Excerpt

EXCERPT FROM TIME AND TYRA AGAIN
COPYRIGHT © TRACY COOPER-POSEY 2017
ALL RIGHTS RESERVED

Chapter One

The second time I saw Tyra of Norwich was in England.  That sounds sensible, doesn’t it? One would expect to find the wife of Lord Norwich in the kingdom where her husband’s lands lie.  There were two reasons why seeing her that second time made my heart beat with a wildness I had not felt in nearly two centuries.  The first was my understanding that Tyra was dead of a war wound, for she had been merely human, after all. The second was that her death had occurred almost two hundred years ago, in Jerusalem, nearly a year’s travel away from the muddy road where I stood staring at her now.

There was a third reason, of course, but I’ll come to that.

I gazed at her, completely oblivious to the soft rain falling on my head and shoulders or, indeed, the noisy progress of the King’s procession along the narrow road, as his retinue wound their way up to the open gates of York Castle.  It might have been just the two of us standing along the side of the road, even though there were at least a hundred more watching King Edward return from his victorious settlement of the Scottish problem.  Most of them were damp, miserable Englishmen, but not all of them.  Those who were not stared at the King’s men and carts as they went by, resentment painted on their faces.  I noticed none of them, though, after spotting Tyra.

I absorbed the details, cataloguing the differences.  The last time I had seen Tyra, she lay with a white face upon a pallet built upon water barrels, while the two men in her life held her hand or spoke to her, one dark-haired, the other as pale as Brody had been dark.

In those conservative times, their devotion to Tyra had been extraordinary, but to me, knowing Tyra even a little, it had been perfectly understandable.  In the years since, I had often wished I could have been one of those privleged to sit next to her pallet and share her company.

Now, here she stood in the misty rain, tall and upright and quite alive, her dark hair hidden beneath a sheer veil, her slender figure disguised by a modestly cut surcoat and fur-lined mantle.  Yet it was her.  I could feel it in my bones.  From the independent lift of her chin to the high cheekbones and direct examination of the world with her big eyes…it was Tyra, exactly as I remembered her.

There could be many reasons why Tyra might still be among the living, even now, after so many years had passed.  After all, I still moved among humans even though I no longer counted as one.

I would find out how she came to be here, later.  There would be an explanation the likes of which would make a human mutter of witchcraft, but it would be a truth I could grasp.