Castaways in Time (The After Cilmeri Series)

by Sarah Woodbury

  “I was.” Callum’s brow furrowed.

  “Then it’s also the truth that you continued to serve your country the best way you could, which meant staying close to me. At the first opportunity, you returned to the twenty-first century with the time-traveling King of England in tow.”

  Callum blew out his cheeks and then laughed. “No less than the truth, as you say.”

  “If MI-5 was paying attention, they’ll know we’re here because of the flash,” David said.

  “That would explain how the coastguard was scrambled so quickly. It may be that they’re paying more attention than they were last November.” Callum turned on his heel and disappeared into the cabin behind them. The roof had been ripped off in the storm, but the walls were still intact. David could hear his boots scraping on the deck as he moved things around inside.

  David rubbed his forehead. Every muscle in his body hurt. “Would it make you uncomfortable if I admitted that I’m a little afraid?”

  Cassie gave a half-laugh. “Not at all! I am too, and I don’t think the truth is a great idea. The people on that cutter aren’t going to know who we are. We can let them rescue us, tell them we lost all of our identification and luggage, and then they can drop us on the shore with no more questions asked.”

  “That’s not going to work,” David said. “We’re Americans. They’ll hold us until they can sort out who we are and how we got here. Besides, I don’t lie well. Even if they don’t understand what is really going on, they’ll know something’s off.”

  “For a politician, you are disconcertingly honest.” For a few more seconds, Cassie’s eyes followed the approaching cutter, but then she faced David. “I know it’s too late now, but the instant we woke up, we should have run and not stopped running until we got back home again.”

  “How could we have done that in the ten minutes between waking up and when that ship appeared?” David said. “Could you have swum to shore?”

  Cassie licked her lips. “How do you imagine this playing out? Less than a year ago, they chased your parents halfway across Wales, trying to prevent them from returning to the Middle Ages. Callum came with your mother because he wanted to arrest them. Are these MI-5 agents going to view us any differently than Callum did? They’ll lock us up until they can figure out if we’re safe to be loosed on the world, and if they do believe us, it’s going to be even worse. Time travel, David! You’re going to be like every holiday of the year wrapped up in one neat bundle and delivered to their doorstep.”

  “Cassie—” David began.

  “No, David.” Cassie glowered at him. “Even after more than six years in medieval Britain, with all the poisonous politics, backbiting, and outright murder, you still think the best of people? They’re going to lock you up and never let you out!”

  David didn’t know what to say. He’d brought his friends here with a certain kind of confidence that never left him. He was the King of England, and that meant he had to show confidence at all times. Only his closest friends and family knew how often he struggled with uncertainty. Bile rose in his throat, which was hurting badly enough as it was. He didn’t answer Cassie.

  She nodded slowly as she watched him. “You know I’m right, don’t you?”

  “Yes. You’re probably right.” David could smell the diesel fumes from the coastguard cutter, even from this distance. He felt lightheaded and took in a deep breath to steady himself. “I may have miscalculated.”

  Cassie didn’t rub it in, though she could have.

  “I’m glad you said something, but now it’s too late to do anything but what we can,” David said. “It was too late the instant the coastguard found us. I’m sorry. We’re cornered now.”

  Cassie didn’t answer, just turned away from him to observe the approaching ship.

  “I have to tell the truth, Cassie.”

  “Okay.”

  “What does that mean?” David inspected the cutter too, acknowledging that its only relationship to the ship they were on was that they were both technically ‘ships’. The coastguard cutter was metal and sleek, needing a mere handful of men to crew it.

  “It means okay,” Cassie said. “What’s done is done, and we’ll deal with what is before us and try to get out of this in one piece.” Then she shot him an actual grin. “It can’t be more dangerous than facing down King Edward without a sword.”

  David managed a laugh, and then Callum stepped between them, holding a billfold in his hand.

  “What do you have there?” Cassie took it from Callum and opened it. It contained not money but Callum’s MI-5 badge. Cassie stared at it and then at Callum. “I don’t know which is more incredible—that you kept it, or that you brought it!”

  Callum looked sheepish. “I didn’t bring it to Scotland, as you well know, but I threw it in my bag this time because—”

  “—because you were traveling with me,” David said.

  Cassie’s mouth was open. “I knew you thought a lot about returning to this world when you first got here, but I didn’t know you still did.”

  “Every day.” Callum took in a breath. “We can do this.”

  “Under the circumstances, I don’t think we have much choice,” Cassie said, “and I agree that if we stick together, we might get out of this in one piece. I won’t lie, David, if you don’t want me to.”

  The cutter pulled up to within fifty feet of their wreck and stopped. A man came out of the wheelhouse and put a megaphone to his lips. “Do you need assistance?” The helicopter hovered overhead.

  David laughed at the absurdity of the question. They were standing in a husk of a ship, slowly sinking into the Bristol Channel. What did they need if not assistance?

  “Just follow my lead, my lord,” Callum said.

  “Will do,” David said.

  If they weren’t planning on telling the truth, he might have suggested that Callum cease with the ‘my lords’, but David was who he was: a twenty-year-old American boy turned King of England. What he hadn’t said to Cassie was that he’d wanted to tell the truth because that mantle of responsibility was so solidly his now that he was completely uninterested in pretending otherwise. He’d been arrogant, though, and probably delusional to think that anyone here would accord him comparable respect.

  For years, he’d played over and over in his mind what he would do if he ever returned to the twenty-first century. He’d known about MI-5; he’d known that they’d chased his parents across Wales. But he honestly hadn’t spent any time thinking about what they might do to him if they apprehended him. He was about to find out.

  Callum moved to the ship’s rail and held up his badge. “Security Service! I must get these people to Cardiff immediately.”

  Callum had left his badge in David’s care when he’d gone to Scotland, before he met Cassie. David was grateful for whatever impulse had told Callum not to leave it behind this time. That Callum had brought it didn’t necessarily mean that he wanted to forsake his life in the Middle Ages, only that he’d been thinking about it. A lot.

  Cassie filled Callum’s place beside David. “I have a bad feeling about this.”

  David smirked. He couldn’t help it; Cassie had said the phrase so perfectly.

  The man with the megaphone peered at Callum’s badge, and then someone in the wheel house, whose face David couldn’t see because of the glare off the windshield, signaled his approval. The first man gave a quick salute to Callum. “Sir!”

  Callum glanced back at David, who shrugged. It was too late to change course now; they were committed. Twenty seconds later, a lifeboat appeared in the water off the back of the cutter and surfed towards the wrecked cog. It pulled up to the side. David and Callum reached over the rail to grasp the hands of the first man out of the lifeboat, the same one who’d spoken to them through the megaphone; they helped him to hop over the rail and onto the deck, and then he handed each of them a life jacket.

  “I’m coastguard rescue officer Dan Timmons.”

  “David Ll
ywelyn.” David shrugged into the life jacket.

  Callum held up his badge. “I’m Agent Alexander Callum.”

  David did a double-take at Callum’s use of his first name. It was completely normal to give it under these circumstances, but this was only the second time David had heard ‘Alexander’ come out of Callum’s mouth. In the first instance, Callum had been drinking mead for the first time and had consumed a few too many cups.

  “I’ll need to speak to my superiors immediately,” Callum said.

  “You can radio them from the ship.” Timmons words came out clipped. His first priority, as it should have been, was not to chat but to get them off the cog and to safety.

  “Thank you.” Callum said.

  Cassie went first, clambering over the rail with Callum steadying her by holding onto her upper arm. The officer who’d remained in the lifeboat reached for her hand, but as she stepped into the lifeboat, the buoyant surface caused her to lose her footing, and she went down on her knees between the seats. At least she was safe.

  David followed, losing his footing as she had, and swallowed down a curse. He felt awkward, completely out of his element, and helpless. The last time he’d come to the modern world, he’d done it accidently-on-purpose to save Ieuan, who at the time had been his man-at-arms and had been wounded by an English arrow. The wound would have been mortal if David hadn’t jumped off a cliff with him on the wild theory that putting his own life in danger would transport them both back to the twenty-first century. It had done exactly that. They’d returned to the Middle Ages with Bronwen in the same way he and Anna had come the first time: by almost causing a car accident.

  More recently, his mother had jumped with his father and Goronwy off the balcony at Chepstow Castle, also on purpose, to save his father’s life. Llywelyn had been suffering from an infection around his heart, which was killing him. They’d returned to the Middle Ages the same way, though with Callum as a stowaway. Today, with the storm raging around them, David had calculated that the odds of ending up in the twenty-first century, rather than ending up dead, were relatively high. In a strange way, it was almost as if he were immortal, except that he was pretty sure that one swing of a sword to his neck would put an end to him in short order.

  Still, the risky part was that time travel didn’t always happen. Before he was born, his mother had fallen out of the window at Brecon Castle with his father to escape an assassin, and a few years ago she’d been caught up in a storm in the Irish Sea and almost drowned. Anna had seemed to waver in time at the birth of her first son, Cadell. None of those events had resulted in time travel. The unpredictability of the whole process made him more than nervous about getting back. It made him want to puke.

  “What’s wrong?” Cassie’s voice was a low whisper in David’s ear as he struggled to right himself and find a seat in the boat beside her.

  “I’m royally ticked off to be here,” David said.

  Cassie snorted a laugh, a hand to her mouth.

  “How about you?” David said.

  “Ask me in a few hours,” she said. “I think I’m still too stunned to think straight.”

  “You need to know that I’m serious about the timeline,” David said. “To me, this is a raid: we get in, we gather whatever information we can or need, and we get out. Or at least I do,” he amended.

  “Callum and I are with you,” Cassie said, “whatever happens.”

  David nodded, accepting that she meant it in this moment, though they really would have to see how both she and Callum felt in a day or two, after a shower and the chance to truly consider what they would leave behind to return home with him. Callum, at least, was none too certain that a return to the Middle Ages was what he wanted to do, even if Cassie didn’t want to admit it.

  Callum and the coastguard officer got into the life raft last, and the coastguard officer waved at the helicopter, which began to circle around them but at a higher altitude. David touched the artificial fabric of his life vest. He wanted to take everything here home with him, but he would have to make do with filling his brain instead.

  “Why not the Bahamas?” Again Cassie leaned in close to whisper to David, though between the noise of the helicopter and the lifeboat engine, she could have shouted in his ear and nobody else in the raft could have heard her.

  “Excuse me?” David said.

  “Why don’t you ever end up some place warm? We could have a hut by the beach, a hammock, and a fruity drink by now.”

  “Because that’s not where I’m needed,” David said, taking her question as a serious one instead of a joke.

  Cassie made a rueful face. “Leave it to you to be so practical, even when doing something that ought to be impossible.”

  The lifeboat sped back to the cutter, and David allowed himself to be lifted onto the deck. He followed the others as Timmons led them up to the wheelhouse and indicated a bench seat where they should sit.

  “We need the cog towed to the pier,” David said. “It’s a wreck, but it’s medieval. You don’t want it sinking into the channel.”

  Officer Timmons swung his head to look at David. “Did you say the ship is medieval?”

  “It is.” Callum answered for David.

  Officer Timmons seemed to notice their full medieval garb for the first time. Although he said, ‘yes, sir’, his eyes flicked from the sword at David’s waist to Callum’s.

  Callum pulled his sword three inches out of its sheath. “Believe me, it’s real.”

  “And so is the ship,” David said, “though it’s hardly seaworthy any more.”

  Timmons opened his mouth to say something, stopped to think again, and simply said, “The tug is already on its way. My first priority is to get you to shore safely.”

  David grumbled to himself and sat, cataloguing the contents of the trunk left behind in his cabin. Besides clothes, it held his armor and what passed for toiletries in the Middle Ages. His primary secretary had ridden in a different ship and retained the endless paperwork that went along with being King of England. David was kind of sorry about that now, since such documents could have provided proof that he was who he said he was.

  David was feeling more and more anxious, and he glanced at Cassie, who sat beside him. He’d thought telling the truth was a smart move and that if he didn’t tell the truth, he had nothing to say. He was a kid named David who’d disappeared with his sister from Pennsylvania almost seven years ago. Was his reappearance on a medieval cog in the Bristol Channel more incredible than the fact that he’d time-traveled to the Middle Ages in the first place?

  If his mom and dad hadn’t just come here and left again, and he wasn’t with Callum and Cassie, maybe he really could have passed himself off as a hapless kid, thrown about by the winds of time. But Callum was in the forward section of the wheelhouse, even now radioing the Cardiff MI-5 office for instructions. At least none of them looked too out of place, except for their cloaks and swords. The design of their breeches was virtually indistinguishable from what modern people might wear, except that they were made from natural fibers and sewn by hand. David liked pockets and belt loops in his breeches, and what the King of England liked, he tended to get.

  Self-doubt might be eating David up, but he didn’t have time for it any more than he had time to be here. He was just going to have to commit himself to whatever came next, and deal with it when it went all wrong.

  Which it surely would. He had a bad feeling about this too.

  The cutter chugged towards Cardiff’s inner harbor and had passed through the locks that protected it when Callum finally came to sit beside Cassie. “My people are going to meet us at the pier.”

  “What do you mean by your people?” David said in Welsh, guessing that for all that they were in Wales, nobody on this ship but they could speak the language, especially the medieval version.

  “In my absence, my second-in-command, Natasha Clark, was promoted to the head of Cardiff station,” Callum said. “Jones and Driscoll, two men fr
om my team, are also still here.”

  “Are you ready for this?” David said.

  That got him a laugh from Callum. “No. Are you?”

  Chapter Five

  September, 1289

  Bronwen

  It had been five days since David had ridden from Windsor, heading west to Caerphilly and then Cardiff to take his ship bound for Ireland. In that time, Bronwen and Anna had spent hours with the scholars, first explaining the science behind disease and antibiotics, which many had heard before from David, and then putting them to work in the lab Bronwen had converted out of one of the lesser receiving rooms in the lower bailey of Windsor Castle. It might have been a minor room of uncertain use, but it was still forty feet long and thirty wide. Plenty of room for everyone to work.

  Many of the men had experience with alchemy: the ‘science’ of turning base metals into gold and/or finding the elixir of life, a serum of youth and longevity. Bronwen had to bite her tongue more than once to keep from making references to Harry Potter. Because of this work, and despite its questionable efficacy, the men did know a great deal about trial and error, which was a first principle of the scientific method. Many, Roger Bacon among them, knew how to work systematically and took copious notes about their work.

  Over and over during the last few days, Bronwen was reminded that to a less advanced people, science was indistinguishable from magic, and what was basic thinking to a ten-year-old in the twenty-first century was new, radical, and potentially sacrilegious to men living here. Thus the careful explanations, again and again and again, to head off that kind of thinking. As David had reminded her before he left, transparency had to be the order of the day.

  The women they’d included among the scientists, mostly midwives and village healers with extensive experience in herbal remedies, had far less overt education in philosophy and religion than the men, but far more practical experience in working with and treating ill people. It had been Bronwen’s task (only borderline thankless) to take on the scholars today, so Anna had a chance to work with the women. While only a handful had the desire to study with the men in the lab, many more were involved in the actual treatment of patients.