Guardians of Time

A novel from the
After Cilmeri
series

by

Sarah Woodbury

Copyright © 2015 by Sarah Woodbury

Cover image by Christine DeMaio-Rice at Flip
City Books

Guardians of Time

Christmas 1292
. Time travel has meant
many things to Meg, David, and Anna over the years, but regardless
of the circumstances, it has always been about saving lives: their
own, their family members’, their friends’.

This time, it’s a combination of all
three.

Guardians of Time
is the ninth novel
in the
After Cilmeri
series.

www.sarahwoodbury.com

To Linda

Books in the After Cilmeri Series:

Daughter of Time
(prequel)

Footsteps in Time
(Book One)

Winds of Time

Prince of Time
(Book Two)

Crossroads in Time
(Book Three)

Children of Time
(Book Four)

Exiles in Time

Castaways in Time

Ashes of Time

Warden of Time

Guardians of Time

The Gareth and Gwen Medieval Mysteries:

The Bard’s Daughter

The Good Knight

The Uninvited Guest

The Fourth Horseman

The Fallen Princess

The Unlikely Spy

The Lost Brother

The Renegade Merchant

The Lion of Wales series (novellas):

Cold My Heart

The Oaken Door

Of Men and Dragons

A Long Cloud

The Last Pendragon Saga:

The Last Pendragon

The Pendragon’s Quest

The Paradisi Chronicles:

Erase Me Not

David (Dafydd)—Time-traveler, King of
England

Lili—Queen of England, David’s wife, Ieuan’s
sister

Llywelyn—David’s father, King of Wales

Meg—David’s mother

Anna—David’s sister

Math—Anna’s husband, Lord of Dinas Bran

Callum—Time-traveler, Earl of Shrewsbury

Cassie—Time-traveler, Callum’s wife

Ieuan—Welsh knight, one of David’s men

Bronwen—Time-traveler, married to Ieuan

Arthur—son of David and Lili (born June
1289)

Gwenllian—daughter of Llywelyn (born June.
1282)

Cadell—son of Math and Anna (born July
1285)

Geoffrey de Geneville—Norman/English lord

Justin—David’s captain

Goronwy—Llywelyn’s advisor

Samuel—Sheriff of Shrewsbury

Aaron—Samuel’s father

Darren Jeffries—time traveler (bus
passenger)

Peter Cobb—time traveler (bus passenger)

Rachel Wolff—time traveler (bus
passenger)

Mark Jones—time traveler (bus passenger)

Bridget Donaldson—time traveler (bus
passenger)

Elisa Shepherd – Meg’s sister

Ted Shepherd – Meg’s brother-in-law

Elen Shepherd – Meg’s niece

Christopher Shepherd – Meg’s nephew

Dinas Bran (Llangollen)

Christmas Eve 1292

Anna

“T
ime travel isn’t
meant to be a get-out-of-jail-free card.”

Her mother’s words of warning echoed in
Anna’s head as she prepared herself to
travel
one more time.
She’d found a seat near the front of the bus, one of a number that
faced inward so she was looking out the opposite windows.

Ten years ago, the first time Anna
remembered time traveling, she’d been seventeen, driving
fourteen-year-old David to pick up their cousin, Christopher. A
wall of snow had appeared across the road upon which they’d been
driving, and when they’d crashed through it, they’d found
themselves in medieval Wales.

Unlike the other times she’d
traveled,
it wasn’t their own lives that had been in danger
in that moment, but Papa’s. Both that day and this one had been
gloomy December afternoons within an hour of sunset. Oddly, the
turquoise color of the Cardiff bus wasn’t far off from the color of
her aunt’s minivan either. Today, however, it was raining instead
of snowing, and it wasn’t Anna driving the vehicle.

The Cardiff bus was both bigger and smaller
than Anna remembered. Bigger—because it had been a long time since
Anna had seen any vehicle larger than a hay cart, and most medieval
ships were half the size of this bus. But it was smaller too,
barely seeming to hold, once they’d piled into it, the forty people
they were taking to the twenty-first century.

David, in his obsessive attention to detail,
had built a well-graveled road expressly for this purpose. From the
perspective of anyone who wasn’t in on the secret, the road itself
looked pretty useless. It started at the bus hanger outside
Llangollen and ended at the bottom of a cliff wall. David hadn’t
completely given the game away because he’d had the road continue
past the cliff until it reached a river.

Still, one might wonder why such a
magnificent road would end at a spot where there was neither a
bridge nor a ford—and no road on the other side. If they made it
through this, Math would have to build one.

Of course, David had built the road this way
on purpose, and it very much resembled one of those ramps that
semi-trucks were supposed to use when their brakes failed while
driving down a steep hill. In this particular case, however, there
would be no braking involved. The bed of the road was made of rock
and hardened earth, not sand, and the goal was to get the bus going
as fast as possible by the time it hit the cliff.

Which was what had prompted Mom to comment
on the relationship between Monopoly and time travel in the first
place.

That had been a few days ago. Anna, Mom, and
Lili, David’s wife, had been warming themselves on cushioned chairs
near the fire in Anna’s sitting room, not even pretending to work
on the needlework at their feet that was the required pastime of
every noble woman in the Middle Ages, even those like Anna who
hadn’t been born to it.

When Mom had added, “It might not work—”
David, who’d been leaning against the frame of the door, had made a
chopping motion with his hand, cutting her off. “This is going to
work. I know it.”

Anna had already had this argument with her
mother—and lost—so she’d brought in what she considered to be the
big gun—David—and was more than willing to let him make her point
for her.

David had been dressed, for once, as the
King of England he was, in black leather boots polished so brightly
they reflected the firelight, brown breeches and blue coat of the
finest wool, and a silk shirt that wouldn’t have been out of place
in one of the fanciest clubs in London in any century. Or so Anna
supposed, since she’d never been in one.

Twenty-four years old in November, David’s
once baby-round face had slimmed in the past few years as he’d
grown into his body—and the pressures of being King of England
weighed him down. When he’d arrived in Dinas Bran, Anna had been
shocked to see a few strands of gray amidst his normally sandy
brown hair.

He’d come with his family to celebrate
Christmas—
and
the tenth anniversary of their father’s
survival at Cilmeri. Dinas Bran had been full to bursting with time
travelers and medieval people alike. David had ditched his entire
English retinue at Chester Castle in England. His English retainers
should have known by now that such behavior meant he was up to
something, but as he was the King of England, they had allowed
themselves to be persuaded.

“Didn’t we decide that uncertainty and fear
are necessary to make the
traveling
work?” Mom actually
laughed. “Should I be worried that you’re not afraid enough?”

“None of us will be feeling any shortage of
fear, I assure you.” David shifted in the doorway, straightening
slightly as his intensity level rose. “You need to get checked out,
Mom. Breast cancer isn’t something to be screwing around with.”

“It’s nothing,” Mom had said. “Most lumps
disappear on their own.”

“Most lumps do, and it is
probably
nothing,” David said, “but since I’m going, you might as well come
too.”

“I will come with you, Meg,” Papa said.

“Llywelyn, be reasonable. We can’t leave the
twins alone. Who knows the trouble they’ll get into?” Mom put a
hand on Papa’s cheek.

Papa’s hair might have nearly as much gray
in it now as black but, according to Rachel, he was fit and
healthy, and his blue eyes had twinkled at Mom with compassion and
understanding. Even after all these years, the looks that passed
between them gave Anna a tingly feeling in her stomach to see how
much her parents loved each other. In the need to see that love,
some part of Anna would always be three years old, and she knew
herself blessed to have found something similar in her marriage to
Math.

Who, unfortunately, Anna would be leaving
behind.

“Between their nannies, Gwenllian, and me,
we are perfectly capable of taking care of the twins for a few
days—weeks even, if that’s what it takes,” Lili had said, “and
Wales is in good hands with Math and Ieuan. You’re going to have to
look for a different excuse not to go.”

Lili was heavily pregnant with her second
child, which meant Mom hadn’t asked why she wasn’t going. Mom had
time traveled while pregnant three times. Anna herself had done so
with her mother when she was a toddler, so
traveling
didn’t
appear to have any negative effects on small people. Still, the
very act meant putting themselves in danger, which nobody, least of
all David, was going to let Lili do. Childbirth in the Middle Ages
was dangerous enough.

Mom had faced David again, shaking her head
hard enough in annoyance to loosen a pin or two from her elaborate
upswept hairdo. Brown strands framed her face, and her eyes
flashed. “What about England? Don’t you think you’re being just a
teensy bit reckless and irresponsible leaving everyone in the lurch
so you can go back to the modern world? You just want a McDonald’s
hamburger for the first time in ten years.”

David had studied his mother and hadn’t
answered.

Mom’s color had been high, and the words
she’d thrown at David hadn’t been nice—or even true. Then she’d
looked away. “I’m sorry. I’m really sorry. I shouldn’t have said
that. I don’t believe it. I’m just—”

“Scared.” Papa brought both hands down onto
Mom’s shoulders. “As we all are. But that doesn’t mean we shouldn’t
go forward anyway. You must see a physician. More to the point, you
must have one of these—” he made an impatient gesture with one
hand, “—scans.”

“If it were just you, Mom,” David said, “I’d
consider waiting to see if the lump goes away. You say it’s tender,
which cancer generally isn’t, and Rachel tells me lumps like yours
happen all the time to forty-something women who’ve nursed four
kids. You are an unlikely candidate for breast cancer anyway. I
believe her. But I’ve been thinking about this for a while, and now
that Shane is sick—”

His voice had broken off as they all
considered the real reason—the driving reason—that David was
contemplating this trip. Shane, a tow-headed seven-year-old who’d
come to the Middle Ages on the Cardiff bus with his parents, Jane
and Carl, had what Rachel feared to be childhood leukemia. The
disease was eminently curable in the twenty-first century. Not so
much in the thirteenth.

David, in fact, had confessed to Anna that
he was taking Shane to the modern world regardless of what anyone
else thought or said against it, even if he had to hold Shane in
his arms and jump off a cliff alone as he’d done with Ieuan a
number of years ago.

In the end, Mom had agreed to come. She’d
even seen the wisdom in taking the other bus passengers back with
them. Now, Anna’s overriding concern was to have them all survive
the attempt. Like David, Anna assumed it was going to work.
It
had better work!

From the front of the bus where he’d been
standing near the driver’s seat, checking names off a list, David
lifted a hand to get the attention of the passengers. “Everybody
buckle up!”

Anna got to her feet instead. “I should
stand beside you, David.”

“Sit, sit, sit!” David flapped a hand at
her. “You’re fine where you are, Anna.” And then he added in an
undertone, “You and Mom should wear your seat belts in case this
doesn’t work.”

“That is not what I wanted to hear from
you,” Papa said, but then he smiled, and his tone softened. “We’re
with you, son. Whatever happens.” He draped one arm across the back
of Mom’s seat and bent one leg to rest his ankle on his knee. He
was looking far more relaxed about the trip than Anna might have
expected.

In fact, Papa had been with David from the
start. Mom had
traveled
with Papa and Goronwy a few years
ago to save Papa’s life. He saw it as a fair trade that he would be
doing the same for her. Besides, the shadows behind his eyes told
Anna how worried he was about Mom, as they all were, even if they
told themselves the worry was for nothing. More than any other
disease, cancer was a terrifying proposition, incurable in the
Middle Ages. Anna saw it as a parasite growing inside her mother,
and she just wanted it
out!