Free The More I See You by Lynn Kurland

several crude huts. Bodies hovered near the doorways, dogs cameclose and barked at the horsemen who kicked at them with curses. Jessica could only stare in amazement. The poverty and the living conditions she saw were appalling. How could Richard allow his people to live like this?
    The inner wall wasn’t quite as tall as the outer, but who was measuring? It was still impossibly high and, she noted as she rode through the gate, impossibly thick. Obviously Richard had no intention of being murdered in his bed by marauding neighbors.
    The inner bailey wasn’t exactly what she’d expected. Though medieval English history hadn’t exactly been her thing, she had seen artists’ renderings of medieval court-yards and remembered them to be full of all sorts of interesting buildings.
    Richard’s inner bailey looked more like a quarry. There was a crude wooden building to her left that obviously served as the stables, for men were leading their mounts to it. Other than that, the only things of interest were the enormous piles of rocks, and the huts and tents hugging the walls. A small patch of ground looked to be trying to sprout something edible but Jessica had her doubts it would succeed.
    Then she lifted her eyes to the corner of the bailey and found that something—probably horror—was squeezing her chest so tightly she couldn’t breathe.
    It was a round tower.
    It wasn’t that the castle didn’t have three others in its corners. It was just that this one was so much bigger than the others. It should have looked out of place, but it didn’t. The frightening thing about it was that she knew what it looked like from the seaward side.
    That view was courtesy of that Victorian painting she’d seen in Henry’s gallery.
    If she’d entertained in the back of her mind some lingering doubt that she hadn’t actually traveled back in time, she entertained it no longer.
    Richard’s guardsmen had departed, leaving her sitting atop her horse in the midst of the bailey. She knew she should have dismounted, but she wasn’t sure she could.She thought about asking Richard for help, then she saw the look on his face and decided that silence was definitely the better part of valor at the moment. He was advancing on a young man who held a mallet in his hands. She couldn’t help a little sigh of relief. She wasn’t the one going to be getting yelled at.
    “What in the hell are you doing?” Richard bellowed.
    The other man flinched. “Starting the hall, my I—”
    “I can see that, you fool!” Richard thrust out his hand and pointed at what looked to be framing for something very large. “That looks remarkably like wood.”
    Well, his powers of perception were right on, Jessica noted.
    “Of course, my lord. The hall will be fashioned—”
    “Of stone,” Richard finished, jabbing his finger in the man’s chest. “I told you no wood! What must I do to make my wishes clear?
No wood!
”
    “But I cannot see the harm in it,” the man said hastily. “That is how ’tis done, my lord.”
    “Aye, a century ago!”
    “But, my lord de Galtres—”
    “The hall will be made of
stone.
Saints, boy, haven’t you seen the abbey at Seakirk? ’Tis made of rock, not twigs! Now, either you build my hall thusly, or you pack your gear and hasten through my gates before you sour my humor further!”
    The architect made Richard a hasty bow and scuttled off without further comment. Jessica dismounted slowly, then found herself almost knocked over from behind. She regained her balance in time to see Warren come to a skidding halt in front of his eldest brother.
    “Where is everything?” he exclaimed. “What have you done with the hall? What have you done with everything it took Father so long to build?”
    The look in Richard’s eye made Jessica back up a pace. She wondered why it didn’t have the same effect on his younger brother. Richard looked at Warren coldly.
    “I tore it all down.”
    The way he said those five simple words