The Crown of Valencia Read online

  Synopsis

  Ex-lovers can really mess up your life.

  Kate Vincent's ex, Anna, certainly does. Not only does Anna interfere in Kate's love life, but she totally screws up the world by traveling back in time to 11th century Spain and changing one crucial event. As any sane person knows, you cannot alter an event in history without altering everything that follows—but Anna has an agenda, and a score to settle.

  When Kate follows Anna back to the 11th century to clean up Anna's mess before she and those she loves cease to exist, she finds herself fighting not only Anna and her hired thugs, but also another woman—the woman Kate has never stopped loving.

  Romance, betrayal, and intrigue pack this tense conclusion to the epic adventure begun in The Spanish Pearl.

  The Crown of Valencia

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  eBooks from Bold Strokes Books, Inc.

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  The Crown of Valencia

  © 2007 by Catherine Friend. All Rights Reserved.

  ISBN 13: 978-1-60282-380-8

  This electronic book is published by:

  Bold Strokes Books, Inc.,

  New York, USA

  First Edition: November 2007

  This is a work of fiction. names, characters, places, and Incidents are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, business establishments, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

  This book, or parts thereof, may not be reproduced in any form without permission.

  Credits

  Editors: Cindy Cresap and J.B. Greystone

  Production Design: J.B. Greystone

  Cover Design by Sheri ([email protected])

  By the Author

  The Spanish Pearl (Bold Strokes)

  The Crown of Valencia (Bold Strokes)

  A Pirate’s Heart (Bold Strokes)

  The Compassionate Carnivore: Or, How to Keep Animals Happy,

  Save Old MacDonald’s Farm, Reduce Your Hoofprint, and Still

  Eat Meat (DaCapo)

  Hit By a Farm: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the

  Barn (DaCapo)

  The Perfect Nest (Candlewick)

  Acknowledgments

  Without the skilled people behind a book—publisher, editor, copyeditor, proofreader, cover designer—most of us writers would be sunk. I’m grateful the talented crew at Bold Strokes make my books look so good. To Cindy Cresap, my editor, and Julie Greystone, my copyeditor—thanks for always catching the stuff I miss, and I promise to get a grip on the whole lay-lie thing one of these days.

  Many thanks to my dear friends in the KTM, Rainy Lake, and Hayward groups, who’ve listened to my work (and my rants) for fifteen years. Your support, laughter, and encouragement have kept me going.

  Thanks to Pat Schmatz and Lori Lake for reading the most recent drafts, even though I hear you were taunting people because you knew what happened next!

  And finally, my heartiest thanks goes to all the readers of The Spanish Pearl who took the time to let me know you loved it—you made my day, over and over again. You stayed up until 4 a.m. reading it; you missed your subway stops; you got so swept up in the story you couldn’t stop thinking about Kate and Elena even while at work. Knowing that others fi nd Kate and Elena’s story riveting is more important to me than sales fi gures or published reviews. Satisfying you is like a drug—now that I’ve had a taste, I want more, more, more… my new motivation for writing.

  Dedication

  Melissa, my love, you amaze me.

  With every book I write, you cheerfully climb on board and take the emotional rollercoaster ride with me.

  The ups and downs and hairpin turns and sudden drops aren’t so frightening when you’re holding my hand.

  Chapter One

  I was flunking the eleventh century. In Spinning Yarn I gave myself a D-. Weaving was definitely an F, since it was hard to weave without yarn. Making Butter, C-. Cooking Over an Open Fire, C+. I earned the ‘plus’ because last week I did not scorch the stew.

  But in my own defense, I’d been born nine centuries in the future, so my survival skills were meant for an entirely different era. I could zip my car through rush-hour traffic on I-95 and let the obscene gestures roll off me like water off a duck. I knew all the Thai take-outs in Chicago and half the surrounding burbs, so I was never more than six blocks from a plate of life-sustaining chicken satay. My idea of roughing it had once been to go two whole days without a tall double almond cappuccino, no foam.

  Yet here I was, living in a rough wooden building with no running water and a chamber pot for a toilet, celebrating the nine-month anniversary of the day I’d met Elena Navarro. To live with Elena, I had left behind in the twenty-first century, my now ex-partner Anna and young Arturo, the child Anna and I were to have adopted.

  Stretching my aching muscles after painting all morning, and feeling the beginnings of hunger in the pit of my stomach, I headed outside the barn, wondering where Elena might be. I inhaled deeply to take in the flowering tree outside my studio, grateful that spring had finally come to our corner of Spain, which was the high, dry plateaus of eastern Castile.

  Elena was probably working somewhere since leisure made her nervous. While farming and serving as Duañez’s don wasn’t fighting, at least it was work. Tall, strong as a man, with black hair clipped close to her head, Elena’s androgynous features hid the truth from almost everyone. At first, I’d been afraid that I might call the “man” people knew as Luis Navarro by her real name, so I always called her Luis. But after a few months, late at night when we were huddled under our woolen blankets finding innovative ways to keep warm, I had begun calling her Elena. At first it had sounded odd to both of us, but soon she’d whisper in my ear every night, “Say my name again. I love it when you say my name.” I no longer feared I would call her Elena in front of everyone else.

  Our rough wooden house, which the Duañez locals called a castle, capped a gentle hill surrounded by sloping sheep meadows so bright green it looked as if a child had gone wild with a crayon. The rugged sand bluffs stretched north beyond the meadows, and rich, fertile flatlands reached to the south, soon to be planted with wheat and oats. After King Alfonso lifted Rodrigo’s exile last fall, Rodrigo gave Luis the small holding at Duañez and temporarily dispersed his army as political tensions chilled with winter.

  I squinted into the sun, but saw nothing of Elena. Farmers yelled to the sullen white oxen dragging single plows through the soil, and metal rang as the blacksmith worked in the shed nearby. Duañez pulsed with life, except for the small acreage on the next hill. I gazed up toward the neat rows of white, wooden crosses, and felt my jaw tighten.

  In the dead of winter, influenza had swept through Duañez’s close-knit community. Old Señora Perez was the first to die. We took the ill into our castle, where Elena kept a vigorous fire blazing in the main hearth day and night. Marta and the others tended the children, and I did what I could. I wiped the Chavez girl’s perspiring brow, told stories to a fitful Manuel, and watched as, one by one, three more adults and seven children succumbed to some sort of virus that could have been cured in the twenty-first century with a handful of pills. Thank goddess I hadn’t returned to the twenty-first century and brought Arturo back with me. Life here was too uncertain, too on the edge. Over nine hundred and twenty years in the future, Arturo was splashing through neighborhood puddles and would be almost through with the first grade. Most importantly, he was safe.

  I wiped my han
ds on my now-grungy apron, which reminded me I had a pile of laundry the size of Mt. Rainier waiting for me back at the castle. Soap making, D-. Laundry, B-. I discovered by watching the other women that I could freshen our dingy undergarments by laying them out on the rocks behind the house, where they whitened in the sun. But when it came to washing the outer clothes, I still hadn’t found a system that worked. When I’d told Marta I wanted to wash Luis’s shirts and my skirts, you’d think I’d just said I wanted to stick something sharp in my ear and pull it out through my nose. Personal cleanliness had yet to become fashionable among Christians.

  “Doña Kate!”

  I squeaked at the sudden arrival of little Miguelito, one of Marta’s dark-eyed boys who seemed to be perpetually running from place to place. He looked so much like Arturo that whenever I saw him, a sharp pang of regret pierced me, not regret that I wasn’t a parent, for I didn’t feel the same yearnings other women did, but regret that I wasn’t Arturo’s parent. He was a neat kid, and I hoped Anna appreciated her life with him. I would have made a rotten parent—I wouldn’t have known how to do anything, mostly because my parents hadn’t known either. No use perpetuating the Vincent Method of Bad Parenting. No, young Arturo was better off with Anna as his sole parent. That’s what I told Elena and what I told myself; but now and then I’d wake up before the sun and the roosters, my face drenched in sweat, my vision filled with Arturo’s face, and I would wonder what I’d given up.

  Miguelito waved his brown arms, hopping from one foot to the other. “Doña Kate! Come quickly. The oven is vomiting. It is vomiting!”

  “What?” My Spanish had improved greatly these last nine months, but surely I heard him wrong. “Vomiting?”

  The frantic boy grabbed my hand and pulled, so I followed him around the barn and down the grassy slope toward one of the common ovens the women from the twenty-five households in the valley used to bake bread. Miguelito stopped and pointed. “Shit,” I breathed. Huge billowing clouds of rising bread dough spilled out the front and dripped down the brick onto the dusty ground. The sharp smell of yeast gone wild filled the air. I grabbed my head and grunted in anger.

  “My bread, oh no.” I sank to my knees, watching as the oven continued to vomit the overheated dough. Marta had said to leave it in the cold oven only an hour, then punch it down, but I’d been painting for most of the morning. How many times would I have to screw this up before I figured it out? If not for Marta, Elena and I would have starved over the winter. Baking Bread, F.

  Miguelito had grown quiet at my elbow, eyes wide to see the doña moaning on her knees. For his sake I stopped, heaving a sigh. “Miguelito, in the shed outside the east castle door is an empty bucket and a shovel. I will need them both.” Pebbles clattered as Marta’s helpful son scampered away. Cursing myself, I stood and searched through a patch of weeds for a stick then approached the mess. This was going to take hours to clean up. Beyond the oven, Marta and a woman I did not know stood by the well pulling up wash water; from where they stood they couldn’t see the mouth of the oven. That must be Marta’s sister, back from a winter working as a servant at Burgos.

  The expanding dough made an awful sucking sound as it overflowed the oven lip, then landed with a wet plop on the growing pile on the ground. What a waste. What a stupid, stupid waste. This village had few resources as it was, and I just wasted half a bag of flour and all that yeast and Marta’s eggs, not to mention the generous dollop of honey I’d added, hoping to surprise Elena.

  I had no business trying to bake bread. I gripped the stick and began smacking it against the oven’s domed clay top. “Stupid, stupid, stupid,” I yelled. When I stepped in the doughy mess and dragged my skirt hem through it, I began stamping my feet and flapping my skirt.

  When Miguelito returned quickly with the bucket and shovel, I began shoveling the dough out of the oven. After just a few scoops we both heard footsteps on the rocky path behind us. Miguelito looked up, giggled, and ran off.

  “So, is this how you bake bread in your century?” Elena whispered in my ear. My body quickly responded by flushing warm and going all fluttery in my belly. That Elena could affect me like this irritated me quite a bit, actually. I’d always been a practical woman, not one who went all weak in the knees, and right now I was in no mood to be needled.

  I whirled and stomped my foot so hard a glob of dough splattered against her dusty boot. She stepped back, all legs and leather and wide smile. “Very funny,” I snapped. “You know very well it’s not.” I pushed back a lock of my hair and felt wet dough streak across my cheek. Damn it. I slid into English. “No, in my century we have ovens and electricity. And microwaves! I used to live a civilized life.” I waved the stick around, flinging bits of dough everywhere. Elena took another step back, her crystal blue eyes narrowed with mirth, which only fed my frenzy. “With frozen pizzas better than delivery, with ready-made tortellini and pesto, with take-out egg rolls. With a dozen choices of bread at the Happy Baker.” I flung the stick to the ground and switched back to Spanish. “Damn it, Luis, if you want bread so badly, you can just bake it yourself.” Why did I have to love this blasted woman so?

  Marta had reached the oven by this time, her wide face brimming with concern and the same barely-contained laughter that danced across Elena’s face. “Oh dear,” Marta said as she reached for Elena’s arm. “Don Luis, perhaps you had better come back later after we’ve helped Doña Kate clean up this mess.”

  Elena, at once breathtakingly beautiful and damned handsome, winked at Marta. “An excellent idea, Marta. It must be that time of the month for my lovely wife.”

  That time of the month? I scooped up a glob of warm dough and aimed it at her retreating back, but she sidestepped just in time. She bled once a month just as I did, which had been a great relief, actually, in the month after Gudesto had raped her. The only two other people who knew the truth about Elena were our friend, Nuño Súarez, and the cruel Gudesto Gonzalez. Nuño had discovered Luis’s true sex years ago but had stayed silent out of love and loyalty, and since I’d stabbed Gudesto to death last fall, he no longer counted. Killing him had left me oddly satisfied, and I didn’t like the feeling.

  As she moved away from me, Elena’s long green shirt and leather vest did nothing to hide her broad shoulders, but they did camouflage the narrow waist and woman’s hips below, as did her loose-fitting pants. She moved with an easy grace, to me so obviously female that it still took my breath away that no one else could see the truth. Instead, her men saw a slightly built but fierce Luis Navarro, El Picador, a man they did not want to cross, a man they trusted to lead them into battle and out the other side, still alive.

  I growled rudely as Elena strode down the hill toward town. At that, Marta threw back her head, her black braid sliding over her shoulder, and laughed. Broad-shouldered, tan, and dressed in a brown homespun skirt, she would have been called a peasant by history books, but she knew more about life than I ever would. “Pay him no mind, doña. Men think bread can be created out of thin air. Come, my sister Juliana and I will help you.” I nodded to the other young woman, slighter and lighter than Marta, yet built with her same sturdiness.

  Encouraged by their smiles, I sent one last glare at Elena’s back and turned to face my mess. Juliana moved in and held the bucket higher for me. “Have we met before, Doña Kate?” I shook my head, struggling to balance a glob of dough on the shovel. “Well, perhaps not. There is just something familiar about you.” I was grateful for Juliana’s chatter, as I had little breath for speaking myself while I scraped. “I did much of the bread-baking for the court at Burgos this winter, and this tragedy happened at least twice to me.”

  I doubted her words, but appreciated her efforts to comfort me. Soon dough caked all our arms up to our elbows, splattered down our skirt fronts, and stuck in our hair. As we worked, Juliana amused us with stories of King Alfonso and his court.

  When the oven was finally clean, we washed ourselves off at the well as best we could. “Thank you very
much,” I said as we rested in the shade of a spreading live oak. “I may never bake bread again.”

  Juliana tipped her head as she listened to me speak. “I just figured it out. You talk differently than most, and I’ve been trying to bring up in my mind who talks like you, and I think I know now.” When I had first arrived in the past, I spoke modern Spanish, so it had been a struggle to be understood. After nine months, I thought I’d altered my language and accent enough to blend in better, but I must still be using some modern phrases that sounded as foreign as Swahili to these people. “You sound like King Alfonso’s new mistress. She uses some of the same strange words that you do.”

  “From what I’ve heard,” Marta muttered, “that woman has too much control over Alfonso.”

  Juliana nodded. “It’s true. She has stolen Alfonso from Queen Constance’s bed, so all the queen’s ladies are furious with her.” She frowned. “More troubling, however, are her abilities as a seer. When I served the court, I overheard much, and some noblemen are worried about her influence.” Juliana stopped and crossed herself. “The woman isn’t normal. She’s been right in every prediction she’s made. She knows who will win what battle, and what the Moors will do and when.”

  Curious, I leaned closer, pulling another glob of dough from my hair. “Where’s she from?”

  Juliana shook her head. “I don’t know.”

  Curiosity was one of my downfalls. A woman who talked like me and seemed to know the future? Could there be more time-travelers besides myself and my friend Grimaldi, who lived in Zaragoza with his wife Liana?