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

by Sarah Woodbury

  “I’m okay.” He opened his eyes and forced his vision to clear.

  “We all have bad memories,” Matha said. “Some men have been known to drink too much because of them.”

  “I’m not doing that,” Christopher said. “I know better than to do that.”

  “If you ever start not knowing, tell someone. Tell me.”

  Christopher nodded, though inside he wondered if the point at which he drank himself to sleep would be past the point where he would be able to ask for help.

  The ride through the camp was uneventful, considering the fact that they were enemy soldiers, and every second Christopher was sure that someone would recognize them. He wasn’t wearing his helmet, which on second thought might have been a good idea. As it was, they reached the entrance to the town, which was being guarded on the road by two men. It wasn’t much of a defense, really—literally no more than two sawhorses and two men with pikes barring access to the main street through the town.

  A newly dug or re-dug ditch on both sides of the road was the only other barrier of any kind between the army and the town. To the left, the ditch ended at the river, and the water level was such that a moat had formed for a hundred feet. To the right, the ditch looped east and north until it stopped at a stone wall demarcating a farmer’s field.

  If someone had a mind to, they could leap the ditch and cut through the yards behind the houses and workshops to the left and right.

  Christopher and Matha, however, were waved through the barrier. They both knew enough about how these things worked to realize that before entering the castle on foot they had to find housing for their horses, if not themselves. Neither of them was high-ranking enough—nor did they want to be viewed as such—to justify staying in the castle itself.

  So Christopher leaned down to speak to a guard, who appeared to be coming off his shift. He didn’t wear a sword, and his tunic indicated he belonged to the town’s garrison, not to Balliol specifically. Christopher said in his best medieval English, “Do you know where we could find lodging for us and our horses?”

  The man stopped. Knights, whatever their nationality, were to be respected. “We have only one inn, and I know it’s full, but my aunt and uncle decided this noon that they’d do their part and take in lodgers. No point in passing up the opportunity for coin.” He hesitated, seeming to have more to say, but he swallowed it down. Christopher could only hope that his hesitation was because he wasn’t thrilled about hosting a rebellion against the king. “Tell them Alvin sent you.”

  The name wasn’t one Christopher had ever heard in medieval England before. It wasn’t Saxon or Norman. Christopher might have thought the man was Norwegian except for his perfect English. He didn’t feel he could explore any of that, however, at least not at this time, so he and Matha accepted the directions and made their way to their possible lodging.

  Skipton was a small town, really a village, that had suddenly turned into an armed camp. The streets were packed with soldiers. Unlike in Shrewsbury or London, the houses had been built a good twenty feet apart, with yards and gardens, many of which were fenced. The house to which they’d been directed was slightly larger than most, two full stories, and Christopher wondered if Alvin’s uncle was the village headman—or rather, since this was England, the town’s mayor.

  The front door was right on the street, and as Christopher and Matha arrived, the door opened, and a woman came out with a broom to sweep the dirt as if the road was her porch.

  It was a lost cause to Christopher’s mind, but it saved him the need to knock. He dismounted and approached her. “Excuse me. Your nephew Alvin sent us. We are looking for lodging for the night.”

  At first, the look the woman gave him was startlingly fierce, and he felt taken aback, but then her expression smoothed into something entirely noncommittal. “It isn’t much for great lords like you.”

  “We would be grateful for any bed you could offer us, and even more, a safe place to leave our horses.”

  The woman paused again, clearly hesitating to commit. Then her husband appeared around the side of the house and intervened. “Alvin sent them. Of course we have room for you and your horses. I am Gunnar, and this is my wife, Inge. Please come with me, my lords.”

  As they followed him around to the back of the house, Matha, who’d dismounted by now too, leaned into Christopher. “They’re Danish.”

  Being from Ireland, Matha knew Danes when he saw them, and Christopher vaguely remembered that the Danes had once been big in the north of England, so their descendants would still be here. At one of the crossroads that morning, before they’d discovered this mess, they’d passed someone heading to Thorlby, an adjacent town, named (obviously) after Thor, the god of thunder and a personal favorite of Christopher. If he’d known then what he knew now, he would have told the man to turn around.

  Gunnar led them into a largish yard, thirty feet square, that included a couple of outbuildings. One was the kitchen, set apart from the house because of the danger of fire, and another was a barn. Chickens strutted across the dirt, and a boy of seven ran after a pig that weighed twice what he did.

  The house butted up against the river, so they didn’t have any neighbors on that side. From the bank, Christopher could see the raised drawbridge, protected by a wooden gate on the town side, and the road heading north out of town.

  He turned to look at Gunnar. “We appreciate this.”

  “Certainly, my lord.” Gunnar stood in front of them, looking from Matha to Christopher with an expectant expression.

  “Payment. Of course.” Christopher dug into his purse for a few coins, the same amount he’d paid the innkeeper for a room and food last night.

  From Gunnar’s wide-eyed look, it was something of an overpayment, but Christopher was happy to have a place to stay at all. It was late afternoon by now. He hoped that Huw and the others were well on their way to completing their tasks too.

  Gunnar pocketed the coins. “Bread is just out of the oven, and the beer is fresh if you’d like to take your rest.”

  Christopher looked at Matha, who nodded. “Thank you. We aren’t due at the castle for another hour. It would be good to settle in first.”

  A large table took up one side of the central room, necessary for the numerous children Gunnar and Inge had, but only Matha and Christopher were eating now. Inge seemed to want nothing to do with them, because it was Gunnar who served them. The walls were decorated with various weapons, many of them ancient. He even had a bow, though it was half the size of Huw’s great weapon.

  At the sight of it, Matha got to his feet to inspect it, and when Gunnar reentered the room with a small plate of cheese, he said, “This is of Irish make.”

  Gunnar set down the plate. “I have relatives in ... Ireland.”

  He turned to leave, but Matha put out a hand and spoke in a foreign language.

  Gunnar stopped, his eyes narrowing as he listened. Then, he answered in English, “My ancestors came to these parts hundreds of years ago.”

  “I’m surprised, then, that your loyalties lie with Balliol,” Matha said. “Or that you support his alliance with Norway.”

  Gunnar’s feet appeared frozen to the ground, but he had something of his wife’s ability to remain expressionless, because his face gave nothing away. “I try to stay outside of the affairs of kings.”

  “That’s probably wise,” Matha said.

  To hide his discomfort, Christopher took a big bite of his buttered bread. After Gunnar hastened away, relief he couldn’t hide on his face, Christopher spoke around the food, which was delicious, “Why’d you ask him that? He can’t tell us the truth.”

  “But we know it now, don’t we?”

  “I suppose we do.” Christopher sat back in his chair.

  “It could be that most of Skipton feels as he does.”

  Christopher nodded thoughtfully. “And before we’re through here, we might need them.”

  Chapter Twenty-eight

  2 April 202
2

  Livia

  MI-5 had pulled out all the stops for this one—as had Chad, Livia was sure, though little of what he was doing had been shared with her. She’d known something was afoot from the moment she’d woken that morning, but nobody wanted to talk to her about it, for obvious reasons. They treated her like a mole in their organization. And of course, that’s exactly what she was.

  “I would ask you to tell me the truth, but I’m not going to bother.” David gazed out the car window as they left the rental house in one of Chad’s vehicles.

  The roads were congested, and it was a good thing the windows in the vehicle were tinted black, because otherwise people might have been able to see David’s face. She knew without asking that the vehicle was armor-plated, just as Five’s would be. The sun was near to setting as well, which she assumed was why David had chosen this hour to meet.

  “I am telling you the truth.”

  He looked at her. “As you know it. Maybe.”

  “Mark trusted me,” she said as mildly as she could manage.

  “I’m not going to be taken in again. For the thousandth time, I have absolutely no reason to trust them.”

  “Then why are we even doing this?”

  David tsked. “Because I am just like you and Mark. I want to believe. I want to trust them, and somehow I can’t help giving them a chance.”

  “So this is a test?”

  He laughed. “Yeah, it’s a test. Didn’t you know that?”

  Livia hadn’t thought about the meeting that way, and it was too late to mention David’s thoughts to the D-G without everybody overhearing. To her, this meeting was intended as a meet-and-greet, a chance for them to get to know each other after several bad years of estrangement. To her—and she was pretty sure to the D-G—David’s relationship with MI-5 was the one that really counted, while his current arrangement with Chad Treadman should be viewed as a temporary aberration.

  In other words, MI-5 was family; they were the known quantity and who David would want to work with once he got over these current difficulties. For David to include Chad Treadman was like a cousin bringing the boyfriend nobody liked to Christmas dinner. Livia had been thinking—and she was pretty sure that Philips had been thinking it too—that David just needed to be coddled a bit, and he would come around.

  It hadn’t occurred to her that some things couldn’t be fixed.

  They arrived at the Tesco, which was packed, as David had assumed it would be on a Saturday afternoon. There could even have been more tourists present than usual, either hiking up Snowdon to see where the plane didn’t crash or over to Beaumaris, which might well end up as some kind of shrine. The driver parked in the middle of the parking lot, while the two other cars that had driven in with them found spaces nearby.

  “How are you going to do this?” Livia turned to look at David. “You may be the most recognizable person in Britain right now, and that includes the current royal family.”

  “Nobody is going to expect to see me here.” David pulled a black wool hat with a Welsh dragon emblem on it down low over his ears. The emblem came to rest off-center between David’s forehead and ear. He looked foolish, and he appeared to know it, because he grinned at her. “It’s raining, so we’ll carry an umbrella. Just you and me.”

  “You are out of your mind. What if someone does recognize you? You’ll be mobbed.”

  “That’s why Tesco’s staff has been augmented by a dozen of Chad Treadman’s men. I bet half the shoppers in there are MI-5 anyway. We’ll be fine.” Having accepted the umbrella Michael offered, David got out of the car and came around to her side to open her door. It was a chivalrous move she hadn’t expected, augmented by the umbrella he held open over the top of the car to prevent a drop of rain from touching her head.

  Thankfully, she’d had the foresight to pack trousers and sensible leather shoes instead of the heels she normally wore. From the look of it, David was already getting wardrobe advice from Amelia, since he was in black jeans, shoes, and leather jacket. And then, of course, there was the hat. The rain was coming down hard enough now that she planned to keep her hood up too.

  With Livia’s hand tucked into David’s elbow, they hustled through the rain to the front doors. On the way, they passed twenty people coming and going, and nobody looked at them twice. David picked up a basket and wended his way through the shoppers towards the produce section, which was somewhat in the center and to the back of the store. He stopped in front of a bank of squashes. “Zucchini was never my favorite, even when I could get it.”

  “We call them courgettes,” Livia said. “You don’t have them in the Middle Ages?”

  “Most squashes are New World.” He poked at a fat yellow squash. “I could see bringing back pumpkin seeds. Did you know the Celts invented Halloween, but they carved turnips, not pumpkins?”

  “I didn’t,” she said flatly.

  Her eyes continuously scanned the store for threats. At the opposite end of the aisle they were in, someone dropped a container of chocolate milk, and it exploded. Instantly, service workers were there with a yellow warning sign and mops, and it was only then that she realized the entire scene had been orchestrated to close off that end.

  David was watching too, and a smile played around his lips. Then he turned and looked behind Livia. “Director Philips, I presume.”

  It was. In his suit and tie, he was more out of place than David in his funny hat—but the D-G stuck out his hand as if meeting a time traveler in the produce section of a Tesco was utterly normal. His hair, streaked with gray at the temples, was wet, as were the shoulders of his raincoat.

  David shook. “Thanks for coming.”

  “I was in the neighborhood.” The statement came out something like a drawl.

  David laughed. “As was I.”

  This was going better than Livia had hoped—feared—it might.

  “We would like to put our relationship back on what we consider to be a proper footing,” the D-G said.

  “As in, not hostile? I wouldn’t be opposed to that.”

  “Let me begin by apologizing again for what happened with your sister. It was a mistake.”

  “I still have questions about that. Which part, exactly, are you referring to as a mistake?” David said. “The part where you hunted her across England, or the part where you sent fighter jets to drive her plane into Snowdon?”

  Philips took in a breath through his nose. Livia knew he hated apologizing, for all that he’d done it a half-dozen times so far to David. He wanted things to go well, but he was loath to grovel. He did it anyway. “I know that Livia has expressed Five’s regrets in that regard. I would like to assure you of mine as well. I am truly sorry.”

  David nodded, his eyes never leaving Philips’ face. “You do realize where the problem lies, don’t you?”

  A gesture from the D-G encompassed their surroundings. “Meeting in a Tesco is all very well and good, but walking into Thames House and walking out again? We have never allowed you to do that.”

  “You have not.”

  There was a pause, and then Philips said, “What about Chad Treadman? What makes you trust him?”

  “For now, he has given me no reason not to.”

  “He broadcast your face across the planet.”

  “Yeah, I didn’t like it, but I can see why he did it.”

  “So you’re going to give him what he wants?”

  David’s eyes narrowed. “I am not for sale.”

  The D-G put up a hand. “I would never dream of suggesting it.”

  “He told me what the CIA hopes to gain from me, which is more than you have done, though you have to know.” David paused. “And if you don’t, that’s far worse.”

  The D-G’s benign expression wavered for a second. “What did he tell you?”

  “That they want to ride me back and forth from Earth Two to Avalon. They want to make me their slave.”

  Livia could feel the rage in David at the thought, though he mostl
y kept it out of his voice.

  “That is not my doing,” the D-G said, “and I would never help them achieve it.”

  “I would hope not.”

  Philips’ jaw clenched for a moment. “I know you agreed to allow Treadman and his people to help you when you are in this world.” He took a card from his breast pocket and held it out to David. “I would hope that next time you, or whoever returns here, would extend us the same courtesy.”

  David took the card. “Next time?”

  “There will be one, surely.” Philips paused. “That’s what you fear, isn’t it?”

  David looked down at the card for a count of five. “That’s it? You’re willing to wait?”

  “We are not fickle. Nor are we subject to the same rules and laws that govern the rest of the world, including your new friend Chad. The Security Service have been defending Britain for over a hundred years. We’ll be here after a hundred more.” Philips canted his head. “Can you say the same about Treadman Global?”

  Chapter Twenty-nine

  2 April 1294

  Ieuan

  Ieuan stepped out of the pavilion that had been set up at the center of the camp they’d established near the village of Bury, roughly fifty miles from both Chester and Beeston, having reunited with the bulk of the army that had set out from Chester yesterday morning.

  With no guilt whatsoever, he’d left Beeston in the hands of lesser captains, who were perfectly capable of cleaning up the mess he’d made, and taken only mounted men north. He, Math, and Callum had bigger fish to fry. Except for Mark and Cador, the twenty-firsters and former captives had been left behind as well. Mark had learned horsemanship in the time he’d lived among them, but the others could not have kept up today.