“I suppose this is appropriate,” he said. “I brought my baby girl to Wales and now I leave with a baby girl to replace the one I have given away.”
Penelope could sense his farewell coming and she fought off the lump in her throat. “You will spoil her as you spoiled me,” she said softly. “You will be the best father in the world to her as you were to me.”
William leaned over and kissed his daughter on the forehead. “I have done my job and now it is time for you to do yours,” he said, trying not to notice the tears in her eyes because it would bring on his own. He looked at Bhrodi. “Your niece will be well tended and brought up to love and respect her Welsh heritage. You may come and visit her any time you wish.”
Bhrodi nodded. “Mayhap someday,” he said, his gaze lingering on the baby. “Thank you for taking her. I am at peace knowing she is out of Wales and out of Edward’s reach.”
William’s gaze was on his daughter as Bhrodi spoke and he could see the tears beginning to trickle out of her eyes. That was his cue to leave before they both started weeping. He turned for the keep entry with Bhrodi and Penelope following.
“Once I have returned to Questing, I will discover what I can about Edward’s current status and plans,” he said. “Although I am sure he will leave you alone now, I am equally sure that his conquest of Wales is imminent. I am not entirely sure what he intends to do about Anglesey but I suppose time will tell. For now, you are safe.”
They had reached the top of the steps leading down into the bailey where the de Wolfe party await. Penelope had already said her farewells to her brothers and she waved down at them as they wait impatient for their father. Edward, Thomas, and Patrick waved back while Scott yelled up at his father.
“We are already an hour late,” he called. “Are you coming with us or not?”
William gave his eldest son a wry expression. “I am going to hand this baby over to Paris and come show you personally just how enthusiastic I am about your question.”
As the knights snorted, Paris held out his hands. “Finally!” he exclaimed softly. “Give me the child so you can go teach your arrogant son a lesson.”
William shielded the baby from the man’s probing hands. “Never,” he said. “My son will have to wait. For now, I plan to see this baby personally delivered to the nurse so we can depart. Go mount your horse and leave us alone.”
Paris was unhappy but did as he was told. He kissed Penelope on the cheek before descending the steps and heading towards his charger. William, very carefully, began to take the steps as Penelope followed. Bhrodi, however, remained at the top; it was still difficult for him to take steps with ease. Besides, he had a feeling Penelope wanted a few moments alone with her father. She had been weepy about it all morning and now the time to say her goodbyes had come.
“De Wolfe,” he called. When William paused and turned around, Bhrodi’s gaze was warm. “For everything… I thank you. I owe my entire life to you and I will not forget it. Do you remember when we first met and I told you that I was raised on stories of your valor?”
William nodded. “I do.”
Bhrodi smiled faintly. “I consider it an honor to now be part of those stories, however small.”
It was the first humble thing William had ever heard the man say and he grinned. “I am flattered,” he said, glancing to his daughter. “Now you will make your own stories with my daughter by your side. I will be proud to tell everyone that my daughter is married to The Serpent. It is the stuff legends are made of.”
Penelope gazed at her father, unable to stop the tears. Wrapping her arms around his waist, she hugged him tightly.
“I miss you already, Papa,” she whispered. “Safe travels.”
William kissed the top of her head. “Thank you, sweetheart,” he murmured. “And to you, I wish you only the best. Should you ever need me, you know I will come.”
Penelope nodded, wiping at her eyes. “I know,” she said. “And thank you.”
He stepped off the last step, turning to look at her. “For what?”
She smiled faintly, glancing up at Bhrodi as she replied. “For making me come here,” she said. “For giving me this future. You were right when you said this was an honor; I cannot think of anything more honorable than being the wife of Bhrodi de Shera.”
William could hear the love in her voice and it touched him. “Love him well, Penny.”
She turned to him, a smile of such warmth and joy on her face that it took William’s breath away.
“I already do, Papa,” she murmured. “I already do.”
William’s lingering recollection of that moment was of watching his daughter rush up the stairs and into the arms of the man she loved. For The Wolfe and The Serpent, their lives, their loves, and their legends were forever linked.
They were the Immortals.
*
The de Shera Dynasty
Children of Bhrodi and Penelope
William b1284
Perri b1287
Bowen b1289
Dai b1292
Catrin (g) b1294
Morgana (g) b1296
Maddock b1299
Anthea (g) b1303
Talan b1305
EPILOGUE
Present day, early June
Pendraeth Forest, Anglesey, Wales
Archaeological Dig for the University of California at San Marcos in conjunction with the University of Aberystwyth
Eleven hundred and twenty one.
That was the number of broken and scattered skeletons the dig had managed to piece together under the direction of Dr. Becker, but there still wasn’t one complete one. There were pieces missing from every single skeleton, small bones, broken bones, whatever… Becker was starting to believe he would never find everything.
But there was more now that had come to light over the past two weeks – weapons. Swords, shields, daggers and the like. They were strewn about near the broken bodies as if someone had thrown them all around without rhyme or reason. There was no logic to their locations, which made Becker think he wasn’t witnessing a battle. More than that, these weapons could not do the amount of damage he was seeing. It was indeed baffling.
Because of this, both the University of California at San Marcos and University of Aberystwyth had allocated more funds to what was becoming a truly spectacular Medieval find, something never before found anywhere in the world. They’d called in Medieval scholars, paleontologists, anthropologists, cultural historians and the like. They had Welsh historians covering the place, searching out legends and myths, trying to determine what, exactly, they were dealing with but so far they’d come up with very little. It was like one giant historical mystery that, naturally, made the historians foam at the mouth. Situations like this were rare and the small army of scholars was determined to solve the puzzle.
On this muggy day in early June, Dr. Becker was excavating an undisturbed section of the dig, uncovering more skeletons, while Dr. Paz was riveted to what they determined to be a nest of destroyed sauropod eggs near the skeleton of the creature. It seemed like a normal day, but things were about to change. It was mid-morning when a small Vauxhall sedan pulled up to the main section of tents and a woman emerged.
Dressed in a blouse, jeans, and Wellington boots, the woman was slender and very lovely with long dark hair pulled back into a ponytail. In her arms she carried a veritable mound of notebooks and file folders. She entered the first tent in her search for Dr. Becker but was told he was out in the field, so she headed into one of the tents where they were assembling the skeletons. They knew the woman here and she was greeted amiably. When she asked for Becker again, someone went off to fetch him.
The woman sat at one of the main plastic folding tables around the tent and, brushing the dirt off the surface, began to spread her papers out. She had a very specific order for them, as she had been sent out on this project by Dr. Becker. She was a Ph.D. candidate in Medieval Studies and had been loaned to Dr. Becker from the Universit
y of Pennsylvania because her advisor and Dr. Becker had been college buddies. Dr. Becker had needed a crack research assistant and Paige Wolfford had been recommended, but her first project with the famed Dr. Becker had been, in the truest sense of the vernacular, a doozy.
Paige spread her things out, organizing her thoughts, as she waited for Dr. Becker to make an appearance. He wasn’t long in coming and he wasn’t alone; there was a man with him, perhaps in his early thirties, and as he drew closer, Paige could see that he was a big man with dark hair and an extraordinarily handsome face. She had no way of knowing that she was looking at the man the rest of the women around the dig had been calling Lord McHotness since he had arrived two weeks earlier. As it was, she felt her heart leap a little as the man came near, his dark green eyes fixed on her. Dr. Becker spoiled the moment by putting himself between her and his Royal Hotness.
“Hello, Paige,” he greeted pleasantly. “I didn’t expect to see you here for at least another week or so.”
Paige shook his outstretched hand. “Me, either, but I think I found something you’d be interested in so I didn’t want to wait.”
Becker nodded eagerly and then realized he hadn’t introduced her to the big guy trailing after him. He indicated the future Mr. Paige Wolfford.
“Paige, this is Dr. Bodie Deshere,” he said. “Bodie is from the University of Aberystwyth, well-versed on anything Welsh. He’s been helping me try to piece this puzzle together.”
Paige shook Bodie’s hand. “Nice to meet you, Dr. Deshere,” she said. “So you’re the go-to guy for all things Welsh related?”
He grinned, a sexy gesture that Paige found captivating. “Maybe in a land of English people, I am,” he said, his English spoken with a heavy Welsh accent that made it very difficult to understand. “But to the Welsh, I’m just a kicker.”
Paige cocked her head. “What’s a kicker?”
He shrugged. “Some smart kid who thinks he knows everything,” he replied. “I have a doctorate and my father still thinks he knows more than I do.”
Paige laughed. “I have a dad like that, too.”
“Is your dad a scholar?”
She shook her head. “No,” she replied. “He’s with the United States Navy. In fact, both of my parents are. That’s how they met; my mom is a nurse and dad came in with a busted up leg or something. I really don’t know because he won’t tell us the whole story. All we know is that my mom worked on my dad and it was love at first sight.”
Bodie started to say something but Becker interrupted. “You kids can get more acquainted later,” he said. “Right now, I want to know what you found out. Anything good?”
Paige nodded and turned back to her paperwork, disappointed she wasn’t able to continue her conversation with Deshere. But her disappointment was forgotten as her attention shifted to the paper in front of her.
“Well,” she began as she fingered through the sheets. “You know there wasn’t a lot of information around here for some reason. We know Rhydilian Castle belonged to the de Shera family from about the conquest until the late fourteenth century when the family evidently abandoned it.”
“Edward the First had conquered all of Wales at that point,” Deshere said. “The de Sheras were the hereditary kings of Anglesey, but even they couldn’t stand up to Edward’s war machine.”
Paige nodded. “That’s what I thought, too,” she said. “Edward the First is who I’m writing my thesis on so I know more about him, and his time period, than just about anything else in the High Middle Ages. So I started back-tracking in the de Shera family history thinking I might find something there that would help us understand what this site is all about, but they really didn’t have any surviving records other than church records, and those only record marriages, deaths and births. Therefore, I started looking at all of the de Shera marriages moving back from 1394 A.D., which was when they abandoned the castle. I didn’t find anything interesting until I came to 1283 A.D. when a lord by the name of Bhrodi de Shera married a bride from a very powerful English family. I thought that was kind of odd, you know, a Welsh warlord marrying an Englishwoman, so I began to trace the de Wolfe family. A really impressive history if you ever have the time to read about it.”
Becker was nodding rather impatiently. “I know all about de Wolfe,” he said. “But what did you find out pertaining to the de Sheras?”
Paige pulled out a sheet from a file folder and started reading. “The de Wolfe family was a heavy presence from late in the rule of Henry the Third and well into Edward’s rule, so much in fact that I found evidence of a treaty brokered by Edward that betrothed a daughter of William de Wolfe, who was perhaps the greatest knight during that time period, to Bhrodi de Shera, who was the head of the family at that time. It was supposed to be a peace treaty for all of Northern Wales since the de Shera family had such influence there, but it didn’t turn out that way at all. There was something really weird going on there because after the marriage, it was as if Edward made a conscious effort to stay away from the de Shera family and, specifically, this part of Wales, which isn’t like him at all.”
Becker was growing very interested. “What do you mean?”
Paige was still looking at a photocopy of something. “I was in London doing most of my research at the British Library and a colleague of mine, who has connections with Northumberland Heritage, made a call to see if I could get a look at the de Wolfe family papers. There are a ton of them, you know, from the time of the conquest up until the Georgian era. Their seat was Castle Questing, which is now just a ruin. Sometime in the late sixteenth century they built a big manor house near Belford up on the Northumberland coast and abandoned the castle. Anyway, I was able to drive up to the manor and take a look at their papers.”
Becker pulled up a chair, as did Deshere. The sat down opposite sides of her, straining to catch a glimpse at what she was looking at. Paige glanced up at the pair, seeing they were rather anxious.
“I know Dr. Paz is working on the skeleton of the creature,” she said quietly. “Do you want to bring her in here to hear this?”
Becker sent one of the grad students on the run and Paige didn’t say another word until several minutes later when Dr. Paz entered the tent. The woman was sweating profusely in the early June humidity, removing her gloves and ball cap as she approached.
“What’s all the excitement?” she wanted to know, wiping at her forehead as her gaze fell on the young woman with the stack of papers before her. “Hello, Paige. I thought Dr. Becker sent you to London.”
Becker thrust a chair at her. “Sit down,” he said. “Paige has discovered something about the site. She says you’re going to want to hear this.”
“Really?” Dr. Paz perked up. “What did you find?”
Paige looked up from the papers she had been reading. “Rhydilian Castle has connections to the House of de Wolfe, so I went to Northumberland to do some research and see if I could come up with some kind information about this sauropod and its history here by way of the de Wolfes. They had a daughter who married Bhrodi de Shera, a very big warlord during the late thirteenth century. I focused on William de Wolfe because it was his daughter who married de Shera, and it turns out that de Wolfe, in later life, ended up dictating a lot of his history to a local priest. It’s all written in Latin, but there’s a section that talks about his daughter’s marriage to de Shera and how Edward betrayed the very treaty he had proposed. It says that one night, when Edward came to lay siege to Rhydilian, that The Serpent did smite its enemies and that Edward was turned back. According to William de Wolfe, Bhrodi de Shera was also known as The Serpent.”
Becker’s brow furrowed in confusion as he looked at Deshere. “Have you ever heard of that?” he asked. “You’re the Welsh folklore expert.”
Deshere sat back in his seat, pondering the question. After a moment, he cocked his head. “You know,” he said thoughtfully, “I did a research paper once on the families of Anglesey and there was a passage in one of the
sources that described the de Shera family as having bred a beast. I didn’t take it literally because they were known for their fierce warlords, but now that I think on it, it’s quite possible that the source meant literally. If de Shera was known as The Serpent, the beast and The Serpent could have been one and the same, but there’s a problem with that.”
“Why?” Becker wanted to know.
Deshere shook his head. “Because the sources are very early, possibly eleventh century,” he said. “Well before Bhrodi de Shera was born.”
“Wait,” Paige said, interrupting their conversation. “This gets better. I went back to the history of Edward the First during the time that Bhrodi de Shera married into the de Wolfe family somewhere around 1283 A.D. This was the same year that Dafydd ap Gruffydd was captured and executed as the last Welsh prince when, in fact, de Shera was really the last Welsh prince. He was a hereditary king, in fact, but Edward left the man completely alone, which I thought was really bizarre. I found all kinds of information about the battles Edward fought in northern Wales, including the battle of Moel-y-don, which was when Edward’s men built a pontoon bridge over the Menai Strait and tried to invade Anglesey but were defeated. The only battles described between January and June of that year are, in fact, with Dafydd, but in cross-referencing those battles with other known sources, I came across an account of a knight who fought with Edward during those months. The knight’s name was Keir St. Héver. It’s St. Héver who describes Edward making an attempt to seize Rhydilian but was driven back by what he describes as a great and terrible serpent.”
Becker digested the information, as did the others. “But you said de Shera was known as The Serpent,” Becker said. “He could have meant de Shera.”
Paige nodded. “Maybe,” she said. “It seems pretty coincidental, don’t you think? De Shera is known as The Serpent, yet you find this sauropod skeleton with bodies scattered all over the place. St. Héver stated that Edward lost nearly a thousand men. How many skeletons have you found?”
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