Daughter of Time: A Time Travel Romance (26 page)

Llywelyn squeezed me more tightly. “If you
hadn’t been pregnant and stewing about it these last three nights,
you wouldn’t have been sitting on that window sill. And if you
hadn’t been sitting there, I wouldn’t have gotten out of bed, and
we’d both be dead.”

“There is that.” I wrapped my arms around
his neck. “I love you.”

“I love you too,” he said, “but I think we
ought to get moving.”

“I don’t feel very good,” I said, starting
to shake.

He checked the location of the moon to gauge
the hour. “I’m in a rather telling state of undress, your wet
nightgown reveals more than I want another man to see, and it’s too
cold for us to be outside and wet. We need to find some clothes
quickly.”

“I can rip my gown,” I said. “You can tie
the scrap around your waist.”

“Good idea,” he said.

We scuttled forward into the brush at the
edge of the sand bar and I worked at the lower section of my gown,
starting at just above my knees. My hands were stiff but Llywelyn
held the ends of the gown tight and I found a loose thread Llywelyn
wrapped the scrap around his waist and I tied it in a sarong-type
knot.

“Very dashing,” I said, as he crouched down
again behind our bush to check the area for any signs of human
activity.

Llywelyn took my hand and began to lead us
west through the trees, back towards the castle. It was very dark
under the trees, but there was a hint of grayness to the murk that
told me dawn was not far off.

“Do you have a plan?” I asked.

“Not much of one,” Llywelyn said. “It begins
and ends with clothing.”

Fortunately, we didn’t have to walk more
than a hundred yards before we came upon a hut, centered in a patch
of dirt scraped bare of vegetation. It stood under a shaft of
moonlight that filtered through the trees.

“You or me?” Llywelyn said. We inspected
each other. He certainly
looked
better than I did. His
shoulder length black hair was thrown back from his face and I
loved that he’d not grown that mustache he’d threatened me with. He
was tall and muscled; I knew he was laughing at me as I studied him
because of the way his eyes were twinkling, even if he wasn’t
smiling.

“Me,” I said. “I’m not threatening. I may
look bedraggled, but
you
are completely unacceptable.”

Llywelyn smirked at what he viewed as a
compliment. “I’ll wait here.”

Wincing on the stubby grass, rocks, and
sticks that poked my feet, I tiptoed across the yard to the hut,
took a moment to gather my thoughts, and knocked. A woman opened
the door. She was much older than I, with gray hair pulled tight in
a bun at the nape of her neck. She wore a dress that was patched,
but clean. I was glad to see that the floor of the hut behind her
was well-swept and the room ordered.

“Yes,” she said, looking me up and down.
“What is it?”

“My man and I fell in the river,” I said.
“Do you have a spare change of clothes we could borrow?”

“Borrow, is it?” she said. “You mean
take.”

“We would leave you ours in exchange. When
we are safe again, we can return your clothing to you.”

“Humph,” the woman said. “Where’s your
man?”

“Waiting in the bushes,” I said. “He’s
wearing fewer clothes than I am.”

“And that’s not much,” the woman said. She
looked past me and I waved a hand towards where Llywelyn crouched.
He stepped out from the trees. The woman sighed. “You might as well
come in.”

“Thank you,” I said.

Llywelyn minced his way across the uneven
ground. At his approach, the woman’s eyes widened. “My lord!”

“Indeed,” Llywelyn said, coming to a halt on
her threshold. “Have you seen any English nearby?”

“I haven’t, my lord,” she said, “but others
from the village have spoken of it. Little groups of them, poking
their nose in where they don’t belong. Coming from the south, they
are.”

“Is it Clare’s men, do you think?” I asked
Llywelyn.

“I don’t know,” he said. “It was a bold move
indeed to get past my guards and into our room with a crossbow.
We’ve had traitors up and down Wales apparently, about whom I’ve
been completely unaware.”

“That’s always the way of it, my lord,” the
woman said. She’d gone to a box set in a corner of the room and
removed a small stack of clothing from it.

“We must get back into the castle,” Llywelyn
said.

“Anna’s there, Llywelyn.” I grabbed his arm,
the panic rising as it hadn’t before, even in the river. “They
won’t hurt her will they?”

“I’m sure she’s fine, Meg,” Llywelyn said.
“They won’t bother with her. She’s not my natural child and they
know it.” He turned back to the woman. “I need another way inside
the castle, other than through the front gate. Has the river
flooded the undercroft gate, do you know? My engineers have been
concerned about the Honddu side of the castle for the past
year.”

“Not that I’ve heard,” she said. “One of my
neighbor boys and my nephew got into it just the other day.”

“What undercroft gate?” I said.

“Clare arranged a way to provision the
castle from the river, just in case it was ever attacked—by me,”
Llywelyn said.

“Can we use it?” I said. “I need Anna,
Llywelyn. We need to go now.”

“I know,
cariad
,” he said, drawing me
closer. “We’re already there.”

“I can tell you the way,” the woman said.
“Straight out the back door and across the clearing is a trail
between two matched trees. It leads directly to the gate that
guards the Usk. If you follow the river west you’ll see the ford,
though with the flood, you’ll be hard pressed to cross before
noon.”

“Thank you,” Llywelyn said.

We dressed quickly in the clothes she
provided, the fabric well worn from use, but not by her. I glanced
at the woman out of the corner of my eye, acknowledging the loss
she must have suffered to have these clothes to spare. I didn’t
know that I could ever get used to it.

“The boots are a little tight,” Llywelyn
said, tugging them on and cursing under his breath. His toes were
well scrunched at the tip.

“At least they’re well-worn,” I said. “The
leather is soft. Can you walk?”

Llywelyn gingerly put a foot on the ground
and hobbled forward. “Well enough,” he said. Llywelyn tugged my
hand and I followed him out the door.

Chapter
Eighteen

A
lightness and joy
filled me that even the troubles of the day couldn’t suppress. The
emotion augmented the sharpness of my vision; I couldn’t explain it
otherwise, either by the bright March day or the clearness of the
air.

Meg carries my child!

With effort, I restrained myself from
punching the air every time I thought about it and tried to focus
on the task at hand.

While we were in the hut, the sky had
lightened. Soon the sun would push over the horizon. Early spring
flowers poked through the damp ground, and it reminded me again of
my incredible luck.
I am alive. And Meg carries my
child.

I checked Meg beside me. She was caught up
in the baby too, more so even than I, and I didn’t think it had
sunk in fully that someone had wanted to kill us. The anger that
I’d been keeping in check for the last hour began rising in my
throat again and I tamped it down. It would do me no good.

It was the kind of thing my grandfather had
cautioned me against, on one of those rare instances when we were
alone and he’d a moment to spare for one of his many grandsons: “It
is not the actions of a man when he is sober and clear-eyed that
are his measure, but when he is pressed hard, his back against a
wall. At those times, fear and anger will be his undoing, and it is
a rare man who can put aside those feelings and do what must be
done. Be one of those men.”

Meg trudged beside me through the woods, her
hand clasped tightly in mine. “So who betrayed you this time?”

“Hard to say.”

“Not Goronwy,” she said.

“I trust him with my life,” I said. “If he’s
betrayed me, I could never trust my own judgment again.”

“He loves Anna.”

“And love for your daughter is a proper test
of a man’s character?”

“It ought to be one,” she said, “though many
tyrants through the ages have loved their children and yet
despoiled their country. It seems contradictory to me.”

“Men are nothing if not contradictory,” I
said. “That’s one of the first things you learn when you begin to
lead them. Plenty of people are perfectly capable of holding two
entirely opposite opinions at the same time, and arguing vehemently
for each in turn.”

Meg laughed. “So young, and yet so
cynical.”

We walked on, our silence drowned out by the
rushing of the river. We gazed across it at the castle.

“Now what?” Meg said.

We’d come out of the woods to the south of
the castle, but the Usk was still in full flood, so we had no way
to cross, except over the bridge to the castle. I studied the
battlements and the gate. I couldn’t see the other gate from where
we stood as it faced east, reached by a bridge across the Honddu.
That’s the one we’d gone under. This one was even larger and better
fortified.

Except today.

The portcullis was up and the drawbridge
down. “I don’t like this,” I said. “Where is everybody? The
guards?”

“We look like peasants in these clothes,”
Meg said. “I can’t wait any longer. I have to go in there. Anna’s
going to wake soon and if I’m not there, she’ll cry.” She glanced
at me and I shrugged.
Into the lion’s den.
We ran to the
bridge across the Usk, our footsteps thudding across its length. At
any second, I expected to hear a shout from within the gatehouse,
but no one called to us.

Just past the portcullis, I tugged Meg
through a left-hand door into the gatehouse. Then I stopped short,
surprising Meg who bumped into me and caught my arm. The two guards
who should have been protecting the entrance to the castle sprawled
unconscious on the ground. I bent to check the breathing of one of
the men while Meg felt for his pulse. She looked at me and nodded.
“It’s faint, but there.”

The other man was alive too.

I slid the first man’s sword from its sheath
and hefted it. It was hardly my grandfather’s sword, but it would
do for now. Then I tugged the belt knife out of the spot on the
man’s waist where he carried it and handed it to Meg. “Here.” She
was too small to hold a long sword, but in a pinch, a knife might
do.

“What’s happened to them?” Meg whispered,
though there clearly was no need for quiet as anyone else in the
guard room was unconscious. “Were they drugged, or poisoned?”

I cast my mind back to the night before.
Anna, Meg and I had shared the meal with everyone else.

“You pushed your mead away last night,” I
said. “Why?”

“Pregnant women shouldn’t drink alcohol,”
Meg said. “It’s bad for the baby.” She glanced at me. “You didn’t
drink it either, though. Was that just because of me?”

“The well at Brecon is deep and the water
always good,” I said. “I wanted a clear head.”

“Maybe that’s it, then,” she said. “That’s
what they used. But it doesn’t matter now. We should get
moving.”

“This way.” I took her hand and with her at
my heels, knife and sword out to counter any threat, we poked our
heads out of the guard room.
Nothing.
How could there be
nothing? Where were my men? Or the assassin and his men, if he had
them? “No one’s awake.”

“We should close the portcullis,” Meg
said.

The mechanism was designed to release with
the push of a lever. I hit it with my boot and it let go, falling
to the ground with a rattling crash.

“If anyone awake doesn’t know something’s
up, they do now,” I said. Grunting at the effort, Meg helped me
push the great double doors closed and dropped the bars across
them. “It takes three men to winch the drawbridge closed. We’ll
leave it as it is for now.”

We moved into the bailey, hugging the gray
stone wall that fronted the Honddu River, into which we’d fallen.
Brecon’s great hall was in the bailey, at the base of the motte
where a circular keep of last resort and the oldest part of the
castle shot up against the sky. The Bohuns had greatly expanded the
castle during their reign. The outer wall of the great hall, above
which housed the room where we’d slept and Anna still lay, was
worked into the curtain wall. This fortification projected out from
either side of the hall and formed a complete circle around the
motte.

Last night, the great hall had been full of
men, the stables full of animals, and the bailey busy with craft
workers. Many of the people who worked in the castle lived in the
little village outside it, so I wasn’t surprised at their absence.
With the dawn, however, people should be starting to stir. Now, the
silence was eerie, only broken by the sound of our boots scuffling
on the rocky ground.

The vast expanse of Brecon before us was
daunting. I glanced up the hill at the keep. What might await us
there? Most of my men had actually slept in its old hall that had
been the center of the castle before Bohun built his new one.

Control what you can; let go of what you
can’t
. It would take too much time to explore all of Brecon on
our own, and the continuing silence made me worry that our assassin
had resources we didn’t yet know about. Where was the spy who’d
shot at us waiting? Someone had left the castle open to attack, but
for whom?

Meg released my hand and darted toward the
second gatehouse that guarded the crossing of the Honddu. She
entered the gatehouse before I could catch her and dropped the
portcullis with another loud crash. Meg reappeared and had the gall
to look contrite. “Sorry. Someone left the castle wide open on
purpose.”