Masters of Time

by Sarah Woodbury

  “I haven’t ever liked Clare,” Bridget said flatly, “and I have no trouble believing that if one of David’s barons was going to betray him, he would be the one to do it.” Now that Bridget and Peter were married, and Peter was the captain of the Shrewsbury town garrison, it was an open secret that Bridget’s shop was a clearinghouse for news from around the country. Even so, as a woman, she was more effective at her job than a man would be—and the whole point of her not returning to Avalon was for her to do her job. “We must do what we can to stop him.”

  “First of all,” Lili said, “we don’t even know if what I saw has happened or will happen. As far as we know, Clare hasn’t done anything wrong. We can’t convict him because I had a dream of what the future holds. I have no proof of any kind against him except what’s in my heart.”

  Bridget laughed without humor. “In Avalon, movies have been made about people being convicted for crimes they haven’t yet committed, but you’re right.” She studied Lili for a few heartbeats. “At the very least, you must tell Carew what you saw.”

  “Must I? Can I trust him? He could be as much a part of this as Clare. He’s Norman too.”

  “I may not have been here very long, but I’ve learned a lot in a short amount of time. We can trust Carew. He and Clare have hated each other since birth and have worked together recently only because of David.”

  Lili allowed herself to feel a bit of amusement. “You have learned a lot.”

  “You have Peter and me, but you need the help of at least one man who isn’t a twenty-firster,” Bridget added. “Besides, Carew is in the Order of the Pendragon.”

  “So is Clare!” Lili generally called Dafydd’s counselors by their first names, but she hadn’t ever grown comfortable referring to Gilbert de Clare with such familiarity. “He has heavily influenced the names that have been put forth for membership. Who knows how many he’s corrupted?”

  Bridget shook her head. “I think you overestimate his reach.”

  “I fear that I do not. Half the people in the Order could be loyal to him rather than to Dafydd by now.” Lili threw out a hand to encompass the whole of Westminster Castle. “Dafydd took the majority of his most loyal men with him. The garrison here could be made up entirely of Clare’s men for all we know!”

  Bridget looked at her sideways, not willing to argue further, but her eyes glinted, telling Lili that there was a great deal more going on behind her calm exterior than she was currently saying.

  And the truth was, Lili didn’t want to argue. Bridget was right that they needed help, and they didn’t have very many options. Dafydd and most of his men were in Aquitaine. Callum and Cassie were in Shrewsbury, awaiting the birth of their first child. Bronwen had become a mother for the second time a few weeks ago in Wales, where both she and Ieuan had wanted the child to be born. Lili had intended to travel to them, but a sudden sickness had overtaken both Arthur and Alexander just at the point she meant to have left, and they had ended up not going.

  That left Nicholas de Carew as the last man standing—and she was lucky to have him here at all. His wife and children were in Somerset, no doubt missing him as much as Lili and the boys were missing Dafydd.

  Lili dressed quickly and then told the wet nurse that she would be gone for a while. Alexander was sleeping. Now that the baby was older, she could expect a good four hours of sleep from him at this time of night. Bridget had woken Peter while Lili was dressing, and the three of them hurried down the corridor that ran inside Westminster’s curtain wall, to the Queen’s Tower, which had been given over to Nicholas and his staff.

  One of his men stood outside the door. At the sight of Lili, he bowed and, without questioning her presence, knocked. “My lord?” He spoke to the closed door.

  Nicholas replied, and the guard opened the door to poke his head inside, albeit without admitting Lili yet. In retrospect, she probably should have sent Peter to Nicholas to ask him to come to her instead of going to him herself. Then again, it really didn’t matter. Either option would have invited comment and was unusual enough that there would be talk about it belowstairs.

  Another minute passed, and then Nicholas himself pulled the door wide, admitting the trio into the sitting area. The room was brightly lit with many candles, which emitted a friendly glow. Nicholas’s bedchamber lay adjacent. This suite of rooms was slightly smaller than Lili’s in the King’s Tower, but since Nicholas’s wife and children were not with him, Lili didn’t need to worry about waking anybody else. Thus, once the guard had shut the door and returned to his post, Lili explained about her dream and Dafydd’s belief in Clare’s treachery.

  Nicholas listened in complete silence, with his arms folded across his chest and looking down at the floor. When she finished, he looked up and simply gazed at her without comment.

  “I know how foolish this sounds, even to my ears,” she said, by way of apology. Now that she’d laid her fears before her friends, she couldn’t help but doubt herself in the same way Nicholas had to be doubting her. Peter probably felt it too, but he’d been too polite to say so, at least to her.

  Nicholas dropped his arms, and his expression gentled. “With David gone, it’s natural that you should worry about him. Dreams are often a confused mix of thoughts and ideas that we don’t even know we have—” He stopped, one shoulder lifting in an unasked question.

  “I know what you’re thinking. What I experienced might have been only a dream. You are absolutely right that I miss Dafydd and feel unsettled. I know as well as you the number of times Dafydd has put himself in danger. This family makes a habit of it. But you also know that my sight has been true before, and that Clare is capable of betrayal and deceit. More than capable.”

  “Queen Lili is right.” Where it had been rare for Branwen to speak to any noble other than Lili, Bridget was far more forthright.

  Nicholas now directed his gaze not towards Lili, but at Peter. “Say the queen is right. Should we have seen this coming?”

  “Six months ago, rumors and warnings from various sources suggested that Clare might be working with the King of France,” Peter said. “Bridget shared what she had with David and Callum, and they decided that the rumors were exactly that. She and I talked about it again last Christmas during the investigation of the ambush of the French emissary and James Stewart.”

  Bridget nodded. “It did sound far-fetched at the time.”

  “But you think now, in light of Lili’s dream, that we made a mistake?” Nicholas said.

  Peter tsked through his teeth. “It could be.”

  Nicholas didn’t argue further, just glanced once at Lili before moving to pace back and forth before the fireplace, unlit as it was June. “Sight or not, a real seeing or not, sometimes a dream can bring together bits and pieces in a person’s mind that he has been unable to put together when awake. Even if what you saw hasn’t happened, perhaps we should be looking instead at the intent of the dream.” Nicholas stopped his pacing to look at the others.

  “Which was to show us that Clare is no longer loyal,” Bridget said.

  Peter’s eyes gleamed, and he spread his hands wide. He wasn’t one to talk unless it was necessary, but he had experience investigating crime and espionage, both in Avalon and in this world. “What is the downside of following up? If it was just a dream, we have lost nothing by entertaining the possibility of treachery. If Clare has indeed betrayed us, then the sooner we move, the better off we’ll be.”

  Nicholas rubbed his chin, clearly more accepting now that Peter, the other man in the room, had concurred with Lili. “I suppose I could make a few discreet inquiries.”

  “Of whom?” Lili said. “We aren’t in a position to trust anyone in the Order, not with Clare having as much influence as he does.”

  “My lady,” Carew said, “if Clare is plotting treason, we four here are hardly enough to overcome whatever he’s planning, not with Arthur and Alexander to protect. We need someone we can trust outside our usual circles.”

  P
eter looked rueful. “We don’t have many allies in the Church.”

  The new Archbishop of Canterbury, Robert Winchelsey, had not been Dafydd’s choice. An austere man in his late forties, he’d been confirmed in February with great enthusiasm by Pope Boniface. Winchelsey disagreed with Dafydd on just about everything to do with religion and politics, from taxation, to freedom of religion—to the idea that Winchelsey and the Church had to listen to, respect, or obey Dafydd at all. Winchelsey agreed with Boniface that the Church should be the cornerstone of all spiritual and temporal authority.

  “Archbishop Romeyn remains in Italy,” Nicholas said, “so, no, I don’t think we can look there.”

  “One of us could speak to our Jewish friends,” Bridget said. “They’ve never trusted Clare.”

  “For good reason,” Lili said.

  Nicholas snorted. “The massacre at Canterbury didn’t help.”

  Lili bit her lip. “Who else in London isn’t a possible companion to Clare?”

  “What about your brother? He has been nothing but accommodating since he took over Temple Church.” Peter was referring to Godfrid de Windsor, Carew’s bastard younger brother, who’d adopted the old family name of Windsor rather than Fitzcarew because, as Nicholas had once told Lili, if his family didn’t want anything to do with him, he didn’t want anything to do with his family. He was the new master of Temple Church, the Templar seat in London. “He was one of the people who warned us months ago that Clare might not be all that he seemed.”

  “I can speak with him.” Nicholas blew out his cheeks in a puff of air. “It will give him a chance to tell me I told you so!”

  “Even if Godfrid is loyal, how can he help us?” Bridget said. “He’s stuck in London just like we are.”

  “His men aren’t, though,” Peter said. “Godfrid has access to hundreds of men and resources in France and Aquitaine—far more men and resources, in fact, than Clare can marshal. He can get word to his brethren that David might be in peril.”

  Nicholas nodded. “He can warn the commanderies in France to be careful of Clare, whose men might be hunting David throughout the Aquitaine countryside. Godfrid also can have his fleet warn us if Clare attempts to cross the Channel to England.”

  “Even were Clare to do so, we still can’t arrest him,” Lili said. “As far as we know right now, I had a dream, and he’s done nothing wrong.”

  Nicholas’s laugh caught in his throat. “For a moment there, I forgot what we were basing our anxiety on.” He studied Lili a moment. “You’re sure?”

  “Yes,” Lili said, and suddenly she was. “If you lay out what I’ve told you, will Godfrid believe you?”

  “I don’t plan to lay out what you’ve told me.” Nicholas gestured to Peter and Bridget. “He will know from his own sources that two of David’s spies are visiting. I will tell him that we have reconsidered the information he gave us last year and now believe the king’s meeting with France to be a trap. Once I name Clare, Godfrid will immediately understand that we can’t go to the Order of the Pendragon for help, nor can we rely on the fact that David is the Duke of Aquitaine.”

  Nicholas eyed Lili. “I must warn you that Godfrid might not agree to help. Previous English kings, Edward among them, rubbed shoulders with the Templars in the Holy Land, but the Order has rarely concerned itself with temporal politics. He is a Templar first, English second.”

  “I know,” Lili said. “Perhaps Godfrid will be willing to make an exception in this case.”

  “We must also warn Callum and Cassie at Shrewsbury,” Bridget said. “It would be better to send word to all of David’s barons, but I don’t see how to make that happen because we can’t use the radio for this. We have no idea how many of our men Clare has bought. If he was smart, he would have started at the radio stations.”

  Before traveling to Avalon last Christmas, Dafydd had already shifted gears away from his quest for a telegraph and moved straight to radio. Compared to laying wire for telephones and telegraphs, radio was easy, relying on relays and antennas that were producible with technology available to them in this world.

  And, as it turned out, among the numerous gifts from MI-5, for which Mark Jones had traded himself, had been a box of old (to the twenty-firsters) CB radios, transistors, and transmitters with mini-solar kits to run them. Tate had included them as a by-the-way, and nobody had realized the treasure they’d been given until Bridget and Peter had taken the time to go through the boxes.

  Oddly, it was Rupert Jones, a reporter who’d hidden himself aboard the bus before it left Caernarfon, who’d been instrumental in making the network viable. Dafydd had been able to broadcast a May Day greeting to all of London last month. What’s more, only two weeks ago, he in London and Callum in Shrewsbury had been able to send and receive messages from Llywelyn in Caerphilly.

  “I thought that was what the radio was for,” Nicholas said, sounding slightly exasperated. Lili could understand, since quick communication had been the entire point of the network and now, all of a sudden, they were back to communicating in what Dafydd would call the old-fashioned way.

  “Peter and I will go to Shrewsbury,” Bridget said.

  Lili gazed at her friend. The journey was a long one, but Bridget had traveled it recently and knew what she was suggesting. In fact, her clear eyes and level head tonight had given Lili a new respect for her. They hadn’t known each other very long, but Bridget’s short visit to London had made her a closer companion to Lili than almost anyone but Bronwen, Lili’s sister-in-law. Yet up until now, all of their discussions had been focused on everyday things—the children or their husbands or politics—or Avalon. Lili was ashamed to have given little thought before this about the person Bridget was inside. She’d come to Lili’s world and chosen to stay. What did she lie awake thinking about in the wee hours of the morning when she couldn’t sleep?

  “You can’t, Bridget.” Nicholas was dismissive. For all that he’d lived under Dafydd’s banner for ten years, he was fundamentally unchanged in matters of women. “I have twenty men I can send with Peter.”

  “Who might that be, Nicholas?” Lili said. “If Clare can betray Dafydd, how many others can too? Would he have had the foresight to woo some of your men with promises of wealth and a higher station? Can you trust every man-at-arms in your retinue? Can we trust any men at Westminster with what we fear?”

  Nicholas put out a hand. “Surely it can’t be that bad—”

  Lili cut him off. “Clare is the wealthiest man in England. He has more men and resources than anyone—perhaps more even than Dafydd. We can’t take anyone’s loyalty for granted.”

  Nicholas narrowed his eyes at Lili. He didn’t have a satisfactory answer to any of her questions, so Lili turned instead to Bridget, whose eyes were very bright. “You’re sure you’re ready to do this?”

  “Are you sure of what you dreamed?”

  Lili nodded.

  Bridget smiled. “Then I am too.”

  Chapter Three

  Near Midnight

  12 June 1293

  David

  David and Philip hit the dark water, which loosened Philip’s arms from around David’s waist, and the two men plunged into the depths separately. As David’s boots touched the riverbed, his knees bent, and he surged to the surface, coming up twenty yards downstream from where they’d gone in.

  Philip had surfaced too, and both men gasped for breath, struggling to stay upright in the swift current. The weight of their clothes pulled them down, though without mail armor, neither were in danger of drowning. David sent a look upwards. No heads were silhouetted against the light of the torches that lit the battlement. David was still shocked that he wasn’t looking at the twenty-first century Chateau Niort, but there seemed little doubt that they were still in medieval Aquitaine.

  Though they’d risen to the surface near each other, during the subsequent seconds that David had been fighting the current, Philip had been pulled away from him and was struggling in the water more t
han David. With long strokes, David reached Philip, grasped him around his waist, and turned him onto his back so he could float better.

  Philip didn’t protest. That he hadn’t drowned meant he could swim a little, but staying afloat seemed to be the extent of his abilities.

  “You took those arrows for me,” Philip said. “Why aren’t you dead?”

  “I have good armor.” David didn’t want to waste energy—either his or Philip’s—talking. One of the two arrows that the archer had shot at David had caught in the fabric of his shirt. With impatient motions, he worked the arrowhead out, though once he did that, he didn’t know what to do with it. The arrow was three feet long, and if he tossed it towards the near bank, Clare’s captain might find it, which wouldn’t do at all. If the man had any sense, he would send men looking for their bodies along the riverbank, and if he discovered the unbloodied arrow, he would know that David, Philip, or both had survived the attack.

  In the end, David snapped the arrow in half to make the wooden shaft a more manageable eighteen inches long and shoved both halves down beneath the strap that bound his right boot to his foot. Since he had no other weapon, maybe it would come in handy later, and he was tall enough that it rested comfortably against the side of his calf.

  David expected to have huge bruises tomorrow where the arrow points had hit him, but today he was just happy to still be breathing. Philip, however, lacked David’s Kevlar vest and had been wounded by the arrow that had struck him. He was bleeding and in pain, not to mention big and heavy. History called him Philip the Fair or the Iron King, which wasn’t too far off in David’s judgement, since he weighed a ton. History wasn’t talking about Philip’s weight, of course, but his resolve.

  Philip was the French king who’d stood up to Pope Boniface at the beginning of the next century, who’d had him murdered, in fact, and who’d wiped out the Templars in 1307 as a way to avoid paying back the money he owed them. Historians always liked kings who got things done and were decisive. David had to admit, whatever Philip’s faults and motivations, he’d carved out a place for himself in history.