Ashes of Time (The After Cilmeri Series)

by Sarah Woodbury

  Marty started backwards up the stairs. He was holding Anna with her arms wrenched behind her back. It was all she could do to fumble at the side of her dress with the fingers of both hands, trying to lift the hem of her long skirt so she wouldn’t trip as Marty pulled her up the stairs with him. Anna was wearing her nicest dress, a dark red with embroidery at the bodice and on the sleeves, with a train that made her feel like a princess. Or it had until five minutes ago.

  Anna managed not to step on the hem on the first step, but the second step had her coming to a complete stop with the fabric caught underneath her left shoe. She froze, suspended, unable to take a step forward because of Marty’s grip and the knife, and unable to step back without ripping out the back of her dress, though Anna’s seamstress was accomplished enough that it would take more than a few tugs to rip it.

  More likely, it would hold, she would fall backwards into Marty, and find her neck sliced open. He would be dead or captured a few seconds later, but that wouldn’t be of much comfort to Anna. She didn’t want to die for her own sake, but more than that, she needed to live for her boys. Sadly, Marty was doing what he was doing because he felt absolutely the same: he had lost his wife and child and had nothing left to live for.

  Fortunately, Marty had lived long enough in the Middle Ages to understand why Anna wasn’t moving. He didn’t tug at her but instead barked at Mom, “Gather it up for her.”

  Mom crouched at Anna’s feet, and Anna shifted her foot from side to side so Mom could pull the hem out from under Anna’s boot. Marty pressed his knife into Anna’s skin the whole time, and she couldn’t even look down as Mom swept up her train. Anna bent her left forearm enough so that she could hold the train and the tail of her cloak in her hand.

  David had used the delay to move a few feet closer. “Marty—” His voice held a warning.

  “Not you! I don’t want you!” Marty squeezed Anna tighter and the knife scraped her skin.

  David’s face paled. Anna knew he was dying inside as much as Anna was, desperate to help, but helpless to do so.

  Ieuan and Papa, meanwhile, had moved closer to the exterior door that Marty and Alan had come through and which led down to the inner ward. They were sidling slowly, waiting for their chance to move through it and summon help. Lili was bending over the steward, aiding Bronwen’s attempt to stem the flow of blood.

  From inside the stairwell, Anna couldn’t see anything else of the room. Nor could she see where Math was standing, though by the quick glances that David kept sending to his right, he was close by. From where she stood on the first step, she could easily see through the doorways to the left and right, down the long corridors on either side. Unfortunately, Marty could see along them as well. If Math tried to leave the queen’s hall through one of the side doors into a corridor, Marty would spot him. Again, Anna prayed for a maid or a servant—anyone—to come down one of the long hallways, but they were uncharacteristically deserted.

  Marty took another step back. Now neither of them could see anything but the stone walls of the stairwell on either side. Anna leaned into Marty, trying to rest her full weight against him and drag her feet at the same time. She wanted to slow him down, to give the others time to get help. The wall-walk ran all the way around the top of the inner ward. If Math could reach the southwestern tower before they did, he could stop Marty at the top of the stairs.

  But it seemed Marty had the same thought, fearing it as much as Anna was praying for it. In response to her stalling, he pressed harder with the knife. A trickle of blood ran down Anna’s neck.

  “Okay! Okay!” David’s hands were up again. “See, I have no weapon. Nobody’s going to do anything you don’t want.”

  “Let’s go.” With Mom following, Marty began to climb quickly, circling around and around, moving up the stairwell so fast that Anna was practically running backwards to keep up. She fixed her eyes on Mom’s, willing her to have a plan, willing her to get them out of this. But Marty kept his knife pressed to Anna’s throat, and as long as that was the case, neither of them could act.

  Anna lost sight of David almost immediately, though she could hear his footfalls on the stairs below them. He kept out of sight, presumably to put Marty at ease. Anna couldn’t hear anything else but her heart pounding in her ears and her breath rushing in and out. She wanted to hear orders in Welsh. She wanted someone to save her—a thought which made her more mad than scared. There was a time when she might have been able to save herself.

  Anna could feel Marty’s manic determination in the way he held her and the knife. This wasn’t a drunken man-at-arms who didn’t know what he was doing, which had been the case with the last man who’d tried to hurt her. Marty had Anna pinned to him and wasn’t about to let go. He wasn’t at all the soft middle-aged village headman Callum and Cassie had described.

  “I’m sorry about your wife, Marty.” Mom kept her eyes fixed on Anna’s. “But what you’re doing now isn’t the answer.”

  “Isn’t it?” Marty said. “I know you can take me home, since you’re the one that brought me here in the first place. I heard all about how you went back to the modern world when Llywelyn was sick. You jumped off the balcony at Chepstow. Well, we’re just going to jump off the tower at Rhuddlan. Same difference.”

  He pronounced ‘Rhuddlan’ the English way—saying Rudlan instead of Rithlan—

  but neither Mom nor Anna corrected him.

  “Llywelyn and I jumped into a river, Marty,” Mom said. “If it didn’t work, if we hadn’t travelled back to the modern world, we’d have just gotten wet. That’s not what’s going to happen here. What if it doesn’t work?”

  They had passed the next level and in only a few more circuits approached the top of the tower. Marty spoke around gritted teeth. “It’s going to work.”

  They hit the top step and spilled out into the circular tower. Marty swung Anna around so that at last she was going forward. She had a brief image of Mom stabbing Marty in the back with her belt knife. He wasn’t wearing armor, so a well-placed knife could go right through his clothing. But Mom wasn’t a warrior. She didn’t know how to kill with a blade. And even if she did, she couldn’t risk stabbing Marty in the back on the chance that his arm would jerk and he’d slice Anna’s throat.

  Marty pushed Anna towards one of the crenels. Now that they were outside, Anna could hear men shouting in both the inner ward behind her and the outer ward directly below. Three men pounded along the battlement, coming from the northwestern tower.

  Mom threw out a hand to them. “Stay back!”

  In response to the threat, Marty brought Anna tight against him again and faced the soldiers. They slowed and pulled up, their faces drawn and white. Anna assumed that someone—Papa, Math or Ieuan—had told the soldiers what was happening, but hearing about the danger was very different from seeing it.

  Or living it.

  Anna was breathing too fast, and the world began to darken around the edges again.

  Having neutralized the guards for now, Marty turned Anna so that his back was up against the battlement. With the guards to his left and Mom on his right, each at a forty-five degree angle to Anna, nobody could get to him without going through her. Mom’s eyes were very wide, and her mouthed worked as if she was trying to speak but was having a hard time figuring out what she could say to end this nightmare.

  “It’s okay, Mom,” Anna said, though it really wasn’t. The only part about this that was in any way ‘okay’ was that when Marty had grabbed her a moment ago, he had repositioned his left arm so it went across her chest rather than holding her arms wrenched behind her back. It meant Anna could move them. Which meant she might be able to fight him.

  “Meg, get up into that gap.” Marty was talking about the crenel. The classic gap-toothed appearance of a medieval battlement was composed of merlons—the higher bits—and the crenels—the gaps between them. When Mom didn’t move right away, Marty clenched Anna tighter. “Now!”

  “I’m doing it! I’m
doing it!” Mom went to the closest crenel and put a hand on one of the merlons. She had to use the other hand to gather up her own skirt and cloak, and then she boosted herself up into the gap. Although Anna couldn’t see what Mom could see, she’d been up here before, and she knew it was a long way down.

  Anna wouldn’t have been nearly so scared if Marty had taken them to the tower in the outer ward that overlooked the Conwy River. David was having problems with the river undercutting the bank and the curtain wall, and the water lapped right at the base of the tower. Jumping from there would have been much the same as when Mom and Papa had jumped from the balcony at Chepstow Castle. The three of them could have ended up in the river if the time travel part didn’t work—instead of flat as a pancake at the base of this tower.

  Out of the corners of each eye, Anna could see the men who had gathered along the wall-walk leading from the southwestern tower to the other two corners. Everyone was watching Marty. Nobody dared to move, not even the two men who stood with arrows nocked to their bows.

  “Just shoot!” Anna said.

  But because Marty was hiding behind her and Anna was the sister of the King of England and the daughter of the King of Wales, none of them would risk shooting her to get to him. Getting out of this in one piece was going to be up to her. She needed to do something. She just didn’t know what that something should be, and she feared that whatever she might try would come too late to save any of them.

  Then Math came through the stairwell doorway, his face white as a sheet. Anna wanted to say some word of comfort, but there was nothing to say that would make the fact that his wife was pressed to a stranger’s chest with his knife to her throat any better. And that his mother-in-law stood in one of the crenels behind them. Anna didn’t know how Marty had known about it, but the crenels in the southwestern tower were a foot lower, hitting slightly below her waist, than the crenels in all the other towers, where they rose to chest height.

  “I don’t mean to hurt you.” Marty’s words came low in Anna’s ear.

  “Don’t you?”

  Maybe it was the venom in Anna’s voice, which surprised even her; maybe he’d expected to hear fear. Either way, it didn’t matter. His knife dropped slightly, and Anna reacted, getting her arm between his arm and her neck, in order to shove the knife away, and slamming the heel of her right boot into his knee. Then Anna held onto his arm with all her strength and used his weight as leverage for her own.

  “Damn you!” Instead of swinging forward away from the wall as Anna had intended, however, Marty used their combined weight to swing them around and pin Anna between him and the battlement. In doing so, Anna’s forehead banged into Mom’s legs. Instinctively, Anna’s arms came up, releasing their hold on Marty’s arm in favor of grabbing onto Mom.

  Mom shrieked. “Anna!”

  “I’ve got you!” Anna’s arms clenched around Mom’s knees.

  But though Mom’s hands scrabbled at the stones of the merlons on either side of her, the sudden weight of Anna falling against her and Marty pressing forward onto her lower half was too much. Her fingers couldn’t maintain their grip. If this had been a movie, more often than not, Mom would have been saved from falling at the last second by heroics from Anna or David.

  But Anna wasn’t strong enough to stop Mom’s fall, and since falling was what Marty wanted, he threw his weight forward against Anna’s back. They toppled together through the crenel. As she fell, Anna made one last attempt to get free, twisting away from Marty. He screamed and released his tight hold around her waist.

  But it was too late.

  Anna squeezed her eyes shut. Black abyss or horrifying thud, she didn’t want to know which it would be until she hit.

  Chapter Three

  November 1291

  David

  “Mother of God!�� Math was the first to reach the crenel, his hand clutching at empty air.

  David was beside Math an instant later, and both men lunged over the parapet, their eyes staring and their hearts in their mouths. It was fifty feet to the ground, and David was sure he would see three bodies sprawled below the tower. But he didn’t. Only one body lay in the grass of the outer ward: Marty’s.

  “They’re gone.” Math’s voice was full of shock.

  David had been sure as he’d come out of the stairwell, his eyes fixed on Anna and Mom, that there were a million things he should have done to stop Marty. But at the time, he couldn’t think of anything other than what he did, which was to let Marty get this far and then try to do an end run around him. David put a hand on Math’s shoulder, trying to comfort him, though what comfort he could give at a time like this couldn’t be much.

  Dad appeared on David’s right and looked over the wall too. “Dafydd—” He gripped David’s shoulder hard, and David checked his father’s face. In the fading light, David couldn’t tell if his face was paler than usual, only that he’d gone white around the lips. David had a sudden vision of himself throwing his father over his shoulder and jumping too.

  “Don’t have a heart attack on me, Dad,” he said.

  “Your mother—”

  “She’ll be all right,” David said. “They both will.”

  Math finally blinked and straightened, resting his hands on the stones of the crenel. “Where do you think they’ve gone? To Pennsylvania again? Or Cardiff?”

  David shook his head. He hadn’t a clue and didn’t want to guess.

  While David, Dad, and Math had chased after Marty, Ieuan had taken the opposite tack, maybe hoping to break their fall if they didn’t time travel. He had arrived at the base of the tower within a few seconds of Math and David’s arrival at the top. He looked down at Marty’s body and then squinted upwards.

  David leaned out to talk to him. “I assume he’s dead?”

  “Indeed.” Ieuan toed the body. Marty’s neck was set at a cruel angle, and two arrows stuck out of his back, arrows which had been released by the bowmen when Marty had turned his back on them. It was an ugly sight, even from here.

  A man-at-arms ran to Ieuan with a torch. The way the soldier kept looking from the top of the tower to Marty had David’s mind moving quickly to damage control. Ieuan was clearly thinking about it too because he spun on his heel and surveyed the crowd that had gathered in the aftermath of the fall. Though the sun had just set, it was only a little after four in the afternoon. So, while the craft stalls and smithy were closing up for the day, it wasn’t as if everyone had gone to bed.

  “How many people saw that, do you think?” Dad said in a low voice.

  “Too many,” David said.

  And then David looked past him to see Gwenllian hovering in the doorway to the tower.

  “Is she … is she …?” Gwenllian said.

  “Honey, no.” Dad was with her in two strides. “Mom’s going to be just fine.”

  David followed, since there wasn’t anything further to be done from up here, and tugged Math’s elbow to make him come too.

  “How do you know that?” Gwenllian regarded Dad with big eyes.

  David had never spent much time with his little sister, and not for the first time, he felt bad about it. His half-sister Gwenllian was fourteen years younger than David, and he didn’t know her well at all. But he didn’t have to know her well to know that she loved Mom too. Mom was the only mother Gwenllian had ever known.

  “Because she always is,” David said. “She’s done this twice before. I’ve done it. Anna did it to come here with me not long after you were born. It’s terrifying when it happens, but they’ll be back in a few days. You’ll see.” For maybe the first time in David’s life, he took Gwenllian’s hand, and they followed Dad downstairs.

  The queen’s hall was now full of people: kitchen staff packing up the uneaten food; a serving girl scrubbing at the blood on the floor, since Alan had been taken away and was no longer bleeding against the wall; counselors and advisors waiting for orders. One of David’s most trusted counselors, Nicholas de Carew, stood next to Cadwall
on, the young captain of Dad’s teulu. Carew had come with David to Rhuddlan for the opportunity to confer at length with both him and Dad. The day hadn’t turned out quite like anyone had expected.

  Goronwy hustled through the exterior door, followed by Bronwen, who was drying her hands on the edge of her cloak. David caught her arm. “How’s Alan?”

  She shook her head and shrugged at the same time. “He’s alive. That’s about all that can be said.” Bronwen picked up Catrin, who wrapped her arms around her mother’s neck. “The wound is a nasty one to his gut, but it’s pretty far to the left, and his bottom rib deflected the blade.”

  Lili had gathered all the children at one end of the table, out of the way of the activity in the room. Catrin, Bran, and Elisa sat on her lap, while Arthur’s nanny clutched Arthur and Padrig to her. As David came over to them, Lili looked up, a terrible questioning expression her face.

  “They’re fine,” David said. “Gone, but fine.”

  “What do we do?” Lili said.

  “What we always do,” Dad said. “We wait.”

  Feeling bereft, David sat down in the chair Mom had been sitting in. The party they’d planned for so long had barely started before Marty had arrived. When David had traveled to the modern world two years ago with Cassie and Callum, he’d seen the storm and guessed what was about to happen. His family—Mom, Anna, and himself—time traveled when their lives were in danger, and with the single exception of when Mom had returned to the modern world with Anna at David’s birth, it always happened when they were in motion.

  So far, by David’s count, they’d survived three car accidents, a plane crash, a shipwreck, and three long falls from high places, with this latest incident making the fourth.

  “Wherever they’ve gone, if they’re going to get back, they’re going to have to survive another brush with death.” Math pulled out the chair next to David’s.