Prince of Time (16 page)

His beloved.
I looked at him in the rear view mirror. He winked.

David turned back to the front and buckled his seat belt. “Okay, fine. Let’s go.”

Shaking my head at my crazy men, I started the car. I pulled out of the driveway, turned right as David indicated, and started driving. After a few minutes he stopped giving directions and just sat, his arms folded across his chest, looking out the window. I drove and drove, up one winding road and down another. Except for the slurping, Ieuan was silent in the back seat. Every time I reached a more populated area, or one of the main streets through the Main Line, David had me turn around and go back the way I’d come.

Finally, after forty-five minutes of this, I pulled to the side of the road. “What exactly are you looking for?”

“I don’t really know.” He ran his hand through his hair. “It’s been nearly three years and it was snowing. The terrain looks completely different today. The trees have leaves and the roads are lined with flowers instead of snow. How far are we from my aunt’s house?”

“A couple of miles,” I said. “I’m not really sure.”

“Good. Just keep driving.”

Fine.
He’s an escapee from an insane asylum and I’m just as bad for humoring him
. I started the car again and pulled into my lane. I went up one hill, down another, up again and was just heading down another, following it as it curved to the left, when David tensed and leaned forward, anticipating something that he saw but I didn’t.

“What?” I said.

He didn’t answer. We took the curve at a higher rate of speed than I normally might, and I braked, before straightening once we were on the other side of the hill. David turned in his seat to look behind us.

“Pull over and turn around,” he said.

I did as he asked, driving through someone’s circular driveway before heading back the way we’d come. We drove back up the hill and when I was a hundred feet past it, straightening the wheel, David asked me to turn around again.

“What are we doing?” I said.

“I’m trying to figure it out,” David said, without really explaining. “Pull over again.”

I did so, about fifty feet from the curve, and he got out of the car. David walked away from us and stood at the corner, on the right side of the road, looking ahead to the part of the road I couldn’t see. He stood, watching who knew what, while four cars passed us.

Then, all of a sudden, he turned and came running toward us. “Start the car, Bronwen! Let’s go!”

I was already accelerating forward as David threw himself into his seat. As before, we crested the small rise and were taking the downhill curve to the left when a large truck came lumbering up the hill in our direction. David leaned over to grip the wheel. He turned it hard into the truck and then pulled it back just before we hit it.

“Are you insane?” I slammed on the brake and wrenched the wheel from him. In doing so, I overcorrected. In five seconds we went from perfectly safe and normal to totaled. I skidded sideways into the truck.
And then through it.

A black gaping maw encompassed us. “Hang on!” David said.

In a moment we were bumping and jerking over a grassy field near a small stand of trees. A turf wall loomed ahead and I managed to twist the wheel hard to the right so as to avoid hitting it. We stopped.

David reached over and turned off the engine. “Excellent.” He looked back at Ieuan who was sprawled in the back seat, his long arms stretched from door to door to hold himself steady. “Except for the fact that I don’t know where we are. This isn’t where I thought we should end up.”

“That was quite invigorating, my lord,” Ieuan said. And then to me. “You are not injured,
cariad
?”

I shook my head but couldn’t speak. I was listening to my heart beat, feeling the car settle, breathing the sweet air coming up from the meadow through the open window. The grass was green and still dew-covered, with a foggy layer near the ground. Trees shimmered in the distance, with mountains beyond. Birds sang, accepting our existence.

I wrapped my arms around my waist and leaned forward, my eyes closed, almost in tears. The doors opened on either side of me and a second later, Ieuan had replaced David. He leaned towards me across the gear shift, wrapped his left arm around my shoulders, and pulled my head into his chest. I tried to breathe deeply. “You told me the truth,” I said, stunned. He was from the thirteenth century.
I am in the thirteenth century
.

“He did,” David said from his post on the other side of the driver’s side door. “I’ve lived with lies all the years I’ve been in Wales. For better or for worse, we told you the truth. I thought you believed us.”

He strode away from me, clearly angry.

Ieuan brought my chin back around with his hand to look at him. “Don’t worry about him. He carries the weight of the world on his shoulders and sometimes feels too alone. I think, in a sense, he was as lost in your world as I was, more so perhaps, because he thought he should understand it.”

Together we gazed at David, who stood on the turf wall, staring over the meadow. Ieuan spoke again. “When I asked you to marry me, you didn’t think I was serious, did you?”

Was he right, after all? Was David?
I looked down at my hands.

“So now do you say ‘yes’?” he said.

Did I? How could I know?
“Yes.”

Ieuan flashed me that fabulous grin and squeezed my shoulders. “Good, because the tide has turned. You’re in my world and we have a journey ahead of us.
You
are going to have to trust
me
.”

* * * * *

We got out of the car. “Where are we?”

“In England, it looks like.” Ieuan climbed onto the turf wall to stand beside David.

“Guys?” I said, to their backs. “What’s going on?”

“We’re near Offa’s Dyke,” David said.

I squealed. “Offa’s Dyke?” I clambered up next to Ieuan.

Offa’s Dyke was a turf wall that ran the full length of the border between the present-day England and Wales, or at least it did in the Middle Ages. Over the centuries, many English rulers had feared the Welsh and felt the need to contain them. The commonly held belief was that the Dyke was built in the eighth century by Offa, the Saxon King of Mercia—before England
was
England.

The Dyke consisted of a rampart twenty-four feet high and twenty feet across, which towered over a ditch on the Welsh side of the border and allowed the English to gaze into Wales from a great height. I followed David’s pointing finger, and there it was, less than a mile away.

“We’re in the no-man’s land between England and Wales,” I said.

“And there lies Huntington Castle.” David pointed northeast.

Ieuan spit on the ground. “Hereford. Again.”

“Tell me about Hereford. Now that we’re really here, I need to hear it one more time.” I looked from one to the other.

“Huntington belongs to Humphrey de Bohun, the third Earl of Hereford,” Ieuan said. “We spoke of him earlier. It could easily be Bohun’s heir who leads here, while his sire has bigger fish to fry.”

“His heir is only ten, Ieuan, but the wife could command in her husband’s absence,” David said. “I would like to avoid them all, if possible. Despite my father’s recent victories, the Bohuns are lords in this land. Only last month they laid siege to Buellt Castle. My father and the men of Powys drove them away. Bohun also controls Brecon castle, a stronghold in Wales to the west of here, and Caldicot Castle to the south, among others.”

“They control all the lands in this region,” Ieuan said.

I saw the problem. “Hereford is more than a place and a man. He’s an institution.”

“More importantly,” Ieuan said. “He’ll have patrols throughout the countryside.”

David nodded. “I’d say that’s one there.”

To the east of where we stood, a road ran from Huntington Castle heading south, and on it were more than a dozen riders, fortunately not looking our way. David jumped to the ground and trotted back to the car. He popped the trunk, removed his backpack so he could rummage through it. He took out a small, black box. Then, he climbed onto the wall again with a small pair of binoculars in his hand.

“Where did you get those?”

“Uncle Ted,” he said.

“Uncle Ted didn’t care?” I said.

David took the binoculars from his eyes and looked at me, his brow furrowed. “Uncle Ted believed my story after a five minute summary over the phone from Aunt Elisa. I think
he
would have come with us, if I’d asked.”

“Somehow I don’t think that Aunt Elisa would have been in favor of that,” I said.

David laughed. “No, she sees him little enough as it is. He’s a political analyst of some sort and is never home. Quite frankly, the only time I’ve ever seen him take a day off is on Christmas, and that’s only because nobody else is working so he can’t talk about work. He bought these, Aunt Elisa said, because he lists his hobby as ‘bird-watching,’ but he has two more expensive pairs that he uses if he ever goes out. Which is rarely.”

“What do you see in these ‘binoculars’?” a clearly impatient Ieuan said.

“Riders. They wear Hereford’s colors, about twenty of them.” David swung his binoculars further south.

“And there are another ten, belonging to the Tosnys.”

“The Tosnys hold Castell Paun, or Painscastle as the English called it, which lies on the main road into Wales. The road we can see here leads into it,” Ieuan said.

“Then we’ll have to avoid all of them, won’t we?” David jumped off the wall. “Okay. Let’s move. We need to hide the car and get out of here.”

“You would be quite a prize, my lord.” Ieuan joined David beside the car. “What the English wouldn’t give for a chance to get their hands on you, roaming around free in their country.”

“I don’t know of any Englishmen who will recognize me on sight, not even Hereford. Until our trip to England, I’d never left Wales. Still, as in Scotland, patrols abound. I’m loath to be caught up in one again.” David stowed the binoculars and reached in through the open window of the car to release the brake.

“How is it that Hereford thinks you’re dead if he doesn’t know what you look like?” I said.

David grunted, the muscles in his arms bulging as he and Ieuan pushed the car into some bushes. “In my fight with Edward, he tore my surcoat from me. My colors are the red dragon of Wales on white.”

“The Welsh flag,” I said.

“Close to it, yes,” he said, “but not in the Middle Ages. In this time, that flag hasn’t been seen since the mid-7
^th
century when Cadwaladr ap Cadwallon was high king.”

That’s a little strange.

“What?” David noticed my furrowed brow.

“Do you know how it became the Welsh flag?”

“No.”

“Henry Tudor—Henry VII—flew it when he marched across Wales to Bosworth Field to unseat Richard III from the throne of England. And do you know why?” I didn’t wait for him to answer. “Because Welsh legend says that the man who carries that flag is the redeemer of the Welsh people who will lead them to victory against their enemies. He has a name, too.”

“Arthur,” Ieuan said.

“Yes indeed,” I said. “Arthur.”

“You’re kidding me,” David said.

“You didn’t know?” Ieuan said.

“Of course I didn’t know,” David said. “You’re telling me that since I began flying that banner, everyone has looked at me as if I am the return of this Cadwaladr? Of Arthur?”

Ieuan studied David through a couple of heartbeats. “Yes.”

“That’s just what I need,” David mumbled under his breath. He tossed each of us a sandwich, made sure the rest of the food was in his pack, and then locked the car. He tossed me the keys.

David continued to mutter while he and Ieuan pulled their swords from their sheaths and hacked at some of the nearby branches. “The green blends in well,” Ieuan said. “At least in the summer.”

Then Ieuan noticed how stiff I was and came over to me. He put his hands on my shoulders and bent down to look in my face. “I don’t know what the next hours will bring. From this moment on, you need to follow my direction. Your ability to do so might save your life.”

“Obey you,” I said.

“Yup.” That was David, shooting me an
I told you so
grin.

“Can you?” Ieuan said, still looking into my eyes.

“Like you obey David?”

The corners of Ieuan’s eyes crinkled as he smiled. “Well, maybe not exactly like that.” He threaded his hand through the hair at the back of my head and kissed me.

When he let go, I staggered back, a little shocked. “Okay. Fine. I’ll obey you.”

“Good.” Ieuan took my hand and nodded at David. They checked their weapons, and Ieuan slung his great bow on his back. David wore the twenty-first century backpack. We climbed over the turf wall and began to walk.

“Do you have any water in that pack?” I said.

David pulled a water bottled from a side pocket. “Here.”

“What else do you have in there besides my coffee and the food?” I said.

“Lots of stuff,” he said, shouldering the pack once again. “Some things I’ve missed that I think we can duplicate pretty well, like a good pair of scissors, and some things we can’t, like medicines. Aunt Elisa and I went to a drugstore after you were in bed. I couldn’t sleep and neither could she. We filled the cart with everything I thought might come in handy, including fifteen tubes of antibiotic ointment—we bought out their entire supply, in every brand they had available.”

“You have your papers, don’t you?” I said.

“Yes, along with some maps of Wales I downloaded from the internet and a detailed geological survey. Wales is rich in minerals; we just have to know where to find them.”

David really did have plans for Wales, just as he’d said. “Can I ask where we’re going?”

“You can ask,” David said.

“But you’re not going to tell me.”

“I actually don’t know where we’re going. My intent is to find a holding where I can buy clothes for all of us. You need a dress, and Ieuan and I need some plainer clothes. Then, we must find some way to cross the border into Wales without the English capturing us.”