Crossroads in Time (The After Cilmeri Series)

by Sarah Woodbury

  “King Llywelyn—”

  “King Llywelyn will come around. You have to give him time. Dafydd has made clear time and again that he will marry a woman of his own choosing, not some six year old from Scotland, France, or England, whom his father has picked out for him because she has royal blood. Sending Dafydd away isn’t the answer, not if it means that you spend your days pining for him.”

  “I’m not pining—”

  “You are.” Ieuan’s tone brooked no argument. “I don’t know if he and his men will rest here tonight or push on, but regardless, you must ride with them. They’ll head to Caerphilly. You need to go there too.”

  Lili knew her lower lip was sticking out, but she couldn’t help it. “No.”

  “This isn’t a request, Lili. No castle is safer. I need to know that you are within its walls before the Normans attack.”

  Lili ground her teeth. She’d intended to travel to Caerphilly weeks ago when Bronwen had ridden there to be with Meg. Both women were pregnant: Bronwen, at long last, with her first, and Meg, newly so and unexpectedly with her third, at the age of forty-one. Although Lili was delighted for both of them, births and babies unsettled her. And if she was honest with herself, Bronwen’s happiness reminded her too much of what she didn’t have with Dafydd.

  King Llywelyn would be there, too, and she couldn’t face him. It wasn’t so much that he didn’t believe she was good enough for his son. He believed, rather, that by selecting her to marry, Dafydd was wasting an opportunity to create or cement a relationship with another country. Wales needed alliances if it was to survive.

  The King had refused permission for them to marry and suggested that Dafydd could resolve the matter by taking Lili as his mistress, which Dafydd refused to do. And Lili wasn’t going to marry Dafydd in secret, as he wanted. She’d sent him away because she refused to be the wedge that drove Dafydd and his father apart.

  “Yes, Ieuan.”

  “Good.” Ieuan eyed Lili carefully, and then leaned forward to kiss her forehead. “Dafydd will have fifty men with him at least.”

  “I know how to manage a castle, Ieuan,” Lili said.

  Ieuan strode to the door, but turned back to look at her before he went through it. “I know you do. Be careful.”

  “You be careful,” Lili said. “You’re the one riding to war.”

  Ieuan shook his head. “I’d hoped the Treaty would gain us more than three years.”

  “We knew the peace couldn’t last,” Lili said. “The Normans were chained, not defeated. Be glad we had so much time to prepare.”

  Ieuan shrugged. “I’ll be gone before the dawn. Obey me now.”

  After Ieuan left, Lili sat where he’d left her on the end of the bed, kicking her heels into the wooden frame as if she were a child instead of the eighteen year old woman she’d become. Shouts came from the courtyard. At least half the garrison would go with Ieuan. Those that were left behind would be the old, the young, and the discontented, unless Ieuan took the latter with him to keep them out of trouble. Either way, the garrison of Buellt Castle would be much diminished in Ieuan’s absence.

  The portcullis cranked up, screeching as it locked in place. With a thunder of hooves, the company rode from the bailey, pounded down the road from the gatehouse, and was gone. Gethin, the captain of the guard whom Ieuan would have ordered to remain behind, was a smarmy fellow who looked at Lili in a way she didn’t like. Maybe she would go to Caerphilly. Maybe she would go today, before Dafydd arrived. It would be cowardly of her, but she couldn’t face him, not after she’d turned down his proposal for a second time.

  She had known when she’d sent him away that there wouldn’t be a third. He’d told her as much. Shouted it, even. That was two months ago and she hadn’t seen him since.

  Lili kept her male garments in a trunk set against the far wall. She went to it and lifted the lid. To his credit, Ieuan had never confiscated her breeches, though he preferred not to see her robed as a boy past the dawn hour. Bronwen, for her part, laughed every time Lili wore her breeches and told her she wished she could wear them too. Not that any breeches fit Bronwen anymore, even if her belly still hardly showed despite being six months pregnant. Lili hadn’t seen Bronwen clothed as a twenty-first century woman since the day she put on her first dress. She’d embraced this life with Ieuan. Lili was thankful for it, but often felt that Bronwen belonged in this time more than Lili did herself.

  Maybe that was because Bronwen had chosen this life while Lili couldn’t help but chafe at the restrictions put upon her.

  Lili dressed in the dark, having done it so often she didn’t need a candle, and left the room. Down the stairs, through the deserted kitchen where she grabbed a day-old biscuit (or two), and then into the kitchen garden. Once outside, she slowed and sniffed the air. No wind blew, as was often the case in the lull before the dawn.

  The guard at the postern gate, a man long since accustomed to her routine, waved her past him. Lili gave him a nod and left the castle. She skipped down the hill and passed through the cut in the rampart, before heading southeast, away from the castle and the Wye River.

  Some hundred yards from the last of the castle’s earthworks, Lili opened a rickety wooden gate that led to the archery range. By the time she reached it, the darkness had turned to murk and she could see something of the field in front of her. How many times had she come here to think and to be alone? Especially recently, it had been her refuge whenever she didn’t want Dafydd in her head.

  Today, however, he wouldn’t leave. Her first arrow went wide, and then her second. Then she shot over the target on purpose—out of frustration and guilt, and maybe even a bit of fear—losing the arrow in the trees beyond the range. Ieuan was riding into danger and she was loosing arrows at a target, safe at Buellt. She didn’t want to be safe. She wanted to yell and fight and blow up a curtain wall like they had at Painscastle. Her life was so sedate, so set, and not what she wanted. She would have screamed in frustration if the air wasn’t so still that someone on the castle ramparts might have heard her and come running to see what was the matter.

  Lili bent her head and pressed the hard wood of her bow to her forehead. This was when it was most important to shoot straight, when her emotions were running high. If she could hit the target today, she could hit the target any day. Taking a deep breath, Lili set her feet in preparation, bent her bow, and steadied her arrow on the string. And then the earth rumbled beneath the turf.

  At first she felt it more than heard it. Clutching the arrow and bow in her left hand, she knelt, put her right palm flat to the ground, and listened hard. The sound grew louder and unmistakable: many horses pounded down the road, coming from the east and heading towards Buellt. Trees screened the archery butts from the road so she couldn’t see who it was.

  Lili glanced towards the towers that loomed above her to the west, measuring the distance back to the postern gate verses how far she had to go to reach the road. She was equidistant from both. She decided not to retreat. Not today. Not even from Dafydd, who had arrived too soon for her to flee, though it was odd that he came from the east and so soon. Perhaps he’d had business that had taken him to the border of Wales, before bringing him here.

  Lili ran to the far side of the field, some hundred yards away, and climbed the fence at the other side. Once into the thick woods beyond, she slowed, though still moving steadily, and came to rest in a stand of rowan trees ten yards from the road. The Romans had built this avenue, so it was raised slightly above the level at which she stood, with ditches running parallel to the road on either side.

  The thudding of the horses’ hooves came louder now. She grasped the trunk of a sapling, that was growing out of the wall of the ditch, to help her climb it. Her boot slipped and she fell to her knees, scrabbling in the dirt so she wouldn’t slide back down. She snorted through her nose at what she’d look like to Dafydd, with mud on her breeches and hands, and her hair in disarray.

  She glanced up as the company gallope
d towards her. Her fall had made her too late to intercept them without startling the lead horses. She crouched where she was, deciding that she’d accept the gift fate had given her and not confront Dafydd just yet. Bushes lined the road and blocked her vision of all but flashes of the red and white tunics of the riders. They swept by her: a company of two dozen men.

  Their passing left Lili gasping, for the company wasn’t Dafydd’s. Everything about them, from their beards to their banners, was wrong.

  They were from England.

  When the last of the riders had passed her, she pushed up from her crouch—which possibly had just saved her life—and climbed onto the road. At the sight of the Mortimer red, instead of Dafydd’s dragon banner, she bit her lip. The Mortimers had owned Buellt Castle before Dafydd’s father had taken it from them. It seemed they wanted it back. But how? The lookout on the battlements would see them coming as Lili had. He’d see them more easily, in fact, since the sound of the horses’ hooves would have carried high into the air, and those on the stone walkway would have had ample time to warn the rest of the garrison and close the gate.

  Still looking west and standing in the center of the road, which was deserted except for her, Lili followed the path the company was taking with her eyes. Then she began to walk towards the castle. She didn’t fear the riders: if a stray horseman looked back, he would see a peasant boy and think nothing of it. The riders disappeared around a bend, following the curve in the river. The sound of the horses’ hooves faded. Lili mocked herself for fearing to see Dafydd more than foreign soldiers, and then she began to run.

  She crested a rise in the road, from which point she had a good view of the path in front of her, along with Buellt’s gate that fronted the Wye River. At the sight of it, she pulled up short. The last of the Englishmen was urging his horse under the portcullis and into the bailey.

  Lili stared after them, aghast. A string of curses bubbled up in her throat, for she had spent enough time among the garrison to be able to curse as fluently as a man. But what came to her lips was something Bronwen would say, and for the first time Lili truly understood what it meant: no freaking way!

  Stunned and disbelieving, Lili gazed at the rider’s retreating back, knowing what had to have happened but not wanting to believe it. Gethin, the captain Ieuan had left in charge of Buellt Castle, was a traitor. The Normans had bought him—and then he’d invited them in.

  As she glared at the castle and the hated foreigners inside it (whom she couldn’t see, of course), Lili knew what she had to do. Fate, it seemed, had ensured that she would see Dafydd today whether she wanted to or not—though surely that was a petty complaint compared to what the English had just done. They’d walked in and taken over Buellt Castle right in front of her nose. Ieuan would never forgive her if she didn’t do something about it. Nor would she ever forgive herself.

  Right then and there, before she second-guessed her plan of action, Lili began to walk. Although the western ford was closer to her current location, she headed east, to a good ford of the Wye River downstream from the castle. It meant a delay, but to go east meant she wouldn’t have to pass in front of the gatehouse. Peasant clothes or no peasant clothes, men of the garrison had seen her garb more times than she could count and would recognize her instantly.

  She didn’t have to walk to Dinas Bran to find Dafydd, of course. If Dafydd had pushed the horses on his ride south, which surely he would have, he’d have spent the night north of Caersws. His company would have rested only as long as the horses needed, sacrificing human sleep out of the urgency of the moment, and should have left with the dawn. Only one road led to Buellt from there. Somewhere between Caersws and here, she would meet him.

  Him.

  It took Lili half an hour to find the ford. With her bow in one hand and her boots in another, she waded across. The river widened here, with the water only knee deep this time of year, though it was still very cold, having come down from the mountains to the west of Buellt.

  Lili laced up her boots again and set off, thankful she hadn’t worn a dress, and even more thankful that Ieuan had woken her when he had. She strode along, mile after mile as the road climbed towards Caersws. The Romans had built this road too. After a while, she began counting the paces in her head, calculating distances like one of those mathematical problems Ieuan had enjoyed tasking her with when she was younger: If Dafydd rode fifty miles the first day, he’d have thirty left to reach Buellt, and if Lili walked four miles an hour, she should be meet him by noon—

  In the same way that Lili had known the company of riders from England was approaching before she saw them, she heard Dafydd’s teulu before she saw it. Resigned to whatever might come, and to whatever he might say or not say—recriminations or silence, she was prepared for either—Lili came to a halt in the center of the road, and simply waited.

  Chapter 3

  25 August 1288

  North of Buellt

  David

  David knew who was standing in the middle of the road from the moment he crested the rise and gazed into the valley in front of him. It was the way she stood and waited, the shape and stance of her, her hands on her hips, even from that distance and wearing boys’ clothes. She was mad at him; he knew it. What exactly he’d done, he couldn’t say, but given that she had walked miles from Buellt to meet him, likely she blamed him for the need.

  Which brought him to the most important point—why the hell had she walked all the way here to meet him? If an imminent invasion from Bristol wasn’t enough, if having to babysit Bohun’s son (though William had behaved perfectly the entire journey from Dinas Bran) wasn’t enough, he had to find his beloved standing in the middle of the road, in the middle of nowhere, with her bow in her hand, a quiver on her back, and a glare in her eyes.

  The company slowed and then stopped, twenty paces from Lili. Utter, total silence descended on his teulu after the initial hush, man! from Math. David’s men gave him space, as well they might. Most of them had ridden from Buellt with him after Lili had sent him away two months ago. They knew how he felt, not that he’d worked very hard to hide it.

  It was impossible to keep secrets when men worked so closely with one another day in and day out. They were comrades in arms. He trusted these men to do their job. He trusted them with his life. It seemed purposeless to try to hide from them that Lili had broken his heart. They would have wondered why he no longer went to Buellt and then guessed the answer, even if he hadn’t stormed out the castle with his color high and his tail between his legs.

  Alone, David trotted his horse up to Lili and reined in. He gazed down at her and she up at him for a count of ten. And then—“What’s happened?”

  “English cavalry have taken Buellt,” she said.

  Crap. David looked back towards his company. “Take a break, Gentlemen.” He dismounted along with them and then waved Owain and Math closer before turning back to Lili. “The horses are past due for a rest. We’ll take it here while you tell us all about it. You’ve walked far.”

  “I would have walked to Dinas Bran if I had to, but your messenger arrived in Buellt in the early hours of the morning to say that you were coming. Ieuan has already left for Chepstow.”

  “If the English have taken Buellt Castle, how did you escape?” David took Lili’s arm and walked with her to the edge of the road where his men had gathered.

  Trees lined the road on either side. Beyond them to the east, a field of oats stood ready to harvest. Some of David’s men settled themselves onto their helmets, while others crouched in the grass. David made sure he and Lili remained out of earshot.

  “What is it, Dafydd?” Math came to a halt at David’s side, Owain right behind him.

  “Our Norman friends have taken Buellt.” David gestured to Lili. “Tell us.”

  “Ieuan woke me to say that he was leaving. He told me about your meeting with Humphrey de Bohun,” Lili said. “Instead of going back to sleep, I chose to rise and shoot. It wasn’t yet dawn when
I arrived at the archery range. I’d hardly unlatched the gate when I heard cavalry coming from the east, down the road from Offa’s Dyke.”

  “How many?” David said.

  “Two dozen?” Lili said. “I thought at first that it was your company, riding to Buellt from the wrong direction for some reason. When they passed by, I was still in the trees beside the road. Once I knew they weren’t Welsh, I stayed hidden until I was sure I was safe.”

  “How did you know who they were?” Math said.

  “They wore red and white, which is why I thought they were yours, my lord, but then I saw that the emblem on their tunics was that of the House of Mortimer. They rode right into Buellt …”

  “What do you mean, rode right in?” David said.

  Lili shook her head. “Ieuan left one of his lesser captains, a man named Gethin, in charge of the garrison. I can only surmise that he opened the gates for them. Though it could have been whoever was on duty at the time.”

  “How many men did your brother leave?” David said.

  “Ten,” Lili said. “If I’d asked any to ride with me to Caerphilly, it would have left even fewer. Because of the shortage of men, Ieuan said that I should wait to go with you instead.”

  David schooled his expression before it could betray his surprise at her admission. She had been going to go to Caerphilly. With him. Maybe she was softening. The instant the thought crossed David’s mind, he brutally shoved it away. Better not to think about it. Better to take her presence now for what it was.

  “Even if every man in the garrison didn’t have a part of Gethin’s scheme, ten men would have had a hard time defending against two dozen, once they got inside,” David said.

  “And you walked all this way to tell us?” Math said.

  Lili lifted one shoulder. “The English will know you are coming because Gethin knew.”