Masters of Time

by Sarah Woodbury

  “Slow down; slow down. Did you say David is dead?”

  “That’s what Clare thinks, but it isn’t true, according to Gwenllian. David escaped and is stuck wandering around Aquitaine by himself.”

  “Is Gwenllian there?”

  “Yes.”

  “Can I speak with her? She knows me.”

  A little nonplussed, Christopher held out the phone to Gwenllian. “It’s Mark Jones. He says you know him. He wants to talk to you.”

  Tentatively, Gwenllian took the phone and put it to her ear in imitation of Christopher—and then launched into a flurry of Welsh of which Christopher understood nothing.

  He looked at Jon, who was eyeing him. “Did I hear him say he’s MI-5?”

  “Yeah. He’s one of Callum’s men.”

  “Whoo.” Jon let out a rush of air and sat back in his seat, one of a long line of booths at the diner, which was decorated in a 1950s style and was owned by a Greek family. Apparently, when Greeks came to the United States, many bought diners, just as Italians opened pizza parlors and Vietnamese ran doughnut shops.

  Gwenllian had tears streaming down her cheeks, and Christopher felt bad, because she was sitting across from him so he couldn’t hug her. The tears came a little harder every time she said David’s name. Arthur, who was sitting next to Christopher, had stopped eating and was staring at Gwenllian.

  Christopher put his arm around him, and Arthur didn’t pull away. “It’s okay. It’s going to be okay.”

  Any fool could see that it wasn’t, but before Arthur started crying too and Christopher had to figure out a way to calm him down, Gwenllian wiped at the tears on her cheeks and handed the phone back to Christopher. “He says David is alive.”

  Mark was still on the line, so Christopher put the phone up to his ear. “How could you possibly know that? Did you see a flash? Is he here too?” That would solve all of Christopher’s problems at once.

  “No, but I don’t think the time traveling would be working if he were dead.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “Because it’s about David. It’s always been about David. Every single time someone has time traveled, it’s been because either David needed to or needed them to,” Mark said. “Does David need his son alive? Yes, he does. It’s that simple.”

  Gwenllian was looking a little better since Mark had talked to her, though Christopher thought Mark’s idea was wishful thinking. Anna and Aunt Meg had traveled on their own enough times that he didn’t see how Mark could be right. But if it got them all through the next few days, he wasn’t going to argue with him. And honestly, believing David was alive didn’t change anything. Christopher still had to get Gwenllian and Arthur back to the Middle Ages in one piece.

  He made a sweeping gesture with one hand, though Mark couldn’t see it. “Whatever. What do I do now?”

  “Where are your parents?”

  “Dad’s in California, and Mom’s mad at me. I haven’t been able to reach either of them.”

  Mark made a gah sound in the back of his throat. “Let me liaise with a friend of mine in the FBI.”

  “How do you know we can trust him?” Christopher said.

  “We can trust him,” Mark said, without answering Christopher’s question. “His name is Jim Jenson, and you’ll know he’s the right bloke because he looks like Bruce Banner. Actually, on second thought, text me his picture when you meet him, just to make sure.”

  “Why do we need him?”

  “Because I’m worried about who else picked up the flash, and you’re an ocean away. I’m pretty sure CMI—that’s the private security company that’s been chasing David for years—hasn’t given up, and there might be other interests, governmental or otherwise, who look at the possibility of traveling to the Middle Ages as an opportunity to make a fortune.”

  “Oh.”

  “Can you stay where you are for a while?”

  “If we order more food,” Christopher said.

  “Order more food. Let me make some arrangements and get back to you.”

  “Why don’t I just take them back to the Middle Ages now?”

  Another pause. “You’re sure you want to do that? You’re sure David would want you to do that? They’re here because it’s safer here.”

  “They always arrive back where they’re supposed to,” Christopher said. “David said so.”

  “Yeah, but even if David is alive, he’s still in France. Give him some time to straighten things out there before you put his kid back into the middle of it.”

  “Okay,” Christopher said. “But hurry.”

  “Before I go, does your friend have a phone?”

  “Yes.”

  “I want you to take apart your phone and bin the pieces. What’s his number?”

  Christopher told him, hung up, and then related the gist of his conversation to the others.

  “Waiting to go back sounds like good advice, actually.” Jon held out his phone to Christopher and made a gimme motion with his fingers for Christopher’s. Silently, Christopher handed it to him. He had forgotten to tell Mark that the case for his phone was solid and wouldn’t open. Jon would have to pry it apart if he was going to take out the battery.

  “I have an idea.” Jon turned slightly in his seat. The people in the booth behind them were just getting up, and one of the men had hung a raincoat over the wooden partition between the booths. Jon slipped the phone into the outside pocket, seconds before the man’s wife scooped it up and hung it over her arm as she walked away.

  Christopher laughed softly and looked at the other three. Gwenllian seemed to be feeling much better, and Jon was grinning, engaged in the adventure and pleased with himself for his quick thinking.

  Arthur turned his bright eyes on Christopher, and it wasn’t just their piercing blueness that reminded him of David. “Can I have some ice cream now?”

  Chapter Twenty-five

  16 June 1293

  Lili

  As soon as they reached an accessible spot along the riverbank, Huw moored the boat and leapt out. He held his hand out to Lili, even as his eyes went past her to Westminster’s battlements, still visible in the distance.

  “Do you see anyone?” Carew said.

  Huw shook his head. “There’s no alarm yet, and with all the traffic on the river, we should be hard to spot.”

  Here in the late afternoon, the Thames was almost as busy as a city street. In fact, the people of London used the Thames as a street, hauling goods from one side of the city to another more easily than by cart. The southern side of the Thames wasn’t normally a place to stop, however, since it wasn’t really part of the city. As Lili’s soft leather boots squished into the mud, she remembered that it was essentially a marsh. At times, in the never-ending quest for land to expand the city, parts of it had been filled in, but most of it was wet and difficult to traverse due to the narrow paths and the forests of reeds, which, of course, made this area all the better to hide in and was the reason Huw had taken them here in the first place.

  Fortunately, they didn’t have to stay. Huw led them unerringly down a narrow path through reeds that grew higher than Lili’s head and everything she could see was green and wet. After a quarter-mile of travel, they came to a place where the reeds were replaced by trees, and they could stand on more solid ground. Huw found a spot where they were hidden on all sides from the eyes of any passer-by—were one to brave the marsh at all—and shrugged his satchel off his shoulder.

  “I have a change of garments for you, my lady.” He looked apologetic for even mentioning it. “It won’t do for you to go about in those clothes.”

  “I am in no way offended, old friend.” Lili took the plain blue overdress he offered. “You saved us, and you know as well as I that I have spent far more of my life wearing clothing like this than the gowns of a queen.”

  “I’ll stand guard, Huw.” Raff, the second man, who’d shared the rowing with Nicholas, paced away from them back towards the river, his boots leaving cl
ear prints in the soft ground. Other than ducking his head when they’d been introduced, these were the only words he’d said.

  Nicholas looked intently at Huw. “Who is he and why do you think we can trust him?”

  “He thinks more than he says. He’s a good man, despite being from Yorkshire,” Huw said, as if it was obvious that being from Yorkshire was something to apologize for.

  “He’s willing to come with us to Wales?” Lili gently laid Alexander down on the ground, still asleep in his wrappings. He had a tendency to take one four-hour nap in the afternoon, and they were fortunate that he could sleep—and maybe sleep a little harder and longer—through the upheaval of the day.

  “To the ends of the earth,” Huw said.

  “Why?” Nicholas’s tone was just short of demanding.

  “His father stood for Parliament this last election and won; his sister was allowed to divorce an abusive husband, thanks to Dafydd’s reforms,” Huw said. “Raff himself is a bastard, now allowed to inherit because of that law Dafydd pushed through in April. Some in the Church hate these changes, but the result has been an unswerving loyalty in those whose lives have been transformed.”

  Nicholas subsided at this rather eloquent speech, nodding, and took off his own ornate tunic in favor of a leather jacket and mail vest that Huw pulled from his bag. Without concern for propriety, Lili untied the strings on her dress and shoved it down to her hips. She wore a linen shift underneath, which covered her completely, but Huw and Nicholas swiftly turned their backs anyway.

  Laughing at their embarrassment, especially since she’d been nursing Alexander in front of them, Lili tugged on the coarse dress of a peasant woman, thankful it wasn’t itchy and that she didn’t have to give up her linen shift, which was softer against her skin. While it was true that she’d worn dresses like this one before—and more often simple breeches—the roughness of the fabric wasn’t as familiar to her as it once had been. She then wrapped her hair in a headscarf and tucked in the strands. She was now transformed into Huw’s wife or sister.

  She tapped Nicholas on the shoulder, and he turned back. “What about your sword?”

  “Keep it,” Huw said. “Queen Lili and I shall act as your servants, and Raff as your man-at-arms. Nobody will look twice at us, especially when the queen carries a baby in her arms.”

  “You’d better start, both of you, by calling me Lili.”

  Huw looked unhappy, but Nicholas smiled gently. “I will go down on bended knee before David when he—” His face paled.

  “None of us believe he’s dead, Nicholas—I mean, my lord. My heart beats constantly—against all expectation—that I will see him coming around a bend,” she gestured back the way they’d come, “or sailing down the Thames, as he did when he defeated William de Valence.”

  Huw bent to pick up the baby, who’d opened his eyes. “I’ll carry him for now.” He whistled like a bird through his teeth.

  Raff came hustling back, sweeping a stick behind him to scatter dirt, grass, and leaves. He’d noted the footprints too and was doing his best to disguise them. “Men patrol the walls of Westminster. Chances are they know by now that you’ve escaped. We should hurry.”

  The little group started walking with long strides, led by Nicholas, the group’s natural leader. As they headed southwest from the river towards the main road out of London, leaving the life Lili had led for five years behind her, tears fell silently down her cheeks. She had never wanted to be queen, but she’d accepted it because Dafydd had needed to be king—not for his sake, but for Wales and ultimately for the people of England.

  She kicked at a rock in her path, suddenly angry at Dafydd for going off to Aquitaine when she and the boys still needed him. Never mind England and Wales, which would fall into iniquity under Clare’s rule.

  In between alternating bouts of gut-wrenching fear and boredom of the last few days, Lili had been spending quite a lot of time thinking about the Order of the Pendragon—even more now as she had her friends in it to thank for her and Alexander’s survival. For all that they’d—she’d—been completely taken in by Clare, it wasn’t for a lack of information or because any one of them had been asleep at the wheel, as one of the twenty-firsters who’d gone back to Avalon had liked to say.

  Their mistake had been in not putting the pieces together from the bits of information and rumors they’d heard, starting last autumn, and they’d allowed Clare’s own reassurances to lull them into a false sense of security. Clare was a charmer. She’d seen him work his way through a room and been the recipient of his charms more than once. Because Clare had no royal blood, he’d settled for less than the crown time and again. His new French wife had died in childbirth shortly after the Christmas feast, and Lili wondered if it had been her death that had made him choose this moment for his ultimate betrayal. Maybe it had been the final push to make him decide that he should—as Lili had heard Cassie say more than once—go big or go home.

  Last January, after Clare’s wife had died at his estates in Ireland, he’d risked a winter voyage across the Irish Sea, landing in Wales at Rhuddlan. He’d ridden to Llangollen, where Dafydd and she had remained for a month after Alexander’s birth, since it would have been unhealthy for her or the baby to travel far, and Dafydd had been reluctant to leave them.

  She’d been present when Clare had strolled into the reception room at Dinas Bran and drawled in that casual way he had, “I hear someone has been impugning my name.”

  Dafydd had reassured him of his continued trust, since he had every reason to believe that the plot that had been uncovered was not between Clare and the King of France, as rumors had told it, but between Aymer de Valence and the Red Comyn.

  That all seemed foolish and naïve now. Clare had probably encouraged Valence in his mischief and treason, at no cost to himself, knowing that he was far away in Ireland, awaiting the birth of his child, and wouldn’t be implicated in the plot, no matter how it ended.

  It hadn’t ended well for Aymer de Valence, though Dafydd had intended to let him out of the Tower of London once the treaty with Philip was signed. Releasing Valence was probably the first thing Clare had done after capturing Lili and the boys, accompanied by a speech about how now was the time for reconciliation and forgiveness.

  After another half-mile, they reached the Portsmouth road and fell in behind a merchant traveling south with a wagon full of spinning wheels, which had been invented in the east and arrived in Europe a few years ago. Dafydd had immediately encouraged the spread of the technology—adding the treadle and the flyer—and thus energized the wool industry, which had been further transformed by Bridget’s introduction of knitting.

  “The day wanes, Huw,” Nicholas said. “I hope you have a plan?”

  “We will stay in Kingston tonight.” Huw glanced back at Nicholas and Lili. “We have friends at the Church of St. Mary.” Kingston was a market town, established during Saxon times.

  “How many miles?” Nicholas said.

  Lili was glad he’d been the one to ask, because she was afraid to.

  “Five miles—no more than that,” Huw said.

  Lili could walk fifty miles if she had to, and she was glad now of her simple garb. She wasn’t a queen any longer. All that mattered was the safety of the children. She prayed that when Gwenllian and Arthur returned, they would arrive in the right place at the right time. She prayed too that they were safer in Avalon than they would have been if they’d stayed with her.

  Chapter Twenty-six

  16 June 2021

  Gwenllian

  After a while, even with their orders of ice cream, which Gwenllian enjoyed very much, they couldn’t stay at the diner anymore. They were just getting ready to leave when Mark called back to say that the FBI man needed a place to meet, and Christopher should choose one quickly. Since it had started to rain, Christopher didn’t want to go to a park or some place outside, and he didn’t think they should go to either his house or Jon’s, so he settled on a place called Bryn
Mawr College, which was where his mother had gone to university. Gwenllian had traveled once with Dafydd to Cambridge, where he had met with scholars from all over the world, so she knew what a university should look like.

  Or so she’d thought.

  Bryn Mawr, she decided instantly, was where she would choose to go if she was allowed to attend university. It might be that men and women were equal in Avalon (according to Mom and Anna and Bronwen and Cassie), but it looked to Gwenllian like women who attended this school had the better end of the deal. Huge stone buildings, almost as impressive as Dafydd’s castles, loomed over her, and the great hall was more magnificent than any hall she’d ever been in—not so much in size but in decorations.

  “Wow.” She spun slowly on one heel as she studied the images in the stained glass windows. Then she frowned and pointed at a red and yellow banner that hung on the far wall. It showed Gwynedd’s three lions. “That’s Papa’s banner!”

  Christopher laughed. “This is Bryn Mawr, Gwenllian. The people who settled here, and who founded the college, were Welsh. Didn’t you realize?”

  Gwenllian shook her head. She hadn’t given any thought to the Welsh name, since most names in her experience were Welsh.

  “They remember that your dad was the last Prince of Wales—in this world anyway,” Christopher said.

  Jon had come into the hall with them, slouching with his hands deep in his pockets. “I don’t know about this, Chris. Why are we meeting the FBI guy here?”

  “Because it’s private, but it’s also public. I suppose I could have chosen the mall.”

  Gwenllian didn’t know what a mall was, but she was glad Christopher had come here, even if Jon wasn’t. Arthur was back to sucking on his finger, which Gwenllian didn’t take as a good sign, though he wasn’t crying and held her hand willingly enough. She wished she could wrap him up in her arms and protect him from all of this. That’s what she’d thought she was doing when she’d jumped out of that window. Now, she hoped she’d made the right choice. She had been thinking only of escaping and hadn’t given any thought to what they were going to have to do to return. It would have to be something spectacular and terrifying.