Daughter of Time: A Time Travel Romance (10 page)

Just like Trev.

He burst into the space in front of me,
grabbed my arms, and pulled me to him. He brought his nose to
within inches of mine.

“Tell me how you knew!”

“I . . I . .”

“Are you the traitor? Are you a spy for the
English?”

“No! No!” I said.

“Who did you tell that we were coming this
way?”

“Nobody! I didn’t tell anyone! I didn’t even
know until just before we left!”

“You knew they’d attack us here!”

“I only knew that at one time someone had!
Would I have told you about it if I planned to betray you?”

He stared down into my face while I gazed up
at him, my face white and my eyes wide. He’d gripped my upper arms
so tightly it was going to leave marks. Then my words finally
penetrated and Llywelyn’s vision cleared. He relaxed his hands and
set me on my feet. Anna had been asleep on a blanket but sat up,
her eyes wide, looking at us. Llywelyn’s face fell and he put his
forehead into mine.

“I didn’t mean to scare you or her.” He ran
his hands up and down my arms. “Last night, I promised you I
wouldn’t hurt you, and here I’ve already broken that promise. I
can’t fix it. I’m sorry, Marged.”

“I didn’t betray you, Llywelyn,” I said.

“I know that now,” he said. “But there’s too
much about you that is unfamiliar and unusual. I haven’t had time
to hear your story, but you can’t evade my questions any longer. I
will not abide another day in ignorance.”

“I know no more than you, Llywelyn,” I said.
“I don’t know how I came to be here, or why, only that Anna and I
are here.”

Llywelyn eased back from me further.
“Perhaps you are a gift from God,” he said, in Welsh. “Perhaps he
sent you so I wouldn’t die at Coedwig Gap today.”

“How many are dead?” I said, in French, not
letting him know I understood him. His comment had been for himself
alone.

“Too many.”

“I saw the battle. I saw men fall, but many,
surely, survived.”

“And they need help,” Llywelyn said. He
stepped around me to my horse. “We need the bandages you
carry.”

“Is there someone who can stay with Anna?
Perhaps I can assist. I took a first aid class last quarter.”

He glanced at me. “You know something of
healing?”

“Yes,” I said. “I do.

Okay, so by twentieth
century standards I knew nothing about healing, but I figured if
this really was the Middle Ages, the people here knew less than
nothing and I might actually be useful.

In addition to that first
aid class, which I should have known not to mention to Llywelyn
since he couldn’t possibly know what ‘first aid’ was, I’d had a
baby. I’d doctored Anna’s knees countless times. I’d even held
Elisa together when as a child she’d run into a barbed wire fence
without seeing it. Our parents hadn’t been home and in the first
frantic minutes, I’d staunched the blood, cleaned her wounds, and
plastered her with bandaids before calling my neighbor for
help.

“
We’ll need clean water
and alcohol,” I said as Llywelyn tugged the saddlebag off the horse
and lugged it toward the road. I grabbed Anna’s hand and hung back,
not wanting her to see what was in front of us. I’d followed the
battle as best I could from my hiding place. Men had died, many of
them.

“
Rhodri!” Llywelyn called
to a young man hauling a man by his feet off the road. Helmetless
but unhurt, he trotted over to Llywelyn.

“
Yes, my lord,” he said, a
little breathlessly. His face was whiter than the usual Celtic
pallor.

“
I want you to stay with
the little girl, here,” Llywelyn said. “Marged has some healing
skill that we need.”

“
Yes, my lord,” Rhodri
said. “I’ve six younger brothers and sisters. I know how to look
after little ones.” He crouched in front of Anna. “Would you like
to walk with me and look for bugs?”

I thought the chances of
finding any bugs in the middle of a leafless, January woods in
Wales slim to none, but he had the right idea. I bent to her and
spoke in English. “Will you go with him? Mommy’s going to be right
over there, helping some people who got hurt. Rhodri wants to know
if you’d like to look for bugs with him?”

Anna nodded and
transferred her hand from mine to Rhodri’s. They set off slowly
toward the woods, away from the road, Rhodri modifying his gate to
a loose-hipped walk to match her tiny steps.

“
Okay,” I said, looking
after them for another few seconds, and then turning the other way.
I didn’t know if I was traumatizing Anna for life by all she’d seen
and heard in the last twenty-four hours, but she’d been making
friends among Llywelyn’s company during our ride, so I hoped she
was okay with Rhodri—and more importantly, okay inside.

The scene in the gap hit
me like a punch in the stomach. Dead men and horses lay strewn
across the ground, although Llywelyn’s men were attempting to clear
the road. I’d carelessly mentioned the possibility of ambush, but
the reality was far worse than I could have ever imagined. There
was blood everywhere. The
Middle Ages.
Dear God, I’m in the Middle Ages.
I walked
faster, hustling to keep up with Llywelyn’s long legs.

When we reached Geraint,
Goronwy shifted out of the way and I fell onto my knees beside the
wounded man. Llywelyn crouched beside me, his hand resting gently
on the small of my back.

“
Oh, my Lord,” I breathed.
“What’s to be done?” The sight of his bloody shirt lessened my hope
that I could help him or anyone.

Llywelyn ripped open
Geraint’s shirt so we could see the extent of the damage. “That’s
the first time you’ve used my title,” he said. His voice was low so
I wasn’t even sure I heard him correctly.

I glanced at him,
confused, and then realized that he thought I meant
him
, not God. It made me
want to laugh, that hysteria from this morning bubbling to the
surface yet again, but one look at Geraint and I sobered. I lifted
the cloth that Goronwy held to the old man’s side and revealed a
three-inch hole. “He’s just bleeding out on the road,” I
said.

“
Can you help him?”
Llywelyn said.

I thought back to my basic
biology from high school. There weren’t very many organs on the
left side of the body, but it was a
huge
hole and I couldn’t imagine
that his intestines weren’t punctured. At least the site wasn’t
full of dirt, as the sword had ripped through layers of mail and
cloth to reach Geraint’s skin, but who knew where that sword had
been.

“
Do you have some strong
alcohol?” I asked Goronwy, who’d been waiting nearby, in French.
“Not to drink but to pour on the wound. It’s the best way to clean
it right now.”

“
I’ll find
some.”

“
Hurry,” Llywelyn
said.

I sat back on my heels as
Llywelyn pressed at the wound again, trying to staunch the flow of
blood. During the minute it took for Goronwy to run to one of the
horses and back, the bleeding gradually slowed. Llywelyn looked up
and met my eyes.

“
I’m
sorry,” I said. I couldn’t take my eyes off Geraint’s face. I’d
seen death before—of course I had—but never like this. I’d never
held someone’s hand as his life left his body, both of you knowing
that it’s over. In the last second, Geraint’s eyes had widened, as
if he’d really
seen
me, and I met his gaze. There had been acceptance
there, but something else that looked like despair. I ached for him
and didn’t want to move or have anything to do with all the others
who lay as he did, dead or injured in the road.

Llywelyn closed Geraint’s
eyes, then cleared his throat. “Others aren’t as bad
off.”

“
Yes, Llywelyn,” I said.
“I’ll see what I can do.”

Llywelyn straightened and
stared down at his friend, long lines drawn in his face.
How old is he?
I didn’t
know; didn’t even know what year this was.
Llywelyn helped me to my feet just as Goronwy reached us,
having slowed to walking pace at the sight of us. We didn’t need to
tell him the news.

“
Here,” he said, handing
me a flask. “Others have need of it.”

Llywelyn led me to a young man who sat on a
stump a few feet off the road. He hung his head and his right hand
pressed on his left forearm as blood seeped between his fingers. I
knelt in front of him and gently nudged his hand away to see his
wound. Thankfully, a sword hadn’t slashed through a vein at his
wrist, but across the top of his forearm—more like a laceration
than a cut.

“My bracers protected my arms,” the boy
said, “but the blow was so strong I can’t even feel my hand.”

“
Brifo,
Cadoc,
”
Llywelyn said, his hand on the
young man’s shoulder. “This is going to hurt.”

I struggled to control the
shaking in my hands as I mopped at the blood with a wet cloth. I
poured a small measure of the woody-scented alcohol on the wound,
grimacing for the boy as I did so. He jerked as the first drop hit,
and swore, but then the only indication of pain was the slow tears
leaking from his eyes. I wrapped the wound in strips of cloth and
tied it, then looked for Llywelyn again. He must have been watching
me, at least part of the time, because he broke off his
conversation with Hywel and came over.

“
If he gets the cloth
dirty or he changes the bandages, he needs to put more alcohol on
the wound,” I said in French, my entire Welsh vocabulary having
apparently evaporated from my brain. “Otherwise it will get
infected. It still might.”

“
What’s this, ‘infected’?”
Llywelyn asked.

I searched for the proper
word. “Festering?” I suggested. “Full of evil vapors?”

Llywelyn nodded as if that
explained anything and he sent me to the next man. All told, I
worked on five men like Cadoc, each one with a wound caused by the
hacking of a sword at limbs that should never have been near a
sharp object in the first place.

“
I thought armor was
supposed to prevent this kind of damage,” I said as I tied the last
knot on the last man.

Llywelyn glanced at me,
surprise showing on his face. “If not for the armor, they would
have lost their limbs entirely. These are minor wounds compared to
what they would have experienced unprotected.”

And that was certainly
something I should have known, if I were a thirteenth century
woman. I put a hand to my head and bent forward, feeling all of a
sudden the dizziness that I’d been holding back for the last hour
as I worked on the men.

“
Sorry,” I
said.

Llywelyn put his hand on
the back of my neck and pushed me down, so that my head rested on
my knees. “Breathe,” he said. “You’ve done very well.” He called
something in Welsh that I didn’t understand and could barely hear
anyway as the rushing in my ears was so loud. Then a new pair of
boots appeared by my knee. It was Goronwy.

“
My lady,” he said, “Can I
help?”

I shook my head, just
trying to regain control. This always happened to me once the
danger was over. I just hoped I wouldn’t pass out. After a few
minutes, breathing came more easily and I looked up. Llywelyn had
left me to confer with someone whose name I didn’t know. In the
time I’d been working on the wounded, order had set in. The dead
enemy had been stacked in the ditch on the far side of the road and
our dead had been wrapped in blankets, laid out in a line near
where Llywelyn stood. Several men helped to heave the bodies onto
horse’s backs for the rest of the journey to the manor.

“
Your color returns,”
Goronwy said. “If you can ride, we need to move. The sun will fall
behind the trees at any moment.”

He helped me up. Though I
swayed, I managed to stay on my feet.

“
Do we know what
happened?” I asked him. “We left Castell Criccieth on very short
notice. Someone must have been working very quickly to ambush us
here.”

Goronwy’s face grew more
grim. “It’s someone we trust,” he said. “Someone knew that we might
come, had men ready for that possibility, and sent word ahead. A
rider alone could have arrived here before us easily. The question
is who that rider was. I recognize some of the men we killed, but
no faces leap out as having been at Criccieth. Most were men of
Powys, Gruffydd ap Gwenwynwyn’s men.”

“
Whose
men?” I’d never heard such a
bizarre name, even in Welsh.

Goronwy glanced at me, a
hint of a smile on his face. “Gwenwynwyn. He and Prince Llywelyn
are at peace, but in the past, Gruffydd has been a staunch ally of
Prince Dafydd, Lord Llywelyn’s brother, and of King Henry. I’m
disappointed to think that he is involved in this attack.
Regardless, neither he nor any of his men were at
Criccieth.”

“
So who’s the traitor?” I
asked. “Does Llywelyn suspect his brother? I’m not sure that I
liked him very much.”

For the first time since
I’d met him, Goronwy looked amused. “The Prince has asked that we
don’t speak of him for now. He will not countenance unfounded
suspicions. If Prince Dafydd has betrayed his brother, his actions
would be unforgivable.”

I wasn’t too sure about
that. Our library hadn’t carried any Welsh history books to speak
of, but Mom loved to tell stories. Growing up, it was Mom’s stories
that gave me a sense of Wales, but I wasn’t sure how many of them
were myth and how many were true.