Daughter of Time: A Time Travel Romance (7 page)

We were destined for full, medieval regalia,
in keeping with the fantasy: leather boots, woolen leggings, shift,
petticoat, dress, and wimple, with a cloak over all of it, for both
Anna and me, even though we were inside. After dressing me, the
girl—Dana was her name—fixed my hair. One night and I already
understood why women went to bed with their hair in a braid,
because otherwise the tangles were painful to get out with only a
wooden comb that pulled and caught in my hair.

With my hair finally smooth, Dana began to
do something elaborate with small braids and in the end perched
them on the top of my head, a cloth pinned over them. At least I
wasn’t being forced to wear a veil; at least the dress was blue, my
favorite color. But honestly, did the fantasy have to go so far as
to not allow me a shower? Or underwear? I cursed myself for not
shaving my legs the previous morning. Of all days to forget . .
.

Anna watched the procedure, eyes wide,
taking it all in. What questions or pronouncements might I get out
of her later?

I liked reading about history a lot. I liked
listening to Mom’s stories about Wales, but it didn’t take a genius
to realize that for women, living in any era but the twentieth
century—the latter half of the twentieth century
even—
sucked.
After the fact, I understood that I’d allowed
Trev to guilt me into a subservient existence with him, but I
had
eventually left him when he hurt me, and I
knew
that occasionally I was even smart and capable. Throughout history,
however, women had little say in their lives, less power, and no
credit for doing anything interesting.
No, thank you.

I took Anna’s hand and she and I trailed the
maid down the hall, down a flight of stairs, and through a door.
I’d heard the voices from halfway down the stairs and guessed I’d
find many people where she was taking me, but was still completely
unprepared to step into a cavernous hall at the foot of the stairs
populated by more than a hundred people. The noise level didn’t
really change at our entrance, but plenty of heads swiveled toward
us and away again as the maid led us to an empty spot at the end of
a twenty-foot table.

The room was huge—a great hall in every
sense of the word. Window slits started at head high, and a
fireplace took up a portion of one wall, big enough for half a
dozen people to hide. Thick tapestries that looked like rugs filled
in the spaces between the windows. The room smelled of smoke,
unwashed bodies, roasted meat, and beer. Great. Just like that frat
party Elisa took me to in October.

A smaller table stood on a dais about six
feet away. Dafydd sat at it, accompanied by four men, all dressed
as he was in mail armor, cloak, and boots. He raised his glass to
me, the smirk thankfully absent, but I looked away and didn’t
return his greeting, turning instead to Anna. When in an awkward
social situation, having a little girl on your lap is an excellent
distraction.

“Are you ready to eat?” I asked her.

Anna nodded. The activity in the hall had
struck her uncharacteristically dumb. I hugged her close and talked
to her to fill the gap and put her at her ease. “It’s okay. We’ll
have some breakfast and then maybe we can go outside and see if
it’s a nice day.”

A serving maid brought a plate of biscuits
and another of fried eggs. Next to those she laid a carafe of an
unspecified liquid (mead?) and another plate of bread—flat and
unleavened. I glanced surreptitiously at my neighbor to my left. He
was using the flat bread as a plate.

“What’s that?” Anna asked.

“A trencher,” I said, without remembering
where I’d heard about them.

I pulled one to me and spooned the eggs onto
it. I offered Anna a biscuit with honey, which she took, moving off
my lap to kneel on the bench so she could reach the table better.
She wore a simple, undyed, linen dress, little boots, and cloak of
her own. Her hair stuck out all over her head in a curly mass that
we’d tamed with a head band. She also wore something that bore only
a passing resemblance to a diaper. She’d peed in the chamber pot
earlier, as she’d started waking dry more and more often at home,
but I wasn’t holding my breath about her being potty trained in a
day. If we stayed here very long, it was I, I suspected, who was
going to be trained, not her.

And then I shuddered, terrified that we
might stay here longer than a day. The more I surveyed the room and
these people, their total immersion in the thirteenth century
became more apparent.

Did they even have a phone? Were we going to
have to walk to the nearest town? Anna had mentioned horses, so
maybe we could ride, not that I had any skill in that
department.

“Are you okay?” I hugged Anna around the
waist and gave her a kiss on the cheek.

She nodded, big eyes again. “I don’t see
Gramma.”

“If she were here, it would be hard to spot
her in this crowd,” I said. “But I don’t think she is. We’ll see
about finding her after breakfast.”

Covertly, I studied my neighbors, needing to
abandon this charade, get up and leave, but not sure how. No one
paid me any attention, even Dafydd, who now conferred closely with
a man on his right, his face turned away from me. Relieved, I slid
off the bench, picked up Anna, and sidled away from the table.

I really wanted to walk out the great front
double doors at the end of the hall. To do it, I’d have to cross a
fifty-foot gauntlet of people, mostly men. I wasn’t sure that would
be the best idea. I shuddered at the memory what could have
happened last night if Llywelyn had been a different man from the
one he was. Given the seriousness of these people, escape seemed
ill-advised as yet. Instead, I returned to the stairs.

Thirty steps led to the second floor.
Instead of stopping there and going to my room, I kept going. I
climbed another twenty steps to the third floor, huffing from the
effort of carrying Anna, and then twenty more before I faced a
heavy wooden door, set in the wall ahead of me. I pulled the latch
and stepped into a new world.

The sea air filled my lungs.

“Look at the bird!” Anna said.

The wind tossed her curls into my face. I
hugged her to me and wrapped my cloak around us both, not wanting
her to get chilled.

It was a seagull, exactly like the ones I
might see at home. But this wasn’t home—wasn’t like any place I’d
ever seen. We stood on the battlements of a castle, just as Anna
had said. But it wasn’t a picturesque castle from a fairytale. It
was a working castle with stables and smoke rising from a
blacksmith’s forge, chickens and pigs and horses, and lots and lots
of men sporting various weaponry: swords, axes, bows and arrows.
Some milled below me in the courtyard of the castle and others
moved purposefully from the keep, through the courtyards, and
gatehouses, and back again.

Beyond the walls, the sea surrounded us on
three sides and crashed on the rocks below so loudly that it wasn’t
any wonder that the sound had penetrated the walls. High white
clouds skidded across the sky, and lower, storm clouds lay on the
horizon. Gray dominated everything: the sky, the sea, the castle
walls on which I stood. It didn’t feel cold enough for snow, but I
could believe that rain was coming. The view awed me.

Anna brought me back to reality, wiggling to
get down. She ran around the inside of the circular walls once
before poking her finger into a hole in the mortar between two of
the stones.

“Don’t be fooled by the view. The man isn’t
worth it.” I nearly jumped in shock, and turned at the voice behind
me. Dafydd stood in the doorway, one shoulder propped against the
frame, his arms folded across his chest. He spoke in French, as he
had with Llywelyn in the bedroom.

“Excuse me?” I said.

David pushed off the frame and walked toward
me. I took a half step backward, stooping to grasp Anna’s hand. I
held it tightly in mine, pulling her away from the wall and toward
me.

“I speak of my brother, Prince Llywelyn,” he
said. “War is coming. He’ll be off and you’ll pine for him for a
while, but then you’ll leave him. They always do.”

“I have no idea what you’re talking
about.”

Dafydd laughed. “Is that so? You soon
will.”

I took another step, trying to get away from
his smile, but the tower had a diameter of twenty feet and I had
nowhere to go. The cold rough stones of the battlement pressed into
my back. Dafydd was very close now. He’d tied his long hair back
from his face with a leather tie, revealing a sculpted face and
strong jaw.

Here was a man who would have tried last
night.

No doubt many women were attracted to him
because of his looks alone, which of course he knew, but I saw
something else in his eyes that seemed sincere, and a little
vulnerable, despite the flippancy of his words.

The thought was icier than the wind. I might
not be the sharpest crayon in the box, but if I needed any further
evidence that the person living the fantasy just might be me, not
Llywelyn, this was it. These people were real. I was out of
place—and time?

I bent to Anna and swung her onto my hip.
Dafydd ignored her. He put his right elbow on the top of a
crenellation and stroked my left sleeve with one finger. “You’re
very beautiful,” he said. “Why have I not seen you before?”

“I haven’t been here before,” I said. I
scooted sideways, putting a few more inches between us.
Unfortunately, Dafydd matched my movement, following me.

“My brother is very fortunate,” Dafydd said.
I looked away, completely at a loss. The man was flirting with
me—this strange, gorgeous, armor-clad man was flirting with me on
the top of a castle in God-knows where.

“Why don’t you like him?” I said.

Dafydd stopped short. “He’s my brother and
the Prince of Wales. I would die for him.”

I stared at him, completely befuddled by his
statement. I hadn’t thought he would tell me why, but that he would
deny, with all sincerity, that he hated Llywelyn was so out of sync
with his words or actions both in the past and in the future that
it left me speechless.

A shadow moved below me and I turned to look
down. Even from the back, I recognized Llywelyn coming down the
stairs of the keep. Dafydd must have seen him too, because he
straightened and pulled away from me, perhaps not so sure of
himself after all. Another man had followed Llywelyn out of the
keep and at his call, Llywelyn turned. In doing so, he glanced up
at the battlements and saw us looking down at him. He stood, his
hands on his hips, head thrown back, and met my eyes. I gave a
little wave and then felt stupid to have done so, but Anna mimicked
me and turned it into something cute.

“Hi!” she said.

Anna could melt any man’s heart, no matter
how severe, and Llywelyn was no exception. I could see his smile,
even from fifty feet above him. He spoke to the other man, sketched
a wave at us, and continued across the courtyard and through the
enormous gatehouse that marked the entrance to another courtyard.
He’d ignored Dafydd completely. Not sure what to make of that, I
turned to Dafydd to try to read his expression—but he’d
disappeared.

I looked to the doorway; Anna and I were
alone again. I’d grown cold—and unsettled. I didn’t want to stay up
here alone any longer. I took one last long look at the mountains
and the sea and then, with Anna on my hip, headed for the door to
the stairs. Before I could reach it, however, another man came
through it, the same one I’d seen talking to Llywelyn on the stairs
to the keep.

“Madam,” he said, with a slight bow,
speaking in French. “I am Goronwy, counselor to the Prince. He asks
that you come inside. Plans have changed and we will leave before
the noon hour.”

“Where are we going?” I felt really
disoriented now.

“Brecon,” he said.

A chill settled in my stomach that had
nothing to do with the air around me. I knew what Brecon meant to
me—a dorm at Bryn Mawr College where my sister went to school—but
Goronwy meant the real thing: Brecon, Wales.

“May I ask where I am?”

“You don’t know?”

I shook my head. “I don’t have a good memory
of last night.”

“Mine is very clear. Lord Llywelyn has some
questions for you on that score, but they will keep. For now, I can
tell you that we are at Castell Criccieth, in Gwynedd.”

I’d never heard of it. “How long will it
take to get to Brecon?”

“At least a week,” Goronwy said. “Lord
Llywelyn wishes to depart before the rains come. If we ride inland,
we can reach his manor in the forest of Coed y Brenin by evening,
with a move to Castell y Bere the day after that. You will need
warmer clothing.”

Oh. My. God.
Anna wiggled and I put
her down. She couched to point out a spider that crawled across the
flagstones. Goronwy bent and spoke to her in Welsh. Watching them,
I put a hand to my mouth, and a wave of hysteria rolled through me.
This time I couldn’t control it. My laughter began as a choke and
then swelled to full-fledged giggles. I swung around to face the
sea and took a stride toward the edge of the battlements. The wind
caught at the cloth on my head, but I let it go, instead wrapping
my arms around my waist to try to contain myself. Finally, I gave
up and let the tears come.

“Madam?” Goronwy spoke from behind me. I
glanced back to see him staring at me, Anna’s hand in his. Anna,
fortunately, was used to this sort of thing from me and was smiling
too, though with no idea of the joke.

I wiped at my cheeks. “I’m fine. Let’s go
in.”

* * * * *

Anna toddled happily after Goronwy and he
picked her up before we were half-way down the first flight of
steps. That was a good plan because she took a
very
long
time to navigate a set of stairs on her little legs, usually with
me counting them one by one. I followed them, watching my feet as
we made our way down the stairs, tears still pricking behind my
eyes.