Daughter of Time: A Time Travel Romance (32 page)

I turned as my men rode up to us.

“Bohun. Tudur.”

Tudur was off his horse before he’d fully
stopped to grab my shoulders. I hadn’t realized I was weaving on my
feet. He eased me to the ground and I rested my arms on my knees
and my head in my hands.

“You were just in time,” Goronwy said.

“Or far too late, depending,” I said,
surveying the wounded and the dead. “Where’s Boots?”

“Here, my lord!” Bevyn crouched over a man
half-way down the hill and raised his hand. “He’s alive but
wounded.”

I turned to Tudur. “And Meg? Rhodri and
Bevyn were to guard her.”

“It was she who sent us, my lord, upon
Bohun’s news.”

“That’s the last time I assign the job of
guarding Meg to Bevyn, as he’s abandoned his post both times,” I
said, but I couldn’t be angry at him. I turned to Humphrey. “Thank
you.”

“Are we even now?” Humphrey gazed down at
me.

“Did you know that Prince Edward was going
to accompany Clare?”

Humphrey gaped at me for a heartbeat before
mastering himself. “Your lady spoke of honor and she was right to
do so, but it comes to me that there’s very little of it left in
this world. Very soon, honor will be replaced with expediency. You
might want to make sure you’re not on the losing side when it
does.” He bowed, more deeply than he ever had, and turned away to
join Bevyn in caring for the wounded.

“That one bears watching,” Tudur said.

Chapter
Twenty-
three

I
paced the
battlements at Brecon, looking east. I felt like a seaman’s wife,
watching and waiting on a widow’s walk for the ship that would
bring her husband home. I waited through All Saints’ Day, and the
next, for Llywelyn’s return. And he did come, he and Goronwy,
leading a much diminished company of men. Humphrey was not among
them.

I met him at the entrance to the hall; he
didn’t speak, just put his arms around me and rested his head on my
shoulder. I looked past him to Goronwy, who met my eyes, just
briefly, before looking down.

“Tell me,” I said.

“We lost half our men,” Goronwy said, “and
the other half wounded. Those who could ride, or for whom we had
horses are here. The rest we left at our borrowed castle to await
aid and their women.”

“From one moment to the next, the world
ended, Meg. It’s only because of our young Bohun that I live.”

“Prince Edward was behind this,” Goronwy
said.

“Edward!” I said.

Goronwy heaved a sigh and lowered himself to
a bench near the fire. “He’s spreading his wings. This was only the
beginning of his plans for Wales, and he made it clear that
nothing—no treaty, no sense of honor, no right—will hinder
him.”

Llywelyn leaned heavily on me and we walked
together to sit beside Goronwy. “Are you injured?” I asked him.

“No,” he said. “My pride is bruised. A
paltry thing, considering the number of men I lost because I
expected better of Clare. He took me completely by surprise.”

I looked down, not answering. He glanced at
me. “Yes, I know you expected it, because of Cilmeri. But that was
a rare thing, you know. How could any treaty ever be signed if the
men coming to the meeting feared for their lives? It is a terrible
precedent that Edward sets.”

“He doesn’t care,” I said. “He feels that he
is a law unto himself.”

“He wears the right of God like a crown,”
Goronwy agreed. “We face much danger from him in the coming years.
Maybe he’ll be killed by the Saracens during his Crusade and we’ll
be saved from facing him again.”

“No,” Llywelyn said. “Wales has never been
that lucky.”

* * * * *

Some days later we lay side by side in bed,
our hands clasped beneath the blanket. Then Llywelyn rolled over
and put a hand on my belly. “I spoke of luck,” he said, “and our
lack thereof.”

“Yes.”

“But you are more than lucky for me. You
give me the hope that God has seen our plight and seeks to aid us
in our time of need.”

I put my hand on his. “I hope so, Llywelyn,
but I’m scared.”

“Of the birth?”

“Of everything,” I said. “I’m scared of
loving you so much and not deserving that love. I’m scared of
losing you. It was a near thing today. How many more chances do you
get?”

“Fourteen years you gave me, Meg. I plan to
use every single one of them.”

“Did you think of that, there on the
hill?”

“No,” he said. “I was so damn scared that
all I could think about was dying and leaving you and our son
unprotected, with only Dafydd standing between Wales and
England—Dafydd and his loathsome designs on you.”

“But you want to name our baby Dafydd, if
it’s a boy?” We’d talked about names over the last months, and he’d
always come back to that one.

“It was my uncle’s name, and the name of the
patron saint of Wales. What name could I give him that wasn’t that
of an enemy or one who has betrayed me? Owain? Gruffydd? Rhys? I
think not.”

“Okay,” I said, laughing at his predicament.
“But your brother is going to think he’s named for him.”

“Let him think that,” Llywelyn said. “We
know the truth.” He rolled onto his back and soon was breathing
gently, easing into sleep. I was glad and gently rubbed the top of
his shoulder. He was going to need his sleep, because I was feeling
an ache in my back that meant
baby, and soon! It’s early though,
if my dates are right.

I awoke some time later to a cry from the
next room. Feeling the need to use the guarderobe, I swung my legs
over the bed, heaved myself to my feet, and walked to the curtain
that separated our room from Anna’s. I pulled it back and found
Anna sitting up in bed, but no nurse beside her.

“Where’s Maud, sweetie?”

“I don’t know,” she said. “I need to
pee.”

“Okay,” I said and held out my hand. Anna
clambered out of bed and toddled toward me, staggering slightly on
sleepy feet. I eased open the latch to the door, not wanting to
wake Llywelyn, and left it ajar. Anna and I walked down the hall to
the toilet. I opened the door and stuck in my head. The room was
empty, and the smell wasn’t too bad. Llywelyn had ordered the
toilet cleaned daily because I had a tendency to lose my lunch if
the stench got too bad.

I hiked up Anna’s nightgown and lifted her
onto the seat. She leaned forward into my belly, clearly very
sleepy, and I crouched in front of her so she could rest her head
on my shoulder. As I shifted to find a more comfortable position,
the room shifted with me.

Pop!

I clutched Anna to me. She gasped, and I
gasped, and then we were gone.

* * * * *

The blackness took me. It was an abyss
opening before my feet and I choked as we fell into it. Then my
feet hit the ground and I fell over, my arms still wrapped around
Anna. My mouth was open in a scream but nothing was coming out.

“Mammy!” Anna found her voice. “Look!”

I lifted my head and stared at the lights on
the house in front of me. Electric lights. I sat up, supporting
myself on one hand, and Anna stood next to me, her hand on my
shoulder. I couldn’t think. My brain whirred but processed no
thoughts. Then the front door slammed and a woman came out the
door, wiping her hands on her flowered dress. She trotted down the
front steps toward us, slowed, then stopped, her breath coming in
gasps.

“Mam,” I said. I reached for her. She fell
to her knees in front of me, touched a trembling hand to my face,
and we both began to sob.

“Meg, my darling Meg,” she said, wrapping
her arms around me, the wetness on her cheeks mixing with my own
tears.

“Gramma, Gramma, Gramma,” Anna said,
bouncing up and down. In the back of my head, I was surprised that
Anna remembered her, and then I realized that she was saying
‘Gramma’ in Welsh: “
Mam-gu
.”

“The baby’s coming, Mam
,
” I said,
breathless. “Now.”

“Let’s get you into the house,” she said,
wiping at the tears on her cheeks with the backs of her hands and
not asking me any questions I couldn’t answer.

I stumbled with her to the front door,
clutching her hand. I was bent over in pain from the child that was
coming but still lost in the thirteenth century. I found myself
crying in relief at being home, and at the same time for Llywelyn,
for the man who’d died in every version of history we knew, on that
snowy hill at Cilmeri.

Mam kept repeating
cariad
over and
over again, which only made me sob all the more. “We’ll get you to
the hospital, Meg,” she said, helping me up the steps. “How long
have you been contracting?”

“Days,” I said. “But it’s too early. The
baby’s not due yet, or so I thought.”

“I’ll get the ambulance,” she said. “You
sit.”

While she made the phone call, Mam put me on
the couch next to the door, the very same couch I’d sat on with
Anna the day we’d driven to Wales. Anna climbed onto the couch and
snuggled beside me. The contractions were coming strongly by the
time the ambulance came, and then the hours blurred together in a
midst of pain and anxiety, and finally joy.

Llywelyn and I had a son.

* * * * *

I stared out the window, David in my arms,
watching the lights come on as evening progressed. I marveled at
the brightness and color, but couldn’t help
missing, missing,
missing
my life in Wales.
Until time do us part
,
Llywelyn had feared, and he’d been right to. We would probably
never know what had caused me to come to him after Trev died—at the
very spot where he died. Or why. Only that I did.

“Can you tell me,
cariad
?” Mam said
the next morning. “I missed you.”

I shifted my head to get a better view of
her in the chair beside the bed, and adjusted David on my breast.
“I’m sorry, Mam,” I said. “I spent the last nine months explaining
where I’m from, and now I must explain to you where I’ve been, and
you aren’t going to believe me any more than they did.”

“Meg,” Mam said. “I’m your mother. What
won’t I believe?”

“That I traveled to thirteenth century
Wales. That David’s father is Llywelyn ap Gruffydd, the Prince of
Wales.”

I held Mam’s eyes, though her face showed no
expression, but then she smiled. She stood, came to sit on the side
of the bed, and took my hand. “I know,” she said.

“You
know?
I said. “How do you
know?

“Anna,” she said. “She’s told me all about
her Papa, and horses, and a man named Goronwy who made her laugh.
She spoke in Welsh. You’ve done wonderful things with her,
Meg.”

“You believe me!”

“You are my darling daughter,” Mam said.
“There’s nothing you could tell me that I wouldn’t believe, if you
believed it to be true.”

When David grew old enough to travel, we
flew to Wales—against my mother’s better judgment. I begged her for
help, for I didn’t want to go alone, and eventually she consented
to come with me.

“He’s not there,
cariad
,” she said,
even as she booked the tickets and then paid for them. “The castles
are gone or empty shells. It will be nothing like you remember
them. Keep your dreams. Cold reality will only dash them.”

Mam was right, and yet she wasn’t.

We went first to Criccieth, since it was
there that I’d started—we’d started—though I’d only stayed there
for a day. It was as I remembered, a mighty fortress built on rock
on a promontory in the sea. But the walls had mostly crumbled, and
I confused the lady at the visitor center who speculated on its
successive construction, postulating that it was Edward who had
built the outer curtain wall.
I think not!

I stood on the edge of the cliff, as the
battlements were gone, and looked out over the sea. Then I turned
to the town below. The mountain loomed behind it, as it always had,
but the village had spread along the seashore, thriving and modern,
having long since filled in the marsh in which my car lay buried.
Power poles lined the beach instead of trees, but if I closed my
eyes and
breathed
, it smelled the same. It was my Wales, but
still, without Llywelyn in it.

Everywhere we went, I collected stories
about Llywelyn.
He lived
here.
He fought
there. Two
different abbeys claimed his body as his final resting place, but
none could produce his grave. Throughout, I restrained myself from
pointing to the baby in my arms and saying: “Look! This is his son!
The true Prince of Wales! Open your eyes and see!”

We reached Brecon in the driving rain. Anna
had held Mam’s hand as we walked across the parking lot, but she
stopped as soon as she saw the castle and refused to go any
further. I could understand, for it shocked me too. The castle had
a giant, white house attached to it.

“What is that?” I asked.

“It says on the information sheet, ‘Brecon
Castle Hotel’,” Mam said. “That’s where we’re supposed to be
staying.”

“What have they done to it?” I breathed.

Mam scooped up Anna and we walked across the
castle grounds, or what had been the castle grounds and into the
front entrance of the house. Mam checked us in as I blindly
wandered the reception room, following my nose, until I reached the
garden and the last standing stones of the old castle. Mam and Anna
followed me outside and we stood in the center of what had been the
outer courtyard.

“Papa’s not here, is he?” Anna said.

“No, honey.” My eyes filled with tears.
“He’s not.”

That was the last of the Welsh castle tours.
We visited Roman ruins and the massive and well-preserved English
castles that Edward had built to subjugate Wales, but I didn’t want
Anna to wonder where Llywelyn was when she was too young to
understand my grief or cope with her own.