At first, Anna had hoped—if she’d hoped anything at all—that she could lose herself in the fog, but as she glanced back to see how close the riders were, she was terrified to find them only forty yards behind her. Anna had to assume her men were dead. She was incredibly grateful that, unlike the last time she’d been abducted, Cadell was safe in his own bed.
“We have to split up!” Anna said to Mair as the other midwife came abreast. “They want me, not you. I need you to make your way to the castle!”
“I can’t leave you!” Mair’s voice was high and frightened.
“You can, and you will!” She motioned to Mair once again, to confirm the order, but Mair had already obeyed, breaking to the left down a track Anna hadn’t noticed, or she might have taken it herself.
Which left Anna alone with her pursuers.
She glanced back once again. The men were gaining, which was no surprise, given their skill versus hers. On the other hand, Anna was a good hundred pounds lighter than any of the oncoming men, not necessarily because she was so much smaller, though she might be, but because they were in full armor. Even if her horse wasn’t fast, Anna had an inkling of hope his greater endurance might save her.
Unfortunately, that hope was squashed a second later as a second contingent of men appeared out of the fog in front of her, torches blazing. There had been too many hooves on the road for her to distinguish the sound of these newcomers sooner—not that doing so would have done her any good.
She pulled up, knowing she could go neither forward nor back, and in a moment, she was surrounded by grinning men. Though most were English, Anna heard more Scots accents above the general hubbub, as the men spoke to each other or their horses in satisfied tones.
An Englishman with a red plume on his helmet, riding with the initial company, urged his horse closer and looked Anna up and down. “Princess Anna. It is a pleasure.”
He took her hand and kissed the back of it. It was a gallant gesture, but completely out of place in this setting, and Anna was in no mood to be wooed. As his head came up, she pulled her hand away, and in the same motion, caught his jaw with her elbow. To her delight, her aim was perfect. His head jerked backwards, and he came within a hair’s-breadth of falling off his horse.
The men around him laughed, a few in the back with utter abandon. By their dress, these were the Scots she’d heard speaking earlier. On another day, as fellow Celts, she would have viewed them as allies. But not today.
“Who are you? What do you want?” The words came out somewhat breathless because Anna was breathing hard with the effort she’d expended and wasn’t able to modulate her tone. She didn’t mind if the men thought she was afraid. She was afraid—but she was also able to stand outside that fear and evaluate her surroundings. If she was taken to a castle, and there were plenty within ten miles of this position, she could end up alone in a cell for a very long time. And worse, she could be used as leverage against Math or David or Papa. Or all of the above.
“Do you hear that, gentlemen? She doesn’t know.” The man whom she’d hit had recovered, though he rubbed his jaw as he looked at her, making her think that hitting him might have been a mistake. He wouldn’t be underestimating her again. Still, he gestured expansively to his men. “Should we tell her?”
“What don’t I know?” Anna’s horse danced again, and she was pleasantly surprised by his energy. She’d raced him harder than he’d ever run in his life, and she’d assumed he’d be completely worn out. Perhaps, like a small child, the horse could sense the menace in the air, didn’t like it, and it was keeping his adrenaline going.
The leader leaned forward. “Your brother is dead, along with your parents. They’re dead on the floor of the great hall at Trim.”
Anna stared at him. She could tell the man expected her to gasp or weep, but instead she felt herself on the verge of laughter at the absurdity of his claim. “When?”
“Yesterday. The day before. What does it matter?”
Anna’s eyes narrowed. Ten seconds into being told one of the worst things a person could hear, she was torn between a gut-wrenching belief that he might be speaking the truth and mockery that he would tell her David and her parents were dead without knowing the particulars.
“I don’t believe you,” she said flatly. Anna found her stomach settling. She’d spoken the truth. She really didn’t believe him.
“You should.” A black-bearded Englishman, who’d come with the second contingent of riders, clenched his hand into a fist. “Soon the whole of Britain and Ireland will be in our hands.”
“Your hands? And whose orders do you follow?” Still unsettled, Anna’s horse turned in a full circle, prompting the men nearest to her to move farther away in order to give her horse more space. These soldiers were all medieval, of course, so they hadn’t watched any movies and didn’t know you should always secure your prisoner before answering questions or monologuing. Nobody had taken her reins either. It was a rare man who didn’t underestimate women. For once, Anna preferred it that way.
“Are you saying you yourself will be king? Who has these delusions of grandeur?” Anna encouraged her horse to spin one more time, a move that allowed her another complete view of her surroundings. Her horse’s dancing movements had put the man closest to her well out of reach, and while the way forward and back on the road remained completely blocked, nobody had moved to fill the space on her left or right.
The left-hand way involved a ditch and a thick wood and was the way Mair had gone. On Anna’s right, a crumbling stone wall fronted an uneven grassy field.
“Who is it you serve?”
The red-plumed leader scoffed. “You’ll see him soon enough.”
“Why can’t you tell me? Are you so ashamed of this allegiance you don’t dare speak his name or wear his colors openly?”
Before the leader could answer, one of the Scots, who’d spoken earlier, shouted, “We don’t fear to speak King John’s name!”
The Englishman twisted in the saddle, anger in his face, though since he’d been boasting too, and several of the men with him were Scots, it didn’t take a genius to put two and two together and come up with John Balliol, the King of Scots, being behind whatever was happening here. Why an English lord would support Balliol’s plans wasn’t yet clear, but Anna wasn’t going to hang around to learn his name. At least if she survived this, she could tell Math about the Scots.
The thought of what awaited her if she escaped solidified her courage, and Anna took advantage of the leader’s moment of distraction. Her horse wasn’t one to gallop if he could help it, but he could jump, so she took a chance on the field. With a nudge, the horse surged forward, needing only a few steps to get his legs underneath him and leap.
He sailed over the wall, and in a few strides, had left the startled men behind.
The fog was thicker over the field, not surprising because that’s how fog formed—when warm ground met colder air—and Anna could see virtually nothing in front of her. She wracked her brain for an image of what this area had looked like yesterday when she’d ridden past on her way to the birth, but she had no clear idea of where she was. In the fog, all fields and forests looked the same. Still, her horse’s hooves pounded steadily on the turf, and though she hadn’t yet escaped completely, she exulted. For the moment, she was free.
Behind her, the leader shouted directions to his men, sending some after her directly while the rest rode east and west in the hope of cutting her off.
“I see her!”
Anna prodded her horse to go faster. She’d gained a few yards in leaping the wall before her pursuers responded, but though her horse could jump, he hadn’t become faster in the last ten minutes, and whatever adrenaline he’d been running on was fading. The rider behind her held a torch, but as sometimes happened in fog, it made it almost harder to see, since the light reflected off the water droplets in the air before her. But then the fog thinned, and she could make out the silhouettes of trees in front of her.
She’d reached the far side of the field. While she could turn left or right in an attempt to evade the riders, she’d heard the leader’s directions to his men. Her best chance of escape was to ride straight ahead into the woods, which would slow her down, but also hinder her pursuers. If she was very lucky, she might be able to lose them entirely. So she urged her horse forward, and he cooperated with a burst of speed. He had to be exhausted, but he kept going, filled with the same fear and urgency she was.
He leapt the equally decrepit wall that bordered this end of the field, bounded between two birch trees, and trampled the scrubby undergrowth. He had barely recovered from the leap, however, before he was faced with a three-foot-high blackberry bramble, beyond which more fog, thicker even than over the field, blocked her vision. Behind her, the torchlight bounced, indicating the nearest rider had leapt the wall too and at any moment might be close enough to touch. There was no time to lose.
“Yah!” Anna snapped the reins, and the horse hitched its step and leapt. Unfortunately, though they sailed easily over the bramble, they didn’t find themselves on another road, which would have been ideal, or in an adjacent field.
Instead, they leapt into nothingness—literally off the edge of an escarpment. Anna’s heart caught in her throat—how could it not?—and she recalled again the story of King Alexander.
He hadn’t been a time-traveling twenty-firster, however. Instead of falling to her death as the King of Scots had done, she felt the all-too-familiar blackness overtake her.
One, two, three …
Chapter Two
19 March 2022
Anna
The horse’s hooves skated on the smooth surface of the floor, and he whinnied as he tried to arrest his motion. Despite the suddenness of her changed circumstances, Anna had the presence of mind to haul back on the horse’s reins, even though what she really felt like doing was throwing up. It wasn’t as if the blackness had come as a surprise, and she was very glad not to be dead at the bottom of that ravine, but she was terrified to the point of nausea at how close she’d come to dying. Again.
Any arrival in Avalon instead of death was a good thing, however, and at least she wasn’t galloping down some twenty-first century freeway. The horse was less happy about his situation, and he skidded around and ended up facing the opposite direction from which they’d come in.
They were in an enormous hall, and one, amazingly, Anna recognized. The roof was supported by elaborate wooden archways and buttresses, the floor was gray tile, and the walls, which in the Middle Ages were lined with tapestries, today had banners spaced every few yards celebrating the thousandth anniversary of the birth of Harold Godwinson, the King of England who’d been killed by William the Conqueror at the Battle of Hastings.
Long before the twenty-first century, Westminster had become the Parliamentary building, rather than where the King or Queen of England lived, and if she remembered properly the pictures she’d seen, in Avalon the hall itself was dwarfed by the size of the buildings that had grown up around it. There were banners in here because the hall was for show, rather than a place Parliament met or the king dined. Still, it was not the place she would have chosen to appear.
“Police! Put your hands where I can see them!”
Anna obeyed instantly, dropping the horse’s reins and slowly turning in the saddle so she could see who was speaking to her. By the black and white uniform, the man was obviously a cop, a bobby, she supposed, since this was Westminster Palace and they were in modern England. He wore a white shirt, black pants, and a black protective vest as body armor, perhaps David’s beloved Kevlar. He also had a gun pointed straight at her heart.
She had thought modern British policeman didn’t carry guns, but as she was trespassing inside a national landmark with a horse, maybe the police were making an exception for her. Anna had been to Avalon fifteen months ago when her whole family had spent Christmas Eve at the chicken farm that was all that was left of Aber Castle, but it had been a lot longer than that since she’d spent any time here—really not since 2010, when she’d driven Aunt Elisa’s minivan into medieval Wales. She would have given almost anything not to be here now.
“Hi,” she said to open the conversation, not entirely sure how to talk to a cop under these conditions.
The policeman moved slowly in a wide circle around her until he reached a point where she didn’t have to twist in the saddle to face him.
Anna had given upwards of a hundred talks over the last five years to people of all walks of life. She didn’t have any trouble speaking to complete strangers or constructing an argument. But no amount of rationality was going to clarify for a modern cop how she’d ended up in Westminster Hall wearing full-blown medieval clothing and riding a horse—or make him look on her with anything but distrust.
Judging by his relatively unlined face and the lack of gray at his temples, the cop was in his late twenties or early thirties. His body armor indicated how concerned the authorities were about security, probably fearing terrorists more than thieves or normal criminals. They had good reason to be worried. At that Christmas fifteen months earlier, a terrorist had blown up Caernarfon Castle, and before that, his organization had destroyed the government buildings in Cardiff.
So the more she stared at the gun, the more concerned she became that the cop might actually use it. Anna had already faced down a company of enemy cavalry tonight, so a single man should have been easy, but it was not a good sign that his hands appeared to be shaking more than hers. She was far more concerned about his fear, in fact, than her own.
In her most calm voice, one she saved for speaking to particularly recalcitrant barons—or one of her children when he was being unreasonable—she said, “I have no weapon other than this dagger at my waist.” She twisted a bit to show him the sheath. “You can put that gun away.”
“Toss it over here.”
Anna’s hand went to the dagger’s hilt, but it seemed she’d moved more quickly than the cop liked, because he barked, “Slowly!” He seemed very twitchy, for which she couldn’t blame him, and he appeared to still be trying to encompass the horse.
“If you want me to get down, I’m going to have to use my hands.”
“Stay where you are!” He took a step back, as if he was afraid Anna was going to launch herself at him rather than dismount. She could have dismounted like Christopher had taken to doing, by swinging one leg over the horse’s head. But even were she that good, she was wearing a skirt, which probably would have hooked on his ears.
Very slowly, his eyes never leaving her face, the cop took one hand off his gun to press a button on a black device hooked to his collar and spoke to somebody only he could hear. Anna had thought everything would be wireless by now, but she was hardly in a position to question the cop’s methods. It could be cell phone reception wasn’t very good in these old buildings. From the short time she’d had a phone in Caernarfon, she’d seen it was hit or miss in north Wales.
Regardless, the cop told the person on the other end of the line that he needed backup. Anna resigned herself to the fact that she’d ended up in yet another situation she couldn’t escape. The phrase out of the frying pan and into the fire could have been coined for just this situation. It seemed the best thing she could do was sit on the horse and wait for whoever else was coming, though to do so was annoyingly passive. While she would have preferred not to be in Avalon at all, and hated to find herself so far from Math and her boys, now that she was here, she had an agenda. The last thing she had time for was to cater to some cop’s fears.
Then the horse made clear he had an agenda of his own, and it didn’t include standing still. As he’d done on the road twenty minutes and seven centuries earlier, he started to dance and even buck a little. The men who’d captured her there lived and breathed horses, so they hadn’t been surprised by her horse’s movements, but the cop here was a different story.
He backed off, his voice and hands shaking. “Hold still!”
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Anna was too focused on the horse to answer. His ears were rapidly swiveling, flicking back and forth, telling her he was anxious and stressed. As he bucked again, it was hopeless to think she could control him with just her knees. In a quest to keep her seat, she brought down her hands and scrabbled for the reins. Discovering they’d fallen to the floor, she caught her fingers in the horse’s mane.
But it wasn’t enough. The horse danced again, his eyes rolling in fear.
“Hold still or I’ll shoot!”
“I can’t hold him!”
Already alarmed by the unfamiliar place, the shouting pushed the horse over the edge. Perhaps remembering in his tiny horse’s brain what had saved them on the road, he gathered his feet under him and leapt in the direction of the door. Unfortunately, it was also in the direction of the cop, who finally fired his gun. The bullet hit the horse in the chest, stopping him cold, and he went down.
Anna had only a second to clear her feet from the stirrups. Though she managed that part in time, the karate roll that would have taken the weight of her fall on her shoulder didn’t come off as well. The floor was concrete tile and very hard, and as she hit the ground, something snapped in her left wrist, and she screamed.
The cop was shouting incoherently, but Anna didn’t care about him anymore. She curled up into a ball on the floor, gritting her teeth against the pain in her wrist, her eyes on her horse. It lay on its side on the floor, blood from its wound seeping between the tiles. The scene was beyond awful. She couldn’t believe she’d escaped the men in Wales only to be almost killed by a cop. Things could have gone more badly only if the bullet had actually hit her.
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