Champions of Time (The After Cilmeri Series, #13)

by Sarah Woodbury

  The door flew open to reveal Christopher, fully dressed but not yet wearing his armor or sword.

  Huw, the tallest of the three, bobbed up and down behind him. “King Dafydd has been asking for you.”

  That got William to his feet like nothing else could have. Excitement was building in his chest, not just at the summons from the king, but also at what today would bring. This was the morning of mornings. They were finally moving out, and he was thankful his friends wouldn’t consider leaving him behind. The plan today was to begin the march across England as the latest step in showing the world that David was not only alive but willing to fight for his throne and his country. William himself was long past the point of admitting that he would follow David anywhere. If that meant more battle, then he would be right beside the king when it happened. He wasn’t David’s squire anymore, but a squire of the king never quite gave up the job.

  “Where’s the king?”

  “On the wall-walk.” Christopher gestured to Huw. “We’ve already had our talking to. We’ve been waiting for you.”

  “What kind of talking to?” William wracked his brains for some reason he might have garnered the king’s displeasure, but couldn’t come up with anything recent.

  “You’ll see.” Huw sounded pretty cheerful about the coming chastisement.

  And since whatever William could have done wrong had been done by his friends too, his stomach settled enough for him to realize he was hungry.

  While for men like King David or William’s father, the last two weeks had been a blur of preparation for war, William and his friends had been given little of importance to do. After the battle of Tara, all three of them (four with Robbie Bruce, who’d gone with James Stewart to Scotland) were knights now, but their elevation hadn’t noticeably changed their status or routine. The three of them had whiled away the hours in training, as they had most of this past year, or leading scouting parties from Chester, which was a good-sized town, refortified by King David after the death of the Earl of Chester ten years ago.

  While his friends went down the stairwell, William made his way to the doorway at the end of the corridor that led to the curtain wall. The news that King David was on the wall-walk was in no way a surprise, especially on a day that had dawned clear, and they could see for miles. If the king wasn’t in his quarters or the hall, he was usually to be found on the ramparts, often walking with Arthur, or Alexander when he was fussy.

  David was without his sons today. He stood with bared head, though in cloak and boots, facing away from the rising sun, his hands resting on the stones of two adjacent merlons. Chester Castle stretched a hundred yards along the River Dee, taking up a dominant position in one corner of the town of Chester.

  William’s room was in the guest house, a large stone building built into the western curtain wall, putting the wall-walk some thirty feet above the level of the bailey. Below him on the other side of the wall was the moat with its connection to the sea, one of the many improvements that David had made since taking over the castle.

  To William’s right, the bailey teemed with men and horses and, on second glance, wasn’t quite as chaotic as it had first appeared. Ieuan, who was in charge of the king’s men, wouldn’t tolerate anything but an ordered muster. Besides, most of the soldiers who’d come at David’s call had been camped in the fields around the town, not inside the castle itself, and most of them had started their march at first light, under the command of their captains and minor lords from whose domains they’d come.

  “You asked to see me, my lord?”

  “I did.” David turned to him, and William was relieved to see the benevolent expression on his face. The king was feeling good today too.

  So William risked a query. “Did I do something wrong?”

  David laughed. “Not unless there’s something I don’t know about—”

  “I’ll see you in hell!” The shout echoed in the still morning air, heard clearly above the movement of men and horses below them.

  William turned his head towards the opposite battlement from which the shout had come and was forced to put up a hand to keep the newly risen sun’s light from blinding him. He could barely make out the figure on the opposite wall-walk a hundred feet away, but the silhouette appeared to be that of a crossbowman.

  The realization that the king’s life was in danger came over William like someone had thrown a bucket of cold water over his head. At the same instant that the crossbowman released his bolt, William shouted, “Get down!” and launched himself towards David, his only thought to shield him from the bolt as best he could. But David was already moving too, reaching for William and trying to move him out of the way in order to take the missile himself.

  The crossbow bolt ripped across the bailey.

  Pain exploded in William’s side.

  And the world went dark.

  One ... two ... three ...

  Chapter Three

  1 April 1294

  Sophie

  The first volley of arrows came from men on Chester’s highest towers. Up until that moment, these men had been facing outward, watching for an approaching enemy army. Everyone in the bailey had heard the assassin’s shout, but in the single moment between his shout and when he released the bolt few were able to process what was happening.

  These guards were constantly prepared for danger, however, and were the quickest on the uptake. Certainly quicker than Sophie had been, not that she could have done anything constructive by way of a response. She and Bronwen had been talking together in the shadow of the keep. They’d watched the events unfold, but so quickly there’d hardly been time for two breaths.

  But in the five seconds it took, first to register that the crossbowman had actually shot a bolt at David, and then to reach for bow and arrow, the would-be assassin dropped his weapon and flung himself through the crenel behind him.

  Even Morgan, David’s chief archer, who was among those in the muster in the bailey, could do nothing. Nobody had noticed the assassin before he shot, and even if Morgan had marked him, his bow had been tucked into its rest alongside his saddle.

  “No! No! No!” The disappearance of the crossbowman released Bronwen, and she ran for the stairway up to the wall-walk from which David had disappeared, hiking up her skirts to take the stairs two at a time.

  A host of men, Morgan and Bevyn among them, ran for the wall-walk opposite, from which the crossbowman had escaped. Even as Sophie mounted the stairway after Bronwen, she glanced over her shoulder and saw Morgan pointing to other soldiers, telling them to go around the outside of the castle, something they could accomplish either by slipping through the postern gate or going through the town. Men moved to do his bidding. With so many prepared to travel this morning, they had more than enough men for any kind of pursuit.

  The two women arrived at the top of the stairway a half-second before Samuel, Callum’s friend, who’d come out of a nearby tower, all of them pulling up short at a spot halfway along the rampart. A crossbow bolt, bloody along its full length, lay on the stones of the wall-walk.

  Samuel reached down and picked up the bolt to hold it gingerly in his fingers, which came away bloody. “How-what-what just happened?”

  Callum came to a halt behind him, and Sophie was sure she’d never seen such a grim look on any man’s face. Samuel may not have seen the events unfold, but Callum had been standing at the far end of the wall-walk, as was his habit, as a kind of guard for David. He held a gun loosely in his hand, but now he wordlessly reached to the small of his back and holstered the weapon unfired. He had arrived back at Chester only last night, having spent the last ten days in Shrewsbury, marshaling his portion of the army, as the Earl of Shrewsbury.

  Sophie knew medieval weaponry. She’d learned something of it in the months of research about the Middle Ages she’d put in as part of the preparations Chad had made for the eventual arrival in Avalon of someone from Ted’s family. When she’d told Anna on the plane that she wanted to go to the
Middle Ages, that it was part of her job, and that she’d prepared for it, she had been completely serious. Neither she—nor Chad Treadman—ever did anything by halves.

  So she knew a modern crossbow could fire a four-hundred-grain bolt at four hundred feet per second, achieving a kinetic energy of a hundred and twenty-four pounds at thirty yards, which was roughly the distance across the bailey. Even at half that weight and power, this crossbow bolt would have been unstoppable in the time between when the crossbowman fired it and when it hit William.

  Only William, it seemed, could move faster, and Sophie thought it likely that his movement to protect David had started out of instinct before the bolt was fired, like a striker in cricket who was already swinging before the bowler released the ball.

  By comparison, the crossbowman had moved much more slowly, but even he had wasted no time getting away. On the opposite wall-walk, one of the guards held up a hook and rope that had been anchored to the corner of the crenel. Morgan, meanwhile, bow in hand, was loosing arrows one after another over the other side of the wall. Sophie was pretty sure the only way out of Chester for the assailant from that part of the wall-walk was to swim the moat, which he could be doing now under fire.

  Callum called across the bailey, “Don’t kill him!”

  Morgan didn’t respond to the order, but Bevyn, who stood beside him, cupped his hands around his mouth to answer. “He has already hit him in the calf as he was coming up the bank on the other side. He’s across the moat, but he won’t get far.”

  “This is impossible.” Callum took a moment to lean through a nearby crenel and then pulled out.

  Sophie had already looked down to the ground on their side of the castle. While the medieval Chester Castle looked very different from the modern one she’d explored with friends several years ago, there was still nothing to see. All the vegetation on the slope had been cleared as a security measure, to prevent anyone from sneaking over the castle wall once they made it through the moat, and she could see plainly that David’s body wasn’t floating in the water.

  She let out a breath. “How worried are we?”

  It was a genuine question. Her experience with time travel and the medieval world was far less than the others’. Though she’d heard all the stories, read all the files, and time-traveled herself, she’d never experienced anything like this. Anyone could see that neither David nor William was here, which meant they’d gone to Avalon.

  “Better in Avalon than dead,” Callum said.

  Bronwen had her arms wrapped around her waist. “I keep looking around, expecting him to appear at any moment.”

  “How did the assassin get inside the castle?” Samuel said. “He couldn’t have climbed in the same way he escaped. Someone would have seen him!”

  Ieuan arrived on the wall-walk, puffing to a halt behind Sophie. “I hate to say it, but the bowman was clever enough to have a plan he stuck to. He didn’t waste time talking about what he was going to do but saw his target and shot.”

  “He shouldn’t have shouted at all,” Callum said, “but maybe he wanted to see David’s face when he killed him.”

  Ieuan barked a laugh. “You mean he’s an honorable villain, who couldn’t bring himself to shoot Dafydd in the back?” He put his arm around Bronwen and pulled her to him.

  His wife shook her head. “I don’t understand how this could happen.”

  “We’ll discover that too.” Ieuan meant to be comforting, but unlike Callum’s grimness, he looked worried. “I’m in charge of the men. That the assassin got inside Chester Castle is my fault.”

  “That’s not what I meant.” Bronwen made a despairing gesture towards the bolt in Samuel’s hand. “What I really want to know is how did this work?”

  Callum took the bolt from Samuel and fingered the deadly point. “I’m with Bronwen. Why did the bolt remain behind?”

  “Dafydd’s life was in danger.” Ieuan seemed the most philosophical about what he’d seen. “Didn’t something similar happen back at Dover when Dafydd fell off the wall with Lee? He fell, traveled to Avalon, was almost shot, and traveled back, all in the blink of an eye and was never actually injured himself?”

  Callum let out a breath. “We can only hope. He hadn’t yet put on his armor this morning. He was wearing his Kevlar vest, but—” he shook his head, “—unlike a bullet, a bolt has a non-deforming steel point. At this range, the Kevlar might not even have slowed it down. Maybe if the bolt hit the ceramic plate above David’s heart it would have stopped it, but who’s to say that’s where it was aimed.”

  Bronwen looked to be near tears. “You mean it went right through him.” She spoke dully and turned her face into Ieuan’s shoulder.

  “Or he traveled before it could.” Ieuan put both arms around her now. “The blood may just be from William.” He kissed the top of Bronwen’s head. “We have no way to know. Not until Dafydd returns.”

  Samuel took the bolt back from Callum. “We must face the fact, however, that William is seriously wounded, if not dead.”

  “I don’t look forward to telling that to his father,” Ieuan said.

  “William isn’t dead.” Callum’s face became slightly less grim and took on a contemplative look. “It went through him without sticking, which means it pierced only tissue.”

  “That’s not making me feel better,” Bronwen said.

  Somewhat tentatively, Sophie put up a hand to get everyone’s attention. “Chad will be waiting for David.”

  She could fully admit to herself that she’d bought into David’s mystique long before she’d arrived in Avalon, and the man himself had done nothing to disappoint her. He’d been wearing a crown when he’d greeted the plane in Ireland, but he appeared every inch a king without it. She remembered what Anna had said about him always being treated like a kid when he went to Avalon, but even not knowing him beyond the superficial conversations they’d had so far, she didn’t think he’d find himself so much at a disadvantage this time.

  For her part, the medieval world was everything and nothing like she’d imagined. Bronwen and Mark Jones had assured her that she would find her feet, but she felt so far out of her depth that the bottom was a hundred feet down with no hope of ever touching. In a way, losing David and William a moment ago was just one more mad event in a world gone mad.

  Not knowing the direction Sophie’s thoughts had taken, Bronwen nodded. “I’m still reluctant to trust, but I’m not sorry that David has Chad—glad of it, in fact. He’ll call him as soon as he can—and get back to us as soon as he can. He knows the urgency.” After a quick glance into the bailey, she made a motion with her arm and headed along the wall-walk to the guesthouse doorway from which William had arrived on the battlement hardly twenty minutes ago. “We’d better get off the wall-walk. We’re too much of a spectacle up here.”

  They reached the doorway at the same moment that Lili opened it. David’s wife was looking stricken, sad, and determined all at the same time. Bronwen embraced her, and there was a moment when the rest stood awkwardly in a line behind them.

  Lili released her sister-in-law and wiped at her cheeks with the backs of her hands. Then she gestured everyone inside. Now, instead of standing on the wall-walk so everyone could see them, they clustered together in a narrow hallway. Constance, Lili’s bodyguard, stood a respectful distance away at the top of the stairwell.

  Quickly Ieuan filled his sister in on what they knew so far, which admittedly wasn’t much. Lili took the bolt and held it up to the light of the lantern hanging from a hook on the wall. By now, the blood was streaked and drying.

  “It’s from Chester’s armory,” Ieuan said flatly. “Englishmen employ crossbows, and it was among the stockpile intended for the garrison’s use.”

  “That means the crossbowman blended in well enough here to get to it.” Lili sighed. “Is it really someone we know? None of you recognized him?”

  “I never managed a good look,” Ieuan said, “but whoever it is, we’ll find out soon. Morgan was
shooting at him, and Bevyn said they could see the direction he was taking. He won’t get away. Even had he escaped into the town, not a soul would aid him.”

  Lili straightened her shoulders. Between one second and the next, she transformed herself from grieving wife to Queen of England. While David had taken the throne reluctantly, Lili had been even more reluctant than her husband. But she’d accepted the mantle anyway and had lived within it for the last five years.

  Standing before them now, her hands on her hips, Lili didn’t spend any more time on tears. “I need your thoughts. How do we move forward? Without Dafydd, how much of our plan can survive?”

  “The army is already marching, and we know how it must be used.” Ieuan turned to Callum. “Have we heard from Math?”

  “I spoke with him this morning. He will meet us at Beeston.” Their conversation would have taken place through their telecommunications network that linked David’s major castles.

  “I thought he wasn’t coming?” Last Sophie had heard, David and his father had decided that he and Math should remain in Wales, held in reserve in case the fighting went badly. This was an English rebellion, and including Welsh forces sent the wrong message to both the English people and the Scots. For that reason, David had also moved his command center from Dinas Bran to Chester, to highlight the fact that this was an English rebellion and he was England’s king.

  “Dafydd changed his mind.” Lili shook her head. “He claims to have nothing of the Sight, but sometimes I wonder ...”

  “Math can stand in for Dafydd better than I can,” Callum said.

  “Or I. I lead the men, but they all know that I’m merely the go-between.” Ieuan made this comment entirely without resentment.

  “I have a couple of ideas, actually.” Sophie raised her hand again, like she was in school, and then dropped it when everyone looked at her.

  Lili spread her hands wide. “We’re listening. Just say it. Everyone outside is still in shock, but in another minute they’ll start to feel lost without Dafydd to lead them. They were just getting used to having him back. I need to speak to them soon, and I need a clear idea of what to say and what we are going to do next.”