Ashes of Time (The After Cilmeri Series)

by Sarah Woodbury

  “That isn’t going to happen, not unless this place is really, really remote,” Anna said.

  “It looks pretty remote to me,” Meg said.

  “Yeah, but they know we’re here, right? Callum keeps talking about a flash,” Anna said. “They could be scrambling rescue helicopters even now.”

  Instinctively, both women looked up. Meg had a vision of men in Kevlar converging on their position, but the only sound was the rustle of the wind in the trees and the crunch of snow beneath their feet. The sky remained clear of rotor blades. “It’s late afternoon. Maybe nobody’s on duty.”

  “The world could have changed a lot in two years,” Anna said, “Maybe nobody’s on duty at all.”

  “That’s a very nice thought, Anna,” Meg said, “and I hope it’s true, although it would be unfortunate if we’ve fallen into a world undergoing the zombie apocalypse.”

  “It’s weird to think about, isn’t it?” Anna said. “Anything could have happened here. Maybe MI-5 has taken over the world.”

  “We have too much to do to spend even an hour in a cell,” Meg said.

  “I don’t suppose you have any modern money hidden in that dress you’re wearing?” Anna said.

  “No.” Meg cursed to herself as she realized what an idiot she’d been. “In fact, I don’t have anything good on me at all, not like last time.”

  Before Meg had taken Goronwy and Llywelyn to the modern world, she’d carefully sewn her passport, credit cards, and money into the hems of several dresses as a precaution against the day the opportunity to time travel arose or Llywelyn fell ill enough to make the need to come to the twenty-first century urgent. Which he had. Unfortunately, Meg was wearing a new dress today and hadn’t bothered to transfer any of those papers into it. “What’s really dumb is that I actively didn’t do it. I told myself there was no need.”

  “Hindsight is 20-20,” Anna said. “It’s like when you’re cutting a bagel with the blade towards you and you think—right before you slice through your finger—this is really dumb.”

  “I had no business becoming complacent,” Meg said, still kicking herself. “If we ever get home, I won’t make that mistake again.”

  “I, however, have something.” Anna loosened the strings on her purse, which was tied to the belt around her waist, and pulled out a piece of paper that had been folded into a small square. Unfolding it, she waved it at Meg, triumphant.

  “Is that David’s list?” Meg said, unable to keep the incredulity out of her voice.

  “Yup,” Anna said. “I started carrying it everywhere last year, just in case.”

  Meg’s eyes had deteriorated enough since she’d turned forty. While many people her age couldn’t see anything without reading glasses unless it was three feet or more away from their face, Meg had the opposite problem. She couldn’t read (or see) anything clearly unless it was ten inches from her face. This low light didn’t help at all, but half the time broad daylight wasn’t much better. For the first time in her life, reading had become a chore. She never had enough light, and she ended up leaning closer and closer, trying to see what was on the paper.

  She had acquired a pair of glasses for seeing distance, but they never felt comfortable to her eyes or on her face, and they couldn’t correct the way she needed them to. She hadn’t been wearing them to the dinner anyway.

  “I’m glad one of us was smart enough to plan ahead,” Meg said. “Or maybe you really do have the sight, like the legends say.” In the Arthurian mythology that David existed within, Anna was Morgane to David’s Arthur.

  Anna shot her mother a disgusted look but didn’t reply, turning the paper this way and that. She was trying to catch a bit of light so she could read it. “Some of what’s on here isn’t going to be easy to get.”

  “We’ll do what we can, and David will forgive us if we fall short,” Meg said.

  After David had returned from modern Cardiff two years ago, he’d enumerated a list of items that he would have liked to procure if he’d had the chance and if he hadn’t been incarcerated the whole time he was here. He’d come home with a stack of papers, which was useful, but consisted only of what he could discover in an hour on the internet. He’d asked for two telephone calls: one to his Uncle Ted and one to an employee of the CDC (Centers for Disease Control)—and been denied even that.

  Meg knew, even if she couldn’t read it at the moment, that the list went far beyond the CDC and Bronwen’s lip balm. It included heirloom seeds for foods like pumpkins, chocolate, and tomatoes; a couple different varieties of potatoes; vaccines for the children as well as other medicines, specifically more sophisticated antibiotics than the rudimentary penicillin Anna had developed; and maps of Great Britain.

  David’s most pressing request, odd as it sounded, was for a geological survey showing where minerals and resources were to be found throughout Britain and Ireland. He wanted a better map than what he’d downloaded off the internet when he was sixteen. Though David hadn’t mentioned it today when he was talking about either the rebellion brewing in Wales or his grand plan for a United States of Britain, minerals meant wealth. No state—whether kingdom or republic—could succeed over the long haul without them. David had gone as far as he could with what he had. Unfortunately a map to the level of detail he wanted was classified.

  Which meant they needed Callum—for that and for everything else.

  “It feels like we’ve been walking for hours.” Anna cinched her cloak tighter under her chin. “I was hoping I’d warm up, but I haven’t.”

  She was right that they’d been walking downhill for a while now, and as they neared the bottom of the current slope, a prickling sensation started at the back of Meg’s neck that she not only knew where she was, but that she’d been here before. Well, not here-here, but in the vicinity.

  “What’s up, Mom?” Anna said when Meg didn’t respond to her complaint. “You’ve slowed down.”

  “One, I can’t see a thing,” Meg said.

  “Maybe we can get you some glasses while we’re here.” Anna suddenly giggled. “When we do get back, we can say that we went to Avalon to do our Christmas shopping because we’d grown tired of the selection at the local mall.”

  Meg laughed too, though Anna was right about the glasses. Not being able to see properly was painful—like a sore toe that wouldn’t heal. It nagged at Meg every moment of every day.

  Lights flared ahead of them. After a few seconds, the single glare coalesced into two points of light, which meant they were headlights on a vehicle. The car was moving fast on a road that ran along the bottom of the slope. Within fifteen seconds it had passed them by, moving from left to right in front of them.

  Anna broke into a run. “Thank God!”

  The powerful smell of burning gasoline was overlaid by the scent of smoke. “Is that a woodstove?” Meg sniffed the air.

  They were still fifty yards from where Meg thought the road should be, though they’d been plunged into darkness again, made worse by the flare of the headlights that had ruined what little night vision she’d had.

  Anna spun around to look at her mother. “Even if all we run into is a log cabin next door to the middle of nowhere, we’ll have heat.”

  “And the possibility of a phone,” Meg said.

  The two women went a little farther. One instant there was nothing, and then there was a road, a dark strip of black against the gray of the trees that lined it on either side. Meg wanted to hurry in case another car was coming along the road even now, but her vision hadn’t improved in the last two minutes, and the ground was very slippery. She and Anna were wet and cold enough that they didn’t want to add to their misery by having one of them step in a hole and go down with a sprained ankle. Given how remote this location appeared to be, it might be a while before they saw another car.

  They stumbled into a ditch that was fortunately no wetter than the surrounding grass and leaves, and clambered up the other side onto the road, which had been cleared of trees for twe
nty feet on either side. The blacktop had been laid in a narrow strip, without the yellow line to delineate the two lanes of the road.

  “Wow.” Anna bent and touched the blacktop with one hand.

  “Don’t kiss it,” Meg said. “It’ll be dirty.”

  Anna laughed, bouncing up and down on her toes. “Who’d have thought a paved road could be such a beautiful thing.”

  “Not to rain on your parade, but we should start walking.” Meg looked up at the sky, which was now clear of all but a few clouds. It was colder than before too, with a brisk wind blowing down the road towards them. “Can you see the north star? My eyes are so bad I can barely tell there are stars up there.”

  “I see the Little Dipper.” Anna pointed.

  “So we head this way.” Meg turned into the wind and set off. If Anna had pointed to the correct star, it meant they’d come from the south, so now they were going west, which also happened to mean continuing downhill.

  “Why west?” Anna hurried to catch up. “Do you know where we are?”

  “If we’re in Wales, west will eventually get us to the Irish Sea, right?” Meg said. “And if we’re not in Wales …”

  “The whole United States is to the west of Pennsylvania,” Anna said.

  “I’m thinking the trees are wrong for Pennsylvania,” Meg said. “These are evergreens.”

  Anna’s step faltered. “Do you think we’re in Oregon?” She looked stricken. In the years following Meg’s and Anna’s initial return to the modern world when Anna was three years old, Anna had forgotten her time in Wales, along with everything before David’s birth. This included the existence of both her fathers, Trevor and Llywelyn. She’d blocked the memories so completely, she even told people that she’d been born in Oregon, as if her life had started the day they’d moved there. Eventually, Meg had stopped correcting her. Oregon had been home to Anna. Home to Meg too.

  Meg cleared her throat. “We’ll see. We could be in Colorado, though I can’t imagine why we’d end up there.”

  “We end up where we’re supposed to,” Anna said. “That’s what you and David always say.”

  “And we’ll keep saying it until we don’t,” Meg said unhelpfully. She was getting that hysterical panicky feeling again and needed to keep moving to control it.

  They walked for ten minutes, leaving the smell of smoke behind them. Meg had chosen to follow the road rather than find a house. She wasn’t completely sure why. Maybe it was the awkwardness of appearing at someone’s door in medieval garb and asking for help. If they flagged down a car, the driver would have already been moving, so picking them up would be less of an imposition.

  The sound of an engine reverberated from behind them, saving Meg from having to analyze her own actions any further. The vehicle was coming from the east and heading in their direction. Anna and Meg stepped off the road so they wouldn’t get hit if the driver decided not to slow down or couldn’t see them in their dark dresses and cloaks. Committed at least to the attempt to find help, Meg stepped in front of Anna and waved both arms in a big sweeping motion to see if the driver would stop.

  “What d’you think?” Anna said as she eyed the oncoming vehicle. The size of the headlights and their distance from the ground suggested they belonged to a truck. “Serial killer?”

  “Let’s hope not.” But Meg didn’t think so, and she was a lot less concerned about being in the middle of nowhere with Anna in the modern world than if they’d found themselves stranded somewhere remote in the Middle Ages. Rural areas in the United States were safer places for lost women than cities.

  In the Middle Ages, the opposite was true. Rural areas were home to lawless men, who were very unsafe for women. Even though, relatively speaking, a village was a big place in the Middle Ages and a tiny place in the modern world, their characteristics were much the same. In both cases—rural America and urban Middle Ages—the key was the extent to which everybody knew everybody else and kept an eye on their neighbors.

  Meg really did think she knew where they were too, a fact which was confirmed a moment later as the truck slowed down and the headlights revealed the license plate on the front of the truck. Oregon.

  The truck had a king-cab, and was bright red, clean, and new. When the driver stopped and rolled down the automatic passenger side window, the seats inside proved to be leather. He could be a well-off serial killer, but somehow Meg doubted it, especially when a girl of nine or ten with a mane of black hair (the same color as her father’s) peered at her from the back seat.

  “Can I help you?” In his early forties, the man was clean-cut and handsome, with short hair and dark eyes. He was dressed well for any event on the west coast: dark khaki pants, a buttoned down shirt, and a black leather jacket. Meg couldn’t see his feet, but he wouldn’t be wearing tennis shoes.

  “We were hoping for a ride,” Meg said.

  “Did your car break down?” the man said.

  “Not exactly,” Meg said, avoiding the question as best she could. “Are you headed into town?”

  “I wasn’t going all the way into Pendleton,” he said. “We’re having Thanksgiving near Helix.”

  “My grandmother lives there,” the man’s daughter put in.

  Meg repeated the word ‘Thanksgiving’ to herself at the same moment that Anna breathed the name of the town. Pendleton was a small town in eastern Oregon. Meg didn’t know it well, but she’d been here for the rodeo once and several times more for conferences. She’d visited the cultural center on the reservation, where they now were, and knew something of the geography of the area.

  Meg glanced at Anna again, seeing how she was taking this news. When Meg had gone into labor with David, she’d ended up outside her mother’s house in Pennsylvania because clearly that was where she’d needed to be. But to return to Oregon where they’d lived for so many years caused an unexpected ache in her heart. Like Anna, Meg had real friends here and a life that had been totally, radically different from the one she now led in Wales with Llywelyn.

  “We’d be happy if you can just get us closer than this,” Meg said. “Could you drop us off at the convenience store in Mission?”

  The driver looked the women up and down, concern in his eyes. In their medieval dresses and cloaks, damp and shivering, Meg had to admit that they must have looked a sight. “Are you sure?”

  “Definitely.” Meg pulled open the door. The man found the latch that would move the passenger seat forward, and Anna crawled into the back beside the man’s daughter.

  “I’m Meg, and this is my daughter, Anna.”

  “Nice to meet you,” he said. “I’m Jim. This is my daughter, Star.”

  “Thanks for the ride,” Anna put in.

  Meg glanced into the back and saw Star scoot the blanket she’d been sitting under closer to Anna so they could share it. “Thank you too,” Anna said.

  Star smiled.

  Jim started driving, and after yet another long look at Meg, he turned the heat to ‘high’.

  Meg put her hands right up to the vent and let the heat seep into her. She hadn’t been back to the United States for seven years, and it was odd how natural it felt to be sitting in this truck. She had to acknowledge, for the first time in a while, how fundamentally foreign the Middle Ages still was to her.

  Jim spoke American English and drove an American truck on an American road. Regardless of his ethnic background, Meg knew him in a way she could never know someone she had just met in medieval Wales. In the Middle Ages, even after all this time, Meg was still on the outside looking in.

  “Do you have a phone?” Jim said.

  “No.” Meg shook her head.

  “Not that it would do you any good out here. No service.” He hesitated for a second and then seemed to decide something, because he added, “When we get there, you can use my phone to call who you need to. I can’t just leave you in the parking lot.” Then he glanced in the rearview mirror at Anna. “I don’t mean to pry, but are you guys in trouble?”


  Neither Anna nor Meg answered. Meg wanted to trust him, but after what happened the last time she’d come to the modern world—or when David had come the following year—Meg thought it might be better to involve as few people as possible in their problems. It was bad enough that her brother-in-law, Ted, had found himself mixed up with MI-5. Meg didn’t want to inflict men in black SUVs and Kevlar on a total stranger.

  Still, it was fortunate that Meg hadn’t ended up in some place she knew better. She might have known Jim in that long ago life, and he would have been even more full of questions. He was her age, but since she hadn’t grown up here, they hadn’t known each other at school. And because he was her age, he was unlikely to have taken a class from her, if he’d even gone to college in Oregon. Nor was there any reason for him to recognize a random history professor who’d disappeared seven years ago.

  “The reason I ask is that I noticed when you got in the truck that you have blood on your neck, Anna,” Jim said. “Were you in a car accident or—?” He left his concern hanging, but Meg imagined he was thinking along the lines of domestic violence.

  Meg glanced back at Anna, and they shared a long look. Meg still didn’t want to tell Jim anything and wouldn’t know what to say if she did, but Anna stuck her head between the seats. “Do you live around here, Jim?”

  “Up Meacham Creek.” Jim tipped his head to indicate back the way he’d come. “Why?”

  “Actually … um … I was wondering if you knew Cassie McKay?” Anna said.

  Jim jerked the wheel—just a quick back and forth—but it showed his surprise. Then he steadied the truck. “Are you friends of hers?”

  “Yes,” Meg said. “Have you seen her recently?”

  “Not since last Thanksgiving,” Jim said. “Do you know her grandfather, Art?”

  “We’ve never met, but he should have heard of us,” Anna said. “You wouldn’t happen to have his phone number, would you?”