Kit snorted. "When the government gets involved, things always get worse."

Bull smiled wryly. "Ain't it the truth? How's Margo?"

"Rachel set fifteen stitches in her arm, nearly fifty in her leg."

Bull winced. "That serious?"

"No, the slashes were shallow, thank God, just long. She should be fine, so long as massive infection doesn't set in. Rachel's put her on antibiotics."

"Good. I hear she saved a little girl's life."

Kit managed a wan smile. "Yes. She's a hero. She was damn near a dead hero."

"If you're going to let her scout, Kit, you'd better get used to the idea."

Kit stared at the wall. "Yeah. I know. Doesn't make it any easier."

"Nope. Never does. Get some sleep, Kit. And put away the booze."

Kit grimaced. "Sure, boss." Then he glanced up. "Thanks."

"Don't mention it." Bull smiled, squat and square and for the moment, human instead of demi-legend. Human enough to show how much he cared, anyway, which meant a great deal to Kit in that moment. Bull Morgan thumped Kit on the arm. "See you around, Kit. Tell Margo I asked about her."

Kit nodded and let him out, then locked the door and put away the bourbon. But it was a long time before sleep came. He steeled himself to make the decision and finally settled on Rome as the best place for Margo's next down-time testing ground. Stubborn, brash, untrained ...

And once again, Kit would not be able to go with her.

The silver lining in all this darkness, Kit grumbled to himself as he sought a more comfortable position on the couch, was that Malcolm Moore wouldn't have to worry about rent and meals for months to come. If he'd thought it practical, Kit would have asked Malcolm to consider scouting again, just to be sure Margo had an experienced partner.

Yeah, right. She'd take to that idea with all the enthusiasm of a wet cat.

He sighed and wondered how she'd receive the news that another down-time trip was scheduled? She'd probably see it as her just reward for playing hero. Kit was rapidly discovering that being a grandfather wasn't half the fun it was cracked up to be. When, if ever, did he get to stop being the "mean one" in Margo's life? Every time things seemed to be straightening out between them, something always seemed to happen to muck it up again.

He blinked a few times, remembering how life with Sarah had gone much the same way-and how that had ended.

He lay quietly in the darkness listening to Margo's steady, even breaths in the next room and tried to keep fear at bay by planning out the next phase of her training.

He wasn't terribly successful at either.

CHAPTER THIRTEEN

Kynan Rhys Gower was trapped in hell.

Everyone here who could actually talk to him said otherwise, of course, but Kynan knew it was hell nonetheless, even if it didn't resemble anything the priests had ever described. The closest thing to a priest here, a man called "Buddy," had told him he could never escape-not to his home or even back to the accursed battle against the witch woman fighting on the side of the upstart French.

It hurt him, gnawed at him, that he was cut off forever from everything and everyone he knew and loved. A king whose laws forbade it, Kynan might have understood. But he could not understand why, if this infernal land's diabolical passageways that opened out of thin air could be made to open with the regularity of the rising and setting sun, why could the wizard or demon or hell-spawned sprite who controlled them not reopen the one passageway that would lead him home? Yet Buddy had told Kynan he would never again see the dark hills of Wales or the laughter in his son's eyes ....

At least a hundred times every day, as he struggled to understand devilish things beyond his comprehension, Kynan was tempted to do violence to something. But they'd taken away his weapons. Without them, he was less than a man. Less, even, than the commonest Welsh farm girl, who at least carried a small knife for chores.

Kynan swallowed his pain, his confusion, swallowed the demeaning status in which he found himself-a virtual slave in Satan's dominions-and worked hard to earn the scant coins he needed to pay for his tiny sleeping room and the meals of rice and strange vegetables which kept him alive. He missed meat desperately but was unable to afford it on what he earned

Several times a day, his hatred of the strange, demon birds which lived here-birds with teeth in their bills -deepened as he watched them eat colorful fish he was forbidden to take for his own meals. If he hadn't been terrified of incurring the king's wrath for killing one of the protected birds, he'd have killed and eaten one of them.

So he carried baggage for rich people whose behavior he could scarcely comprehend and whose Language he could comprehend not at all, found a second job sweeping floors in the bewildering place in which he was trapped, and quietly hugged his misery and terror and bitterness to himself. Every time he saw the grinning jackanapes who'd first told him what had happened to him, who had laughed at him while four strong men held him down...

Every time he saw the man called Kit Carson, Kynan wished to do more than violence. He wished to do murder.

But he'd watched that man practice mock fighting in the huge, lighted hall called "gym." He was a cunning, strong warrior as well as a knave. If Kynan wished to purge the stain of disgrace from his honor, it would have to come through sudden, unexpected attack. Kynan once would have sneered at any man who planned such a treacherous approach to an affair of honor, would have rightly called him blackguard. But Kynan was no longer in a land which made sense. He was in hell.

In hell, a man could be forgiven much.

So he pushed his hated broom down the hated floor, sweeping up the hated trash while trying to avoid running into hated, arrogant "tourists" and gradually filled his wheeled trash bin with little bits of refuse. Later he would have to open station trash bins along the "Commons" and empty them as we carrying the "plastic" sacks inside down to the "incinerator" and "recycling center." Even the alien, English words that somehow weren't really English made his head ache. Kynan had never spoken much English commander had translated battlefield commands -- but the so-called English spoken here ...

Even words he thought he knew made little or no sense.

He pushed his broom and wheeled cart into the area of "Commons" called "Victoria Station"-named, someone said, for a Queen of England, who had brazenly ruled in her own name despite a perfectly eligible husband who could have sat the throne in her stead, and filled another tray with dust and trash, emptying it into his bin. A spate of laughter made him grit his teeth. They weren't laughing at him, but Kynan was so lost in despair, he could scarcely endure the sound of another person's joy. It only reminded him how cruelly alone he was.

He glanced up, drawn against his will to look. A group of men in strange, long-coated suits and pretty, sweet-faced women in even stranger dresses were playing an odd game, setting out little wire hoops with weighted feet, standing up two wooden sticks painted with bright bands of color, arguing which of them would claim wooden balls banded with a matching stripe of color.

A pang ran through, him. He wondered what his wife and son might be doing now. Wondered if the village men would teach the boy to use longbow and maul-or if the French would even leave enough men alive to return to the village. What would become of his family? A sickness wrought of empty, helpless longing threatened him again, as it did many, many times each day.

Kynan straightened his back against it. He was a Welshman, a veteran soldier. He might be lost, abandoned by God and saints alike, but he would not give Satan the satisfaction of watching him buckle under the weight of fear and loss which hourly were heaped on him. Kynan watched the game players dully, wondering what these particular demons were doing.