as her uncle. His hair thinned around his temples, and wrinkles crowded the corners of his eyes.

  She choked on his name. Of course he was older, her mind tried to reason. While she’d just left him no more than twenty minutes ago, he’d lived an entire life apart from her.

  She heard herself cry out as her eyes blurred with tears.

  Bill reached out a hand toward her, tentatively, but it was the way a father might move to comfort a child.

  Sera turned and fled.

  She didn’t get far into the woods before reason pulled her up short. It was dark, and she was near a battlefield. It was stupid of her to continue running. She pressed her back against a tree and sank to the ground. Blindly, she stared at her hands in her lap.

  Less than an hour ago Bill had twined his fingers through hers. He’d leaned toward her and she’d thought she might be about to experience her first kiss. Her stomach twisted as her brain warred between the two time lines, trying to orient her.

  She heard Bill coming even before he called out her name, softly. She closed her eyes — his voice really was exactly the same as she remembered. For a moment she was convinced he’d appear as he’d been before.

  But when she opened her eyes he stood there, still so much older. He sat down next to her.

  “This is strange, isn’t it?” he asked.

  She could only nod.

  “I thought about you after . . .” He took a deep breath and ran his hand through his graying hair, such a familiar gesture. “In my mind you were growing older, just like I was. Seeing you now, exactly how you were when you left . . .” He trailed off.

  Sera forced a swallow. She couldn’t bring herself to meet his eyes. “What happened? The last I saw you’d been hit by an arrow.”

  “I got lucky. It was a clean wound — didn’t hit anything important.” He eased the collar of his tunic aside and in the soft glow of the night Sera saw a puckered scar. “Rollo was able to fend off the rest of Siegfried’s men. He waited until dark to take me back to the camp and dress the wound. That’s when we put two and two together and realized that his great-grandfather is the one who saved my great-great-great-uncle. Once we realized all we had in common, I joined up with him.

  “I thought Siegfried would be angry after Rollo let you guys escape, but once Rollo told him that there was a lot of land worth plundering down the Seine in Burgundy and that he’d let Siegfried have it all, that seemed to smooth things over. Then they went their separate ways — Siegfried and his men carrying their ships overland to farther down the river, and Rollo staying behind outside Paris for a while until King Charles the Fat finally paid him to leave.”

  He picked up a stick from the ground and began to break it into smaller segments. “It feels like it was ages ago.” After a pause he asked, “How has it been saving the future?”

  Sera still didn’t lift her eyes. “We haven’t been. When we realized Vígi had hitched a ride we came back here to return her. I . . .” She swallowed with effort. “I thought you’d been killed trying to save my life.”

  He reached out and lifted her chin with a finger. “If I had died for you, it would have been worth it. The cause of the Hystorians means everything to me.”

  She realized, then, that’s what she’d been to him. Not a girl he liked, but a part of a larger cause that needed protecting. She stood abruptly. “I need to get back to the others. We shouldn’t even have come to this time — it’s dangerous to interfere.”

  “Wait.” He stood, but age had made him slower and she was already several steps away. “There’s something you should know.”

  Her shoulders tensed. She just wanted to leave, for this whole night to end. She wanted to remember Bill as he’d been before, not this stranger.

  “You told me that in order to fix the Break the Vikings had to be kept away from Normandy, right?” he asked.

  Sera nodded without turning to face him. “If Siegfried went to Burgundy instead, then we did our job.”

  “Siegfried recently changed his mind,” Bill said. “That’s why we’re here. Rollo’s trying to fight his way into Normandy by way of Chartres. But he lost the battle today —”

  Sera spun toward him. “Dak said Rollo won Chartres. That’s why we came here.”

  Bill shook his head. “We lost today, Sera. And this was Rollo’s last chance to get ahead of Siegfried.”

  “We have a problem,” Dak said as soon as he saw Sera striding back into camp. She didn’t look happy to see him, but that had never stopped Dak before.

  “If this is about cheese, so help me . . .”

  “Rollo lost the battle today,” he said, keeping his voice low. Dak still couldn’t get over the changes in his Viking friend’s appearance. Where before he’d strode through camp with his wide shoulders thrown back and chin high, now he slumped forward on his stool, staring at the fire. Every now and again Vígi would nudge his hand with her nose and he’d smile down at her, but Dak knew that his defeat earlier today had been a crushing blow.

  And it shouldn’t have happened. It wouldn’t have if Dak, Sera, and Riq hadn’t been mucking around in history. By getting Rollo involved, they’d practically ruined his life.

  Dak glanced around the clearing and lowered his voice even more. “Rollo said the Franks have surrounded the hill. They’ve completely cut him off from water . . . and his ships. If they attack, he has no hope of fending them off.”

  Riq strolled over just in time to hear this last bit. “Then I’d say now would be a fine time for us to fire up the Infinity Ring and catch the first warp out of here.”

  “We can’t,” Sera said simply. For once Dak and Riq were on the same page as they both stared at her with confusion.

  “Come again?” Riq asked, taking the words right out of Dak’s mouth.

  Dak noticed Sera glancing over her shoulder to where Bill hovered around the edges of camp. “It’s worse than you realize,” she whispered.

  “Worse than being sitting ducks for an army three times our size?” Dak asked.

  She leveled her gaze at him and Dak’s stomach sank. He knew that expression. It was the same one she’d worn just before their fourth-grade science fair when she’d found out she wasn’t the only student who’d thought of using demotic technology to monitor household energy use.

  “Siegfried’s marching on Normandy and there are other SQ Vikings behind him ready to take his place if he falls,” she said. “Rollo was headed there to try to stop them. But the Franks have this hill surrounded,
and if he can’t find a way out, he won’t be able to confront Siegfried. And we’ll have failed to fix the Break.”

  IF THERE’S one thing that always calmed Sera it was losing herself in the intricacies of physics. The world could be falling apart outside (and with all the earthquakes, tornadoes, and hurricanes roaring about it in the twenty-first century, it sometimes was) and she’d never notice. She’d always had the ability to focus in on problems with a laser-like precision and she hated nothing more than failing to come up with a proper solution.

  After all, she was the girl who’d stayed up for two days straight figuring out the previously unsolvable Yang–Mills existence and mass gap problem.

  But now she didn’t have two days to figure out a solution to their situation; she was lucky if she had two hours before dawn came and the Franks attacked. Rollo and his men had been arguing much of the night, Dak interjecting at times, trying to figure out how a few thousand Viking warriors could fight their way past tens of thousands of Frankish and Burgundian soldiers.

  They’d all come to the same conclusion: It wasn’t possible. Every avenue of retreat had been cut off by the Franks. Even though the fleet of Viking ships floated less than a league away, it might as well have been the distance to the moon.

  Yet a feeling in Sera’s stomach told her she was missing something obvious. She stood from the fire and walked slowly through camp. Everything was so quiet and subdued, nothing like their previous battle experience, full of urgency and hasty preparations.

  A part of her missed the noise. Even though it had been terrifying at the time, there had been something thrilling about the clanging Parisian church bells and the blaring Viking horns signaling the start of battle.

  Sera froze, one foot still suspended in the air. “That’s it,” she said out loud to no one. She laughed at how perfect of a solution it was as she raced back to Dak and Rollo.

  She was winded when she found them in front of the fire. “The horns,” she blurted excitedly. “We may not have enough men to fight the Franks, but they don’t have to know that. Dak, Riq, and I will sneak into their camps with battle horns and start sounding them — the Franks will assume they’re under attack and scatter. In the confusion, you run for the ships!”

  She beamed with pride.

  Rollo scowled. “I’m not sending kids into the enemy camp,” he grumbled.

  Dak bristled at being called a kid, but before he could complain Sera piped up.

  “No one would ever suspect the three of us,” she argued. “If the Franks find a Viking wandering in the woods they’ll get suspicious and everything will be ruined. But if it’s just us . . .” She shrugged. “We’re kids, how much trouble could we be?”

  Dak was glad that before leaving the Viking camp he’d finally been able to change out of his wolf pelt, replacing it with dark leggings and a thick cloak pulled from an injured Frankish soldier. His familiar axe still rested at his hip, and in his hands he carried a large war horn.

  Clouds had rolled in while they’d debated the details of Sera’s plan. Now, even though dawn was imminent, the night was pitch-black, which made navigation rather difficult. Dak had never been a particularly graceful individual and not being able to see where he was going wasn’t helping matters. Every step he took seemed to bring with it a cacophony of cracking branches that caused him to jump (which only set off more noises).

  After finally agreeing to the plan (it took a lot of arguing), Rollo warned the three time travelers not to get too near to the Frankish camps. They’d likely have guards posted, he warned, and they couldn’t risk getting caught.

  At first Dak obeyed this command but the longer he waited out past the edge of the camps, the more restless he became. After all, he was a historian first and foremost, and he saw it as his duty to properly record what he witnessed throughout time. He’d already begun drafting his magnum opus, titled The Time Lord, which, he was quite sure, would establish him as the preeminent authority on all things historical.

  Besides, it was boring out in the woods alone. His mind made up (not that he took much convincing), Dak moved toward the Frankish camp. The closer he got without anyone sounding an alarm, the bolder he grew.

  He kept himself tucked low as he advanced through a collection of lean-tos, pausing every now and again to listen to the snores of the soldiers. His heart pounded with a mixture of fear and excitement.

  Dak was just peeking his head into a crudely built cabin when he heard the first horn blow: Sera. The sound sputtered at first and then gained in volume and urgency. Another horn joined in: Riq.

  Already the sound of mumbling and surprise drifted among the soldiers scattered throughout the tents and bedrolls littered around the camp. A few men popped to their feet, weapons already drawn.

  There was no time for Dak to sneak back out to the thick woods and so he did the only thing he could: hunkered down behind the nearest tree and blew his horn as hard and loud as possible.

  It looked easier than it was. At first the instrument only let out a wheezing, choking sound. Dak’s cheeks began to blaze hot and red with the effort, his head spinning with light-headedness as he heaved in another breath. He changed the shape of his mouth and that did the trick: The horn let out a horrid, piercing wail.

  Whoever hadn’t been woken by the other horns was certainly awake now. Soldiers sprang from their bedrolls, some of them yanking on shoes, some of them reaching for weapons, but most merely fleeing.

  “The North Men are attacking!” Dak yelled, encouraging their panic. “Retreat!” His warning spread like wildfire, and Dak heard it repeated again and again. Soldiers scrambled, fleeing the camp so fast that Dak couldn’t help laughing in between bouts of blowing the war horn.

  The ruse had worked; the Frankish army was in disarray, which is exactly what the Vikings needed to break toward the river. He couldn’t wait to meet up with Sera and congratulate her on such a brilliant plan. Especially since he’d never really been convinced it would work in the first place.

  With a smile on his face, Dak turned toward the cover of the forest — when a hand suddenly clamped on his shoulder. Dak reached for his axe, but he was disarmed immediately and found himself pinned to the ground, staring up at the dawn-tinged sky.

  A figure hovered over him, sharp knee digging against Dak’s ribs. “If it isn’t my old nemesis,” the man said. “You don’t seem to have aged a day.”

  He hauled Dak to his feet and dragged him toward a fire. As the light spilled over the man’s face, illuminating the scar that slashed from his left eyebrow to the right corner of his mouth, Dak felt his insides twist.

  Even though the past twenty-five years had added wrinkles and age spots to the soldier’s face, Dak recognized Gorm instantly. The aged man yanked Dak’s hands behind his back, tying them tightly with a length of rope he’d been using as a belt.

  “You don’t have to do that,” Dak muttered.

  The Time Warden barked out a laugh. “That’s what the man and woman said, too. And since they were older I believed them. That’s the last time I trust anyone from the future.”

  Dak’s heart froze. He swallowed. “A man and woman? From the future?” It could only be his parents.

  “Head still hurts from where the woman conked me with a rock,” Gorm grumbled. Then he gave Dak an evil look. “I’m not taking any chances this time.”

  SUDDENLY, NOTHING mattered more to Dak than getting back to Sera and Riq. And if that meant leading the Time Warden right to where Rollo and his men were clambering into their ships, so be it.

  He had to tell Sera about his parents. If the knot on Gorm’s head was as fresh as it looked, they’d been here only an hour or two ago. They could still be here, somewhere. It took everything Dak had not to start calling out for them in the dusky dawn.

  If the Time Warden was suspicious that Dak offered only a halfhearted
resistance before giving in to his demands to be taken to the Vikings, he didn’t show it. Instead he just trudged along behind Dak, recounting how losing the time travelers in 885 had caused Siegfried to banish him and how miserable his life with the Frankish army had been ever since.

  Dak didn’t care and he barely listened.

  “Siegfried took my sword, Leggbítr,” Gorm grumbled. “Do you know what it’s like for a Norseman to have his weapon taken from him?”

  When Dak didn’t answer Gorm prodded him in the back to elicit the correct response. Dak shook his head.

  “Humiliating. Leggbítr was my father’s sword and his father’s before him. And what do I have to pass on to my own son?”

  Dak glanced back at the Time Warden, wondering if his son had inherited his thick nose and drooping ears. If so, he should be glad to get nothing else from his father.

  Another shove to the back and Dak mumbled, “What?” He tried not to think about what Sera and Riq would say when he led the enemy into their midst. He was being stupid and he knew it and yet he didn’t turn back.

  “Nothing,” Gorm barked. “That is, until I trade that magical metal device to Siegfried. You take me to camp, you give me the thingy, and maybe I let you live. Deal?”

  As if to emphasize his point, Gorm swung his axe through the air, cleanly slicing a thick limb from a nearby tree. His message was clear: If things didn’t go well, that could be Dak’s neck. He shivered, trying to shake off Gorm’s all-too-real threat.

  When Sera realized what Dak was doing she was going to be so ticked off. But that didn’t matter to Dak right now. What mattered was figuring out how to find his parents again.

  “He should be here by now,” Sera hissed. She walked in tight circles along the shore of the misty Eure River while Riq sat along the bank skipping rocks across the water. It was a cloud-choked morning and the stones sailed into the gray before sinking.