Warden of Time (The After Cilmeri Series Book 8)

by Sarah Woodbury

  I wondered what the explanation was going to be this time: had Avalon accepted Lee and spit me out? Or could I spin it in such a way as to say that the journey had saved my life while at the same time taking Lee off my hands? That certainly was the way I was choosing to see it.

  We reached the stairway to the Fitzwilliam gatehouse. Geoffrey de Geneville met us on the bottom step leading up to the entrance. “Sire.”

  “Geneville,” I said. We started up the steps—and not two at a time.

  Bronwen met us at the top. “How did you do that?” she said as she hugged Lili and then me, heedless of the fact that we were both soaking wet.

  “We’ll talk about it later,” I said. “Right now we have bigger problems.”

  “Bigger problems than Lee?” Bronwen said.

  I barked a laugh, filled suddenly with a feeling of exhilaration. “It isn’t as if he’s a problem anymore, is he?”

  Her brow furrowed. “I suppose not.”

  Lee was gone. I hadn’t had to arrest him and see him hanged. His fate was out of my hands. Even with all I’d learned about him—everyone he’d hurt and what he’d destroyed—it would have been hard to do what had to be done with him. Medieval justice, as my mother would have put it, would have been his fate. And it would have been I who would have had to mete it out. I’d have done it out of a sense of justice, and justified it to myself for that reason. But I wouldn’t have liked it.

  “Lee told me the King of France is coming,” I said.

  Concern entered Bronwen’s eyes. “That’s what everyone is saying.”

  “Lee was going to blow a hole in the outer ward so Philip would have an easier time taking the castle,” I said. “He wasn’t here for me.”

  Bronwen patted me on the shoulder in a consoling way, half-serious and half-joking. Being the King of England meant that I tended to assume most things that happened in my vicinity were about me. It was a bad habit to get into, except that it had developed because I had been accused of being an insensitive jerk for not realizing the effect I had on other people.

  “Preparations have begun to counter him,” Ieuan said. “It would be good to know where the fleet intends to land—and we still need more men.”

  Many soldiers lined the battlement above the outer ward, and one leaned through a crenellation to look down at us, waving a hand to get my attention. “It’s Clare, sire!” He pointed northwest. “He comes!”

  I looked at the soldier for a beat or two as I processed what he’d said. And then all of us took the steps up to where he stood. An army was coming towards us. It was the very thing I needed. Valence may have been fooled by my citizen army back at Windsor, resulting in his capture and hanging, but I needed real soldiers if I was going to repel an invasion army.

  “Clare to the rescue,” Bronwen said. “Again.”

  Lili slipped her hand into mine. “He relishes that role. Admittedly, he’s also very good at it.”

  Chapter Twenty-five

  It took the rest of the morning for Clare and his men to reach Dover Castle. By the time the company passed underneath the gatehouse and Clare had made his way to my receiving room, I’d had time for a quick bath and had dressed in yet another set of borrowed clothes—these somewhat finer than the ones I’d acquired either from the Archbishop’s palace or from Jeeves the night before. I decided not to ask who was going shirtless at my behest.

  I’d made good use of the time too, calling all my advisers currently at Dover in to talk to me. Geoffrey had become a veritable font of good information about how to repel the King of France with efficiency and the least loss of life. As I’d said to Bronwen, the aftermath of Lee’s disappearance was still before us—uncovering his allies sprang to mind—but if I’d really taken him to Avalon, he himself was no longer our problem.

  “Sire.” Clare stopped fifteen feet from me and bowed. He was of average height, but that was the only thing about him that was ordinary. He had graying red hair, piercing blue eyes, and a way of looking at you that made you think he could see right through you. His line was as noble (though not royal) as any man’s in England (more so than mine), and he dressed the part in silk and linen. He was also sporting a newly trimmed mustache and, fascinatingly, a goatee. Like the hair on the top of his head, the red goatee was liberally salted with white, reminding me of my father. I rubbed my still unshaven chin. If I grew one of those, Lili might never kiss me again.

  I waved a hand for him to rise and moved forward to embrace him the French way, with a kiss on each cheek. “You came.”

  “You summoned me, sire.” His brow furrowed. “I hear there’s been some trouble.”

  I was glad to laugh. “You could say that.”

  Trouble was Clare’s middle name, and he would probably be the first to admit it. For all that he had vacillated between loyalties in his younger years, I had no doubt about his loyalty to me now. He had a magnetism and sincerity about him—and no claim to the throne himself—that had convinced me, as it had convinced Edward, that he could be trusted.

  “Carew met me on my way in and related some of the recent events that have occurred, though he didn’t have time to go into detail. Are we sailing for France?”

  “We might have been, if the last day had not happened. I know you are concerned about your lands there,” I said. “But no—France is coming to us.”

  Clare raised one eyebrow. “That is bold of Philip.” The nonchalance was typical of the man.

  “He thinks me weak,” I said.

  “He is wrong.”

  “Perhaps so, but I was certainly foolish,” I said. “For the last three months, I have harbored a traitor in my court and allowed him to connive unimpeded. I have seen the error of my ways, but only because my loyal followers intervened. They were almost too late, and we almost died. It was Lee, as I’m sure Carew told you.”

  Clare’s lips twisted in a grimace.

  “I see you didn’t like him either,” I said.

  “I didn’t know him for a traitor,” Clare said.

  “I was arrogant and didn’t listen.”

  “It is the other side of the coin we all store in our purse, my lord,” Clare said. “You make decisions every day that would bring a lesser man to his knees, and you must know your own mind in order to do that.”

  “I wish I’d been wiser.”

  He gave a rueful smile. “I imagine you already are.”

  I nodded, unsurprised that he, of all my advisers, understood how events had fallen out as they had.

  “I have sent for the leader of the port authority and the commander of the navy,” I said, relieved to put the mea culpa part of our conversation behind me. “The Dover Portsman is inappropriately named Jack Butcher. The latter is an old friend of yours, I believe.”

  “Henry de Lacy, Earl of Lincoln.” Clare nodded. “I was the one who counseled you to put him in charge of your navy.”

  “Well, either he’s really that good, was very lucky, or has better spies than I do, but he sent word yesterday that he believes the King of France is on his way.” I settled a hand on Clare’s shoulder. “His report has been confirmed twice over from unrelated sources.”

  “Including Lee, I hear.”

  “Yes,” I said.

  “Does Lacy know where Philip intends to land?”

  “No,” I said. “Nor did Philip’s spies.”

  Clare smoothed the goatee he was sporting into a perfect ‘v’. “Would it do any good for someone else to speak to them?”

  “Geoffrey de Geneville believed them when they claimed not to know,” I said. “I was witness. More extreme measures of questioning might only reveal what we want to hear, rather than the truth.”

  “That Philip moves now is incomprehensible to me,” Clare said. “I can’t understand what he’s thinking.”

  I’d heard an earful of what Philip was thinking from Lee, of course. “He thinks he has all the advantages and we are set back on our heels.”

  “He’s wrong, sire,” Cl
are said.

  “You bet he is.”

  Chapter Twenty-six

  “Hythe! He’s landing at Hythe!” These words shouted in the corridor followed by a pounding at the door woke me.

  Goddamn it!

  I’d been standing in an ice cream store, gazing at the various choices, with the server waiting to select my favorite flavor. The dream winked out, superseded by the threat of a French invasion, and I rolled out of bed. I wondered why I even bothered sleeping these days, since some new disaster was going to waken me before I was ready.

  Lili rubbed her eyes. “What is the hour?”

  “I don’t know.” I turned back to her and leaned heavily on the feather bed, my hands forming fists to support my weight. I bent close to her and kissed her temple. “I’ll find out what’s happening. Stay here for now, and I’ll return when I know more.”

  “Send word at the very least,” she said, knowing that sometimes these events got out of control very quickly, and I might not have even a moment to speak to her myself. She snuggled back down under the covers, yawning. “Don’t forget.”

  “I won’t.”

  I pulled on my breeches and wrapped my cloak around myself before going to the door. It was William de Bohun who’d woken me. He’d returned from Canterbury, it seemed. I stepped into the corridor and pulled the door almost closed, so we could speak without keeping Lili awake. Her pregnancy meant she needed sleep, even in the middle of a war. Short of joining the archers on the walls (which I wouldn’t have put past her), she couldn’t do anything about the preparations at this point anyway.

  Arthur slept in the adjacent room with his nanny. Though having him in bed with us was often comforting—to all three of us—he was a very active sleeper, and Lili and I slept better without him.

  I looked at William. “How do we know they’re landing at Hythe?” It was a town of roughly two thousand, southwest of Dover.

  “A fisherman spotted the sails in the channel and turned for shore to warn the town. He says the boats must carry hundreds of men and horses, sire.” William’s face was pale in the torchlight. I was impressed with the way my other advisers were continuing to ensure that it was William who brought me news, rather than any of them, and I wondered at what point he would figure out that it wasn’t the honor he thought it was.

  “The Portsman of Hythe himself sent a rider to Dover to tell us of it.”

  Some, who didn’t know the intricacies of England’s maritime alert system, might call it luck—and we seemed to be getting our share of it—but the fishermen of Kent had been sent out from every port and village to watch for the French, so it was no coincidence that one of them had reported back as soon as he’d spied the fleet. As with Dover, the men of Hythe constituted a Cinque Port: owing service to the crown to defend England from invasion. Since yesterday, the word had been sent up and down the coastline, from Weymouth all the way up to Yarmouth, that the French were coming.

  Some of my advisers had questioned my decision to retain the Cinque Ports as a semi-military unit once I established the royal navy. They saw the ports as independent to a fault and difficult to control. I couldn’t disagree with their assessment—the portsmen were difficult to control. Sometimes trying to get them to agree on anything was like herding cats. It was worse than Parliament. But as I was a red-blooded American, my sympathies lay with them. I understood their drive for self-governance. In the long run, England would be better off with more of it, not less.

  As it turned out, after a somewhat rocky start, the two halves of our defense fleet had been rubbing shoulders without an excess of rivalry or conflict, once the Cinque Ports understood I wasn’t planning on closing them down or restricting their privileges. This threat from the French was lighting a fire under both organizations.

  The Navy had never been called upon to fight and wanted to prove itself in battle. Since Lacy had been the first to warn me that the French might be coming, the initial bragging rights had gone to them. The Cinque Ports would want to even things out by being the first to take on the French, and the Portsman of Hythe would want to prove to me that his people were capable of defending England and were still relevant.

  I didn’t care who took on the French first, as long as they were stopped. It would be better if nobody decided to be a hero and go it alone, but we might not have a choice about that. Though all the fleets were on alert, it would take time for word to reach each town and for the boats to sail to Hythe, which meant that the men of that town had to hold out until reinforcements arrived.

  I could see why the French had chosen Hythe as the best place to land their fleet. It had a good flat beach, and it was one of the few beaches along the Kent coast that didn’t have massive cliffs overlooking it. When Julius Caesar had attempted to land at Dover, the sight of the opposing army of Britons standing on the cliffs above the port, brandishing their weapons and screaming at him, had sent him scurrying north to Walmer to find a better place to land. Such was the Roman war machine that Caesar had managed not only to land his ships, unload men and horses, and form up, but he’d done it while under constant fire from above, since the Britons had followed him up the coast. I could see them now in my mind’s eye, taunting him the whole way.

  I had no idea if Philip knew his history, but Walmer had certainly been a possible landing spot for him, particularly if he knew about the army I had standing on the cliffs of Dover. My men, like their long-dead brethren, were ready to repel an invasion. Also like the ancient Britons, my army was mobile, but I didn’t exactly have a convoy of trucks by which to move them. Caesar had come across the English Channel at its narrowest point, not knowing what lay on the other side. Philip knew that the center of my fleet was at Dover, and wisely had chosen to land at a spot fifteen miles away. I could be grateful that he hadn’t decided to go fifteen miles farther to Dungeness.

  William recognized the expression on my face. “Sir Stephen says the men of Hythe will be crushed.”

  “And what does Jack Butcher say?”

  William cleared his throat and looked down at the ground. “I cannot repeat it in your presence, sire, other than to say that he respectfully disagreed.”

  I laughed. “I bet you can’t. Let me put on my boots and you can help me into my armor.”

  “Yes, my lord.”

  “We’ll need every archer,” I said, with a glance at the door through which Lili lay sleeping. My archers accompanied me everywhere, but we didn’t have two hundred horses available for them. They had nearly fifteen miles to march to reach Hythe beach.

  “Lord Ieuan already has them moving.”

  “How late are we going to be?” Whether because she couldn’t lie there and wait for the news or because she could hear me through the door, Lili had risen and now stood in the doorway. She’d lit the candles in our room. Branwen, her maid, and Jeeves, my manservant, had entered the room through a side door and were bustling about, choosing clothing. William and I returned to the room. Jeeves would help me dress, but William was my squire and would arm me. He began laying out my gear while I put on a pair of socks.

  “Dawn is less than hour away, my lady, and it seems the French intend to make the beach before the sun rises,” William said.

  I exchanged a look with Lili, and her expression showed worry. We couldn’t reach Hythe in an hour, not with the kind of force we needed to repel an invasion. Our need to organize ourselves was going to give the French precious time on the beach at Hythe. Both successful invasions of England by the French—the first in 1066 and the second in 1215—had succeeded in part because the landings had been unopposed.

  If I were invading the beaches of France, I would have chosen the gray light before dawn too. At that hour, the white beach would stand out, and sometimes you could see all around you more clearly than a few minutes later when the sun was shining behind you. Not that we’d had a plethora of sunny days recently.

  I wasn’t going to second-guess Dover’s Portsman about the doughtiness of the men of
Hythe, but unless they’d been practicing their archery such that they were better than my Welshmen, they didn’t stand a chance against the French fleet and would be better off waiting for our reinforcements. The best I could hope for now was containment.

  “What do you want from me?” Lili said.

  Jeeves had polished my boots until they shone, and he handed the right one to me. I paused before putting it on, surprised she’d asked the question in front of everyone else. And then I realized she’d done so because she knew what my answer was going to be and was going to accept it. “I want you to help defend Dover, which will need defending if we’re wrong about where the French are landing. I can think of a scenario where Philip sends an expeditionary force to Hythe to distract us, while the main body of the fleet lands right underneath us here.”

  Lili nodded, looking down at her feet. I leaned sideways a bit to see into her face, but when she looked up, it showed simple concern, not the intensity of yesterday.

  “Do you have a further thought?” I said hopefully.

  She shook her head. She couldn’t force the sight to come to her; we just had to be grateful when it did. I consoled myself that at least she wasn’t having foresight of my death.

  “All the Cinque Ports are on alert, my lord,” William said. “The men of Dover are moving into position now. Ships have put to sea and are sailing for Hythe as we speak.”

  “From what direction comes the wind?” Jeeves said. He might not be a warrior himself, but he knew a thing or two about warfare.

  “The southwest, as usual,” William said.

  I grunted my disappointment. “Our ships won’t beat those of us on horseback there—and maybe not even those on foot, not sailing into the wind like that.”

  “No, sire.” William bowed his head.

  “I don’t suppose a storm is coming?” Lili asked.